The part of this argument that’s accurate here is that most of the infrastructure that supported the creative class – print advertising for journalists and photographers, record sales for musicians, independent bookstores that often employed entry-level literary folk – have indeed collapsed over the last decade or two. The cult of “free” – the idea that ideas and “content” should be available to anyone with a laptop – has gutted just about every other way people in these fields earned their living. Much of that implosion, by the way, was provoked by these same culture-loving Silicon Valley geniuses.
Source: salon.com