Geoffrey Allan Plauché called to my attention this letter from back in 2007 from sci-fi author Howard V. Hendrix, the then VP of the SFWA, explaining why he wasn’t going to run for President. The letter is an unintentionally funny, jaw-droppingly ludditish rant against technology and the Internet, in which he disparages authors who put their work online for free as “webscabs” (obviously, no one paid him to write his letter–oh, the irony). As Plauché mentioned to me, author Michael Stackpole eviscerates Hendrix’s screed episode of his “The Secrets” podcast “for serious writers”. Here’s an excerpt of Hendrix’s letter:
In another way too, though, I feel that the organization and I are moving apart at the moment. More and more of SFWA’s business is internet mediated. I’ve spent several thousands of hours doing SFWA business online during my Western Regional Director and Vice President years. As a result I’ve developed an almost allergic aversion toward all things nettish, including what I’m doing right now.
I think the ongoing and increasing sublimation of the private space of consciousness into public netspace is profoundly pernicious. For that reason I don’t much like to blog, wiki, chat, post, LiveJournal, or lounge in SFF.net. A problem with the whole wikicliki, sick-o-fancy, jerque-du-cercle of a networking and connection-based order is that, if you “go along to get along” for too long, there’s a danger you’ll no longer remember how to go it alone when the ethics of the situation demand it.
I’m also opposed to the increasing presence in our organization of webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free. A scab is someone who works for less than union wages or on non-union terms; more broadly, a scab is someone who feathers his own nest and advances his own career by undercutting the efforts of his fellow workers to gain better pay and working conditions for all. Webscabs claim they’re just posting their books for free in an attempt to market and publicize them, but to my mind they’re undercutting those of us who aren’t giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work.
Since more and more of SFWA is built around such electronically mediated networking and connection based venues, and more and more of our membership at least tacitly blesses the webscabs (despite the fact that they are rotting our organization from within) — given my happily retrograde opinions, I felt I was not the president who would provide SFWAns the “net time” they seemed to want at this point in the organization’s development, or who would bless the contraction of our industry toward monopoly, or who would give imprimatur to the downward spiral that is converting the noble calling of Writer into the life of Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch.
Astonishing. Taken to its logical conclusion, it’s an argument against generosity as well as against freedom.
The irony of his having written the letter at all is remarkable, as you point out. But there’s even more irony in this: “I felt I was not the president who would … bless the contraction of our industry toward monopoly, …”
That’s right: putting your works online where any Net-connected human can see them is “monopoly”, whereas restricting them to a system where only those who have permission from some central authority can distribute them is, apparently, not.
Confidential to Howard V. Hendrix: “doublethink” does not mean “thinking twice as much”.
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Although you jokingly suggested by email that this might cause cognitive dissonance, rest assured it does not. This is obviously someone from the Michael Moore model of unionism: rather than seeing unions as a form of self-organization to empower workers against large, powerful institutions, Hendrix favors large powerful institutions because they can afford to incorporate unions into their bureaucratic organizational model.
In “Thermidor of the Progressives,” I described this as nostalgia for the bureaucratic “Consensus Capitalism” model of the postwar era, in which it was OK for General Motors to own the entire manufacturing economy so long as Michael Moore’s dad could get good union wages, and also OK for the entire communications system to be controlled by the Big Three gatekeepers so long as they were restricted by the fairness doctrine.
As I argued in that paper, people of Hendrix’s stripe are essentially Schumpeterian. They believe that only large, hierarchical institutions can afford to be “progressive” because they have the market power to charge above marginal cost and pass the costs of higher wages and benefits to the customer via administered pricing. People like Hendrix have a decided antipathy toward anything like network technology or small-scale affordable machinery that threatens to weaken the power of large, hierarchical institutions.
They actually fear and loathe the idea of an economy of self-managed worker cooperatives, or an economy in which the means of digital production are affordable to the producers (“everyone can afford a printing press”), because to these people a giant bureaucracy with Weberian work rules and job descriptions is the only way they can figure out to keep people from being exploited. So it’s better to have a giant bureaucratic manufacturer controlled by a giant bureucratic union, or a giant broadcast network controlled by the fairness doctrine, than to have the means of production actually owned and controlled by the people doing the work. People like Hendrix see the bureaucratic model of “progressive” capitalism, not as an evil made necessary by the enormous cost of production machinery and the resulting wage system, but as a positive good compared to actual worker empowerment.
Just about everything Hendrix says about the Internet — the loss of individual voice, the collectivism, etc. — is just a parroting of Andrew Keen and other like-minded idjuts.
I presume whatever “science fiction” Hendrix writes is in the steampunk genre.
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@Kevin Tip ‘o the hat — it’s a rare site where the analysis in the comments is as good as in the articles.
Although, to be fair, there’s no reason to accuse Hendrix of parroting, just because his ideas are similar to others’. Parallel ideation is the norm, and in any case his letter actually predates the publication of Keen’s book “The Cult of the Amateur” (though postdates by a little bit some of Keen’s earlier, smaller scale writings on the same topic).
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