The Toff Strikes Back, or, So Who IS a Technopeasant, Anyway?
If all of Dr. Hendrix's research is as sloppy as this*, no wonder he's retreating to his rural estate to vegetate in exile like a disgraced Roman senator - because he doesn't even know that "technopeasant" is a long-established term attributed variously to the collective gestalt of early internet users, but which invariably means "people who are afraid of and don't understand modern [computer] technology" - that is to say, the opposite of "technocrat."
Which, oddly enough, fits Hendrix himself, to a T. So for him to insult those he considers the Great Unwashed because we hang out in online communities and use the internet to socialize as "technopeasants" is as ironic as, well, him first claiming the mantle of Uriah Stephens, Joe Hill, Cesar Chavez and all the folks who stood up to the corporate plutocracy in days of yore - and then turning around and insulting us as peasants. Can't have it both ways, pal - either you're on the side of the Sherriff and Sir Guy, Carnegie and the Pinkertons, or you're down here in the dirt of the barricades with us riff-raff.
Not that SFWA is anything like a union, either of old or present - it's more like a medieval guild, an association of independent artisans paying fees which help provide for members in distress, although either there aren't standards for quality of work w/r/t limiting admission or they are very, very arcane ones given some of the things I have read over the years... [/snark] [/snark] [/snark] -- that key's still stuck.
But seriously, any amount of time spent perusing the used bookstores and secondhand stalls will reveal the fact that an awful lot of truly gawdawful stuff gets
through the slush pile and makes it onto the presses, and always has, and even worse things, things which are so colorless and forgettable that they do not even rise to the inadvertant hilarity of the gawdawful, which ought to make Published Authors (and editors!) like Dr. Hendrix a little more humble. I have accumulated quite a collection of Very Bad SF over the years, and even more of it I have returned to the bookstore to get credit towards my quest for the good.
But the "webscabs" accusation, which has been analyzed in some detail with historical citations on the writing blogs (likewise the hard economics of his bleat), and all the associated clusters of insults, however *inaccurate* they may be, do serve to reveal some of our supposedly-nonexistent American classism and stratified snobbery, as well as the underlying mokita, the things unspoken that everyone knows that we're not allowed to admit - and how they are occasionally logically incompatible, which is why they all have to stay sub rosa.
Frex, you have our charientocrat[-wannabe] Dr. Hendrix starting off with his list of charientocrat credentials - I! Have! THREE, Countem, THREE Degrees! okay from a state university most people have never heard of (your hostess excluded for family reasons) But! Still! Do YOU have a Masters AND a PhD? Neener, neener! - with no recognition or admission that what this says, in part, for the most case, is that one either had a good bit of free money *or* a fairly strong family support structure, in order to be able to take the time and energy and not have to punch the clock all day every day in order to keep a roof overhead and bread on the table, and then come home and do all the housework and sundry tasks required to keep the lights on etc, which makes graduate school just a tiny bit difficult, shall we say...
Now, as we have all noticed, the molten core of Dr. Hendrix' outrage is the fear of fiscal loss - very anti-Taoist, but handily illustrating verse 9:
"....Fill your house with gold and jade, And it can no longer be guarded. Set store by your riches and honour, And you will only reap a crop of calamities" - and yet, due to our collective Usonian mythology, it becomes far more complex than that, for he cannot simply say "You're after my STUFF! Hey! I got DIBS on ALL the book-purchasing money out there, me and my fellow-professionals! Get outta here, you greasy thieves!" and not just because when you put it like that, it becomes so obviously absurd a premise, that he and his ilk have some sort of annointed prior right to the market, and no need to compete like everyone else. No, he can't say "I'm mad because you're taking potential profits away from ME, and I consider you a grubby beggar with no right to offer your wares in our closed market" because that violates both wider human and specifically American norms, plus some which I suspect are narrower-in-between Indo-European derived ones, regarding selfishness/greed/altruism, nominal rejection of class distinctions/mandatory feigned egalitarianism, and a [proto-IE? IE?] sense that Making Money is a grubby, unworthy pursuit (no matter the means!) to be involved in, even as Having money is a very fine thing in deed.
