So, I got a chance recently to hang out with an acquaintance of mine named Gretchen Hasse, here in the Uptown neighborhood where I live. Gretchen, for those who don't already know, is the author of a great web comic called Freak's Progress, the surrealist story of a two-headed prostitute and the clueless big-dicked emo boy who loves her; it's really entertaining, too, so I encourage you to check it out if you get the chance. Anyway, so that unsurprisingly got us on the subject of 'micropayments' the other day, a theory that's been floating around the underground arts for decades, only now getting serious because of the absolute latest developments on the web. And believe it or not, I'd actually been thinking about micropayments myself recently as well; because that's the way things work in Second Life too, that alternative-reality videogame that I'm all obsessed with these days. And they've come up with what I think is a really intriguing way to implement such a thing too, something that's had my mind ticking recently, thinking of if there'd be a way for something like this to be set up at my own arts center as well, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (or CCLaP), whose website will be opening this May. So today, some thoughts on artificial 'micro-economies,' created specifically as a way of implementing micropayments to underground artists.

So the theory of micropayments is solid enough; it's been around and tinkered with since at least the 1980s, after all, although didn't start getting really popular until taken up by Scott McCloud in his seminal book Understanding Comics. The theory goes like this - that in the age we now live in, it's no longer necessary for an artist to collect their work up into sets (like publications, CDs and DVDs) before selling them to their audience, but can literally just charge a microscopic amount of money for a microscopic amount of content. So instead of a newspaper directly paying a bunch of comic-strip artists for their strips, then charging their customers 50 cents a day to read a page of these strips, the artists themselves just charge 5 cents directly to their readers to read the strip, bypassing the newspaper altogether. You as a reader still get ten funny comic strips per day for 50 cents, more than were probably funny in that newspaper to begin with; and in the meanwhile you get to pick and choose these comics yourself, instead of the newspaper determining the list for you, and to build a collection if you want of untried new artists and classic mature ones. And in the meanwhile, the artist herself is keeping a full 5 cents per reader per day for that strip, versus the half-a-penny per reader or whatever that they get from the newspaper company for the same deal. It's a win-win situation for everyone involved...well, except the middleman, that is, which is kinda the whole point. Why let the distributors continue to get rich, by screwing artists and customers at the same time? We don't need the distributors anymore, the theory goes, not in an age of direct digital distribution, so let's simply cut them out of the equation altogether.

And as most of you already know, it's not just comic strips that can be distributed on a microscopic level; poems can be sold one piece at a time as well, for example, as well as a photographer's portfolio or a collection of short videos, while longer stories can always be published serially and sold that way, in the style of old 'penny dreadfuls' or Stephen King's modern The Green Mile. And this is a great idea, I think, and one that I've theoretically been behind since first hearing about it; the idea that an artist could already start generating revenue from their work from its very first day of existence, instead of waiting around for that book or CD that might never come. And let's admit it, all you middle-class arts-loving readers; if someone made it ridiculously easy for you to pay a poet 10 cents on the spot, for a poem you particularly enjoyed, a lot of you would most likely do it. And especially if it was a voluntary system only; that is, if you got to read the poem anyway, whether or not you sent payment, and were only sending in that 10 cents as an optional exclamation point to your feelings, a small way of saying to the writer, "Yeah, I really dug that one in particular."

Aye, but there's the rub - making it ridiculously easy, that is, which has so far been the downfall of the micropayment theory. Because let's face it, it wasn't even until five or six years ago that this theory could even start getting discussed seriously for the first time - not until Paypal first made it easy for individuals to accept payments from others via credit card. But even with that, it's the financial situation that's still holding things back; that is, the fact that such companies charge these individuals a certain amount of money, for verifying that online payment for them, which at the very minimum is going to cost a person at least 20 or 30 cents, and just get more expensive from there. And so you can immediately see the problem here - that if an artist is only selling things for five cents, but then paying 20 cents to verify the sale, they're actually posting a 150-percent loss on each transaction. And if they transfer the fee to you, you're suddenly paying 30 to 40 cents for a single comic strip, which defeats the purpose of micropayments in the first place.

So, debate the morality of the situation if you want, argue whether these companies could afford to charge less per transaction and still make a profit; but we're still left with an intriguing question, of whether there's a way for arts administrators to implement such a system right now, to start helping out the artists that it's their mission to support. And this is where Second Life (SL) comes into play, because they have to deal with the same issue over there; that is, one of the biggest parts of SL's real economy there ($5 million exchanged between members every single month) is the buying and selling of virtual goods, things that only exist as pieces of computer code, but that are nonetheless quite valuable in that world, such as clothing, housing, jewelry and the like. And let's face facts - they're virtual goods, which means that most people aren't going to be that willing to invest any serious kind of money into them. Give someone a chance to purchase, say, a fancy unique hairdo for their avatar, for 10 cents or whatever, and a surprisingly large amount of players will go for that, much like how billions of dollars are spent every year on tinny, pointless ringtones for cellphones and mobiles. Charge a dollar for such a thing, though, and most SLers will say no thanks.

