Essays

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So if you're an outsider, take advantage of your ability to make small and inexpensive things. Cultivate the pleasure and simplicity of that kind of work; one day you'll miss it.

Responsibility

When you're old and eminent, what will you miss about being young and obscure? What people seem to miss most is the lack of responsibilities.

Responsibility is an occupational disease of eminence. In principle you could avoid it, just as in principle you could avoid getting fat as you get old, but few do. I sometimes suspect that responsibility is a trap and that the most virtuous route would be to shirk it, but regardless it's certainly constraining.

When you're an outsider you're constrained too, of course. You're short of money, for example. But that constrains you in different ways. How does responsibility constrain you? The worst thing is that it allows you not to focus on real work. Just as the most dangerous forms of procrastination are those that seem like work, the danger of responsibilities is not just that they can consume a whole day, but that they can do it without setting off the kind of alarms you'd set off if you spent a whole day sitting on a park bench.

A lot of the pain of being an outsider is being aware of one's own procrastination. But this is actually a good thing. You're at least close enough to work that the smell of it makes you hungry.

As an outsider, you're just one step away from getting things done. A huge step, admittedly, and one that most people never seem to make, but only one step. If you can summon up the energy to get started, you can work on projects with an intensity (in both senses) that few insiders can match. For insiders work turns into a duty, laden with responsibilities and expectations. It's never so pure as it was when they were young.

Work like a dog being taken for a walk, instead of an ox being yoked to the plow. That's what they miss.

Audience

A lot of outsiders make the mistake of doing the opposite; they admire the eminent so much that they copy even their flaws. Copying is a good way to learn, but copy the right things. When I was in college I imitated the pompous diction of famous professors. But this wasn't what made them eminent-- it was more a flaw their eminence had allowed them to sink into. Imitating it was like pretending to have gout in order to seem rich.

Half the distinguishing qualities of the eminent are actually disadvantages. Imitating these is not only a waste of time, but will make you seem a fool to your models, who are often well aware of it.

What are the genuine advantages of being an insider? The greatest is an audience. It often seems to outsiders that the great advantage of insiders is money-- that they have the resources to do what they want. But so do people who inherit money, and that doesn't seem to help, not as much as an audience. It's good for morale to know people want to see what you're making; it draws work out of you.

If I'm right that the defining advantage of insiders is an audience, then we live in exciting times, because just in the last ten years the Internet has made audiences a lot more liquid. Outsiders don't have to content themselves anymore with a proxy audience of a few smart friends. Now, thanks to the Internet, they can start to grow themselves actual audiences. This is great news for the marginal, who retain the advantages of outsiders while increasingly being able to siphon off what had till recently been the prerogative of the elite.

Though the Web has been around for more than ten years, I think we're just beginning to see its democratizing effects. Outsiders are still learning how to steal audiences. But more importantly, audiences are still learning how to be stolen-- they're still just beginning to realize how much deeper bloggers can dig than journalists, how much more interesting a democratic news site can be than a front page controlled by editors, and how much funnier a bunch of kids with webcams can be than mass-produced sitcoms.

The big media companies shouldn't worry that people will post their copyrighted material on YouTube. They should worry that people will post their own stuff on YouTube, and audiences will watch that instead.

Hacking

If I had to condense the power of the marginal into one sentence it would be: just try hacking something together. That phrase draws in most threads I've mentioned here. Hacking something together means deciding what to do as you're doing it, not a subordinate executing the vision of his boss. It implies the result won't be pretty, because it will be made quickly out of inadequate materials. It may work, but it won't be the sort of thing the eminent would want to put their name on. Something hacked together means something that barely solves the problem, or maybe doesn't solve the problem at all, but another you discovered en route. But that's ok, because the main value that initial version is not the thing itself, but what it leads to. Insiders who daren't walk through the mud in their nice clothes will never make it to the solid ground on the other side.


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