So Hendrix can no more say "Dibs! You can't take profits away from ME!" than Bushco & Blair could have gotten up there and said "Those Mesopotamians are sitting on OUR oil!" even though a lot of people including Liberal Hawks knew this unadmitted motivation - and agreed! Overt admission of greed is something that only the most bold and brazen capitalists can declare, socially - and even then you will find them constantly weasling around and insisting that REALLY it's for the Greater Good of *everyone*, pulling a cloak of Phony Altruism over their grasping talons. They all have to try to pass themselves off as the true Protectors of the People, no matter how feeble the pretense. See, frex, the pious mouthings of Enron for public consumption, even as they cackled about "fucking Grammaw Millie up the ass" in private. For a pretend Moderate (featherless gods, not a Radical Leftist Hippie, oh no!) like Hendrix, even so much overt profit-mindedness as is acceptable in, say, National Review is too crass, too ungenteel, too gauche for his aristocratic stomach.
Likewise, he doesn't say - doesn't DARE say - "I'm going off to retire to my country estate where I will lounge around in my hammock drinking margaritas and read poetry, Nyah Nyah!" - he has to boast of his Pioneer Hardiness, letting you know that he will be out there engaging in Rugged Manly Pursuits that will enable him to be Self-Sufficient (for a given value of Self-Sufficiency) the way that latter Roman Emperors dressed simply like early Roman citizens and had their wives and daughters publically engage in their own dressmaking, to show that they were just Reg'lar Folks, under it all. And "show" is exactly the mot juste, here. Aristos these days have a slightly better sense of lanterne-provoking behavior, these days. But, more than that even, is the American conditioning - even if you're just playing shepherdess like Hendrix or Mark Helprin on your estate, you have to at least pretend to yourself and everyone else that you're not one of the Idle Rich and you don't consider yourself Above Others just because you're a few steps below Croesus, in the top 10% of Americans when it comes to wealth.
Because, you know, we BELIEVE that All Men Are Created Equal™, Dammit! We're NOT like those corrupt slothful Europeans with their aristocracies, NOT AT ALL!!!1!!
And so Hendrix totally inappropriately invokes the days when the Plutocracy stomped bloodily on the working class, and casts himself as those beleaguered underdogs of yore, to wrap his Protectionist, Monopolist, Corporatist ravings. But he can't keep his authentic Olde-Tyme American snobbery towards those whom he sees as coming from the Wrong Side Of The Tracks from breaking loose, within a sentence or two.
And that, too, is so very, very typical of us, along with the denial. It's the secular form of the Puritan Work Ethic - if you're rich, the gods have favored you, even if we don't really believe in the gods any more - and it's just as common among the Milquetoast Liberal Centrist/Moderate Bourgeoisie as it is among the avowed followers of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman.
Thus it is not just a matter of a silly Luddite (in fact to call him such insults the honorable name and historical truth of the Luddites, who really were fighting for their outsourced lives against the Exploiter Class, a truth glossed over in capitalist schoolrooms, to our present detriment) having an irrelevant fit at the world: as always, such outbreaks of entitled anger reveal a great deal and not just about the person indulging in it, but about the whole world-outlook and millieu s/he inhabits.
Some glory in their birth, some in their skill,
Some in their wealth, some in their bodies' force,
Some in their garments, though new-fangled ill,
Some in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse...
There is the boasting of wealth and rank in many forms - both lands owned, and recievéd honors, and scholastic accomplishment, and the ability to indulge in athletic sports - all things which Master Lao no less than Bill S. were quite familiar with in their eras and not quite so impressed with as most modern Americans are. It is interesting to me that as well as having to claim his actions only in the defense of others, he doesn't quite feel equal to saying flat out "I could buy you punks twice over and still have money to spare, so shut up and obey me!" even though this overtness is, I gather, more acceptable in the US than in Europe these days. But that is the subtext and not a deeply buried one - and why not? Mammon-worship is perfectly respectable, and the only real shame in being poor.