How Linden Lab (the owners of Second Life) dealt with this, then, was to simply create their own currency especially for the game, called "Linden Dollars" after the company itself. And even more brilliant, it's a micro-economy as well; which means, for example, that one puny US dollar equals a whopping 250 Linden dollars in-game. And so that lets people charge an amount of money in-game that would be worthless in real life, but actually adds up in the virtual world; L$50, for example, which only equals 20 cents in US currency, can easily get you a cool new outfit in SL, even sometimes a whole house if it's an older one on sale, or will let you tip a virtual stripper while you're out socializing. (I mean, make no mistake, virtual strippers aren't nearly as fun as real ones; but what do you expect for 20-cent tips?) It'd be impossible to charge these small amounts in the real world, because the costs of parts, labor, overhead and more would quickly swallow all the revenue; in a virtual world, though, people are making tens of thousands of dollars a year under just such payments. And so could artists in the real world, I'm convinced, if we could find a way to implement on the web what Second Life has done in-game.

So how do they avoid all those crazy verification fees? Oh, that's super easy - they only let people buy Linden Dollars in bulk, so that there's only one transaction fee for a whole bunch of currency. Fucking brilliant, I'm telling you! But see, there's only one reason that something like that works; and that's because there's a zillion things actually for sale there at SL, that a zillion people actually want to buy. This is what prevents an individual artist, for example, from making the same deal at their site, that if you pay $5 a month you get an entire month's worth of their strip; because what if you don't want to pay for an entire month of their strip? What if you don't want to pay 10 cents for the strips that suck? That's the whole point of such a pricing structure, after all; to give not only artists increased power but audience members too. What if you only wanted to pay 10 cents for the strips you particularly enjoyed, the ones that literally made you laugh out loud and say, "Okay, that chuckle was worth 10 cents of my money?" Then you're back to the same problem as before - 10-cent payments, 20-cent verification fees, and a doubling of losses for that artist with each sale.

So how about this instead? How about a centralized organization (like, say, CCLaP) creating a micro-economy ourselves, on our website, that any artist who wanted to could participate in? Instead of calling it a virtual currency, we could call it something fun and related to social networking instead - like "Shoutouts," for example, which would cost a person 10 cents apiece to give to others. For $1.25, then, an online visitor could purchase 10 shoutouts at once, associated with their online account, plus of course with 25 cents added to cover the payment verification fee. (This fee would then remain the same, no matter how many Shoutouts you bought at once - 50 would cost $5.25, for example.) CCLaP, then, would have a special section of our website, where artists of all types are merely posting small bits of material for free, all hooked up into this very useful database and search engine. (In fact, we're already planning on doing this - we'll be reprinting all the work, for example, that artists donate to us in exchange for free memberships.) You as a visitor, then, just continue to read new material for free, hopefully 2 to 5 new pieces each day if things go well, like you normally would at our site; but then if you particularly enjoyed a specific new poem that day, you could simply click on the "Send a Shoutout" link at the bottom of it, and automatically transfer 10 cents from your account into that artist's account, without either of you getting charged a separate transaction fee for that taking place. Congratulations - you just paid that artist 10 cents, for a particularly great poem or story or photograph.

But don't call it a "payment;" convince your audience to think of it more as "sharing the love," or "saying 'Good job'" to a particular piece they admire. And meanwhile, build an interface much like you see at Digg or Memeorandum - where the pieces with the most Shoutouts appear on the front page, or maybe pieces with not a lot of Shoutouts but a whole bunch of good comments, from fellow broke artists who think that piece deserves more attention than it's getting. It's ultimately a self-filtering system, just like everything else associated with CCLaP, which is what I like so much about it; that is, it's the members themselves deciding which pieces there get the most attention, either through monetary Shoutouts or by spending the time to write a good comment, whichever they can best afford. But it's still a big searchable database as well, which means that you don't have to rely on what else is popular to find new stuff; if all you're looking for are poems about Star Wars, you can just do a search on that, and see which poets have tagged their pieces with those keywords.

Now, granted, CCLaP itself wouldn't make any money from such a system; but it's not costing us anything extra either, merely using technology that was there anyway, and is meanwhile fulfilling our mission in this really profound way. I mean, just imagine a best-case scenario for a project like this; imagine, for example, my friend Shappy Seasholtz, who is pretty much the best performance poet I personally know, and definitely the most popular. If Shappy still lived in Chicago, if Shappy was to perform every week at the CCLaP Slam, and if we were to have a healthy amount of account-holders on the web (1,000 people total, maybe, all of them giving out a couple of Shoutouts each day), I don't think it'd be unusual at all for a lot of Shappy's performances to garner 100 Shoutouts or more, once the MP3 was posted to the web and people were allowed to listen to it for free. That's always been Shappy's strength, after all, is his live performances, not his writing; anyone who's familiar with his performances, in fact, will agree with me that 100 Shoutcasts per poem is not a ridiculous number to imagine for him. So if Shappy got up every week at the Slam and performed a killer poem, and then posted that MP3 to the website each week (a free service we will provide for artists), and garnered around 100 Shoutcasts each week, that's suddenly $10 in extra revenue for each and every poem he's writing. And if he writes 12 killer poems in a row, that's suddenly $120 in real money...before the CD even comes out.

