The Digital Frontier

Some of us just need a frontier of some kind to go live and work on. It's really unfortunate that we're losing the only one that most of us can get to with any ease.

Back in the day, the frontier used to be a physical place that people could go to when they needed adventure or were just not the sort meant for traditional society. A relatively recent, and somewhat local example, at least for me, would be the Diamond A Cattle Ranch. From what I've read, the Diamond A was the sort of place that was modern enough to be relatively safe, but still wild enough for folks who couldn't fit into more civilized places like cities to go. That lack of much human contact was exactly what they needed. As time passed, the Diamond A was eventually modernized out of existence, as all big cattle ranches were, when feedlots took over as the method du jour for raising cattle.

That's kind of what the web is like now. Modern enough to be almost safe for most users, but still wild enough for guys like the team at Channel Awesome or The Spoony One, or even The Walrus and even myself here to speak up and speak out about things.

The thing is, though, that the Web is changing. It's getting so that it's almost completely safe. I once said in a phone call to the Walrus's show that the current state of technology allows pretty much any idiot who wants to, to do things that used to be limited to those of us with the skill and the money for an Internet connection. The worst part of that is the number of idiots who understand that as well as I do and are more than willing to take advantage of that.

Of course, I tend to be as much a part of the problem as anyone. All one really needs to do is check out my DeviantART page to see how I'm one of the idiots making it just a tiny bit harder for legitimate, skilled artists to make any money online. It's been the same way for writers like myself for quite a long time. Given the way the Internet has evolved, presenting text-based material has always come easier than more visually intense things like art, audio, animation, and video. Along with the services to help dudes like me make money off our endeavors here on the web came the morons that, unintentionally or otherwise, wound up reducing the number of hits that those of us with some combination of skill and training could get, thereby making it just that much harder to make a living at it.

What really bugs me about this is that all this means that the Web is now pretty much safe. Used to be that one guy could rake in tons of money just by having a blog or website with banner ads on it. Nowadays, there's enough people doing it that there are entire companies doing it. I can get an actual job doing this with a company if I want. And if I seriously want money from doing it, I pretty much have to. On the other hand, the amount I can make doing this has come way down with the amount of risk involved with doing so. These companies are safer things than just a guy working all on his own. The money is guaranteed, but the amount is less as a result. And it's partly because of the number of people out there doing just what I'm doing.

The thing for me is that getting even a tiny bit of money from this is something of a personal dream for me, and I'd like to think I've still got a shot at chasing it. But that's for another post at another time. I'll get to that soon enough, as always.