Social connections are definitely wealth: they let you coordinate complex tasks and accomplish goals you couldn’t accomplish on your own. But they are fundamentally incommensurable with money. There is no sensible way to build a friends:dollar exchange rate; it’s just silly. This is true for a bunch of reasons. You can’t ‘spend’ friendships in the same way. Certainly you can ask for a giant favor that ‘puts a strain on friendship’, but it’s just as easy to ask for a fun favor, or help with a project, and at the end you’ll have an even more valuable social connection than you had before. Also, you can create more and more friendships and social connections all the livelong day and not worry about devaluing the friendship. The more social connections there are, the more valuable they become. Money, under normal circumstances, becomes less valuable the more of it you print. There are other reasons these are fundamentally different categories of wealth, but they’ll do for now to show the point.

On the margins of money

Social connections have always had a certain kind of collaborative money-like power, but you can’t see it at the level of mass-producing products and currency exchanges. Three places where you can totally see it, though, are these: the very poor, the very rich, and artists. These are places on the margins of money, where either because there’s so little money, or because there’s so much, money ceases to be the main medium for value exchange.

The very poor have to focus on family, on people, and on collaboration – I’ll watch your kids, you’ll help me with some housework – because there isn’t enough money to get things done any other way. When you can’t hire a plumber you have to ask your friend who kind of knows about toilets, and then you have a closer social bond. Loyalty and trust become extremely important in that context.

The very rich have so much money, and so many paid services, that their lives don’t really revolve around the making and spending of money. They have a lot more to do with who you know, and how you build, call on, and occasionally destroy social bonds. When you think of the Ladies Who Lunch(tm) you think of them doing things through social ties, to the extent that you think of them doing things. There’s an interesting overlap here with national leadership, diplomatic circles, and other power elites that are traditionally filled with super wealthy people, where social connections are also very important, and function at the summit of giant piles of money wielded by governments and corporations etc. It’d be interesting to work on how that social world is changing with the rise of social connections as an important category of wealth – but that’s a separate question.

And third, the artists. As I’ve written before, artists tend to get things done through social networks, calling on friends of friends, collaborators of collaborators, and bandmates’ mothers’ couches. This is partly because artists are generally cash poor, and therefore functioning on the margins of the system where money works really well. But there’s more to it than that – even rich artists tend to get things done in the same way. A bunch of people have written about the structural poverty of artists as a challenge when trying to improve the lives of artists. Poverty is one thing, but structural poverty is something else – it means that there are some underlying reasons that artists are generally poor. Even if you give artists money, that doesn’t really help them become richer. What’s up with that? All artists want to have more money – trust me, we’re really good at obsessing over getting paid. So why are artists structurally cash-poor?

But there’s more than money at stake

It’s because artists, by temperament, want to make art more than they want money. If we just wanted money, we would have become actuaries. But we want to make art, and we’ll take what we can get money-wise. If you give an artist a few thousand dollars, chances are they won’t say “great, a nest egg that I can save for retirement”. Chances are they’ll say “great – I can take fewer crappy freelance jobs, or do fewer shifts at the restaurant, and make more art.” Or we’ll spend it on equipment, or rehearsal time, or something else to do with the art itself. We don’t lose the money because we’re terrible at holding onto money. We lose it because there are so many other things we care about more. Now, this does mean that if you want to stimulate a money-based economy, give money to artists and we’ll spend it like crazy. But it also means we don’t tend to have huge bank accounts, and it’s hard to change that structure and cause artists to be richer in dollars.

But remember what I was saying about how social connections don’t get ‘spent’ in the same way that money does? And how making more of them makes them more valuable? Artists are structurally cash-poor, but not structurally poor in social connections. We’re great at building those, using them to accomplish goals, and developing a long-term network of audience members and collaborators. When we say that artists are structurally poor, we shouldn’t think of them as without resources – we should think of them as without cash.

As I keep saying, social connections are an increasingly important category of wealth, and can be used to accomplish complicated coordination tasks that used to be only solvable with money or big organizations. Now, you can’t get health insurance through your Facebook friends list. And you can’t eat your Klout score. But this whole thing is only just beginning, and the better our communications technology gets, the more powerful social connection is going to be for accomplishing all kinds of stuff.

I don’t think money will ever be totally replaced by social connection, but as this continues to impact the economy it’ll be fascinating to watch what happens, and what things are more about connecting than cash exchange, and how those connections persist and how complex collaborative tasks get accomplished almost automatically by huge groups of people with no money involved, no central direction, and not even the notion of being part of a group.