--It's entirely possible, too, in that Clueless Elitist way, that he doesn't fully realize that boasting of his indulgence in outdoor hobbies ("We enjoy backpacking and snowshoeing in the Sierra Nevada, as well as training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu") is boasting of his membership in the class of the Idle Rich Playboy, no less than in his bleating whines about how he had to go back to teaching in order to pay for his new swanky house ("Laurel and I built a house in the mountains so I had to take on more teaching chores to help pay the mort-gage (French for "death pledge"" - boo fucking hoo, Dr. Hendrix, some of us would LOVE to have your fiscal burdens), but I wouldn't bet on it either way. I think he knew exactly what he was trying to say to us peons with that flourish of trumpets and scrolls at the beginning of his rant, even if as usual with rants he was not fully conscious of all he revealed...
Because going back to his core claim, that of webscabbery and the invocation of Organized Labour history to defend his entangled xenophobia and greed - in which, I might add, he is no different in either his passion and fury at the thought of Unworthy Others touching the Stuff to which he is divinely entitled to *or* his methods of argument, from the Tom Tancredos and Pat Buchanans and Minutemen of today or the Cabot Lodges and Know-Nothings of yore - we find something which he is overlooking, most conveniently. And that is that he, himself, does not see himself as labor, but as Management. It's not just that he's not a key member of a union of the sort that can stand up to the corporate publishing industry and say "No farther, buckos! You'll get no more Bug-Eyed Monsters and Sexy Robots from us until you guarantee that we all recieve fair and equal advances, that no beginning author is ever cozened out of future royalties with your lawyers' tricks, and none of us ever has to go beg while you sit on our manuscripts for years in your swanky offices and keep us in limbo!"
Not only is SFWA not that kind of a union, he doesn't see himself as what he is, just another employee of the publishing industry, a hired hand who can be turned off by the owners of Random House if his sales falter. He sees their editors not as likewise poor strugglers caught in the middle, but as his beasts of burden - that is, mere creatures to whose services he is entitled! I think that part of this is that his interests are not simply, and merely, those of the poor struggling artist class, no matter the list of Trials And Crosses he recites - apparently unaware that suffering and loss are part of the Human Condition, and he probably doesn't really want to start that sort of one upmanship with most of us, because most of us (especially those who are poorer than he) can probably top that catalog of sorrows without even blinking. I know I can, and I know others worse off than I.
The use of extreme histrionics as he offhandedly refers to his relationship with Del Rey is interesting in what it reveals about his bent for melodrama and his narcissism (editors "shot out from under" him "like Custer"? --Really? I knew they talked about the "cutthroat world" of NY publishing, but I had no idea it was as dicey as Dorchester when it came to gun violence; or perhaps this is mere hyperbole meant to simultaneously invoke pity for his hard, hard life, with his brutally-exhausting day job as a college teacher and his insecure relationship with his publisher as well as an appropriately-subdued amused reverence at his historical erudition - though it reveals he thinks of his writerly role as far more martial than it really is (shades of Young Werther!) But then, we already knew he was stuck in the Ksatriyah Trap, thinking that his Brahmin's rank and attendant wealth give him innate superiority over us mere artisans - that he should self-identify as a Warrior too just shows that both jaws of it are deeply sunk in his soul.
He's a Petty Bourgeoise self-identified with the machine owners and stomping on the rebellious serfs instead of joining us in revolution, - but trying to wrap himself in a red flag and rally support by singing the Internationale from his soapbox - but it's May Day today, and nobody's fooled.
This, that he is of the Owner Class, of Management and not a mere struggling Artist, is moreover I think the key to the unleashed rage and scorn at his fellow authors no less than the imagined Great Gabbling Unwashed of online fandom: he doesn't see even the published ones as His Peers, because he is as part of the Professional Intelligensia self-identified with his masters, with the machine that made them, published their books at vast expense and paid their wages, and how DARE they stand up and demand the right to sell or give away their work as if it were their own!