Well, spank my ass and call me Shirley, but I think this is remarkable! I mean, sure, it's nothing to live off of, but let's consider what's really going on here - Shappy making over $100 in additional revenue, for something he was just doing for free anyway, as an excuse to drink and hang out with his friends, using technology that's not costing us any extra money either. And meanwhile, that's 100 new rabid fans of Shappy that's been made; so then the next year, when Shappy releases that studio album he recorded with us (another service we'll be providing), with music and sound effects and the whole shebang, those 100 people will go flocking for it the moment it comes out. At at ten bucks a pop in that case, that's when both he and us start really making money. Especially when combined with that book of his we had already published as well. And the summer tour we help him schedule. And the interviews and literary analysis that we publish at the website, again for free download.

I've said this many times, that I think the name of the game for the arts in the Information Age is "synergy;" of combining many pursuits, many products, many artists doing many different things, and many audience members interested in many different things, into one central organization using one small promotional budget. It's about building a legitimate conversation between these artists and audience members, too, to let the relationship pass smoothly into a more direct one between the two groups, and less reliant on the traditional middleman that CCLaP is. It's about understanding the proper times to require payment for something, and the proper times to only request volunteer payment. And it's about exploiting technology as much as possible, to make this process as smooth, inexpensive, and useful to the customer as possible. It's not just the Evil Corporate World that's getting lifted by its feet and shaken these days, not just millions of blue-collar employees losing their jobs; I'm convinced that by twenty years from now, you're also going to see the permanent death of almost all artistic non-profit organizations in this country as well, with the model for CCLaP being the new norm in the world of creativity (that is, a combination of volunteer donations and real-world free-market capitalism). But that's a whole separate entry I'm planning on writing later this week, so I'll save the details of that for then.

So anyway, my thanks yet again to Linden Lab, for giving me something yet new again to ponder these days. Are you starting to understand why I'm so obsessed with getting a chance to play this game these days?

So speaking of CCLaP, I'm just finishing up the newest version of our PDF brochure, which unfortunately is all I have at this point concerning the center to give out to interested parties, until the website finally goes live later this year. I'm past the days of merely conceptualizing the project, and am now into actively selling it to a general audience, so I thought it was time for the document to reflect this as well; to look more like a traditional brochure or catalog, and less like a Powerpoint presentation. Anyway, above are some screenshots of a few random pages (it's about 20 pages total); and the full PDF document will be getting uploaded here soon, for free download by anyone who's interested.

Oh, and speaking of Second Life, good news on the fundraising drive I'm doing right now, to buy a Mac Intel Mini so I can actually start playing Second Life. $360 now raised! Only $240 to go! Many thanks to my old college buddies Tim and Beth Clauss, for the recent extra 50 bucks! And I just want to remind people, by the way, that me getting a Mini and playing SL actually holds benefits to all you daily readers as well, whether or not you're actually into videogaming yourself. See, if I haven't already made it abundantly clear, I actually have a chance to make real money in SL; but you can see the Second Life category page at this site for more on that, if you're interested. So that means, for example, that instead of having to hold a much bigger fundraiser this summer, to raise the $4,000 I need to go to South Africa this August, I can earn the $4,000 within the game on my own, and save you from a whole summer of annoying little pleas for money like this one. Then of course once on the trip, I'll be updating this journal every 24 hours like normal (plus updating my Flickr account with new photos each day as well), which means that all of you get to follow along in real time for free, and to vicariously be in South Africa with me while the trip takes place.

I encourage you to look at it as a reader investment, if you're one of those people who likes coming here every day; that getting the Mini will allow me to finally start drawing a regular income, which in turn makes my real life more stable, which in turn lets me go out and start doing a lot more interesting things again, a lot more often. And that leads to funnier and more entertaining entries here, or at least better than "I sat around and watched South Park on YouTube for six hours again," which I'm having to say an awful lot these days because I'm always just so damn broke. So don't think of it as you helping me to play a videogame that you could care less about; think of it as you helping me get a steady job, so that all of my journal entries increase in quality as a result. Anyway, here's the link to my Paypal account:

Like I said, only $240 to go; for all you internationals, that's approximately 140 pounds or maybe 200 or so euros. I very much appreciate whatever help you're able to offer!