Here’s a key issue with micropayments that Clay Shirky alludes to but doesn’t directly address. When I access a Web article and my account on PayTheNobleCreator.org is deducted 23/87ths of a cent, can I forward that article to my friends who don’t have accounts on PayTheNobleCreator.org? Can I link to it on my blog so that anyone can read it?

And even supposing PayTheNobleCreator.org takes off, it’s only a matter of time before SocietyoftheSpectacle.com starts horning in on the market for micropayments, signing up the big media sites while making itself next to impossible to use by independent creators, and using network effects to be the dominant micropayment provider. That’s the way of capitalism: to vigorously and persistently remake the institutions of creative exchange so that creators become the chattels of those institutions.

By the way, resistance to nickel-and-diming is pretty much an American phenomenon, as I discovered traveling in Australia and discovered that I had to pay for the breadbasket and my glass of water in restaurants.

That’s an interesting idea, like a Starbucks card for media content and other small-payment online services. On the other end, the service would pay content providers and serve the purpose the other poster was taking about, the “middleman to gather the chits and periodically disgorge some bucks.”

Or am I still missing the whole point?

There is a system already in place, that both average and abnormal people use every single day, that is culturally expected and approved, that gives small amounts of money directly to the people providing the service right at the time they provide it with no middleman at all.

It’s called tipping.

Maybe we need to culturally learn to think of art and creativity as kind of a *service* rather than just a *product*.

The right system could do that. It could reframe how we think of creativity.

Second, the reason people hate micropayments (the reason I do anyway), is that I don’t like having 100 tiny transactions on my bank statement that I then have to reconcile.

But if the system was the sort of thing you auto-funded, say, $25 or $50 in every month, and then you just deducted each small payment from your balance, that would eliminate that.

But what would get people to do it? To like it? To expect it?

Culture.

People don’t tip because it gives them warm fuzzy feelings. People tip because if you don’t you feel cheap. It’s a cultural rule.

Right now, the cultural rule of the internet is Things Should Be Free. If we changed that to Creativity Is A Service And Deserves Tipping, a good system would emerge and take off.

I don’t think the problem is in the technology. It’s in what we value, as a culture. As an internet culture. To make micropayments go, we’d need to let go of the Holy Notion of open source, creative commons, and “make it free and you will be popular” being the only righteous way to offer your creative goods to the public.

Not that I’m knocking open source. I think it’s awesome, and I think we can have both. But if payment is no longer the gateway to owning/using the product, it has to be a culturally expected practice to give something back to the creator in gratitude for their effort.

And as it becomes that, the right system will get worked out to support it.

***

And ummmm…on an entirely different note, God isn’t supposed to give you hope. Believing in God as an abstract concept in that hopes that God will somehow lesson some kind of present or future pain misses the point of spirituality completely. God isn’t a being who is going to intercede on your behalf if you believe hard enough. God is the interconnectedness in everything – God is the pain and the pleasure, the magic and the mystery inherent in all things.

Hope, on the whole, is an avoidance of reality. Which is the opposite of the purpose of spirituality. Spirituality is about facing, sinking into, and embracing the present moment. It’s about feeling larger wheels turning in the world as we inexorably evolve into more conscious beings who will recognize and understand the value and purpose of creativity and want to give reciprocally when we benefit from it.

Similarly, “believing in” the economic stimulus package misses the underlying basis of reality, on which we can rest a more enduring faith: that whether or not the package works the way we want it to, life will still be here, the world will still be here, and economies will go marching on. The joy and wonder of creation goes nowhere when the economy tanks, we just stop noticing it. But we don’t have to. We all have the choice, in every moment, to sink into the stillness that moves under the chaos, giving life and voice to the whole of creation. But the point is not to have “hope” – a state of feeling attached to an imaginary future. The point is to experience transcendence and grace right now in the present moment. And then do what you feel called to do to express the aliveness inside you. And feeling yourself doing that, you know that God is moving through you.

(OK, I just couldn’t let it lie there! You were equating God with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy!).

=)