The biggest culture gap between content and coding is that we have repeatable processes to extract a million dollars (or more) out of a programmer paid $100,000, and can scale that to an arbitrarily high number of programmers, but we do not have repeatable processes to extract a million dollars out of a... "creative" paid $100,000 or $10,000, and to the extent that any business has figured out how to scale that, they have either a) decided that the way forward is to use prometeur talent paid peanuts (+) or b) have large Our Business Model Is Dying signs stapled to their forehead. Techies, who like to think we have the intelligence God gave the average squirrel, do not like imitating dying business models. We prefer killing dying business models instead. This is why Demand Media of X sounds like a semi-attractive proposition as long as X is not "Programming." +
+ I write. I don't have an emotional attachment to the profession of writing. From my perhaps biased perspective, there exists a wide spectrum of writing, and the overwhelming majority of it is not the New York Times editorial page.
There's a market for 5 star chefs in writing just like there is in food, but pink slime and Tyson chicken keeps people from going hungry every single day, and the numbers suggest that pink slime is a sustainable, growing business and 5 star chefs are a perpetually money-losing luxury good hanging on to life via subsidies from rich people who enjoy cocktail parties in New York and the social superiority this gives over people who eat Tyson chicken. If we agree that large portions of the creative industries are producing writing/videos/etc where enduring works of literary genius are neither necessary nor particularly desirable (from "How to roast a chicken" to "3 Adlai E. Stevenson High School Students Got Perfect Scores on the SAT" to "7 year old killed in gang crossfire; Family mourns" to "Her: librarian. Him: mindflayer. Plot: chance brings them together, they hate each other, they go on to have mindblowing sex, stay tuned for more of same in books 2 through 8"), then the really interesting questions are not about quality so much as they are about process / business model / etc. We have good, interesting answers to many of those... and our answers frequently do not include high-paid, high-status creative folks.
P.S. If there is any pink slime in the audience, I apologize for putting you in the same sentence as the New York Times editorial page, it is just adopting a common conceit to make a point.
+ I write. I don't have an emotional attachment to the profession of writing. From my perhaps biased perspective, there exists a wide spectrum of writing, and the overwhelming majority of it is not the New York Times editorial page.
There's a market for 5 star chefs in writing just like there is in food, but pink slime and Tyson chicken keeps people from going hungry every single day, and the numbers suggest that pink slime is a sustainable, growing business and 5 star chefs are a perpetually money-losing luxury good hanging on to life via subsidies from rich people who enjoy cocktail parties in New York and the social superiority this gives over people who eat Tyson chicken. If we agree that large portions of the creative industries are producing writing/videos/etc where enduring works of literary genius are neither necessary nor particularly desirable (from "How to roast a chicken" to "3 Adlai E. Stevenson High School Students Got Perfect Scores on the SAT" to "7 year old killed in gang crossfire; Family mourns" to "Her: librarian. Him: mindflayer. Plot: chance brings them together, they hate each other, they go on to have mindblowing sex, stay tuned for more of same in books 2 through 8"), then the really interesting questions are not about quality so much as they are about process / business model / etc. We have good, interesting answers to many of those... and our answers frequently do not include high-paid, high-status creative folks.
P.S. If there is any pink slime in the audience, I apologize for putting you in the same sentence as the New York Times editorial page, it is just adopting a common conceit to make a point.