A Long-Tailed Creative Yawp

2006-02-09T20:17:09+00:00

(Note: This is a long one.)

Reading "The slow decline of the blockbuster" on Ars Technica reminds me that this Long Tail stuff is something on which I've been wanting to write something intelligent for a long time now. This might all just be techno-hippy michegas in the end, but I'm really excited about the possibility of living in a Long-Tailed age.

You see, if I were to pick a lifelong war cry and embroider it on my own personal flag, that cry would be "Follow Your Bliss!" And my bliss is found in the course of learning, in the act of creative work and making things, and in the continual effort of self-refinement as creativity recursively applied.

Now, the thing about bliss is that it's not just some hedonistic easy road paved with whipped cream. Bliss is a hard thing to follow—you've got to keep your eyes on it, and there's quite often a lot of pain involved. But, I believe that following bliss is the only way to get real, honest, unbounded joy out of life that builds in unfailing increment.

What does my bliss have to do with the Long Tail? Well, you see, it's easier to be creative and live creatively in the midst of a culture that is itself steeped in creativity—and I think that a Long-Tailed culture is the best bet for it. I see a Long Tail as the hallmark of a living artisan culture, as opposed to the slow death of a consumer culture that'll just leave us all fat and useless.

Why do we even have a culture that enshrines such a poisonous unidirectional flow of product to consumer? Scarcity. Mass production makes it cheap to make lots of the same thing—yet, the means of that production has historically been very expensive to acquire.

Thus, assembly lines are scarce. The same has goes for transmission towers, radio frequencies, movie theaters, and recording studios. As a perverse consequence, we've all just gotten used to the idea that almost no one is cut out to make much at all and common creativity is relegated to head-patted cottage niches who make their own soap.

What I think the growing Long Tail will tell us, though, is that for many areas of creative concern, scarcity in the means of production is evaporating. Many products of creativity—i.e. sound, video, and text—can be composed on a cheap computer and duplicated with negligible cost on the web. In fact, as things like BitTorrent take off, distribution costs actually fall with popularity and scale. (Just think, what if distribution costs can fall below zero? I'm not just talking money here.)

I've got a lot of hope in what I see happening with blogging, podcasting, and other such network-driven channels for creativity. I also have a lot of hope for the generations of kids not only growing up with computers, but also with Netflix, GarageBand, MySpace, LiveJournal, YouTube, and even YTMND. You can scoff at them all you like, but some of that stuff's got a little bit of genius in it.

We've got this entertainment industry with an ultra-rich royalty caste of supposedly super-creative celebrities, but it's all driven by the scarcity that technology is eroding away. Sure, you can find some really, truly brilliant people up there—but I'm willing to bet there are armies of people down here who just haven't gotten in the right place at the right time or who've abandoned creativity because they had no viable outlet.

So, imagine a more distributed entertainment universe populated by more creative people—with fewer big productions and even fewer gazillionaires. Creativity, attention, and time become the only significant scarcities.

Imagine more people just entertaining each other and goading each other on. Imagine making a decent living doing creative stuff you love, based on the moral and monetary contributions of intimate audiences filled with co-creators—who, while perhaps not quite friends are at least befriendable. No one gets so rich bankwise—they get by just fine, mind you—but everyone lives in a lot more bliss.

This is not unlike Orson Scott Card's description of The Crystal City in his Alvin Maker series.

I want to see a culture where restrictions on remix are given the same odd looks as powdered wigs. I want to see, as an entrenched tradition, future creative adults route around the network damage of old proprietary industries steeped in scarcity and control. After all, "the only long-term effect of copy protection is to ensure that those who defeat it are immortalized."

We'll still need professional editors and crews for the really good stuff—but that's creative work too. The same goes for everyone else who plays an honest role in getting visions realized—this isn't all just about the entertainment industry. Honestly, I see the entrenchment of universal creativity as one of the few ways the United States can cope with increasingly global markets—we've got a bit of a head start in some areas, if we take it. Digging in heels and protecting aging ways of business that have long since ridden out their respective initial creative Big Bangs just won't cut it.

I want to see the 10% left over from 90% of everyone's crud inevitably exceed the total output of today's entertainment industry and spill into other industries. I want to see a new industry spring up whose sole purpose is to sift through chaff and cultivate the naturally emergent creative best. And I want to see that industry as a distributed service (versus control) industry there to help what's already happening through the application of both machine and human intelligence to homestead the noosphere.

...(deep breath)...

