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.

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 the work. You’ll have set up your guitar, or soundchecked your flute, or whatever, and the drummer will still be running back and forth to the car and lugging gear bags back to the stage.

It always happens. Drummers just have more to carry, more to set up, and then more to take down again when they’re doing a show. And if you, with your hands free, don’t decide to go help the drummer, here’s the thing:

I will never work with you again.

I won’t say anything, and I won’t think you’re a terrible person, and the show will go on. But when it comes time to put together the next show, I’m not calling you. Because you don’t carry drums.

When someone else has more to do than you, and you’re working towards the same goal, help them. Don’t look at the job as “my bit” and “their bit”. Look at the job getting done.

The new music group Eighth Blackbird is well known in music circles for passing this test with flying colors. There’s one drummer, and everyone moves the gear. Between shows, often most of them fly, and there’s a van on the ground driving filled with drums. They all take turns driving the van. Also they play music really well, and are doing a really cool thing right now with Amy Beth Kirsten, but that’s a different story…

Why talk about this now?

Because we have a show coming up on Saturday at the Exapno New Music Community Center. And it’s got all kinds of music on it, all kinds of different performances. And everyone working on the show would, I know, carry drums.

We’re going to be putting on a great show, and that’s the most important thing, but even before we load in to tech on Saturday afternoon, I’m proud of these artists. I’m looking forward to showing the audience not just a good time, but a great bunch of people making it happen together.

Thanks you guys for letting me work stuff out at you like this – I really appreciate it, and I’m very grateful to hear about holes in my thinking, implications I’ve missed, and any other way to make this stuff better. Hearing about when I’m wrong is a big part of why I started writing my thoughts down publicly.

Enough of that, onto the mistake!

Last time, I was riffing on Clay Shirky‘s old TED talk about new organizational structures, and doing some serious armchair sociology (as a trained philosopher, the armchair is my main tool for scientific inquiry). I was talking about figuring out ways to accomplish increasingly complex tasks without the need for any organization at all beyond existing social networks.

My thinking is basically that drastically increasingly the efficiency of communication with the people I know makes me much less likely to go someone I don’t know for any given thing. It could be a place to crash in DC (we didn’t wind up finding one) or help fixing a bike, or shooting a concert, or learning a skill. Whenever I can, I’ll look to people I’m tied with socially. If you’re my friend, or my friend vouches for you, or we’ve worked together in the past, or whatever – however remote the connection, a social tie is a great reason to trust that you’re able to do what I need.

Humans like social connections, and big institutions and companies are a compromise between how we like to do things and how it’s been possible to do big things in the past. We haven’t needed a company to do smaller social things, like plan a party or cook a dinner. But we have needed big giant companies to do bigger and more complex things, like governments, armies, bridges and buildings. We need bike repair shops and governments and hotels to make sure we can get the services we need. But we always prefer to deal with a person. We always prefer our companies to act like people, and show us the “human touch”. We like to “know someone” at the companies or shops we deal with.

As usual, technology is changing everything very quickly

Now we have social networking and ever improving communications ability. We can talk to more people better every day, and that means we can get more done with people that we used to have to do with companies. The technologies that make this sort of thing possible are wonderfully interesting, and it’s worth it for everyone to keep on top of them.

So what we’re going to see is more and more collaborative jobs getting done one by one through ad hoc groups of people connected only by social ties, however loose. (Paul Adams is right about the power of small groups and close ties for marketers and business, but I’m talking about something else.)

Already people are swapping simple favors this way. Can I crash on your couch, anyone know a recipe for this, anyone bought something from them, etc. People are starting to share money this way, too. For an example, check out Kickstarter, which I talk about rather a lot. There are other crowdfunding sites too, and a couple sites that exist to connect small chunks of volunteer time to small volunteer jobs that need doing. These are just the start.

But when you look at these experiments, look at which sites are building of off existing social ties, and which sites are trying to create new groups. The former will do much better than the latter. That’s part of why I love Kickstarter so much more than the rest – the focus is on you pushing out to your extended networks.