But my personal favorite outcome is this: we artists don’t onto money, but we’re great at holding onto social connections. We’re cash poor but social connection rich. And as social connections take on the ability to do more stuff you used to have to do with money, artists are going to become richer automatically.

photo credit: http://statigr.am/vino_bibereamo

All businesses build capital if they want security. Apple had interesting special reasons to keep their capital all stored in cash. Big arts companies need capital, too. Non-profit arts institutions keep theirs in endowment funds, buildings, and in the case of museums, their art objects. For profit arts companies – film production companies, television stations, etc., have different incentives, but a lot of their capital is stored in relationships with talented artists, and reputation from past successes, not it money at all.

And at the far end of the spectrum, leading the way into the new arts economy as usual, we have Amanda Palmer. Her cash on hand is small, even if you count the wild success of her most recent Kickstarter campaign, which is at half a million dollars and counting. For every dollar she raises her work commitment goes up, too. And given the expenses of touring, producing, marketing, and distributing records even on a shoestring budget, and the work of actually doing all the performing, that huge pile of gross revenue will translate into startlingly little profit at the end of the day. I don’t know about you, but I want to live in a world where someone like Amanda Palmer can come out of a project like this having made a decent salary, at least.

But even with not that much money in the bank, Amanda Palmer has a huge reserve of long term capital, and she stores hers in love.

Yes, I’m bringing love into a discussion of arts economics.

People are going to do that a lot in the next few years, so get ready for it.

AFP’s support for her is very, very strong, and can pay off for her and her art in a variety of ways, from backing the Kickstarter campaign to investing in Loanspark, to putting her up in a strange city or helping find a location for a photo shoot or a van in New Haven to borrow for a music video shoot (I tried, but all my percussionist friends were using their vans that day). All of that comes from the love of her fans, and because we have crazy awesome communications technology now it’s really easy to convert that love and fandom into tangible benefits for the artist and the art. And of course the audience members involved – If you help an artist you love with something you can do for basically free (borrow a van) you’re not going to feel taken advantage of, you’re going to feel part of something great, and that love you feel don’t diminish because it was spent. It will increase because was involved.

Just to put on my finance hat for a minute: love is an insanely valuable asset class. It doesn’t devalue with inflation. It grows over time. When you draw on the love of your fans to save you money or buy your art, you aren’t spending the love you way you spend money. More often than not you’re increasing the love because you’re connecting people with the awesome stuff they care about. Just as a business investment, apart from the actual benefits to human existence, happiness, and wonder, love is fucking awesome.

And to put on my liberal artsy hat for a minute: isn’t it great that wall street can’t ever invest in love? It’s such a valuable asset, and it’s only available to wonderful people. It’s only available to artists who actually make wonderful things (now THAT’S what I call democracy). It’s only available to people who inspire us. Amanda Palmer has a TON of it, and it’s not the result of a cold strategy and merciless aggression. It’s a result of years doing what art is really supposed to do – make people’s lives better. She’s spent years trying to inspire people, given them wonderful experiences, bring them excitement, and make them happy. And in return, she’s earned our love.

Thirty or forty years ago, pop musicians could be loved by a huge fanbase, but through whatever quirk of fate still not be able to build a career out of it. Record companies could ignore them, and the loving fanbase couldn’t easily support the artist like a magical flock of birds carrying the band through the air, a different bird taking the weight of each step. But we can do that now.

Thanks to the incredible speed of communication, we can talk about love and investment in the same conversation. If we look at it in the pre-internet way, that makes the love part seem dirty and cynical, and makes the investment part seem wishy-washy and weak. But that’s not the world we live in anymore.

My favorite implication of all this, at least for now, is that the best thing you can do as an artist, both to make great stuff and to grow your business, is to fucking captivate people.

But more to the point: THAT’S HOW YOU DO THAT. I spend a lot of time talking about how to run a Kickstarter arts campaign well. I teach my friends how to do it, I teach their friends how to do it. I even vicariously teach my friend’s mom’s students how to do it. Plus I’m teaching cash-strapped arts organizations how to do it at the National Arts Marketing Project‘s conference in November. If you want me to help you, just use the contact form or tweet at me and we’ll figure something out. Video:

If you’re setting up a Kickstarter campaign, you’ve got to study awesome campaigns and learn from them. Amanda Fucking Palmer’s new campaign obviously qualifies. Here’s a list of awesome stuff it does:

Low-budget gimmick in the video

Kickstarter videos are their own evolving genre. You want to look professional, but not so professional that you look like you don’t need money. Enter the low-budget gimmick. Holding up cue cards and throwing them away is great for a few reasons. It’s handmade, giving your project that, well, handmade feel. It saves you having to talk straight to camera, which, lets face it, is really hard for some people. It shows that you put time into making the cards and aren’t just rambling at a camera whatever comes into your head. It shows effort.

