The economic downturn is not going to kill Wikipedia.

Please. Will the talking heads just shut up?

That dude who wrote that book slamming “amateurs,” which I will not name because like hell I’m gonna give him free press, has written something else equally stupid. This time it’s short, at least, and free, and therefore not nearly as offensive as the whole goddamn book.

So full of crap

But he is making the asinine and no doubt intentionally inflammatory argument that the economic downturn will make people stop contributing to insert media darling web 2.0 community here in favor of payola, Web 2.0 style.

When we think of the Great Depression, we imagine long lines of gaunt men, caps in hand, waiting for soup handouts. The equivalent photos of today’s economic hard times — displayed for free, of course, on Flickr — may be represented by images of unemployed people in front of their computers cheerfully donating their labor to Wikipedia.

Oh, pleeeeeeeeeeeease.

In his best-selling book, Predictably Irrational, MIT behavorial economist Dan Ariely suggests that most of us are irrational when it comes to determining the value of our labor. I’m not sure.

Well, you know, that’s just one uneducated man’s opinion. Oh wait. Dan Ariely is an MIT behavioral economist. Who does genuine scientific research. And cites other people’s genuine scientific research. There’s, like, at least 3 decades of research on these topics.

And this guy is… a history major![1] (Would I like fries with this rant? Why… yes!)

So, about that point…

So how will today’s brutal economic climate change the Web 2.0 “free” economy? It will result in the rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with cash; it will mean the success of Knol over Wikipedia, Mahalo over Google, TheAtlantic.com over the HuffingtonPost.com, iTunes over MySpace, Hulu over YouTube Inc. , Playboy.com over Voyeurweb.com, TechCrunch over the blogosphere, CNN’s professional journalism over CNN’s iReporter citizen-journalism… The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren’t going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some “back end” revenue. “Free” doesn’t fill anyone’s belly; it doesn’t warm anyone up.

Oh NO! Better start shorting stock in Jimmy Wales!

But in reality, there’s this thing called science

Most people don’t do it for the “back end” revenue (which is a term I think he made up just then). They do it because they like to, because it gives them fuzzy feelings, because they like helping people, because that supports their self-image of being a helpful person, because it gets their name out there, and because they like basking in the warm glow of geek cred.

Everybody knows—or should know, in this age of cheap and accessible neuroscience/sociology popularization—that when you pay somebody for something (or even mention money), their reasoning flips a switch, from pleasure / social justifications (e.g. I’m posting on digg because it’s fun! or I’m writing this Linux tutorial because it makes me feel good to help people, plus I get geek cred! or I’m helping you move your heavyass sofa because you’re my friend and that’s what friends do!) to economic justification (Like, dude! $1 for a digg post is so not worth me actually hunting down something NEW, here comes recycled blog spam. Or What the hell? You think $40 was enough to help you carry that damn couch? It was made out of fucking lead! Fuck you too!).

Once you’ve got somebody sitting there, economizing in their head about their effort vs your money, you’re pretty much screwed. There’s no way you can pay people what their actual effort is worth, with your Web 2.0 “business” (or friend-powered moving endeavor). Once they start thinking economically they’ll see it’s a waste of their time… and since you’ve sucked the joy out of it by making it work, they’re gonna disappear. Poof!

Even when their coffers are already pretty empty. People have such an overpowering sense of fairness that they’d rather get nothing than receive an unfair cut.

But if you don’t believe me, just look for the shining examples of paid-for content on the interwebs. Look at Squidoo. Look at Netscape’s digg killer (quick! can you name it? I couldn’t, I had to google it). Yahoo! Answers. Et cetera, ad nauseum.

Timely business book cliché

This is also illustrated in the har-har-aren’t-we-businessmen-clever-nudge-nudge apocryphal story about the old man who couldn’t get these noisy kids to stop playing in his yard, and believe you me, he tried everything right up to and including shaking his cane and calling them whippersnappers. Nothing worked. Until one fine day when he hit on the idea of paying them.

“Your young voices, so full of cheer, do me a world of good. I love to have you playing in my yard. It brightens up my day,” he told them, “I’ll give you each 50 cents each day to come play.” At first the kids thought, “Score! Free money!” And yet, money was less powerful motivator than the joy of being annoying little bastards and so they slowly trailed off in their enthusiasm for playing—because now it had become work—until one day the old man told them he forgot his quarters in his other pants, and they never came back again.

Which just goes to show, you shouldn’t piss off old dudes with lots of time and access to pop psychology books.

And if you’re going to rope your friends into helping you move, do everyone a favor and pay them in beer, pizza and affection, not money.

And if you think you’re going to write world-changing social software—or worse yet be a social software critic—do the world a favor and read a book on psychology first.

A special note for the one-uppers

PS — Don’t bring up Mechanical Turk. It’s a different case, and you know it.

[1] OK, the annoying dude also has a master’s degree in polysci, but I remain unimpressed.