See, the really interesting thing is that despite his wails of having to go back to a day job to pay for his new house and his fancy car, this doesn't come off as really being Just About The Money to me, any more than I think he will ever be one of us folks who have had to go without eating for a couple days due to the accidental loss of a ten-spot. No, I am put in mind of Mr. Podsnap's puffed-up anger at the suggestion that there's anything wrong with The System, in any degree, and that anyone who starves to death in the streets these days is simply Not Trying Hard Enough, dammit!
It's not merely the personal resentment of one knight of the landed class against his more-successful rivals on the jousting field (if anything can have a salutory effect on his hubris, it would be the hundreds of lifelong sf readers saying "Hendrix? who's that?" in response to his boasting) - it's the terrified indignation of the whole class of earls and barons in the 1300s - and also their bailiffs, stewards, sherriffs and others identified with their regime; it's the rage of the mill overseer at frustrated millhands daring to invent and patent and sell their own inventions in their off-hours. This is the core of it, and it speaks right from the foul Mammon-worshipping heart and belly of the glorious American Dream - the truths we dare not speak, lest the whole House of Esher come toppling down on us...
No, we may not be Technopeasants, strictly speaking - but we are Technoserfs, all too many of us, like the weavers of old...
As for your name and your body, which is the dearer? As for your body and your wealth, which is the more to be prized? As for gain and loss, which is the more painful? Thus, an excessive love for anything will cost you dear in the end. The storing up of too much goods will entail a heavy loss. To know when you have enough is to be immune from disgrace. To know when to stop is to be preserved from perils. Only thus can you endure long.
--Tao Teh Ching, #44
Sometimes, however, there's such a thing as Instant Karma. And, in this case, the very internet that Hendrix so rightly feared as uncontrollable was the means of agency of his self-wrought doom of public disgrace, for which he deserves less pity than Malvolio.** Autonomous, empowered Proles - an Owner's worst nightmare!
* See also a hilarious academic-insider take on Hendrix' Parthian Shothere.
** No, he doesn't deserve pity for being a poor Dinosaur of Old Media overtaken by the Meteor of the Internets - as I noted in my initial ITPD post, there are most definitely models of this sort of competition that have been in existence for, well, as long as civilization. Nothing new &c.
Which, oddly enough, fits Hendrix himself, to a T. So for him to insult those he considers the Great Unwashed because we hang out in online communities and use the internet to socialize as "technopeasants" is as ironic as, well, him first claiming the mantle of Uriah Stephens, Joe Hill, Cesar Chavez and all the folks who stood up to the corporate plutocracy in days of yore - and then turning around and insulting us as peasants. Can't have it both ways, pal - either you're on the side of the Sherriff and Sir Guy, Carnegie and the Pinkertons, or you're down here in the dirt of the barricades with us riff-raff.
Not that SFWA is anything like a union, either of old or present - it's more like a medieval guild, an association of independent artisans paying fees which help provide for members in distress, although either there aren't standards for quality of work w/r/t limiting admission or they are very, very arcane ones given some of the things I have read over the years... [/snark] [/snark] [/snark] -- that key's still stuck.
But seriously, any amount of time spent perusing the used bookstores and secondhand stalls will reveal the fact that an awful lot of truly gawdawful stuff gets
through the slush pile and makes it onto the presses, and always has, and even worse things, things which are so colorless and forgettable that they do not even rise to the inadvertant hilarity of the gawdawful, which ought to make Published Authors (and editors!) like Dr. Hendrix a little more humble. I have accumulated quite a collection of Very Bad SF over the years, and even more of it I have returned to the bookstore to get credit towards my quest for the good.
But the "webscabs" accusation, which has been analyzed in some detail with historical citations on the writing blogs (likewise the hard economics of his bleat), and all the associated clusters of insults, however *inaccurate* they may be, do serve to reveal some of our supposedly-nonexistent American classism and stratified snobbery, as well as the underlying mokita, the things unspoken that everyone knows that we're not allowed to admit - and how they are occasionally logically incompatible, which is why they all have to stay sub rosa.
