Okay, the amount of talk about the end of Real Salon and Open Salon is getting depressing. It could be part of Dog Days stupidity, where gossip replaces real news - since everybody who makes real news is on vacation and it's too freaking hot to do anything.
On the other hand, free online playgrounds like Salon have suffered quite a hit. Even though nobody who writes for Open Salon, or even Real Salon, are paid for anything they write, it still costs a lot to keep up the servers and the electricity and the Internet access this system requires.
(And you poor dopes thought I was just hyperbolic, or lying to prove an irrational point. Sorry, I was describing the reality you refuse to acknowledge.)
And the failure of FaceBook's IPO may have marked a moment when the deluded, stupid businessmen who run the world have suddenly realized that paying for online playgrounds isn't going to make them rich. They already don't pay for real-world playgrounds, or health care, or Social Security, or American workers. Why should they pay for advertising to support a place that isn't driving hordes of people with bulging wallets towards them?
Business, you see, is not a philosophy. It is a religion. To be specific, a primitive religion, not even as sophisticated as pagan religions. It is a "sacrifice a virgin at the full moon" type of religion.
Shall We Gather By The Cooler?
If you watched business TV shows that popped up in the Reagan years, you could see the cult at its most obvious. Men, and the few women allowed in the executive suite, had to wear dark blue pinstriped suits and ties, trying to look like identical acolytes of the Great God Business. Their sacred artifacts - "fetishes" as they're called, although these rich bastards had other fetishes as well - were part of the religion. Not sacred bones or feathers from sacred birds, but fax machines, IBM PC's (can't ever use a Mac, they're bad juju), spreadsheets, extreme office furniture and personal organizers.
They have a few high priests, whose fancy vestments and clear success prove the benefits and glory of prostrating oneself to Business. Donald Trump. The Kochs. Welch of GE. Cheney, who kept his business interests supported while he was Vice President, against the laws.
These people are so attractive to the worshippers of Business that even people who live in trailer parks and follow the Teabagger Party worship them. Take a look at Real Salon's regular right-wing trolls like Luun E. Toonz, Zorkna, Elephantman and ODA-whatever. When the Kochs are attacked, they reply, "He's made millions of dollars. How many millions have you made, Fag Liberal Terrorist?"
That these high priests made their money by keeping Luun and the others under their boot heels, cheapening and shortening their lives, has not changed the minds of the trailer park boys one bit. Religion is like that.
I am Fear. Bow before me. I am the archangel of your God, Business.
Nonetheless, these high priests don't drive their followers. As a primitive religion, Business is based on fear. And sometimes fear becomes irrational among the worshippers of the Dow. The recent hubbub about FaceBook's IPO is a perfect example. The masses of people charging forward, ready to buy FaceBook stock, did a panicked one-eighty the same day.
Somehow, a moment of sanity and rationality penetrated the worshippers of Business. "Wait a minute," someone said. "I don't buy anything advertised on FB. Nobody buys anything advertised on FB. How is investing in FB going to be profitable at all?"
Any financial problems that Salon is having are part of the stampede. If something as big and powerful as FaceBook is suddenly unpopular, how about a hangout of old farts who are losing their jobs and health care? People who still write poetry and think it means something? People who think their personal lives are so utterly fascinating and universally appealing that they write about them all the time? People who aren't Businessmen?
If Salon does die, expect other outlets like FaceBook, LiveJournal, Blogger and YouTube to fall as well. No one pays attention to their ads either. No one has money to subscribe to the premium services that don't include ads.
No more National Anthem. Just kill the transmitter.
There is a lemming-like panic in the tribal circle of Business. All the things supported by advertising - newspapers, magazines, television, radio - are now seen as liabilities. All are shrinking. I lost my television job, not because of anything I did wrong, but because TV advertising income has dropped precipitously over the last twenty years.
It used to be disgusting for a TV station to sell half-hour blocks of its time for pure advertising. Better to sell ads to the local nightclubs or car dealers, inserted into an ancient rerun of I Love Lucy or Marcus Welby, MD than to put on these "infomercials." Now the things are filling anywhere from a quarter to a third of every local station's air time. They barely make enough money to pay for the station's broadcast expenses. Infomercials are watched even less than ads on Open Salon.
In the 1970's, TV stations that used to sign off at 1 AM became 24/7 operations. Despite economic troubles, they've stayed that way for a long time, to stay "comeptitive" with cable stations and their local competitors. Start looking forward to stations "signing off" again, as Business continues to run away from "inefficient use of ad dollars" and cut their rates for those infomercials even more. And they won't even run the National Anthem or a prayer by a local preacher at sign-off; even those cost too much for a Businessman.
So, dear Salon writers and readers, don't blame yourself or mourn too much. It isn't your egocentric writing or your pretentions or your foolish delusions about being paid to write that will kill Salon - if it is closed down. It's just...Business.