Increasingly, and probably not using purpose-built technology (people will just use whatever’s to hand to do the job they need; the users will figure out what stuff is for), really complicated things will get done. Specialists, experts, people with unusual assets, people in certain physical locations, all sorts of people who aren’t interchangeable (in the way that financial backers on Kickstarter fundamentally are; money is fungible) will collaborate to achieve complicated things.

They won’t create an organization. They’ll just do it, then move on. All that’s left will be the experience of having worked together, the social ties that got created or strengthened, and of course the thing itself that got done.

I agree, but where did you mess up?

I messed up in how I talked about the motivation for people to participate in this kind of project. I talked about people owing each other favors in the music world being a guide to these collaborations in the future. But that’s not quite right. When I offer my expertise on something, I don’t do it so that I’ll be able to expect an equal value of expertise in the future.

I do it because I like the person I’m working with, because I like the goal we’re working on, because I like helping, and because, way at the bottom of the list, I want the connections. People I’ve worked with can call me, and I can call them, and increasingly we do, a process which leads to even more cool projects. Which is the point: I want to fill my life with a sustainable chain of successful artistic projects. I always want to keep going.

It’s not about a mercantile interest in favors-as-money. That was my mistake. It’s about awesomeness. Awesome work, awesome people, awesome experiences. The motivation to do this stuff isn’t self-interest. It’s actually fairly idealistic. I guess that’s part of why I’m in the arts and not a big profitable company.

But what I’m arguing, from my comfortable and under-researched armchair, is that more and more stuff that gets done will fall into this category. People will do it because they want to. People will work together and make things without the need for special organizations and then go on with their lives. And the people who keep it up and quit their day jobs are the ones we’ll call artists, even though they’ll collaborate with a lot of different people.

That actually sounds kind of fun

I agree. It does – more stuff is about doing what you want and what you’re good at with your friends. Less stuff is about companies or creating permanent specialized unsocial groups. Cool. But that leaves two questions.

First: How does anyone get paid for making art anymore? You’ve got me. I have no idea. Kickstarter’s a part of it, people wanting to be part of a continuing story is part of it (that’s what motivates people to pay three times the price for eggs at a farmer’s market instead of saving money at a grocery store), and maybe a stronger social safety net and direct government support to artists is part of it. This isn’t a solved problem.

Second: What the heck do you mean by “awesome”? Do you mean popular, viral, shiny, covered in bees, what? That’s a question that’s worth a whole lot more than $64,000. Particularly when we’re on the internet, it seems like the idea of “awesome” does grab hold of something. Creative, funny stuff is awesome. Cat videos are awesome. New pieces of surprising scientific research are awesome. iPhones are awesome. It feels like it’s a happy thing, an emotionally arousing thing that’s connected to, but not the same as share-ability.

I think there’s a lot to be said analyzing what this kind of “awesomeness” really is, and I’m going to return to it in a future post. I’m particularly interested in it because it does seem to be the driving force behind why people sign on to help each other achieve new and wonderful things in this way I’ve been talking about.

And if we can figure out what that’s all about, wouldn’t that be awesome?

p.s. If you’re looking for an avenue of attack on this, whenever a philosopher-type says “it seems like” or “it feels like” it’s because they’re making a bald-faced assertion that they think they can get away with. Attack there.

Diane’s post is great, but I want to react mainly to the TED talk. Yes, it’s six years old. That’s why the video’s so SD looking and the speaker, Clay Shirky is talking about Flickr tagging as this newfangled thing and doesn’t mention Youtube at all. Once I’ve published this post I’m going to go read his books from 2008 and 2010, as well as his blog, and catch up on the last six years of his brain, but in the meantime, I wanted to put down some thoughts.

The basic thrust of Clay’s talk is that jobs that used to be done by institutions are now being done by big open communities, and how disruptive a force that’s going to be for the next couple decades. He really raises the stakes by comparing this shift in human organization to the progress from the Catholic church running European monarchies to the nation state being codified Treaty of Westphalia – a change he attributed to the printing press. I agree, this stuff is that important.

