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I was curious to see how this article would prove that the acute stress and hectic pace of writing content for a web site literally kills those modern-day gladiators known as "bloggers."
They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop...[and] some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the past few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., a funeral was held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another technology blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.The magnitude of the correlation/causation error here boggles the mind. In other news, did you know that having brown hair can get you fired from the Clinton campaign?Meanwhile, calling blogging a "digital-era sweatshop" is an insult to actual sweatshops. Blogging is, to paraphrase Bob Dole, indoor work, no heavy lifting. Indeed, I'm always fascinated by how little self-consciousness the professional class has about their lives. You often hear folks with six figure salaries talking about how "hard" they worked to get ahead. But working at a law firm isn't any harder than, say, laying tar, or standing on your feet selling cell phones all day. It's just more highly valued. It's smart early investments and a host of material and internal advantages that lead to one man's labor earning hundreds of thousands, while another man's barely pays the rent. But it's hard to argue that attending an Ivy League school where you smoke a lot of pot and pretend you understand Focault is more taxing than entering a service sector job right out of high school. The professional class just likes to pretend that it is in order to lay a patina of virtue and ethics over what are, in fact, amoral decisions of the market.
