In Praise of Private Pondering

I’m not quite sure how to categorize this editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal. The author has what I think are pretty basic and common-sense things to say on the subjects of intellectual property and the annoying trend toward collectivism on the internet, yet his piece strikes me as revolutionary. This observation, in particular, needs to be said more often.

All too often, a youthful perspective falls prey to the fallacy of collectivism. I fell prey to it myself. In my early 20s, I lived in collective households and belonged to food co-ops, as did most of my friends. I recall these things now as harmless diversions, more of a way of extending the experience of childhood than an attempt at revolution.

Youthful fascination with collectivism is in part simply a way to address perceived “unfairness.” If everyone shares, then a young person arriving on the scene fresh will not have less than an older person who has been around for a while.

This is all harmless enough, but the pattern can be manipulated in dangerous ways. I don’t want our young people aggregated, even by a benevolent social-networking site. I want them to develop as fierce individuals, and to earn their living doing exactly that. When they work together, I hope they’ll do so in competitive, genuinely distinct teams so that they can get honest feedback and create big-time innovations that earn royalties, instead of spending all their time on crowd-pleasing gambits to seek kudos. This is not just so that they and their children will thrive, but so that they won’t become a mob, which, as history has shown us again and again, is a vulnerability of human nature.

This is revolutionary because it’s so blatantly and unashamedly old-school. Today, collaboration that is open at every point is the way things should be done, we’re told and if you disagree, you’re just locked into the old, tired way of thinking. Don’t get me wrong here. There are plenty of places where we need more openness, Congress for example, but that doesn’t mean everything needs to be open all the time. Creativity works best when lots of ideas hit the table and, in my experience, when that happens, most of those ideas are going to be bad. Openness works against that part of the creative process because, let’s face it, no one wants to be seen as a frequent failure. But that’s what will happen if the whole world gets to see just how horrible nine of your ten ideas were, even if the tenth idea was the greatest idea ever. Better to work out all your bad ideas in private, or at least among a closed group of people where those ideas aren’t nearly as likely to be held against you.

The other pitfall to complete openness is that people feel entitled to add their two cents to what you’re doing, whether you want it or not. Like a chess game in the park, your open project is going to draw kibitzers, most of whom won’t offer anything of real value. After a while, as we’re seeing across the internet, people will simply assume that what you’re doing belongs to them and they’ll get very angry when you inform them otherwise. It’s already happened in the music world and with web content (which reminds me, have you hit my tip jar this month? No? Why not?) and it’s happening with computer programs. It’s hard to make much money on intellectual property, which takes a lot more time and effort to produce than people think (for example, this post took me about 40 minutes to write, not including the time I spent thinking about the piece itself), when people simply assume it’s theirs for the having.

There is a lot to be said for rugged individualism in the intellectual world. It wouldn’t be a bad idea at all to get back to that a bit more.

No related posts.

Category: The Good Old US of A