Crowdsourcing: sleazy new word for sleazy old scam from Bill Casselman's Canadian Word of the Day

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WARNING !

Some of the language in the column below may offend some readers. But — guess what? It's an offensive topic. However, should you wish to shield young readers from the truths of our world as perceived by some adults, then please go ahead and censor their access to this story about the use of a vile and meretricious word.

— B.C.

Crowdsourcing is getting low-pay or no-pay outside amateurs to do company work. Coined in June 2006 in the pages of Wired magazine by writer Jeff Howe and editor Mark Robinson, the word was formed by analogy with the term outsourcing. But crowdsourcing is offloading a task to a large audience outside the company, so that the company does not have to pay regular employees to perform the task.

You will see in the corporate come-hither advertisements ( The consumer is the creator! Wheeeeeeeee!) written to encourage you to take part in crowdsourcing that huge benefits in personal creativity and imagination and perhaps a modest payment will accrue to you, the hapless schnook asked to do the corporate work for next to nothing. Well, if you believe that, you are a schnook. What the corporation is really doing is tricking you into doing company work for little or no pay.

A Business Concept as Old as Suckers

The word crowdsourcing may be new but the concept is as old as P. T. Barnum. You remember P.T? He’s the American sharper who invented the freak show, the department store and the three-ring circus. His most famous utterance? “There’s a sucker born every minute, and two to take him.”

Fascinating marketing concept and at such a low cost! You get the customers to come up with ideas for you and then you pay them chump change and loose pennies.

Reporter Paul Boutin writing in Newsweek magazine in July of 2006 put it bluntly: “Crowdsourcing is a subset of what Eric von Hippel calls “user-centered innovation,” in which manufacturers rely on customers not just to define their needs, but to define the products or enhancements to meet them. But unlike the bottom-up, ad-hoc communities that develop open-source software or better windsurfing gear, crowdsourced work is managed and owned by a single company that sells the results.”

The Nadir of TV Vulgarity

The use of crowdsourcing that really angers me is man-in-the-street interviews and the ubiquitous neighbours-and-relatives interview after serious crimes. Let us imagine a hideous crime has been committed and a TV news crew and reporter show up to “bring the city all the news it deserves to have.” Here’s what some of the interviews sound like:

“I was shocked that young Johnny Dipstick could kill and eat those 37 babies. He was always such a good boy. When he was 4 and we caught him burying those cats alive, we thought, you know, maybe it was indigestion or maybe Johnny had been deprived of licorice all-sorts as an infant.”

“Wanda was a wonderful mother. Feeding her own toddler into that big city street sweeper was so unlike Wanda. I believe she did it in a fit of pique or because she was denied her welfare-financed trip to Vegas. These Canadian winters can really get poor people depressed, you know. Not depressed enough to work, but you get my snowdrift, eh?”

Why TV is So Bad

One of the many reasons television is so bad is this: it’s too easy to do. Making TV shows and TV newscasts is not rocket science. Many of the people who do it every night are, quite simply, morons. They are not merely dullards; they are also sluggards, lazy stupid dorks who endlessly repeat the same boring questions 365 nights of the year.

Immoral Canadian Newscasts

“Crowdsourcing” streeters are used extensively for what I call: the motiveless invasion of grief. The reporter waits until the cameraman has achieved the big close-up of the mother of the dead teenager, then, like Dracula spying a white neck, the reporter leans in with a hungry look and purrs forth the sensitive, delicate question: “Mrs. Lennex, what did it feel like at the exact moment when the three bullets smashed into Bobby’s skull and you were right there watching his cranium explode? Uh, would you say you were upset, m’am?

What should Mrs. Lennex say? She should say to the TV reporter, “Piss off, you brainless bitch and let me grieve in private. But, if you insist on talking to me, I want 600 dollars from the local TV news. Fork over the money now! Before I utter a single word.”

It takes my breath way to observe the mean-spirited intrusions that grieving families will permit. Private TV cameras now barge right into the funeral parlour while the loved one’s corpse is being prepared for viewing. “Hey, cameraman, just a darn minute,” meeps the mortician. “I haven’t finished applying the spray-on skin to this burnt stiff.”

But the TV viewer can tell from the looks of painful obligation on the faces of grieving relatives as the local TV news crews pound up on the flimsy front porch of the family’s hovel that, somehow, the grieving family feels it OUGHT to talk to the TV camera.

No, it ought not to.

No one is beholden to share grief so that a TV newscast or some other tele-sleazoid can sell toothpaste and pizzas by exploiting the dead bodies of your slain children.

No. No. No.

The only people who want such gore as news are empty-headed creep-viewers with no real lives of their own. These are the brain-dead mouthbreathers who batten upon the misfortunes of others seen on TV and then, gargling another Budweiser, cluck-clucking with fake sympathy, sinking back into their cheap sofas, uttering loud belches, they moan, “Geez, Bridget, I’m sure glad that ain’t us.” These are moronic stooges most of us would not let in the front door, let alone ever have as friends.

Think about it the next time a TV newscast fills your suppertime livingroom with a big close-up of the bloody innards of a poor little boy squished on his bike that afternoon. By watching this visual drivel, what are you participating in? You are helping the already millionaire owners of the TV station, heartless swine every one of them, sell tooth-whitener by invading your neighbours’ privacy at the most fragile moment of their shattered lives. Does that make you feel all warm and toasty?

Such TV news behaviour is 100% despicable.

Yet you see this vulgar pushiness every night at six. When you observe such invasion of privacy, you should tune out of that station; then write and tell the news producers why you are tuning out. That’s what all viewers could do and this particularly loathsome variety of crowdsourcing would disappear overnight. Believe me, if you just stopped watching, the producers themselves would come on camera, bleating and squealing like the greedy pigs they are, “Please keep watching. We’ll stop; we’ll be considerate.”

But, none of you sheep will protest, will you? So tomorrow night when the totally innocent, never-proven-guilty, drug dealer Wachima Kallit gets six rounds in the left eyeball, you will again hear the deeply concerned reporter ask the deeply relevant question, “Mrs. Kallit, what did you feel as Wachima fell dead on your front porch with his eyeballs shot out? Did you, er, like, need an Alka-Seltzer?”

Corporate Excuses

Now listen to some corporate babble, in this flagrantly pro-crowdsourcing paragraph:

“The main advantages of crowdsourcing are that innovative ideas can be explored at relatively little cost. Furthermore, it also helps reduce costs. For example, if customers reject a particular design, it can easily be scrapped. Though disappointing, this is far less expensive than developing high volumes of a product that no one wants. Crowdsourcing is also related to terms like Collective Customer Commitment (CCC) and Mass Customization. Collective Customer Commitment (CCC) involves integrating customers into innovation processes. It helps companies exploit a pool of talent and ideas and it also helps firms avoid product flops. Mass Customization is somewhat similar to collective customer commitment; however, it also helps companies avoid making risky decisions about what components to prefabricate and thus avoids spending for products which may not be marketable later.”

Observing the way some Canadian television newscasts do their business using crowdsourcing is enough to make one vomit.