"There will be no more professional writers"

I call bullshit.

There will always be professional writers. And musicians, and artists. Words are windows on other worlds, and they're not going away any time soon. Music is arguably as necessary to the human condition as food and water: babies who are so premature they can't even suck yet respond positively to music. And art is...well, as a poster that went around Facebook a few months back put it, 'EARTH without ART is just EH".

But you read the article linked above and it really does seem as if the sky is falling on any number of careers. There are an increasing number of people who seem to be willing to "work" for free, "paid" in popularity. Huffington Post, I'm led to believe, doesn't pay its contributors a red cent.  And it's not alone. Time was, whenever news happened, if you were lucky enough to have a camera on you--yes, you yowwens, "cameras" were once unitaskers that you had to remember to bring with you if you might conceivably wish to take some photographs--you'd pull out your camera, take the shot, get it developed (a process that could take anywhere from an hour to several days)...and then you'd look to sell your picture to a news outlet for cash dollars.
Now, of course, everyone seems to have a camera on them if they're awake, and that camera is capable of sharing its pictures in seconds to the entire world. "Selling" your picture is extremely unlikely, since (a) you're probably not the only person who got the shot and (b) even if you were, "information wants to be free". So you put your picture up on YouTube and count your coin hits.

You can't exchange hits for anything edible.

Yet.

In my wild dreamy moments, I hope the financial system we have now sticks around just long enough for a little more tech to develop...and then crashes utterly and completely, never to return. I like to think that dollar bills and debit cards are someday (and relatively soon) going to be as obsolete as wampum.

This is, I'll admit, kind of unlikely, because there are many chiefs out there with mucho wampum, and they have this desire to keep it from anyone else. But then again, given the amount of money being printed out of thin air,  I still believe its only a matter of time before this

is bus fare.

If money is essentially worthless, what replaces it? A different sort of currency--a currency we're slowly getting used to even now. The currency of....currency. Call it what you will. Call it Whuffie, call it darknet credits, call it upvotes and downvotes...this only succeeds as a system if transparency is a constant, not just a buzzword. If everyone can determine with a glance your reputation score, and add to it or subtract from it based on your words and works--well, then we have the basis for a new society. A writer of the next century's Giller Prize winning novel--or, hell, Fifty Thousand Shades of Brown--will collect accolades and be able to spend them.
There are issues to be worked out, to be sure. There should only be so many credits accruable to any one entity, lest someone gain too much power. The credits could be scaled based on reputation: if you're rated an asshole, everything you do costs more. If you do something truly depraved, your credit rating, so to speak, goes right to hell. I'm sure there are other problems to be solved. But they're solvable problems, unlike some of the problems with our current financial mess...