Frex, you have our charientocrat[-wannabe] Dr. Hendrix starting off with his list of charientocrat credentials - I! Have! THREE, Countem, THREE Degrees! okay from a state university most people have never heard of (your hostess excluded for family reasons) But! Still! Do YOU have a Masters AND a PhD? Neener, neener! - with no recognition or admission that what this says, in part, for the most case, is that one either had a good bit of free money *or* a fairly strong family support structure, in order to be able to take the time and energy and not have to punch the clock all day every day in order to keep a roof overhead and bread on the table, and then come home and do all the housework and sundry tasks required to keep the lights on etc, which makes graduate school just a tiny bit difficult, shall we say...
Now, as we have all noticed, the molten core of Dr. Hendrix' outrage is the fear of fiscal loss - very anti-Taoist, but handily illustrating verse 9:
"....Fill your house with gold and jade, And it can no longer be guarded. Set store by your riches and honour, And you will only reap a crop of calamities" - and yet, due to our collective Usonian mythology, it becomes far more complex than that, for he cannot simply say "You're after my STUFF! Hey! I got DIBS on ALL the book-purchasing money out there, me and my fellow-professionals! Get outta here, you greasy thieves!" and not just because when you put it like that, it becomes so obviously absurd a premise, that he and his ilk have some sort of annointed prior right to the market, and no need to compete like everyone else. No, he can't say "I'm mad because you're taking potential profits away from ME, and I consider you a grubby beggar with no right to offer your wares in our closed market" because that violates both wider human and specifically American norms, plus some which I suspect are narrower-in-between Indo-European derived ones, regarding selfishness/greed/altruism, nominal rejection of class distinctions/mandatory feigned egalitarianism, and a [proto-IE? IE?] sense that Making Money is a grubby, unworthy pursuit (no matter the means!) to be involved in, even as Having money is a very fine thing in deed.
So Hendrix can no more say "Dibs! You can't take profits away from ME!" than Bushco & Blair could have gotten up there and said "Those Mesopotamians are sitting on OUR oil!" even though a lot of people including Liberal Hawks knew this unadmitted motivation - and agreed! Overt admission of greed is something that only the most bold and brazen capitalists can declare, socially - and even then you will find them constantly weasling around and insisting that REALLY it's for the Greater Good of *everyone*, pulling a cloak of Phony Altruism over their grasping talons. They all have to try to pass themselves off as the true Protectors of the People, no matter how feeble the pretense. See, frex, the pious mouthings of Enron for public consumption, even as they cackled about "fucking Grammaw Millie up the ass" in private. For a pretend Moderate (featherless gods, not a Radical Leftist Hippie, oh no!) like Hendrix, even so much overt profit-mindedness as is acceptable in, say, National Review is too crass, too ungenteel, too gauche for his aristocratic stomach.
Likewise, he doesn't say - doesn't DARE say - "I'm going off to retire to my country estate where I will lounge around in my hammock drinking margaritas and read poetry, Nyah Nyah!" - he has to boast of his Pioneer Hardiness, letting you know that he will be out there engaging in Rugged Manly Pursuits that will enable him to be Self-Sufficient (for a given value of Self-Sufficiency) the way that latter Roman Emperors dressed simply like early Roman citizens and had their wives and daughters publically engage in their own dressmaking, to show that they were just Reg'lar Folks, under it all. And "show" is exactly the mot juste, here. Aristos these days have a slightly better sense of lanterne-provoking behavior, these days. But, more than that even, is the American conditioning - even if you're just playing shepherdess like Hendrix or Mark Helprin on your estate, you have to at least pretend to yourself and everyone else that you're not one of the Idle Rich and you don't consider yourself Above Others just because you're a few steps below Croesus, in the top 10% of Americans when it comes to wealth.
Because, you know, we BELIEVE that All Men Are Created Equal™, Dammit! We're NOT like those corrupt slothful Europeans with their aristocracies, NOT AT ALL!!!1!!