Accomplishments Without Even Informal Organizations

His talk focused on switching from the old institutions (companies, etc.) to new organizations like the Flickr community and standing communities of software developers. These are all standing organizations though, even if the new ones are looser and more flexible than the old ones. But maybe we shouldn’t be talking about how our new organizations will be loose and informal and non-institutional. Maybe we should be talking about how our accomplishments won’t come from established groups with stated purposes.

Maybe when we need to accomplish something we’ll turn to our existing social networks, and use these blindingly fast communication tools to get things done using our existing social connections that would otherwise have needed an institution, a loose organization or an exchange of money. Just how powerful is that Twitter following of yours? How about your Facebook friends? What about your e-mail contacts?

Favors

This linked up in my head to something I’ve been thinking about for a while, which is favors. Favors in general are non-monetary exchanges of value based on social connections. I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine. It’s not a favor if I’m paying you for a massage. Think about this account of favors like mix tapes in the 80s. Technically it’s piracy, but it’s small enough in volume to not really disrupt existing businesses. Then Napster came along. The barrier to piracy disappeared and the businesses blew up.

I have a hunch that social media is going to do that to favors. More stuff is going to get accomplished without money changing hands, and it’ll be accomplished by existing social networks without creating long term organizations of any kind. This is going to mean more and more economic activity doesn’t involve money at all, and we’ll need new ways to think about the size of the economy and individual wealth. Dear econometricians, I’m sorry you might have to fret about Whuffie banks.

You’re right, dear reader, it’s time for an example

When I have a problem and post it on some social platform (let’s say needing a place to stay overnight in DC for my girlfriend this Friday), my friends read it. If they have a handy solution (for instance a spare couch, which I really do need) they provide it. Sometimes it’s an introduction to the right person, sometimes it’s a piece of expertise, a referral to a business that sells the right product or a wikipedia article or a forum thread explaining that you really, really shouldn’t do that to your car unless you have a Really Good Reason(tm). Also, seriously, if you’ve got a spare couch in DC that night, let me know.

Right now these are very small accomplishments almost exclusively. One person has one need, and their extended network of friends fills it. I think we’re going to figure out how to do it with much more complicated tasks. I’ve been playing with Google’s Schemer over the weekend, which could be a step in that direction, but it needs a better recommendation engine and some other tweaks to handle more complexity.

Okay, maybe. But how does that impact GDP?

Well, if I can’t find a place for my girlfriend to crash in DC that night we’re going to have to turn to a financial transaction. We’re going to pay money for a hotel room. The same kind of service is provided, but as a purchase, not a favor. What we’re hoping is that we can get a favor and spend no money. Six years ago, quick communications with hundreds of friends, like “hey, who’s got a floor for me in DC”, would have been much harder than it is now, or at least much more intrusive into my friends’ lives than a post on a social feed.

Our chances to accomplish the goal and not exchange money were much, much smaller. What does that mean? In the new world we can get more done without buying stuff. My hotel room contributes to GDP, but my crashing on your floor doesn’t, at the moment, count.

But is that how it should work? If we can find a floor to crash on (seriously, we do need one, email me), is there still economic activity happening? Is there still an exchange of value that should be understood as a supply fitting a demand? Does enough activity of this kind have the power to actually impact national prosperity? Probably, said the blogger answering his own leading question, especially if favors like this grow in number and complexity.

If one of you reading this introduces me to someone who puts my girlfriend up for the night, then we’ll owe you favors. Whether we bring a nice present (handmade or purchased) or do some work for free later, there’s still debt created (do you need animation, a theme song, or a communications strategy? We’ve got you covered). And even if that debt is never repaid (as frequently happens with favors) there’s been a relationship created along which these increasingly important favors can flow more freely in the future. The whole system just got more efficient through the creation of the relationship and reduced future costs, monetary and otherwise.

