Paid Content, 2048

REUTERS - Bangalore, Monday January 8, 2048

Author, critic, and collective publishing pioneer Douglas Rushkoff died in his home Saturday afternoon, a family spokesman said. No cause was given. He was 86.

Twenty-six editions of his obituary, each written by "Douglas Rushkoff," from 21 different datelines, appeared on the Web over the weekend, and The New York Times' Monday (intravenous hourly) edition contains a new column bearing the headline "Reports Of My Death Are Greatly Exaggerated."

The Douglas Rushkoff Corporation's editor-in-chief, Jamie Cohen, insisted Sunday night that the actual Rushkoff's death "in no way dilutes his brand awareness or his status as one of the half-dozen writers—living and deceased—working today who can actually demand payment for his work."

Rushkoff, who first surpassed Isaac Asimov as the most prolific author of all time, with 324 books and approximately 2 trillion words posted, may be best remembered for his creation of the "omniscient author," an anonymous writers' collective continuously publishing works under a single name—his—after Rushkoff acheived some reknown as a media critic and novelist in the late 1990s.

In this manner, Rushkoff was able to survive and thrive during the slow-motion collapse of the traditional publishing model as one of the few brand-name writers able to command a premium for content and also produce it in unnaturally large quantities.

Rushkoff first discussed the idea that ultimately produced the Douglas Rushkoff Corporation in an interview with Mediabistro (today a unit of the trade publisher Primediabistro) in 2004. "The next stage in the freelance universe, I think," he said then, "is for those of us who have managed to generate reputations to understand that we have those reputations through the luck of timing, and to start outsourcing. The universe is so big that we could write stuff that doesn't bump up against other stuff," he said—an insight that led to the creation of "Rushkoff bureaus" on six continents. "If the industry is going to be such that it only wants to reward a few recognizable faces," he said, "then those faces have to open up their purses and give us all work. I would love to be part of a writing collective—50 or 60 of us—and there are two or three of us with big names. We can even hire actors to be the fuckers!"

Rushkoff felt that there was a limited number of names that could be sold in the writing market, but much more writing that those names could do. His original vision for writing collectives allowed writers to utilize existing names (or create fictional "authors") to sell their writing and fully realize the economic potential of those names. Ruskoff's model allowed certain people to work on marketing, others to tour, and still others to work on writing. And instead of working for the names they were using, the names worked for the writers.

The eventual reality, however, was much different. An obsessed fan and ex-Internet entrepreneur named Lucas Johnson changed his name to "Douglas Rushkoff" and incorporated the Douglas Rushkoff Corporation in June of 2009. He began hiring writers two months later and now those writers pay royalties to Rushkoff (nee Johnson), despite exploiting the market value of the real Douglas Rushkoff.

The number of writers working for the Douglas Rushkoff Corporation ("the Corporation") today is a closely guarded secret, and after a series of actors portrayed Rushkoff during his Google News Network segments from 2014-2020, a computer-generated rendering of Rushkoff made at that time has stood in for the author ever since. Customized versions of the original Rushkoff avatar were then traded on the Internet via telepathic instant messaging, dramatically increasing the Corporation's brand value.

Rushkoff (or to be precise, the Corporation) overtook Asimov as history's most prolific author in 2034, but was himself overtaken a few years ago by the Cory Doctorow Collective. Doctorow, the author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and more than 400 other novels, personally retired from writing science fiction in 2016, but his subsequent decision to register his body of work as open source—to allow anyone to alter, annotate, revise, and republish his books in any medium—was immediately hailed as a breakthrough by the vestiges of the book publishing industry. Today, the "Complete Works of Cory Doctorow" (updated hourly) is available from Amazon.com in a 6 terabyte download, while an estimated 200 smaller versions of his collected works, in varying combinations, are available as free and paid downloads across the Web. Especially popular are the Doctorow/Ruskoff remixes, which combine modified texts and the usual audiovisuals (holograms, hypersonic sound, etc.) from both bodies of work. Doctorow continues to live modestly in the London flat he has owned for 40 years, and a recent reader poll by the Guardian ranked him the most widely read author living today.

Doctorow once famously compared the plight of 21st century authors to that of piano players made obsolete in the 19th century by player pianos. "The question of 'How do creators make a living in the 21st century?' is similar to 'Can I ever play the piano again?'" Doctorow said in 2004. "The only artists who will make a living are the ones who don't play fair—which is to say that they put a cover letter on the manuscript and send it to the slush pile."

