Marco Arment, co-founder of Tumblr and founder of Instapaper, the ür-read-it-later service.

Now, I use Instapaper a lot, though I’m trying to stop. Not for magnanimous reasons, necessarily, but because I have more than 5,000 things in my Instapaper, and realistically, I will never read all of them. But there are things in there I know I wanted to read, and if I had just made the time to read them when I figured out I wanted to, I would have read them. And been smarter, now. And probably a better writer. So this post wouldn’t suck so much.

Putting aside the weird issue of piling up of assumedly great writing, I do think Instapaper is kind of evil. And maybe Tumblr is, too? It seems. Wait. Picture me saying this, but with the voice of the guy in Thin Red Line/that Explosions in the Sky song:

This great evil… (hah, no). It seems like Tumblr and Instapaper are basically the Napster of “content.” No attributions, no publisher ads, writing ripped completely off other sites and reposted only to get reblogged hundreds or thousands of times. And Tumblr gets most of its impressions on the dashboard. They say this all the time. (The brilliance of Tumblr is that they’re walling you/us off into the dashboard.) (The irony of you likely reading this on the dashboard…) So even if you have a personal Tumblog with ads or links to sites where you make money, most of your impressions will be on the dashboard. Most of your viewers will not know about you, the person who wrote this thing or took this picture. They won’t learn how to hire you. They’ll probably think that whoever it is they follow, the person who reblogged your thing, is cooler than you because that person is a ‘content curator.’ (Fuck them.)

I used to think Instapaper was a weird way for a Tumblr co-founder to go, but it’s not! It’s the same fucking thing as Tumblr, but more brazen. (The fact that Tumblr and Instapaper are both, objectively, amazing services is something to note, of course.) Instapaper is just, like, magic. It really really really is the Napster of writing. Like, I land on a page, click a bookmarklet, and I bounce. Motherfucker, I bounce. I’m on the page for like 4 seconds, and that doesn’t even count as an impression. Not only do I not click on any ads (or look at them), but my visit doesn’t even count.

And Marco is just fine with it. And a lot of people are just fine with it. In fact, everyone is fine with it. Except for the people who make a living on the internet. Choire Sicha wrote about read-it-later services last week, saying,

Some of the proprietors of these [read-it-later] services don’t care about the finances of the creation of writing at all. They don’t want to see “all that junk”: they’re hostile; they say things like they don’t see why they should feel personally responsible for someone else’s ad impressions. They just want to reaaaad and be free, man. But they are responsible, if they want people to make words for them.

The title of his post, if you don’t click through (you should) is “‘Read It Later’: Republishing is Theft.” And it is.

It is fucked up. I know. I really like writing about music. And a lot of the music I write about is, in fact, stolen. This is a shitty thing. Do I buy music? Of course. I’ve bought more $5 albums off Bandcamp this year than I can count. I chipped in ten bucks for Kanye’s latest golden goblet. I think I bought like four Robyn albums last year, even though I only ended up with like 15 discrete songs. But if I’m being completely honest, I have at least $5,000 worth (fair market value) of unpaid for music on my hard drive. I write for free about music I love, and I link to the iTunes/Amazon/Bandcamp page of it. But I know I’m taking things that don’t belong to me.

It’s a cultural thing. People are used to getting things for free. Why?

Well, like I said, I write about music. Sometimes I get paid, but often I just want to hear it and write about it. And a lot of times, I really don’t like it. And a lot of times, I could have streamed it on NPR, but I don’t want to have a streaming thing going all time because, Internet. (How am I supposed to watch cat videos on YouTube if I have to stream music all day?) I guess my point is that I don’t so much expect music to be free as expect it to be freely available, and at some point I will make a decision as to whether I want to pay. And I do make that decision. But for most music, no, I don’t want to buy it (because I don’t like it).