So anyway, that's the sort of stuff that gets me really excited lately. And, in excitement, I'm handwaving away a lot of stuff. But, I think there's something to all of this breathlessness that just might have something to do with my own bliss at the end of the day.

Archived Comments

Matt Brubeck
2006-02-09T23:19:13

"Why do we even have a culture that enshrines such a poisonous unidirectional flow of product to consumer? Scarcity."

My friend Patri wrote an interesting piece that gives a different answer to this question: "Our personal worlds are vastly larger than at any previous time in human history. Our population is much higher, and we are exposed to the best of the best of this huge pool of talent. This can be hard on one’s self-esteem."

"Honestly, I see the entrenchment of universal creativity as one of the few ways the United States can cope with increasingly global markets—we’ve got a bit of a head start in some areas, if we take it."

In other words, there are only four things we do better than anyone else. :-)
Aristotle Pagaltzis
2006-02-18T15:15:43

Reminds me of the comment I left on Spencer Critchley’s analysis of How Digital Production & Distribution Are Making Things Worse For Musicians, Not Better. I responded that artists should sell merch, not music:

Comic artists on the ’net have been giving away their art for years, make a living instead by selling merchandise. It works for them, and the ones I know of who made their comic their fulltime job, managed the leap when their fan base hit several thousand regular readers. This sounds like an easy goal for decent musicians who play out.

If that model works out, we will probably revert to something more like the pre-MTV days, with many local acts of moderate fame and significantly fewer artists of nationwide/international fame; in a generally much more heterogenous landscape. And now that I’m thinking about this, the more I ponder it, the more attractive it seems in many ways – it could be a renaissance for music.

Funny how I arrived at roughly the same vision as you by coming at it from a completely different angle, no?

Urban Birdsong: Copyright and Cores of Culture

2005-10-11T00:34:20+00:00

Mass media has done such a good job at embedding their copyright into culture that it has become culture itself.

Source: apophenia: when media becomes culture: rethinking copyright issues I've been meaning to write something about just this notion for awhile now, but haven't felt like I had anything good to say. But this is why all this greedy copyright grubbing and sphincter-clenched Intellectual Property pisses me off.

I've got this idea that sticks with me: All music started from birdsong and other sounds from the environment. But today, our environment is more and more man-made and urban. So now, birdsong comes from the radio, earphones, and the open windows of passing cars. It's our connotative vocabulary. Only in the past, the birds never had lawyers and egos.

You make music, you tell a story, you spawn an icon with big ears. If you're successful, it makes its way out of your hands and becomes adopted by others. But after awhile, it stops being yours so much as it becomes a shared focus for others. Whatever you meant for it in the beginning, it's become the seed of a hailstone. If you're really good or lucky, the hailstone grows into a comet.

All of the experiences and memories and feelings of all of the people who have taken in your creation accrete around it, eventually becoming more than your creation ever was. But, you can't ever own that, it's not yours—and the only way you can have any say in the matter is through artificial means supported by the barrel of a gun. The core of it may have once come from you, but that's all. The rest is culture.

Artists deserve compensation and need it to keep releasing cores of culture, but we all need to agree that these things are indeed released. There needs to be an realization that, after time, compensation turns into parasitic thievery of the source from which they drew to begin with.

And besides, where's the incentive to keep creating, if you can just ride along milking what you've already released? Isn't that what copyright's supposed to be all about? To "promote the arts and sciences"? How does vampirism in perpetuity do that?

Anyway, in the end, with all this DRM crap and treating the audience as a gang of criminals, I just want to know that I can opt out. You want to copy protect your refried crap to the point where it'll be illegible in 10 years and lost forever when your business model goes under? Fine. Just leave the rest of us out of it and get your hands off my computer.

Whenever I get around to writing and releasing the stories in my head, they'll be released. And in the meantime, I'll continue paying more and more attention to the people who get it—it'll be their birdsong that I'll be repeating.

Archived Comments

Aristotle Pagaltzis
2005-10-11T17:16:10

Amen. Thank you.
Aristotle Pagaltzis
2006-03-10T04:58:12

Funny that in that comment, I would use “amen.”

Check out Can I get an amen?, a 17-minute documentary that traces the life of a particular sample in parallel with the evolution of copyright law. I think you’ll like it.

0xDECAFBAD - Tag: drm

A Long-Tailed Creative Yawp

Archived Comments

Urban Birdsong: Copyright and Cores of Culture

Archived Comments