See, back in late 1997, when Plastic.com was still a gleam in Joey Anuff's eye, AOL started cutting back on its original content. Instead, they counted on their corporate partners and their message-board-using members to write a bunch of stuff. This was a pisser-offer for me, because I had been writing a fair amount of that now-gone original content for AOL, and their pullback meant that I would have to start doing real work, like learning what the hell cascading style sheets were. Now everyone's cutting back on their original content (and, in some cases, then expecting us to pay for the privilege of reading fewer articles than we used to get for free). Automatic Media's only surviving property, Plastic.com, pulls an AOL and relies on enthusiastic amateurs to write their content for them.

From now on, when you want to read something, you'll choose between a) corporate media b) "member-generated content" a la AOL boards or Plastic, or c) indie stuff done for no money, like this little rant here. It's like the days before the web, when one could read mainstream magazines or zines -- but no one expected to do zines for a living as the Salons and Slates and Feeds did when they took zines to the web. It was nice that anyone ever made money writing for zines, but I suspect the party's over.

Besides, the editorial party's been over for a while now. There was a time I would have turned this little insight into an opinion column and shopped it around, hoping to get some cash for it. Now nobody has a freelance budget; people still get their offbeat ramblings published, but generally in non-paying markets. I'm tired, and I'm wondering if I should have stuck to style sheets back in 1997.