Can't Someone Else Do It?

So what does the three-oranges-for-a-buck sale down at da Jewel have to do with the slow death of Wikipedia?

Funny you should ask.

From Gawker:

Wikipedia Is Slowly Dying

Jimmy Wales, the iconoclastic founder of Wikipedia, made a troubling announcement at the seventh annual Wikipedia conference: Nobody wants to edit Wikipedia anymore. Is Wikipedia going to shrivel up and fade away?

Wales told the AP that the number of Wikipedia editors is slowly dwindling. "We are not replenishing our ranks," he said, "it is not a crisis, but I consider it to be important." According to Wales a lot of the core Wikipedians have simply aged out, got married and found that they have better things to do with their time. Previous rumors of Wikipedias demise have focused on a lack of any new stuff to add; but this seems like a real existential threat.
...

And Twitter and Facebook have sucked up all the cognitive surplus younger internet users might have once devoted to building up Wikipedia and shattered it into a million fleeting hashtags.
...

We have a cherished saying in my family: "Let's you and him fight."

Which, translated, is our way of recognizing-with-an-Ozark-laugh that the world is full of people who have lots of good ideas about how other people should spend their abundant "spare time".

What's happening with Wikipedia is not a web phenomenon: it's just the latest manifestation of same something-for-nothing shell game played by every two-bit Alexander the Great I (and probably you) have ever worked for.

It is the fantasy on which turned just about every executive staff session I was ever dragooned into attending into a meeting of all-quarterbacks and no wide-receivers where every wild, dumb idea was flung blindly down-field to no one at all -- in the passive "someone really should move the building two feet to the left!" voice -- by organizational deadwood who later tell their loved ones what heroes they had been that day.

It is the fantasy that allows elected goofs get away with promising that if gummint were just "run like a business" everything would be fine. (Which is bullshit. Most gummint -- most lousy gummint -- is run exactly like a lousy business: idiots on top who got there because or their last names or their college roommates, making far too much money than they are worth by loading up the men and women who actually till the soil and tread the grain [so to speak] with more work than they can possible accomplish [the goof on top didn't get there by telling the public "No"]...and then bitching about their general laziness and clockwatchery, or outsourcing the whole deal to some third party for a quick buck.)

It is the fantasy that has turned unpaid interns into unwitting scabs, and WalMart into an American success story instead of something foul and feudal about which we should be heartily ashamed.

It is the ancient Faustian bargain of the slaveholder – an army of uncomplaining servants created by, oh, let’s say “Providence” to provide the privileged with an endless stream of luxuries at bargain basement prices, and around which mankind has historically erected all manner of depraved theologies explaining why those who do the work should not enjoy the fruits of their labor, but should content themselves sitting on the porch, singin' spirituals.

As I wrote back in 2006:

Live Free or Buy

[Tom Friedman] also treads as lightly as a chubby mouse in a catnip bomber-jacket navigating the main floor of the Lion House just around sup-sup-sup-suppertime, because far too much of his personal well-being is staked to his main gig -- delivering ten-year-old platitudes about globalization to twenty-years-out-of-date, Conservative CEOs. Rich, white men with Republican rock-ribs, who adore George Bush and have voted straight GOP-ticket since they were old enough to golf in ugly pants.

Men who live in First Class – sometimes, to be clear and fair, through dint of long hours and hard work, which are traits to be admired – and have deluded themselves into believing that they can outsource the rivets and steel that hold the plane together, the engines that make it go and the flight crew that navigates it safely though the storm…and yet somehow they will be able to fly on in comfort forever, fueled by consultants and canny financial valuation trickery.

Friedman catches such men as the last of their employees plummet wholesale Earthward, as they sit in the skeletal airframe of their once-proud ships and the deathly cold wind of 30,000 feet is whistling though their ass-cracks and he advises that, perhaps, Steps Of Some Kind Should Be Taken.
...

We may or may not be able to educate our way out of the corner we’re in, but to even attempt to do so, we first have to come squarely to terms with who we are, what we are, and how we really got here.

To do that, consider this, which is one of my favorite quotes from Charlie Chaplin.
“The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.”

That is the dirty truth and true root of our problem; We have become the saddest thing Charlie Chaplin could imagine.

“We have become used to luxury.”

Those $.99 chicken fingers? The $12 bumper-to-bumper, inside-and-out car-wash? The three-oranges-for-a-buck sale down at the Jewel?

These are, all of them, luxury items, created not by a band of rugged Libertarians hewing agricultural and technological miracles out of the living rock, but made possible by an ocean of cheap labor, federal subsidies and a continent rich beyond the dreams of Avarice in natural resources.

What we’re all about (and always have been) is manufacturing what, for most of human history, has been luxury goods, selling them cheap and living fat off the margins. There is nothing at all wrong with making a living doing this, except that in the long run, every race will go to the cleverest, and right now our problem is that we don’t believe that.

We are drowning in our own mythos of Sunshine, Freedom and Manifest Destiny.

We have take a fatal dose of our own Exceptionalism propaganda and have internalized down to our tubby little toesies the belief that God Almighty wants us to live in opulence.

That God wants gas prices to be low.
...

In 1861 the South was prosperous specifically because of the forced labor of four million brown people who were reviled, exploited, abused and utterly necessary.

In 2006, America is prosperous specifically because of the peonage-cheap, illegal labor of twelve million brown people who are reviled, exploited, abused and utterly necessary.

We tolerate with a wink-and-a-nudge a system that simultataneously criminalizes a labor force of twelve million to keep them underground and terrified, and then carefully extracts their labor for pennies.

Any social policy which doesn’t confront immigration on those terms will fail and fail badly because, in the end, we really only have two choices: Either a renegotiation of the social contract to pay working people a living wage, or an open recognition that we will forever rely more and more on cheaper and cheaper labor to remain spoiled and Holy.

So far we have chosen neither. We have chosen to burn through our collective inheritance of wealth and prestige to make foolish choices, set foolish policies, wage foolish wars, without having to feel any pain. Like crack-heads, we have stolen from our parents and mooched from our children enough fast, high-interest cash to allow us to trundle along in a state of oblivious Eloi-ness where we don’t have to make any hard decisions and our God-Given Right to Comfort and Ease keeps us from asking too many tough questions about where all this Free Lunch is actually coming from.

But Physics and Economics are brutal loan-sharks and we can’t all live forever on borrowed money, no matter how successful certain individuals like Dubya have been at doing just that.
...

I use Wikipedia for the occasional fast quote or summary here and there. I appreciate its convenience, just as I appreciate the convenience of free-of-charge services like YouTube and Blogger and gmail.

But I do not own them, and if they went away tomorrow I would find other tools with which to do my thing.

"Crowdsourcing", "cognitive surplus" and suchlike have never been anything but webslang for Homer J. Simpson's famous campaign slogan: "Can't someone else do it?"

And if you build your business, your ideology or your nation like "a foolish man who built his house on the sand" don't come crying to me when the rain comes and washes it all away.