The writing on the cards is great. It’s clear, it’s emphatic, and it doesn’t waste your time. You could do worse for writing your own video than taking this one, erasing all the details and then filling in your own.

The editing is great. One thing that you must remember about low-budget gimmicky web videos: jump cuts are awesome. This is when you suck time out of a video an put two clips next to each other that clearly don’t match. In film school they teach you that this is bad, and in narrative films and tv it is. But in web videos, and particularly kickstarter videos, you should love the jump cut. It lets you take out anything that drags or is a little bit boring or just didn’t work without worrying about continuity. Plus we’re all used to it by now. We’ve seen youtube.

Also, look at the shots and clips that made it into the final cut. There are shots of Amanda matching the message of the card, and generally being enthusiastic about stuff. That’s awesome. Even if I’m supposed to be reading cards, I’ll mostly be watching your face – that’s how people are. We look at faces. But there are also shots of Amanda clearly not knowing what card she’s looking at, and just plain cracking up. Leave some of that stuff in your video, too – it makes you look human, which awesome, because you are human.

Costume and location are great, too. She’s dressed like herself (unusual, fun, etc.) and the location is clearly just outside someplace that looked cool. They shot for free. No mics, no lights, no nothing. You can see watching it that they shot it for free, but it still looks good and competent. And check out the sun setting behind them – the camera guy had to adjust a bit to deal with that, but it also made the shot visually interesting for free. When you’re shooting outside, it’s worth knowing about the golden hour. When you’re shooting inside during the day, remember that windows in the back of your shot and blank white walls both look dumb.

Beautiful rewards structure

You can pirate the album if you really want it for free, so they priced the digital download at a buck. It’s honestly easier than stealing it. It also helps inoculate against people thinking that AFP is so super-successful that she shouldn’t be asking for my money. Yes, she’s successful, and yes, she’s asking for money. But dude, you like her art and you’re griping over a dollar? Give it a rest, just buy the download and get on with your day.

Part of the glory of crowdfunding is that it lets you have a functional business with hugely varied prices all in one place. In a physical store, you’d be confused if there were something awesome for $1 (candy bar?) next to something awesome for $10,000 (shiny new car?) but online, and on Kickstarter, it’s totally normal. You can actually get your whole audience through here, no matter how much money they have. Awesome.

The art book is awesome. 30+ artists made art that’s kinda connected to the project. It lets people who don’t want to go to the show, or who can’t, have a super-premium object they can buy. It’s a cool artistic object all on its own. Plus it includes a bunch more awesome people in the project. It’s not just Amanda makes an Album – it’s Amanda makes a ton of art with a ton of artists. So now there are big crowds on both sides of the Kickstarter. Cool. The lesson most people should take from this is to, if you can, include a lot of people in the making portion, but even more important – highlight all of the people who are involved. Did you see that shot of the camera guy’s feet in the video? That’s important. It tells you that everyone who signs on is appreciated. You, as a creator, should do that, too. You should appreciate everyone who helps, and you should show that appreciation writ large. It will make everyone happy, raise you more money, and make your actual artwork better.

Possibly most interestingly, everything is Kickstarter exclusive. So if you want to be in on the ground floor as it were, you have to buy it here. There’s no reason to wait to buy it later in a store where it might be a little discounted, or where you could save on shipping. This works particularly well for Amanda since she kind of runs the internet, and very few of her fans will miss that this Kickstarter is happening. A lot of the super-successful games and design projects recently got me thinking about how much Kickstarter is becoming not just a way to get started, but also a way to basically sell your entire run of a product. In cases like this, it’s a straight e-commerce platform with marketing tools built in as much as it is a crowdfunding platform.

Don’t skip the project description

Again, the writing is really good and really clear. But there’s more. The photos, section headers (those are embedded images), bullet lists, and varied typography make it easier for you to visually navigate the section. Remember – this isn’t a grant proposal. It’s a website, and your page needs a lot of visual markers to help people skip around the page. Giant paragraphs aren’t going to do the job that well.

