Connection Wealth for Artists
So, social connection and money both solve similar coordination problems. And for a couple centuries doing economics meant you could basically ignore the social connection category of wealth, because it was a pain in the ass to analyze and it wasn’t that powerful, really. But now there are a ton more social connections and those...
Artists Should Invest in Love
Apple has a ton of money. As their business grew, they kept a lot of it as a long term investment. They didn’t invest it in hedge funds or anything like that. They held onto it partly because Steve Jobs was kinda weird, but partly because all that money gave them safety and flexibility. They...
Learn Kickstarter from AFP’s new campaign
Because really, there’s only so long you can go on a blog about the future of the arts and the internet without blogging about Amanda Palmer. That’s her new Kickstarter video down there. Back it. Buy it. Love it. But more to the point: THAT’S HOW YOU DO THAT. I spend a lot of time...
Money and the Internet
I’ve written before about how things that used to involve money and companies, and therefore appear in “the economy”, no loger have to do so, thanks to the internet. If I needed a place to crash in a strange city, I used to have to pay a hotel. Now I can use all these lovely...
Double Fine Adventure and Kony 2012: The Internet’s Doing New Stuff!
These two things have basically nothing to do with each other, but they’re both pretty stonking powerful examples of things changing for culture on the web. Kony First, Kony 2012. Everyone knows by now that the film is an oversimplification and the charity behind it isn’t super efficient. There are problems. But when All Your...
How do we support culture when it’s too busy upvoting itself?
It used to be that the cultural economy didn’t exist, which was terrible. Then in the post-war period it was great at promoting things with mass appeal. That was pretty wonderful – it gave us the astonishing cultural power of pop music and movies, but it meant that there wasn’t any money leftover for stuff...
Kickstart the Brooklyn Bridge?
Government is the name we give to the things we choose to do together. -Barney Frank Christine Quinn delivers State of the City speech. She calls for NYC govt to use @kickstarter to fund civic projects twitter.com/ystrickler/sta… — Yancey Strickler (@ystrickler) February 9, 2012 The world hasn’t changed yet, but it’s going to. Nation states...
Culture has to be a party now
And that could look like a bad thing, but on balance I think it’s great. People have vastly more choice about what culture and entertainment to consume with their time than they did in the past. And they can get all the films, tv shows and music they like from home, plus all the stuff...
I’m digging back into this piece – at 10 PM
Which is, for those of you keeping score at home, bad form. Write in the morning. Use that first burst of energy to do the work you care about most. And by energy I do mean caffeine. Save the bills, chores, Finale entry and associated drudgery for when you’re exhausted, your juices have run out,...
About what Rachel Said
My friend Rachel Fershleiser, newly of tumblr, said this: Think piece I don’t have the energy to write but maybe you do: Internet memes seem to be moving towards the smallest sub-cultural groups possible and catching on that way. - I made Judgmental Bookseller Ostrich as a joke on how there was starting to be...
Always Carry Drums
I have a rule about this. It has broader implications, but for me it starts from putting on shows. And it’s this: Always Carry Drums. Here’s what I mean. If you’re putting on a show, and you’re not a drummer, at some point you’re going to be standing around, having totally finished “your bit” of...
It isn’t favors, it’s awesomeness
I got it wrong about the favors. In my last post I talked about exchanging favors, and owed debts for previous non-monetary transactions. I wanted to connect it to stuff previously done with money, and I mistakenly thought about it as an exchange of value in far too concrete a sense. It’s been haunting me...