By not playing fair, Rushkoff and Doctorow were among the first authors to seize opportunities created by the confluence of changes in the publishing industry, powerful search software that scans text in all forms, radio and broadcast transmissions, and a reformation in copyright law during the first decade of this century.

Rushkoff first made a name for himself in the late 1980s as a chronicler of the San Francisco Bay Area's then-emerging Internet publishing scene. He watched first-hand as the nascent industry, cursed with primitive and expensive publishing tools, attempted to retrofit traditional publishing models to the new online world they were creating. Early publishing software, such as Vignette's StoryServer platform, cost $200,000 (in 2001 dollars) for a basic installation. Three years later, early versions of the now-ubiquitous Movable Type cost just $200 (or $1,711 in today's rates). Movable Type, a subsidiary of MSGoogle, is now free if users opt to automatically enroll in the GNN wire service. Movable Type quickly replaced more primitive publishing tools (Blogger, which gave its name to early publishing efforts called "blogs," is only a footnote now) and become the forerunner of today's vast neural networks ("Neunets") that supply the raw media materials for GNN and its competitors.

Blogs quickly replaced their publishing predecessors when the economic advantages became obvious. Gawker.com, the forerunner of today's Gawker Channels on GNN, was inspired mostly by publications that existed when text was still printed on tree-based paper, but also by an earlier, failed site called Suck.com. But whereas Gawker was published for little or no cost using Movable Type, Suck.com's publishing software had to be invented from scratch. "We had to invent our own ad servers," recalled Web historian John Battelle, the former Secretary of the Digital Interior under President Lauren Bush and once an executive at Suck's parent company. "We not only had to create the content, but we had to build our own infrastructure, too."

But the creation of the "blogosphere" in the 2000s (it now constitutes the majority of the contemporary Web) led to a critical surge in new writers arriving on the Web, often without commercial experience or ambitions. It was without historical precedent—Senator Glenn Reynolds (R-Tenn), then the publisher of Instapundit, once compared the blogosphere's political wing to "20 million Thomas Paines bent on seceding from everywhere but their corner of the blogosphere." (His words would prove prophetic during the Secession Riots of 2032, when 5 million Americans ultimately renounced their citizenship in favor of orbital PayPal accounts.)

But the tipping point was MSGoogle's (then called "Google") decision to begin purchasing distressed mainstream media properties and merge their content with the company's evolving search technologies. A redefinition of its original AdSense program in 2012—which inserted simple ads on bloggers' sites—enabled MSGoogle's search algorithims to repurpose fresh blog postings as content for MSGoogle's own universe of automatically published websites. Deliberately aping the look and feel of its competitors (defined to mean nearly all for-profit publishers), MSGoogle touted its new service with full page ads in The Wall Street Journal the same day it launched a knockoff site composed entirely of the aggregated postings of former Dow Jones employees.

The purchase and rebranding of the CNN cable news channel as GNN (or MSGNN, as it was briefly called) in 2014 led to the creation of more than 200 GNN channels fed with video, audio, and text harvested and repackaged by artificial intelligence software.

While the googlizing of media was decried by most television network executives and magazine publishers, some saw opportunity. Steven I. Newhouse sold his family's Condé Nast stable of magazines to Saudi Arabia's royal family in 2018 and later invested the bulk of the proceeds in Jason Calacanis's Neunets Inc. Reuters and Dow Jones set a precedent for all newsgathering operations by moving the majority of their operations to former third-world cities by 2020, compensating for lower revenues with vastly lower labor costs.

And the few remaining authors with name recognition—beginning with Rushkoff and Doctorow—took advantage of both the draconian copyright laws enacted by the United States Congress in 2006 and the rise of Creative Commons' alternate permissions to create bodies of work that could, in software parlance, "scale." Founded by Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Larry Lessig, Creative Commons laid out an alternative copyright framework based on licenses which decoupled rights' owners collective rights into discrete permissions. Doctorow, a member of CC's board of directors, based his Collective's open source charter on these permissions, while the Rushkoff Corporation used the CC framework to dice the old media concept of "secondary rights" into more than 1,000 permissable publishing situations. (The Corporation was the first to sell subliminal broadcast rights in 2022.)

"Those of us who want to make money with our writing need to do it in one form or another of elite media," Rushkoff told Mediabistro in 2004. "And those of us who want to engage with communities or share ideas or arguments can do it online or in the blogosphere."

Rushkoff was the first to find a way to do both. Douglas Rushkoff, 1961-2048.