We should go dark.
Every one of us who makes “creative content” should pick a day and go dark.
Every photographer, writer, illustrator, and related support companies like reps and stock agencies should go dark.
Take our sites down. Make our content unavailable on YouTube, etc. Stock galleries, everything.
Take away everything that is driving the ad-selling machines that promote “free culture.” “Free culture” is ruining all of us.
What we do is not free, it costs each of us our lives, our souls, our efforts, our sweat, not to mention cash outlays in the form of equipment, tools, and investments in education.
The world needs to see how much value we create.
We drive this bus! Yes us, every one of us who creates! Not the parasites who are riding on our backs, getting rich because of what we make.
What YOU make.
You can get a gazillion RTs or +1s or Likes, but they will not feed your family or keep a roof over your head. You don’t need appreciation like some high school prom queen candidate–you need money. We all need money.
How long are you willing to be Google’s bitch? Or the torrents’? Or Facebook’s? Or any of the gazillion blogs, etc., that exist solely to sell ad space? Who are you creating for? For them, so they can get rich?
Take back your power.
Let’s go dark.
Why just a day – why not a week to make it really effective. Also, to make a difference to the web it would need to be a mass movement (millions of websites) and this would take time to organise. But we’ve got plenty time, and its a huge thing to do.
Start with a petition site seeking artists who will commit to doing this on some specified date. Also need to publish simple advice for artists who want do this about the easiest ways to switch off a website & resurrect it later. Be good to rope in the big content guys as well to really add weight to the campaign. When it happens we can hail you as the “Dark Queen”, now that sounds like something out of Tolkien!
I don’t think a petition is worth bupkis. Let’s just start sharing the idea of it then we’ll pick a day when we get some movement going and DO IT!!!!
PS No “Dark Queen” please. Besides not liking Tolkein, “dark” is a negative… I am sweetness and light. Well, until you piss me off. 😉
Agreed.
(Downloadable/Streamable) Art became like air -it’s free, it’s everywhere. People get used to it when it’s bad and don’t appreciate until they run out of it.
The unbelievable absurdity in all this:
It is “free” yet everyone seems to be making $$$ EXCEPT for the creators. If the creators defend themselves for charging for their creations, it is called “GREED”.
Everyone else is for “FREEDOM OF SPEECH” and “AGAINST CENSORSHIP” :-/
If you just pick a day and you’ve only got say, 1000 artists on that day, it just won’t be noticed. If anyone bothers to report that news it will be reported as a failure, that would be worse than not having the ‘dark day’ at all. I feel its important to build volume then when there’s enough to make a real impact choose a day.
Maybe petition was the wrong word, a pledge site is what I meant where people would commit to this kind of action. Set a target, how many dark sites do we want at a minimum, 1,000,000? The pledge site would collect contact details so that as the campaign builds we can advise them what’s going to happen and when.
That’s why I’m posting and FBing and Tweeting about this… to start the groundswell. Of course we shouldn’t just pick a date and go… we need to get interest. Spread the idea then when we get people who say “yes!” we can set a date.
This “go dark” is something John Galt would say and I would agree.
Ayn Rand should NEVER be invoked when an action is for the good of many. She was a selfish, heartless person. Comparing my ideas to hers is very insulting to me.
Pick a date.
I like it. The Freedom to Make Speech & Eat Day.
I’m on for the dark day – BUT! I’m experienced in political organization. For this idea to succeed, I know it has to be organized and “crowdsouced” in advance.
I have a database of 1,500 customers and prospects. I’m prepared to announce the dark day to them. A bit risky – I may lose a few contacts, even get a couple of spam reports. I’m ready.
Also, I need help to get off and back on. I really don’t want to have to completely erase two websites and then have to reload again later. How can this work?
Well it’s a nice idea for the actual creators of new and original content. Problem is the Content Scrapers will just have to try and reap their harvest from past material. I call them the Content Regurgitators. FWIW, I try and post original opinions, ideas. No one gives a rat’s ass. I get about 3 regular readers. It’s the aggregators, reposters – “Oh look what I found!” – who reap the benefits of others’ work without a fucking original thought in their tiny little heads. I am so g’damn sick o the lists of “100 Absolutely Fantastic Pictures of Frogs” scraped from other peoples’ content I could scream. What’s even more pathetic is that most of these people have no taste anyway. And yet in the photo world where I write for fun and share thoughts of personal growth, these are the posts that garner the most traffic. Trolling for AdSense pennies while riding on the work of others has become a way of life.
I made an original content pledge to myself for 2012. I hope my 3 fans appreciate it.
You pick the day, I’ll do it. There will be 3 disappointed people though 😉 Maybe.
Great. Count me in.
I love the “Dark” Idea but I’m with Gordon Harrison lets make it a week and John Fowler needs organising in advance. As for practicality I suspect its quite easy if long winded,
Social networks you make all you’re images private with 1 slide telling what’s happening and why.
Personal sites/blogs I suspect will involve either “Un Publishing” or making private all the pages of sites designed in WordPress Joomla etc. while HTML sites would probably work if the pages renamed to something that couldn’t be found and the reguar “Home page” would need replacing with a page again telling what’s happening and why. The Big names would probably shaft us though bye not taking there global corporation image libraries “Dark”