Why not Fiction?

I find it interesting that, if collaboration is one of the defining tropes of Web 2.0, it is taking place primarily in the realm of non-fiction, among newsies, techies, and other aficionados of facts. Collaboration used to be a particular hallmark of creative artists—painters, poets, musicians—but artists are leery of the Web, nervous (with some justification) of having their work degraded by unskilled practitioners.

The creative collaborations that do take place are often low-brow, lo-fi, and in a sense unambitious projects, like somethingawful's photoshop phridays. These are dadaistically hilarious, but they only take you so far. Concepts like wikifiction have somehow gotten pigeonholed into fantasy role-playing genre novels, and it's hard to get too excited about something as massively derivative as fanfiction (see also http://www.fanfiction.net ), though that's certainly a genuine and intriguing Web 2.0 phenom. It's a shame that the art of Web collaboration works so well in the domain of facts but has created such uninspiring results in the online arts, and it's confusing, too, from the standpoint of potential profit.

I would have thought marketers in publishing and advertisers in general would have seen the monetary possibilities of creative collaborations. If mass-market publishers or even smaller houses were to sponsor and advertise their own fanfiction rings they might significantly increase traffic to their sites. Small presses and online literary journals could definitely up their numbers by initiating collaborative projects for their readers. It should be possible for publishing houses (or other kinds of labels or distributors) to open fee-based subscription fanfiction sites in which the original author (or recording artist, or animator) participates with subscribers in creating an online serialized novel (or other artwork), or in which participants would vote on the best annual efforts, and the winners would go on to be read by the author, and selected for a prize (I'm sure, actually, that this must have been done somewhere by someone). Think the Heinz Ketchup campaign on You Tube, but with one massive ad-space in constant flux, growing and (hopefully) improving, rather than thousands of individually produced advertisements, most of which are garbage. Obviously copyright and IP issues are the real bogeys turning artists from avant-gardists into reactionaries . Envious of the vitality of the Web space, covetous of its potential, but jealously guarding their sacred texts and graven images, creative artists are the despicable conservatives in the Age of Information. Issues of collaboration aside, I'm shocked that there are poets refusing to publish in online journals for fear someone should copy and paste their work to a blog, and artists defacing their own work with gallery or distributor logos stamped over the images lest a home printer be put to nefarious uses. According to "The Machine Is Us/Ing Us," we're going to have to re-think copyright. I think, actually, that an irrevocable shift toward the total devaluation of copyright and intellectual property could already have taken place. You probably remember how in April Internet activists led "cyber riots," plowing down all attempts to stop them from disseminating a DVD/Blu-Ray encryption key. For the first historical moment that I can think of, activists and individuals are indisputably on equal ground or in a stronger position that the powers they threaten. The encryption key activists were not protesting the suppression of the cryptographic key; they were publishing it, unstoppably. Of course online activists have acted out in support of individual authorship as well. Besides, the AACS riots, the other notable act of cyberactivism that comes to mind are the denial-of service attacks enacted against ebaum when it blatantly republished a site from ytmnd (see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YTMND) as ebaum's own work. Protestors from across the Web (and notably from somethingawful) joined forces to crash ebaum.

Interestingly, the site that was stolen from ytmnd was itself a parody drawn from (and basically just consisting of) stolen material. Also interestingly, even this old-fashioned protest in favor of individuality, authorship, and IP rights was an act of spontaneous collaboration, a creative collaborative act from the collective.

- Micaela