This is just the beginning

And here’s the really important part: it’ll only get bigger from here. So far this has been an account of a really simple job accomplished through favors (and that would have, pre-social media, involved money and a big institution like a hotel). There’s no reason to believe more complicated things can’t be accomplished this way as well with the right communication methods.

We’re used to thinking of big ambitious goals involving structured institutions and companies. We’re getting more and more used to thinking about big ambitious goals being accomplished by big, open collaborative communities, like the Linux or Wikipedia communities, or even Occupy Wall Street. But these are still purpose-built standing communities. If you’re in, you’re in and if you’re out, you’re out. The periphery can be really big, but it doesn’t tend to be that powerful.

But when existing social connections and favors start taking over more value exchanges and accomplishing more complex goals, we won’t have the same need for specially built collaborative communities. We’ll just collaborate with the communities we already have.

Yes, this means I think in 20 years Facebook could destroy Airbnb without breaking a sweat.

Musicians have a decent model for a favor economy already

Trying to figure out how favors will work in the future to accomplish complex goals, we should probably look around for a model of favor economies that work now. How about classical music?

I came up in the classical music world, and for the overwhelming majority of us who don’t have orchestra jobs, it’s all about favors. It’s all about who you’ve worked with, who you can call, how broad your social network is. If you can call enough of the right people, your crazy idea will probably work. If you know your phone will ring when people need help, you have what passes for job security.

There are a couple weird things about this system. One is that it’s not a zero sum game. If we’ve worked together, and it went well, chances are we’ll both come out of it feeling that we owe each other a favor. We’ll definitely be more willing to call each other for other things as well. Musicians do this because we love it, and doing the work is an end in itself for us. Honestly, the chance to do the work in the first place is often the scarcest commodity, and if you can create chances to make music your network will probably stay strong and grow quickly.

My hunch is that this will continue, and people will do things for each other less because there’s money in it and more because they want to do the thing itself. If I need my bike fixed, I probably have lots of friends who could do it, but wouldn’t it be great if my bike-crazy friend did it, and actually enjoyed herself?

Another thing is that this favor economy is really all about money in the end. The reason we trade work and favors instead of cash is that none of us has any money to trade. We spend what we get on our lives, and don’t have much surplus left over to trade with each other to make music. Our time and future favors are much more useful for value exchange than currency. But the reason we do it is so that we can earn money in the future, and so that when the rare high-paying gig does come along we’ll be the first composer, or the first singer, or the first recording engineer on everybody’s list.

My hunch is that this will change a little. My bike-crazy friend won’t obsessively focus on being the first bike person her friends call as much as my violinist friends obsess over being the first on the list. I think this largely because for most people, these activities won’t be their livelihood.

But really, this is the future we’re talking about

And none of it has happened yet. I’ll bet, though, that more and more important activity is going to be possible without any organization or community being created around a single goal. I’ll also bet that more value exchanges are going to switch from commercial exchanges of goods and services for money to social exchanges of favors taking place without money. I’ll also go in for the idea that a lot of these favors and non-monetary exchanges will in the end be about money, and will be attached to money in weird ways.

I know there’s a lot of great stuff out there I’m missing. And not just the last six years of Clay Shirky’s thought. There’s probably great economic research going back hundreds of years about non-monetary value exchanges, and how they impact money economies. There’s probably great research going back maybe half a century about how to measure the non-monetary side of economic production (studies on unpaid work by housewives come to mind). I’d guess that Facebook has people looking at deeper ways of understanding the value of the social connections they capture than just advertising revenue, though I’d also guess that they should have a couple more than they do. There’s probably also some pretty great anthropology being done about how people construct these bonds that are necessary for future collaboration, and I just know that there are plenty of theoretical mechanisms around for systematizing a reputation-based currency like Doctorow’s Whuffie.

So, instead of closing this post with the traditional “what do you think? Join the conversation in comments!” I’m going to ask, what should I be reading next? Christmas is coming and I’ll need something to crack open next to my parents’ fake fireplace.