Writing is like this. I mean, it’s been ‘free’ for a long time. Maybe the problem is the commercialization of writing, the fact that people ever thought they could make a living off writing. But I know that people don’t really expect to pay for writing on the Internet. ¹

I think people should pay for writing. In fact, if you’ve read this far, please consider going to the wonderful Tiger Beatdown blog ² and think about donating or becoming a subscriber. You won’t get anything you couldn’t have otherwise gotten for free, but you will be supporting writing. You’ll be paying for something you like, and for something that takes a team of people time to make. And it’s stuff that they—and by the anayltics, many other people—care about, a lot.

Like, honestly, if I want a chair or a picture frame or some homemade organic dog treats, I pay someone for them. And I’ve made those things. While they’re not, like, easy peasy, they’re an algorithmic process that can be fairly well standardized and streamlined; it isn’t hard. (Wow, I do not want to start a beef with the carpenters, frame makers, and dog bakers of the world. I do appreciate your work, and I know it’s not easy.) My point just is that writing is a similar thing, you know? Someone has to sit down and make the thing you’re reading. You can’t eat it. You can’t sit on it. You can’t feed it to your dog. But someone made it, and it took them time—away from their dog, for instance, or away from their burgeoning interest in making artisanal, vegan dog treats.

I guess what I’m saying is that I was listening to Marco’s podcast, and he said that, and it was like a dickslap ‘cross the face. Seriously. “Some portion of my user base is going to want to pay publishers, and that’s a feature I don’t intend to offer.” Paying people to make things is not a feature.

PAYING PEOPLE TO MAKE THINGS IS NOT A FEATURE.

Sorry. Wait, Ahem. Excuse me.

FUCKING PAYING FUCKING PEOPLE FUCKING TO FUCKING MAKE FUCKING THINGS IS FUCKING NOT A FUCKING FEATURE FUCKING YOU FUCKING TWIT.

Whoa. Anger. Sadness. Anger. Red. I’m sorry. (See, I’m undermining my ‘argument,’ [as it were] as it were, with all this ‘writing.’ But maybe you’ll see my point? I don’t know.)

Jeez, Marco. Maybe I will jailbreak my iPhone and pirate your app because paying app developers is not a feature that I intend to offer. Hey Dunkin Donutz, paying coffee providers for caffeine (freely available in nature, mind you) is not a feature I intend to offer.

I don’t know what the solution is, obviously. I’ve already admitted I steal tons of music, and that I’ve used Instapaper to steal tons of writing. Wait, let me say that again: I’ve used Instapaper to steal tons of writing. There, doesn’t that feel good? To admit that using Instapaper is stealing? Yes. It does.

I don’t know what the solution is, but I know that we need to be talking about the problem before we get to the solution. I know music is going toward a subscription model. Well, we’ve seen how well that’s worked out for publishers. (Just saying.) I buy tons of fucking e-books. (Yes, LOL, why would you pay for data? The fucking Iliad is data, asshole, that’s why.) I subscribe to magazines. I buy journals that I like. I buy tshirts, prints, tote bags associated with publications. Am I a low-class hipster consumer? Sure! Because, and this is the flip side of the argument Oh-you-just-buy-culture-why-does-every-cost-money-volkswagens-are-stupid-ipods-consuemrism-consumerism-consumerism. People don’t get to make shit unless there are consumers for it. OK? Get it? No one’s ever going to pay you to sit on the can and read your Instapaper queue, unless you assiduously do it while slacking off at work. (Which, double theft—good ‘job.’)

I don’t know what the solution is, but I know it involves acknowledging that taking someone’s work and deciding it’s free is not going to work. I mean, I didn’t understand fucking anything from Hegel (or, you know, my childlike understanding of how the world works, which I gained when I was about four years old and for some reason never lost, you know, that when someone does something or makes something, they deserve recompense or else it’s stealing), but I understood that. Workers, labor, alienation. I don’t fucking know. But don’t fucking Instapaper this.