Loanspark

Kickstarter has a $10,000 limit. So AFP is trying out something for bigger, gianter contributors. Interest free loans, payable back once the project recoups (for most artistic project, recouping is a pipe dream), that pay “Creative Interest”. I love that phrase. Creative Interest is a private performance, custom-made art, or a charity gig for a charity of your choice, or probably something else, too. This is kind of the private banking version of artistic crowdfunding. There hasn’t been a huge need for this to be done on the internet before, but now the need for the thing is here, so AFP built the thing. Sweet. If it works, which I think it will, it’ll help change the way capital (that’s all of big content: record labels, film studios, publishers, etc.) relates to artists. It will empower the artists. Hurray!

Two other things about Loanspark. 1) I wonder how many people who are giving this much money to the arts will actually want it back at the end of the day. And 2) I really, really, really do not envy AFP’s tax accountant.

And it’s official

The project crossed it’s Kickstarter goal while I was writing this blog post.

Good work, internet. Good work, AFP. And good work, everyone else, for making better Kickstarter projects and making more art because we learned from Amanda Fucking Palmer.

The financial version, going to a hotel, contributes to normal measures of economic activity, like GDP, because money was exchanged. I may have made friends with a staff member, but that would be unlikely, and beyond that no relationship is formed. Next time if I have to stay in the same city I’m going to go to the cheapest hotel, not the one where I went the last time, because I’m trying to save money, not keep up with friends.

The non-financial version doesn’t contribute to “the economy”, but it does fill a need, so it seems a bit odd that it wouldn’t count toward the economic life of a society. The interesting thing to me is that the “stay with a friend” experience doesn’t involve hard exchange. It may involve “owing someone a favor” but people don’t think of their relationships like that, and the next time we meet it’s just as likely that either one of us will be the one eager to help the other. But asking for and receiving a favor created a relationship that has a definite economic value. The next time one of us needs something, we’ll be more likely to go to each other, and when asked, we’ll be more likely to help each other.

This sort of thing happens all the time, and has forever. But the ridiculous advances in human communication are taking this phenomenon from a rounding error economically speaking, and turning it into a much more significant cultural force. Like what’s happening in the entertainment industry, it’s easy to look at this and say “fewer purchases from companies are happening and that is bad!” But also just like what’s happening to the entertainment industry, there’s still economic activity, and there are more relationships being forged among people. It’s easy to dismiss human relationships as wishy-washy stuff not worthy of analysis, but to do so would be wrong. Not morally wrong, just sloppy thinking and bad analysis.

Trying to define the monetary value of a friendship is difficult if not impossible. And we all know that friendships matter in non-monetary ways, but there’s an easy mistake to make in assuming that creating a friendship isn’t a form of economic production.

I’ve been trying to think of a framework for understanding this for a little while, and I think I’ve got a decent one. And it’s this:

Money and the Internet are both solutions to coordination problems

In trying to understand this non-monetary economic activity, I went back to think about how we got money in the first place. It’s a medium of exchange that greases the wheels. Intrinsically it has no actual use, unlike cheese, farm labor, or a boat. But if we invent a whole category of thing that itself has no intrinsic value, but we all agree to act as if it does and swap it for stuff, we can drastically speed up the rate at which our economy can function.

It’s easier to trade stuff if we have money. And it’s easier to go places and buy things without bringing your herd of sheep with you for bartering purposes. We started with money backed by gold, for which we also had decorative uses, but now we’re just using paper and agreeing to say it’s worth something because if we do create this whole extra commodity called money with its own kind of value, it makes it easier to do stuff that involves other people (and their skills and resources, etc.). Keep hold of that: money makes it easier to do stuff with other people.

And then we come to the internet, and the part of this post where I assert things about the speed of communication just like I usually do: The internet is changing everything. We’re more able to communicate with each other than ever before by a lot, and we’re able to talk to giant swathes of people, and without even the bother of calling them all on the phone. Also we’re more aware of our own relationships than we ever have been before, “Oh, LinkedIn says I know a guy who knows a guy who knows that guy who might give me a job. Interesting… I didn’t know I had an in there…”. And it’s easier to monitor and capitalize on those relationships to achieve goals. The internet, quite obviously, is making it easier to reach out to people and accomplish things with them. The internet makes it easier to do stuff with other people.

