The Long Tail by Chris Anderson Page B

clicks, this amateur collective was almost as accurate as expert planetary geologists.
    In “open-source” software, where anyone can contribute to a project, the mantra is “With enough eyes, all bugs are trivial.” Likewise for astronomy: With enough eyes, we’ll see the asteroid with our name on it—and early enough to do something about it.
    Of course, there are limits to what Pro-Ams can achieve. They’re largely collecting data, not creating new theories of astrophysics. Sometimes, they are unable to analyze properly the data they collect. Nevertheless, their place in the field seems assured. As John Lankford, a historian of science, put it in Sky & Telescope magazine, the bible of U.S. amateur astronomers: “There will always remain a division of labor between professionals and amateurs. But it may be more difficult to tell the two groups apart in the future.”
    DEMOCRATIZING THE TOOLS OF PRODUCTION

    What’s new about this is the way it’s done, not the concept itself. Indeed, Karl Marx was perhaps the original prophet of the Pro-Am economy. As Demos notes, “In The German Ideology , written between 1845 and 1847, Marx maintained that labor—forced, unspontaneous and waged work—would be superseded by self-activity.” Eventually, he hoped, there would be a time when “material production leaves every person surplus time for other activities.” Marx evoked a communist society in which “…nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes…to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”
    To continue with Marx’s vocabulary, Pro-Ams are a creation of thefirst force of the Long Tail, the democratization of the tools of production.
    The same effect we see in astronomy is playing out in countless other fields. Just as the electric guitar and the garage democratized pop music forty years ago, desktop creation and production tools are democratizing the studio. Apple’s GarageBand, free with every Mac, greets a user with the suggestion to “Record your next big hit,” and provides the tools to do just that. Likewise, digital video cameras and desktop editing suites (free with every copy of Windows and every Mac) are putting the sort of tools into the hands of the average home moviemaker that were once reserved for professionals alone.
    Then there’s the written word, always the leading edge of egalitarianism. Although it was the photocopier that first put lie to the aphorism that “the power of the press goes to those who own them,” it’s blogging that has really sparked the renaissance of the amateur publisher. Today, millions of people publish daily for an audience that is collectively larger than any single mainstream media outlet can claim. What sparked blogging was, again, democratized tools: the arrival of simple, cheap software and services that made publishing online so easy that anyone could do it.
    So, too, for desktop photo editing and printing, video games that encourage players to create and share their own alternative levels, and print-on-demand book publishing. A few decades ago, there were two reasons why most of us weren’t making hit movies: (1) we didn’t have access to the necessary tools, and (2) we didn’t have the talent. Today, there’s only one excuse—and even that is not as solid as it was. Hollywood, for all its efficiencies, can’t find every potentially great filmmaker on the planet. Technology, cheap and ubiquitous, can do far better. Once upon a time, talent eventually made its way to the tools of production; now it’s the other way around.
    The consequence of all this is that we’re starting to shift from being passive consumers to active producers. And we’re doing it for the love of it (the word “amateur” derives from the Latin amator, “lover,” from amare, “to