This was an experiment in a new arts and entertainment economy, and by any measure it was a success. Go read Louis’ own blog post from last night about the economics so far. Well done. One of the many responses to that post came from Cindy Au, Kickstarter community guru and tumblr-er and tweeter of delightful geeky things. Something she said got me thinking:

I hope Hollywood studios and television networks and entertainment conglomerates are paying attention to this. Because if they’re smart, they’ll scramble to figure out how to reinvent themselves in a world where content is decentralized and people go directly to those they trust for news, entertainment, and more.

Thought Experiment Time!

People say things like this a lot. If the record industry were smart, if the book publishers were smart, if the MPAA and RIAA would just adapt to the new world instead of trying to legislate the perpetuation of the old one, then things would be better (please defeat SOPA by the way, if you’re for it you misunderstand the world, the bill, or morality).

But we don’t tend to talk through what “adapting to the new world” or “reinventing yourself” would look like. It’s a really hard problem, but as usual I’d like to at least take a whack at suggesting a solution.

I don’t know enough about big studios to say what they should actually change about themselves, so let’s take a different question. Louis CK turned down traditional DVD publishing, the only companies available, and did the whole thing himself. What if there were a company in between those two options? What would that company be like?

We’ve got to, for the moment, pretend that Louis CK isn’t, on top of being a great comedian, a savvy businessman and a talented filmmaker who directs and edits his own sitcom. For people like that, running it yourself is always going to be a great option. Philip Glass is another great example of someone who built his own cottage industry rather than use existing big companies and lose control.

But in twenty years, there are going to be a lot of creative people making wonderful things who don’t have the old-economy-big-publisher option (those companies will just plain not be there) and don’t have or want the extra-curricular skills to run their own productions. All artists will have to be more entrepreneurial, but some brilliant artists just don’t do that and never will. The market will adapt to them. They’re going to need production companies of some kind, and those companies are going to start existing in the next few years.

What are those companies going to be?

First off, they’re going to be smaller, project-based, and incredibly flexible. Their employees are going to be multi-talented generalists combining technical skills in film making, web publishing and marketing with stunningly flexible time and project management and incredible collaborative skills. Everyone will have their specialty, and the right mix of people will be cued in project by project, but a lot of the jobs now done my multiple people will be done by a single person.

I find it hard to imagine these companies having large full-time staffs, or much in the way of office space or equipment assets. I also find it hard to imagine a company like this working entirely with freelancers. I have a hunch they’re going to need a new employment structure.

What if, instead of having a full time staff or a loose network of freelancers, you had a permanent roster of people, paid mostly by project, but guaranteed a very low base salary (or just health insurance) independent of the workload, in exchange for always working on the company’s projects? You could hire from your standing staff for each project, pad out the list with freelancers as needed, and try out any permanent “staffer” as a freelancer on one project before hiring them properly. Maybe this is an unworkable compromise, but I like to think that there’s a way to bridge the gap between the soon-to-be-prohibitively-expensive permanent staff and the far-too-fly-by-night approach of all-freelancers-all-the-time.

IP Ownership

Right now production companies buy copyrights and IP from the artists. That’s going to have to stop. Artists are just not going to accept giving that up anymore. But one of the biggest attractions of the producing business is the potentially unlimited upside from owning the rights to a wild hit that becomes a key cultural icon. Without that, how do you justify the frankly very high failure rate? On the other side of the production business right now is what Louis CK did: straight work for hire. That’s not a great way to build an industry, and the most talented producers and technicians won’t deal with that.

Again, I think there has to be a middle way. In this case I actually think there are about a dozen middle ways depending on the situation. Maybe the artist keeps the IP and promises a share of the revenue on top of a fee to the producer. Maybe the producer takes more risk up front and gets more upside later. The way these deals get put together will be strongly influenced by the start-up world, and the way venture capital functions. And some of the same advice that applies to founders with a great product will apply to artists with a great piece.