So, money and the internet both solve similar kinds of coordination problems. And the solutions to both kinds of problem contribute to the economic health of a society. But our ways of measuring “the economy” only include the money-problems, because up to this point the number of economically important coordination problems solved without money has been tiny. And so in order to understand economies it’s been pretty much sufficient to understand money – how it’s created, how fast it’s moving, how it’s valued, etc. And for now it might still be good enough, but the volume of economically important tasks that get completed without the use of money is only going to keep growing. And we need new ways to think of the economy that include those tasks.

I think that human connectivity is a good metric to start from, since the number and quality of connections or potential connections determine (at least partially) how well new collaborations can arise. To build a metric for this that you could actually use you’d have to look at the normal social interconnectedness of a given community (geographic or otherwise), at the prevalence of different communications technologies and methods, at the frequency of their use, and probably at some deeply difficult to construct wishy-washy measures of human fellow-feeling. Good luck constructing those.

Huh. So does that mean the internet is going to replace money?

No. But it does mean that some things that used to be accomplished best with money are going to be better accomplished with the internet. Well, honestly it’s possible to imagine a distant future where we have perfect Borg-like communication technology and money becomes useless, but it’s far enough off in post-singularity-land that I’m not going to worry about it at all.

The interesting questions to me are these:

• Which kinds of collaboration, or which parts of each collaborative task, are more efficiently done with the Interent than with money for any given level of communications technology? And how do we maximize value in the things we do by picking the right collaborative medium, or mix of media?
• How do we understand the strength, health, or productivity of a society in terms of both human connectivity and money? It’s obvious that human relationships have value, both intrinsically and in terms of the tasks they can help accomplish. But it might be impossible to define that value in terms of money. So how do we account for it?

I’ll leave you with an example. Take two small 19th century towns, both alike in dignity. But one of them’s Amish. And then someone’s barn burns down in each of the two towns. It’s easy to imagine the Amish town banding together and hastily rebuilding and getting the town back to full production. And the other town has family relationships and friends and some merchants to provide goods in exchange for money. The other town might get back on its feet quickly as well, but probably not as quickly. It’s the interconnectedness of the Amish town that converts into a higher economic value, with or without the use of money.

So what I’m saying is that the internet is making us all more Amish. Bring on the scrapple & beards!

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 Base suddenly Belonged To Us, did you think that a 30 minute documentary film about violence and exploitation in Africa would ever be able to spread in exactly that way? For all the thorny issues involved with the film itself, it’s a killer example of long form, serious content going viral. That would have been basically unthinkable a year ago.

Double Fine Adventure

Has crossed $3 million for its Kickstarter campaign, and is continuing to break records. When I help people with their campaigns, which happens a lot, I talk a lot about the power of pre-selling your thing. If you’re pre-selling tickets to a show, and you have a sell out audience before you book the venue, that makes you a lot more attractive to a venue. Pre-sale lowers the risk in making things.

What’s going on right now looks like a great start for Double Fine. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the vast majority of the sales for the game. And that might me a weird thought for the accountants, but it’s a really fascinating change for the internet.

But the sheer outrageous volume of sales the Double Fine has had makes it look less like a pre-sale, and more like their entire market buying through the Kickstarter campaign instead of through normal retail channels. I’d be very, very excited to see how well the normal release of the game sells when it comes around.

Kickstarter isn’t just a fundraising platform to get you going for them, or a place for a few pre-sales to finish off production. Double Fine has basically used it to replace its e-commerce set-up entirely. And the customers get the experience of being part of an exciting, record-breaking campaign right alongside with their actual game. And given the different prices inherent in the reward structure they might actually be paying well over retail for the game.

It’s not just for fundraising anymore. It’s for sales, too.

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 that didn’t have mass appeal, but was nonetheless valuable. So in stepped the NEA, philanthropists, foundations, and corporations wishing to appear cultured. (This was more their stated goal than their actual goal, even if that, but bear with me). This gives us Exxon paying for Great Performances throughout the 1980s.

That system had big problems, and now it’s breaking thanks to the internet. A lot of the analysis of why it’s breaking runs along the lines of “there isn’t enough money coming in to support us anymore!” That barely scratches the surface.

The cost of creating art has dropped through the floor. Hyperbole barely covers how cheap it is now to make wonderful things. It’s also practically free to distribute wonderful things. Be sure not to overlook the fact that you can pay for things much more quickly and easily as well. That’s important.

Dear the arts community: this is great news. If you think it’s bad news, you’re putting your short term interests over the progress of society.

If we’re not just losing money, then what is happening?