And so Hendrix totally inappropriately invokes the days when the Plutocracy stomped bloodily on the working class, and casts himself as those beleaguered underdogs of yore, to wrap his Protectionist, Monopolist, Corporatist ravings. But he can't keep his authentic Olde-Tyme American snobbery towards those whom he sees as coming from the Wrong Side Of The Tracks from breaking loose, within a sentence or two.
And that, too, is so very, very typical of us, along with the denial. It's the secular form of the Puritan Work Ethic - if you're rich, the gods have favored you, even if we don't really believe in the gods any more - and it's just as common among the Milquetoast Liberal Centrist/Moderate Bourgeoisie as it is among the avowed followers of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman.
Thus it is not just a matter of a silly Luddite (in fact to call him such insults the honorable name and historical truth of the Luddites, who really were fighting for their outsourced lives against the Exploiter Class, a truth glossed over in capitalist schoolrooms, to our present detriment) having an irrelevant fit at the world: as always, such outbreaks of entitled anger reveal a great deal and not just about the person indulging in it, but about the whole world-outlook and millieu s/he inhabits.
Some glory in their birth, some in their skill,
Some in their wealth, some in their bodies' force,
Some in their garments, though new-fangled ill,
Some in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse...
There is the boasting of wealth and rank in many forms - both lands owned, and recievéd honors, and scholastic accomplishment, and the ability to indulge in athletic sports - all things which Master Lao no less than Bill S. were quite familiar with in their eras and not quite so impressed with as most modern Americans are. It is interesting to me that as well as having to claim his actions only in the defense of others, he doesn't quite feel equal to saying flat out "I could buy you punks twice over and still have money to spare, so shut up and obey me!" even though this overtness is, I gather, more acceptable in the US than in Europe these days. But that is the subtext and not a deeply buried one - and why not? Mammon-worship is perfectly respectable, and the only real shame in being poor.
--It's entirely possible, too, in that Clueless Elitist way, that he doesn't fully realize that boasting of his indulgence in outdoor hobbies ("We enjoy backpacking and snowshoeing in the Sierra Nevada, as well as training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu") is boasting of his membership in the class of the Idle Rich Playboy, no less than in his bleating whines about how he had to go back to teaching in order to pay for his new swanky house ("Laurel and I built a house in the mountains so I had to take on more teaching chores to help pay the mort-gage (French for "death pledge"" - boo fucking hoo, Dr. Hendrix, some of us would LOVE to have your fiscal burdens), but I wouldn't bet on it either way. I think he knew exactly what he was trying to say to us peons with that flourish of trumpets and scrolls at the beginning of his rant, even if as usual with rants he was not fully conscious of all he revealed...
Because going back to his core claim, that of webscabbery and the invocation of Organized Labour history to defend his entangled xenophobia and greed - in which, I might add, he is no different in either his passion and fury at the thought of Unworthy Others touching the Stuff to which he is divinely entitled to *or* his methods of argument, from the Tom Tancredos and Pat Buchanans and Minutemen of today or the Cabot Lodges and Know-Nothings of yore - we find something which he is overlooking, most conveniently. And that is that he, himself, does not see himself as labor, but as Management. It's not just that he's not a key member of a union of the sort that can stand up to the corporate publishing industry and say "No farther, buckos! You'll get no more Bug-Eyed Monsters and Sexy Robots from us until you guarantee that we all recieve fair and equal advances, that no beginning author is ever cozened out of future royalties with your lawyers' tricks, and none of us ever has to go beg while you sit on our manuscripts for years in your swanky offices and keep us in limbo!"
Not only is SFWA not that kind of a union, he doesn't see himself as what he is, just another employee of the publishing industry, a hired hand who can be turned off by the owners of Random House if his sales falter. He sees their editors not as likewise poor strugglers caught in the middle, but as his beasts of burden - that is, mere creatures to whose services he is entitled! I think that part of this is that his interests are not simply, and merely, those of the poor struggling artist class, no matter the list of Trials And Crosses he recites - apparently unaware that suffering and loss are part of the Human Condition, and he probably doesn't really want to start that sort of one upmanship with most of us, because most of us (especially those who are poorer than he) can probably top that catalog of sorrows without even blinking. I know I can, and I know others worse off than I.
