Outsourcing Your Scrapbook and Your Duty as an Aphid of the Industrial Age

Sign of the times: Here’s a piece that appeared recently in the Arts and Life section of the National Post:

…

People who don’t have the time, money or “talent” to

scrapbook are hiring others to do it for them — for thousands of

dollars. Even if you’re talentless they’ll hire you, according to

DiFranco. She advises, “Don’t question your own ‘scraptistic ability.’

Most clients actually prefer the look of simple layouts. And because

they’re not scrapbookers themselves, they won’t be comparing your work

to anyone else’s.”

What an ideal client base.

---

There’s no way that someone else, given a shoebox of your 

photos, clippings and other mementoes, could possibly create a

scrapbook that would capture their meaning — at least not without

consulting with you extensively. Would a scrapbooker possibly know that

the pack of matches from Ben’s Smoked Meat in Montreal means infinitely

more to me than the photo of me and the then-girlfriend at Lollapalooza

’95? That the grey dog was my first pet and the black dog belonged to a

girlfriend? Or that the mini-bar bill from the no-longer-existent

Holiday Inn behind New City Hall goes with the letters from the sisters

I was dating, each without the other’s knowledge?

(Hey, I was 19, and if you thought you could get away with it, you’d do it too.)

A scrapbook put

together by someone else might be nicely arranged, but it would be

bereft of rhyme or reason, free of nuance or meaning. It would merely

be a vanity coffee table book, a sort of trophy whose raison d’etre

would be so that you could brag that you had one.

---

“What an ideal client base” is what the RIAA, MPAA or Bill Gates

would say after reading the National Post article. These guys prefer to think of you as consumers rather than customers. The distinction, as Doc Searls often likes to point out, is an important one. He says

that as a consumer, vendors see you as an “aphid of the industrial

age”; a creature whose primary role in the scheme of things is to “gulp

products and crap cash”.

Any creative activity — and yes, scrapbooking falls into this category

— is the sort of thing that they wouldn’t like. If you’re creating,

you’re likely not consuming, and hence you’re not  perfoming your

designated function: crapping cash. That’s why they think you’ve only licensed and don’t really own the music and movies you bought. It’s also why they’d like set limits on what your computers can do. It’s also why you and your SMS messages are to blame for the box-office failure of their crappy movies rather than say, the movie being crappy. And finally, it’s also why they want to lock pieces of your own culture away from you and keep it for themselves.

The saddest thing is that people are beginning to buy into their

consumer aphid role, and it starts with outsourcing your scrapbook.