(I) The Race To The Bottom (continued)
You need to avoid the race to the bottom. Wikipedia is massive, popular, and built for free thereby destroying the Encyclopedia Britannica. No single person could have created Wikipedia. A team of hundreds of thousands have created it, in fact. But by breaking the development of articles into millions of one-sentence or one-paragraph projects, Wikipedia did not need to rely on a handful of well-paid experts but instead relies on a loosely coordinated massive group of knowledgeable people, contributing small slices to the whole.
CastingWords does transcription for less than fifty cents a minute. John Jantsch took an interview he did with Godin, and posted it to a site that uses a crowd as its labourers. For a few dollars, the site took the recordings of interview, chopped the audio into tiny bits, and parceled it to anonymous labourers who transcribed the interview in little sections. Less than three hours later, it was put back together and the typed transcript was delivered to John Jantsch. Here we see that Jantsch wins, and the transcribers lose. The factory is planned, controlled, and measured, it’s factory work because it is optimizing the productivity of a product. The automation of the jobs of the past has made it so that millions of people are underemployed. Bringing back the human touch is valuable to society.
