I’m coming late to this meme which peaked yesterday. Basically, it’s another example of the cultural cringe and sense of inferiority still found in folk who make — or try to make — their livings online.

Jeremy Wright takes the prize as the best respondent with his highly-informative Ensight post on how much the unionization of a blog network would cost. #

On digital networks in particular, the problem arose when someone called them an “industry” — a certain J. Wright of Toronto in fact. But given the quality of his post, we’ll forgive him for that.

If blog networks really are an industry then clearly they must comply with industrial standards embedded in law. But not by any stretch of the imagination can they be put alongside General Motors, Rolls Royce or Microsoft. They are a sector at best — a branch of the Content Producers Guild, which is a bunch of disparate individuals in most cases, not public joint-stock companies.

Jeremy’s post, though, covered all the exits. As I’ve written here many times, there just isn’t enough money in online, original content creation to comply with every jurisdiction where you may have bloggers. At peak, Syntagma had writers in nine different countries. I have difficulty keeping up with our own laws, let alone the world’s legislative extravagances. Around 4000 new regulations for business were handed down from Cloud Nine (Parliament and Brussels) last year alone. Most just pile rigidities on top of complexity.

However, there are still some ragged-trousered half-bakes around who consider the Web as a substitute for the old Soviet Union. At Performancing, no less, someone’s even writing about “collectives”. Stick that red flag in the washing machine, you may need it before long.

The internet is about individuality, not collectivization. We have enough of that drab science in the real world, thank you very much.

I’m all for open source and charity. But they should never be forced down people’s throats or the best part of humanity will be choked off at birth.