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Kerry Lauerman
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
Comments
r./
A man with one hundred percent of the money in the world would have nothing. Because the only value it would have is in convincing other people it has value. And he'd have to spend some of it to apply that value.
Did you ever hear of the artist who created his own dollar bills (pretty ones) and convinced merchants to take them for the face value he put on them? He wasn't counterfeiting, he was engaging in a kind of barter system - his art original for goods.
Anyway, there used to be intrinsic value in business - to make a product with quality and value, pay employees a fair wage so they could afford to live and do good work, and bring something useful or beautiful into the world. None of that is involved in the primitive cult called "Business" today.
If you want a laugh, sneak into a Business Conference held by some huge company. (Lots of them have conventions here in Orlando.) Nothing of value is done; mostly people sneak out to the theme parks or to bars, ignoring whatever the sessions are supposed to teach or resolve.
Hookers of all varieties are the common currency at these events (there's that "value" thing again). It sure will be in Tampa for the GOP National Convention. After all, Romney's a Businessman, right?
Actually, I would pay to help keep the playground open to all, but I know not everyone can afford to.
r
First of all, writers are not paid anything, anywhere, for writing anything. To "practice to learn how to write" is like practicing to be a school crossing guard - it's an occupation, but you don't make money for it and nobody respects you for it. Writing is not a profession, and hasn't been since the late 1960's. Writing is a hobby.
Second, if you read most posters, you'd know we are unemployed or barely paying the bills. Nobody here could pay anything for this service, nothing like what it would cost to run. Not even all those annoying ads work, for reasons explained in my article.
And again - this is a point you made, but which needs amplification - the megacorporations are tired of coddling places for "free expression," or free anything. The cult of Business has replaced the process of "conducting business" that used to exist in America, and it is ruthless, cruel and destructive.
A friend in FaceBook (which, despite its problems, is more stable a platform than Salon) commented that in Europe, there are public restrooms. In American cities, unless you have money to patronize a place, you can't go to the bathroom there, so the growing numbers of homeless make the outdoors their bathroom, to the detriment of public health. If the megacorps won't tolerate public bathrooms, why would they tolerate another place where people write on the walls - like Salon?
It could be that the wake-up call for the megacorporations was the ad campaign, using stock footage of Ford SUV's and trucks, that asked people to "write their own ad." The result was a flood of ads that insulted Ford, said they were responsible for global warming, and talked about peak oil. Maybe it finally got through their thick heads - free speech means people could talk against them, so it has to be stopped.
Neutron, thanks for proving my point. . . . .
Now, your homework thought experinent is to determine whether a natural law will limit the disparity of wealth about which we hear so much whining these days.
That would take the One Percent down a few pegs, but because of the collapse, the Chinese will own us due to our indebtedness to them. We'll be the coolies then. We won't even be third-world; we'll be an eighth-world nation, not even deserving to scrape the doggy-doo off our overlords's sandals.
Oh, and if you think that writers not being paid is awful...imagine what happens when writing your feelings can get you shot by your neighborhood Political Officer.
Thanks for your response, with whose core I am inclined to agree.
However, we have carried this debate to the point of the adult Sunday school class discussion on morality.
During the debate, one old man turns to one of the old ladies and asks, "Dear, would you come to bed with me if I paid you $3 million so you could retire?"
"Well, maybe . . . " she responds.
"Would come to bed with me for $20?"
"What do you think I am?" she angrily asks in reply.
"We know what you are, Dear. We're just negotiating the price."
Similarly, whether us robber barons straighten out our misbegotten lives only when we are coolie slaves in Chinese rice fields, or long before, is a matter that will never be settled between you and me.
Perhaps you were thinking that reading the words of Tom Payne, Michael Moore or that inspiration guy - I think his name is Deepfried Oprah - to the rich and powerful would cause them to slap their foreheads, say "I've been a fool!" and change their ways. Sorry, I ain't Dickens, this ain't Christmas, and if God gives a damn about our fate He sure isn't making it known.
I believe it was Grant Tinker who was the head of NBC, who suffered a heart attack. He laid in his hospital bed all day before and after his surgery, and apparently for the first time ever he actually saw the raw sewage his network broadcast. He actually said he was insulted by the awful quality of the programs he had sanctioned. Unfortunately, it was too late; he lost his job and died soon after. The new CEO of NBC Universal doesn't know or care what he broadcasts.
It's only in movies like The Towering Inferno that rich bastards who cheat the world are the only ones to be destroyed by the ugly, useless edifices they build. A lot of us ordinary peons get crushed when they fall, and somehow the rich bastards always escape. The financial apocalypse I mentioned - which is actually pretty likely to happen - is the only way to fulfill your request for a "natural law" solution to income disparity.