The chance to make and distribute art use to be scarce. And we had elaborate systems set up to pick who got to make and distribute their art (and also get paid for it). But now we have a system where everyone makes and distributes their art as a first step. And the internet does a fantastic job of rewarding popular and viral things with attention and, increasingly, money.

The internet does some other things very well, too. It teaches people how to do things by giving them fantastic models to learn from, and often free teaching materials. It rewards niche content and creators by facilitating communities based on interests; this way you can sell a little to a few or a lot to a lot, and scale your business to your audience like a liquid filling a container. It helps different ideas and bits of creativity connect and flourish almost by themselves, and create these big organic group behaviors by people who don’t even think of themselves as part of a group.

And here’s an important thing, it does create another economic system for artists to be supported, even though right now it looks like more artists and getting smaller pieces of the pie, and arguments are raging about whether the pie is actually growing or shrinking.

How do we fix the new system?

But if the NEA and post-war cultural support ostensibly corrected market deficiencies in the old system, what are the market deficiencies in the new system and how do we correct those?

Just for a start, creators have no leverage with distribution platforms right now, and we as a society have no framework for judging, say, how much of YouTube’s revenue should go to YouTube and how much to video uploaders. We just don’t know how to decide that yet, but at the moment I’d wager that creators aren’t getting enough.

Second, the internet is very good at rewarding “viral” stuff, “shareable” stuff. A lot of that content is simply amazing. But there’s probably a lot of fantastic art that we want to encourage as a society that isn’t so “viral”, and that doesn’t do so well in an internet popularity contest. How do we find that stuff and make sure we still have it?

That’s my start to the discussion, but it’s just a start. What else isn’t good enough about the new economy, and how do we build market interventions for the 21st century that actually do something about it?

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 collect taxes, and then have giant democratically accountable institutions decide how to spend the money. These governments are the best scalable way for the citizens of a country to pool their resources and govern themselves so far devised. But look at how opaque and frustrating these governments can be, even if you believe in them (which I seriously do).

They make sure that we have roads, equal protection under the law, national security, and, fingers crossed, universal healthcare. That’s pretty cool. And these institutions are filled with people who devote themselves to serving their society. That’s kind of awesome, too.

But paying taxes is frustrating and uncomfortable, and watching the legislative process unfold is time consuming and confusing. And trying to influence that process is really difficult, and holding your political representatives accountable is nearly impossible without changing careers and becoming an activist or a political operative.

The idea Quinn put forward today, of supporting civic spending projects on Kickstarter, opens the door to some amazing possibilities. There’s work to do to bridge Kickstarter’s existing framework (or that of any extant crowdfunding site) and the Pentagon’s annual budget. We don’t want the rich to get to pick and choose which civic projects get done, and there are issues of confidentiality and civil rights that need to be addressed. We can’t just crowdfund the government – we don’t know how to do it yet.

But imagine if the experience of paying taxes and watching that money be spent were as smooth as supporting a project on Kickstarter. What would that do for the civic engagement of our society? What would that do for your experience at the post office, with police officers, with parking tickets?

The standards for transparency and accountability that are developing for web-native financial transactions are already transforming business. I for one can’t wait for them to transform governments.

P.s. if you want a sneak peak at what this kind of accountability could be like, spend a couple hours reading everything you can about my Jersey City Councilman, Steve Fulop.

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 being created specifically for the web. So getting people out of their houses to actually go to stuff is harder than it used to be.

“Come hear my music” “But I can hear it at home, it’s cold out, and tickets are expensive” “I can’t really argue with that….”

That’s changed into something like this:

“Come to my show – we’ve got music, food, drinks, your friends, foursquare specials, and generally a really awesome night out” “Okay, that sounds fun!”

There are two ways to look at this. First is the hidebound traditionalist way. Artists have to spend time on all this other stuff to go with their concerts that they should be spending on their art and just their art. This is terrible, it’s distracting from the real work and diluting our cultural blah blah blah…

Obviously I’m on the other side.

We’ve got more competition, and we’re upping our game. Instead of just presenting music, and relying on the scarcity of the art to draw people into whatever situation we can present it in, no matter how unpleasant, we have to create a full experience that will get people out. Is the booze and food and relaxed social atmosphere pandering to how people want to experience culture? Yes. That’s good. People have more options to experience culture how they want to. It’s for everyone now, and in these new contexts they have a much better chance of having those transformative artistic experiences that feature in the memories of all of us who decided to do this with out lives. Isn’t it great?