• Don’t take investment unless you have to.
• Pick your investors for their skills and connections, not just their cash.
• Take everyone’s advice, but keep control of your own creation.
• You’ll have to give away something. Don’t give away the farm.

It’s Still BYO Audience

You still need a Seth Godin style “permission asset” or “tribe” to make all this work. By which I mean a mailing list, fans, an audience who cares about you. You need to generate it yourself. Mission Paradox had a great post recently on how three things that used to be connected for artists aren’t anymore:

• Permission to make the art
• Cash money
• An audience

You used to get permission to write the book together with an advance and a promise of an audience from the publishing company. Now you write it yourself on spec, drum up the audience yourself, and then pray to god someone’s willing to pay you. More people get a smaller slice of the (possibly smaller?) pie, but they do get more control.

Your relationship to your audience needs to change

In the old model, the audience came from the publisher, and they were mostly just faceless customers. Now they’re a lot more than that. There’s a magical thing that happens when you’re leading a group of committed people. You have this idea, and it’s good, but it’s just yours. Then you work with people, and the idea becomes theirs too. They work on it, they think about it, and they make it a whole lot better and a whole lot more exciting. This idea lives in the minds of all these people, is part of their lives, makes them a little bit happier. That’s the greatest feeling in the world for me. It’s why I do what I do. Here’s the quote from my idol, the great Kermit the Frog himself:

I’ve got a dream too, but it’s about singing and dancing and making people happy. That’s the kind of dream that gets better the more people you share it with.

That feeling used to come only from small groups of close collaborators. The bigger the group (especially big companies) the less this works. Revolutions in communications technology mean both that bigger jobs can be done by smaller groups and that bigger groups can have experiences that used to be restricted only to tiny groups of people.

This is a new world. If you’re an artist, and you don’t let your audience take over and improve your ideas (without just running a popularity contest), then you’re doing it wrong.

Predicting the future is fun!

But obviously I’m making it up. So I ask you, what am I missing? What assumptions have I blown? What economic forces have I missed? Have I assumed stuff about audience behavior that doesn’t track? Have I overstated the threat to traditional arts economic models? Are there other tech developments coming down the pike that completely explode this analysis? If all this works okay for individual artists and smaller projects, what does this economic model do to to $100 million summer blockbusters?

Alexander Graham Bell first thought the telephone was going to be a broadcast device (as I recently learned from Paul Adams), so I wouldn’t be surprised if all of this turned out to be completely wrong.

I’d be bummed, but not that surprised.

Also, how much do you love the phrase “party on the internet” for these live streams?

A lot of great responses to my original post have come in over the last week. I wrote up the first day’s response in its own blog post. Then great comments came in on that blog post, and more on the Facebook threads. The discussion has been wonderful – full of different and compatible perspectives on a tricky issue. If my seminars in undergrad had been like this I might not have left philosophy quite so quickly.

Higher education has taken center stage for us, and the internet at large seems to keep giving us more grist for our mill. We have the initial study about students washing out of the brutal intro courses many colleges require in technical fields. We also have the recent news that China is considering canceling majors that produce unemployable graduates, as well as this post from Nate Kreuter on how hard it is to tell humanities grad students that there aren’t any jobs for them, and this open letter that Nate references in his post.

So where do we seem to be on all this?

It looks like we all tend to agree that undergraduate degrees in the arts are easier to get than undergraduate degrees in the sciences. If you’re a freshman, and you’re looking for an easy major for whatever reason, you should probably major in history instead of physics. As David Jao points out, one of the reasons people might look for easy majors is that they themselves might think, rightly or wrongly, that they aren’t very bright. You’ll have to work just as hard to make a career, or be at the top of your class, but if all you want is to get a degree, any degree, you’ll have an easier time in the humanities.

But it seems my main argument is still standing: the structure of undergraduate education probably contributes to the opinion that the arts are easy, and the opinion that artists themselves aren’t as bright as their colleagues. What we should be saying instead is that undergraduate training is easier in the arts, not that the arts themselves are easier. That doesn’t actually say anything about how hard it is to find professional success in these fields, or how intelligent or talented the people in them are.

