There is only one blogger around who fits the description in the title perfectly. Someone who has, unfortunately for you and I since it means he is now everywhere, made a very good living out of peddling ill thought out arguments and regurgitated reviews.
And before you jump to any conclusions, no, it’s not John Chow. Maybe if the title was the biggest con man in the blogosphere then he would have been a more appropriate target.
The stupidest man in the blogosphere is none other than Michael Arrington, blogger at Tech Crunch and living proof that popularity, as many a fresh faced teenage pop star has shown us, has nothing to do with talent.
You maybe wondering why I’ve decided to vent my spleen so publicly. And why Arrington is fast becoming my new verbal punch bag.
Three reasons. First, he embodies everything that is wrong with the blogosphere, regurgitating news and reviews without adding anything of value. Second, his main traffic generating trick is the denigration and humiliation of anyone who does seek to create something original or artistic, trolling his way around the internet seeking to annoy at every turn, generating bait ridden posts that the majority of the public are happy to bite. And third, the one where he really hits a nerve with me, he has a seemingly unlimited disrespect of musicians and anyone in the creative arts.
In recent posts Arrington has claimed that musicians should not be paid for recorded music. He steadfastly reduces all creative work to marketing fluff, refusing to accept that it has any inherent value.
I’m not alone in my anger. This quote is taken from a selection of comments on Nicholas Carr’s excellent blog, Rough Type, in a post where Nicholas calls Arrington’s words the saddest, stupidest sentence he has ever read.
I stopped reading TechCrunch months ago. I had originally subscribed because it seemed like everyone around me read it. A pattern became apparent: it exists to rip others apart. There’s a pseudo intellectual smugness to the writing. Maybe it began life with more innocent and honest goals, but it’s quickly devolved into some kind of reductionist theater of the absurd. My suggestion: turn the tv off; unsubscribe.
He really has swallowed the Web 2.0 pill and absolutely believes that the long tail is the only way for artists to get paid. In Arringtons distorted, internet only, opinion, creative output should be free.
Arrington seems to dream of a world in which creativity is not valued. A world in which the independent artists stop creating music because they cannot make enough money to eat. The corporations would provide all the music and creative works. Maybe all the musicians would become tech bloggers, hammering out the same old reviews over and over again.
Billy Bragg described this world quite nicely,
Bye bye Radiohead, hello Hannah Montanna.
Culture then becomes a thing of the past.
Of course, this won’t happen because people will always be happy to pay for quality and integrity. Artists just need to find a way to connect directly with their audience. Start a blog, start a podcast, start independently promoting. Thats the way forward for independent artists. And there’s not a thing Arrington can do to stop it.
I’ll leave you with another quote from the discussion over at Rough Type,
There’s no turning back the clock, so musicians will have to accept their fate. But Arrington will have to accept his fate as well: if he’s not willing to pay for high-quality recorded music, he’ll have to settle for poor-quality promotional crap. Of course, he probably doesn’t know the difference.
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Arrington’s view is, sadly, not unique. The vast majority of us, however, see such nonsense for what it really is: envy.
If Arrington started blogging today he would fail. The man is an arrogant narcissistic egotist with a massive insecurity complex. A dangerous combination.
few people understand the plight of the musician. no one understands the long hours of practice, the setting up and breaking down of stage equipment. the recording mishaps. the deals that fall thru. they think some kid spits into a mike and becomes famous. its that easy, right?
wrong. few people work as hard at their profession we do. few people work as hard on promoting themselves. even rapper work hard. Ludacris talked his way into a job at a radio station. he worked all day and then used their old equipment to make his first album… at night. then he sold 100,000 copies out the trunk of his Caprice at 5 dollars a cut. Whether you think he has any talent or not, you gotta respect that.
it’s even easier now-a-days. I just finished building an online store - it cost 150 bucks. 90 bones for hosting, 30 for a shopping cart and 30 because I wanted to make some money off it. It wouldn’t take but 20 minutes to convert that same online store to sell cuts. we could buy a cut-rate mic from best buy, stick some mattresses in a large walk-in closet and record the whole thing on some pawn-shop mini-disk recorder or beat up gateway laptop. i’ll play bone, my brother can sit in on second trumpet. my best friend would play keys and my other brother would get on the set. hey Ashley, where ya at?