Yes, artists have to work on a full experience instead of the narrow bit they used to focus on. That can look like a dilution, but really it’s a shift of focus from the materials and tools of the art itself to the experience of the audience. Instead of thinking fundamentally about rhythms and pitches, I get to focus on making people happy, and giving them life-changing artistic experiences. Pitches and rhythms are just tools. I think that’s awesome.

In case you’re worried about the death of classical music

To start with, the art isn’t going anywhere. The reason live events are under pressure to change is that art is in more places more of the time and more accessible to more people. There’s a problem paying people properly (a big one – it’s for real), but at a basic level more art = good. The art is not under threat. At all. Stop it with the culture is dying malarkey.

“But live performances have more competition now, and it’s harder to put on shows than it used to be,” I hear you cry. I thought we were capitalists? More competition means we have to get better, it means we have more pressure to actually serve the cultural needs of people. And the great thing about the huge variety of choice on the internet means that we’re no longer competing to be one of the 20 songs on the radio this year. It means we’re competing to authentically reach people who want great cultural experiences.

It’s true that great art is often misunderstood and shouldn’t have to pander, and it’s hard to be a visionary and lead people if you’re trying to give them what they already know they like. But if anything the pressures on the live event from the internet are helping solve that problem, not making it worse. The old system was terrible at that.

Now I use the word social

Look around at these new cultural events, and what you’ll notice is the same thing that you hear about businesses. “It all has to be social now, from the ground up. Connect authentically with your market! Let people talk to each other! be friendly!” Everywhere you go people say the word social as if it’s the revolutionary way of the future. And it kind of is, but it’s more a tearing down of old ways that people were stuck relating to each other, and replacing them with the even older ways that people have always liked relating to each other.

Look at concerts in pubs and people are more comfortable because they’re talking to each other in a social context. They’re making friends. People are getting their culture now in ways that are more like parties and less like single-purpose professional gatherings. They’re more receptive in that context, they’re more comfortable, they’re happier, and they’re more likely to leave their houses and come to your show.

After Ruckus Amongstus, I thought, as a lot of showrunner types do, about how much of the audience was my friends and how much was strangers. There were plenty of people in the house I didn’t know. Come to think of it there were plenty of people on stage I didn’t know. But I could trace my connection through friends of friends to almost everyone in the room. As musicians we’re trained to think of knowing everyone in the audience as a kind of failure. But here’s the thing: it’s not just my audience’s relationships to each other that are more social. It’s my relationships with them.

It’s not that my friends came to my show (though they did). It’s that new technology lets me think of my audience as my friends.

But I’m at a strange place with this piece, and swamped with everything happening in my life right now, so I’m letting myself work late tonight, albeit equipped with an old-fashioned.

The piece is called Poems Without Names – and it sets a poem by Burton Raffel, who translated The Seafarer from Old English. It’s meant to be about five minutes, and I’m doing it for Rhymes With Orchestra, which is a new orchestral side to the lovely Rhymes With Opera organization, run by George Lam and some other good friends from Peabody. Poems is going to be premiered on March 17, so it’s a good thing I haven’t written a note of it yet. George and I cooked up the idea on December 30, at my New Years Eve-Eve Party. He’s got a lute and a saxophone in the orchestra, and I’ve got this poem that Burton Raffel sent me a while ago that has two characters: a living poet and a dead Roman poet. How about I pair the sax with the living poet, the lute with the dead one, and give you five minutes of music? Sound good?

A lot of people make strange decisions at parties. I don’t think many of them involve the lute. Now I have one in my house, lent to me by John Orluk, the fabulous and patient lutenist for this piece.

Poems Without Names, or PWN for short, at full length takes about half an hour to read aloud. I’ve timed it. I’m cutting it down considerably for this performance, and hope to be able to re-expand it at a later date. There are a few discussions on the nature of art, and one love poem from the dead Roman that I would dearly love to turn into a set piece song in this version, but there just isn’t time – either in the piece’s intended length or for me to write it.

You said a strange place with this piece?

Yes. I’ve got a strong cut of the poem done. I have the basic tectonics of the story settled. It’s time to start moving into a map that involves more music. I’m a very top-down composer. I don’t take a motive and expand it into a piece. I take a story or an idea and look for what elements I need to tell that story, on down from the mission of the piece to the individual note. Once I know what the dramatic moment requires from the piece, I rarely revise. If I don’t like a passage of music, it’s usually because I’ve mistaken the intention of the moment.