The use of extreme histrionics as he offhandedly refers to his relationship with Del Rey is interesting in what it reveals about his bent for melodrama and his narcissism (editors "shot out from under" him "like Custer"? --Really? I knew they talked about the "cutthroat world" of NY publishing, but I had no idea it was as dicey as Dorchester when it came to gun violence; or perhaps this is mere hyperbole meant to simultaneously invoke pity for his hard, hard life, with his brutally-exhausting day job as a college teacher and his insecure relationship with his publisher as well as an appropriately-subdued amused reverence at his historical erudition - though it reveals he thinks of his writerly role as far more martial than it really is (shades of Young Werther!) But then, we already knew he was stuck in the Ksatriyah Trap, thinking that his Brahmin's rank and attendant wealth give him innate superiority over us mere artisans - that he should self-identify as a Warrior too just shows that both jaws of it are deeply sunk in his soul.
He's a Petty Bourgeoise self-identified with the machine owners and stomping on the rebellious serfs instead of joining us in revolution, - but trying to wrap himself in a red flag and rally support by singing the Internationale from his soapbox - but it's May Day today, and nobody's fooled.
This, that he is of the Owner Class, of Management and not a mere struggling Artist, is moreover I think the key to the unleashed rage and scorn at his fellow authors no less than the imagined Great Gabbling Unwashed of online fandom: he doesn't see even the published ones as His Peers, because he is as part of the Professional Intelligensia self-identified with his masters, with the machine that made them, published their books at vast expense and paid their wages, and how DARE they stand up and demand the right to sell or give away their work as if it were their own!
See, the really interesting thing is that despite his wails of having to go back to a day job to pay for his new house and his fancy car, this doesn't come off as really being Just About The Money to me, any more than I think he will ever be one of us folks who have had to go without eating for a couple days due to the accidental loss of a ten-spot. No, I am put in mind of Mr. Podsnap's puffed-up anger at the suggestion that there's anything wrong with The System, in any degree, and that anyone who starves to death in the streets these days is simply Not Trying Hard Enough, dammit!
It's not merely the personal resentment of one knight of the landed class against his more-successful rivals on the jousting field (if anything can have a salutory effect on his hubris, it would be the hundreds of lifelong sf readers saying "Hendrix? who's that?" in response to his boasting) - it's the terrified indignation of the whole class of earls and barons in the 1300s - and also their bailiffs, stewards, sherriffs and others identified with their regime; it's the rage of the mill overseer at frustrated millhands daring to invent and patent and sell their own inventions in their off-hours. This is the core of it, and it speaks right from the foul Mammon-worshipping heart and belly of the glorious American Dream - the truths we dare not speak, lest the whole House of Esher come toppling down on us...
No, we may not be Technopeasants, strictly speaking - but we are Technoserfs, all too many of us, like the weavers of old...
As for your name and your body, which is the dearer? As for your body and your wealth, which is the more to be prized? As for gain and loss, which is the more painful? Thus, an excessive love for anything will cost you dear in the end. The storing up of too much goods will entail a heavy loss. To know when you have enough is to be immune from disgrace. To know when to stop is to be preserved from perils. Only thus can you endure long.
--Tao Teh Ching, #44
Sometimes, however, there's such a thing as Instant Karma. And, in this case, the very internet that Hendrix so rightly feared as uncontrollable was the means of agency of his self-wrought doom of public disgrace, for which he deserves less pity than Malvolio.** Autonomous, empowered Proles - an Owner's worst nightmare!
* See also a hilarious academic-insider take on Hendrix' Parthian Shothere.
** No, he doesn't deserve pity for being a poor Dinosaur of Old Media overtaken by the Meteor of the Internets - as I noted in my initial ITPD post, there are most definitely models of this sort of competition that have been in existence for, well, as long as civilization. Nothing new &c.