It’s sort of like an actor asking “What’s my motivation?” when they’ve given a lackluster performance. I could push notes around, but I’d rather grab hold of the tree holding them up and move that – more effective that way.

I’m not totally sure what I’ll be doing to the text tonight, probably tweaking the words a little more, probably imagining dramatic beats and sonorities and maybe, if I’m lucky, sketching out a melody or two. Then it’ll be back to the shape of the piece, the development of the characters, and then back to the music.

Should be fun….

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 an advice animal for every possible field/major/career.

- People who didn’t care about Ryan Gosling care once there’s a blog of him talking about a field of stat-based library science all of 200 people have a degree in.

- Shit Girls Say became Shit every possible racial, religious, and sexual identity say or have said to them.

Like, now it’s not enough for things to be universally funny? If they are micro-funny I feel super-special that someone made them Just For Me and I’m obligated to share/love them?

So memes are getting bigger by getting smaller? The hyper-specification of internet humor? Identity-based memetics? Anybody?

I think this is a pretty cool observation about what for want of a better term I’m going to call micro-funny. I don’t have much to add to the discussion of the evolution of memes, and how they’re changing, but this a really interesting trend to me for another reason.

It’s a great example of what I’ve talked about recently: increasingly complex tasks being accomplished by increasingly loose groups of people who aren’t in fact part of any organization at all.

As an example it’s great because you can see a lot of complex creation being done without any kind of organization. This isn’t a bunch of people who decided to be a group, even a loosely affiliated group, dedicated to making Ryan Gosling stuff. It’s a bunch of people individually deciding to do something related to it, but without any overall plan, without much effort, and without any reward in mind. They’re just doing it because it’s awesome.

It’s important that what they’re doing goes beyond sharing. It’s also making, and curating, and promoting and refining. “That Ryan Gosling thing” involves a lot of jokes written by a lot of different people in a lot of different contexts, and while they all get turned into white or black text plopped on top of a photo, and get shared on tumblr or facebook or whatever, there’s still creativity happening. It isn’t just sharing.

This isn’t a centrally directed thing, and no one is part of any organization however loose, and it won’t last one jot longer than it should, because people will just get bored at stop. But it’s happening. And the better communications and social media tech gets the more complex tasks we’ll be able to accomplish this way, without needing certain categories of businesses or service people or volunteer organizations. We’ll be able to just use our extended network of friends and acquaintances to cause all sorts of complicated things to happen.

For me the important part is that people naturally organize themselves socially, and it’s those social connections that underlie so much of business and politics as it is. As more and more stuff gets done explicitly through social collabroation, people will get a lot more comfortable, and a lot faster, because the only organizations they’ll be part of will be social, not corporate.

Give it 100 years.

Okay, Huckleberry, bring it on back to the stable

Right. Yes.

So what does the rise of micro-funny memes matter at all to what you’re rambling about? Well, the fact that memes are going in this direction means that there’s something about them particularly suited to thriving in this loose-social-connection-based environment. Of all the complex things that could get done with social media based organization-less collaboration, why this?

What Rachel was saying about the hyper-targeting of the jokes, I think, tells us something about the nature of the behavior that leads people to participate in these things. Why did I make a judgmental bookseller ostrich? Because it’s awesome. Why do I think it’s so awesome…. well, I work in a bookshop, or I love bookshops, or I love people who work in bookshops. I personally am a giant bibliophile and grandson of a librarian who promoted banned book week by stuffing anything scandalous on her shelves into the hands of students – an amazing woman. I love it, so I laugh, and I share, and here’s the cool part, that’s only getting huge because the technology is faster, I create my own versions.

And I’m much more likely to do all that if I feel special for getting the joke in the first place. If I think that joke was written just for me I’m going to feel that the joke is a lot more awesome, and I’m also going to feel that I’m a lot more awesome. (I’m using ‘awesome’ here in the technical internet sense).

And then there are really fun questions I should keep my armchair anthropologist hands off of: What governs whether these memes grow beyond the micro-communities they started in? Why these communities and not others? Is it that these are communities that tend to mess around on the internet, or communities that tend to be closely connected to people who mess around on the internet?

Are booksellers and Ryan Gosling people secretly running Reddit? Rachel?

I love examples of new complex stuff being done with nothing more than social ties. If you see more send ‘em my way. In the meantime, go laugh for a while at the Ryan Gosling stuff and the Ostrich of Judgment.