Artists need to think about this too

I started off wanting technical people who’ve lived through sink-or-swim undergraduate education to look more closely at their opinions, especially if they think artists are dumb or the arts are easy. I wanted them to realize that the arts are hard, that good artists can be brilliant people, and that there are worthwhile challenges with no data and no proofs attached. I still want that.

But if I’m being responsible about this, I have to also ask people on the arts and humanities side of things (especially students) to look more closely at their assumptions about their own futures. Maybe you shouldn’t be looking for an easy path to graduation, but an easy path to retirement.

But what about all the colleges and conservatories?

Henry Kandel pointed out rightly that it is possible to identify terrible artists and scholars at 18 and 19 in the same way we can identify terrible engineers. But for the most part we don’t do it. Certainly not on the same scale as engineering departments do. For the arts, the pressure to leave the field usually comes after the bachelor’s degree. It would be ridiculous not to talk about university revenue streams at this point. If you want to keep the tuition revenue, there’s an economic motive to graduating as many paying students as you can, and letting students pay you their money, get their degree, and face reality only afterward.

That leaves us with a f*&^ing difficult question about how we should set up our academic institutions. On the one hand, we shouldn’t promise students the impossible, take their money, and leave them twisting. On the other, China’s potential future approach, destroying majors that don’t pay well, doesn’t live up to the kind of free inquiry and pursuit of knowledge that we want from our universities. It doesn’t live up to the freedom and exploration we want for our students.

In kindergarten we tell students that they can be anything they want. In graduate school in the arts we ask them seriously if they wouldn’t rather be out making money somewhere. What’s the right age to switch from one message to the other? I can’t begin to answer that, but I for one would be much more comfortable saying ’22′ if it weren’t for that whole crippling-student-debt issue.

But the pursuit of knowledge and education should be about more than the pursuit of a job, shouldn’t it?

I’m particularly grateful to two people who pointed out weaknesses in my argument, Emily Kalish and Henry Kandel, and to Lainie Fefferman, who made it shorter. This discussion happened over on facebook on a couple different threads, so I thought it would be good to bring some of it over here.

Henry Kandel’s point

Henry pointed out that I overreached significantly in one part of the argument. I could have just observed that in universities there aren’t the mechanisms to wash so many students out of intro humanities courses as there to wash them out of technical ones. That creates a system that pushes people out of the sciences and into the arts. As a simple argument about how universities teach the point is clear enough: seeing that it’s harder to get an F in freshman art history than in freshman calculus, people presume that the arts are easier than the sciences. Done.

The argument runs perfectly well that way, but I went and got my grubby paws all over the nature of creativity. That was very silly of me. I argued that it’s actually impossible to tell talented from untalented students at 18 and 19. That’s obviously wrong. I put this point next to an observation that writers tend to achieve stuff later in life than mathematicians. It probably also has something to do with the fact that good pedagogy in the arts involves a lot more encouragement and emotional support than people normally get in into chemistry. There may be something to all that, but it’s completely useless to the argument and very difficult to defend. Out it goes!

Here’s a link to the Facebook thread in case your account gives you permission to see it.

Emily Kalish’s point

I spent the whole argument describing some of the lamer aspects of the relationship between artsy and technical people, and Emily did a great job describing some better parts of it:

To start with the obvious: not everyone thinks we suck. There certainly are many science-minded academics or profit-minded business people who feel that way, but there are also many people who look to artists with awe and envy because we spend our lives working on what we love, finding ways to reach people with what we most urgently feel the need to say, etc. Of course most of what we get paid for is not so lofty as all that, but even playing the most mindless gig, we’re still “playing” and we’re still making people happy! It’s really pretty great.

Emily also caught me thinking in exactly the way I was saying we shouldn’t think! Here’s what I wrote:

In my post I jumped up and down on the idea that artists are dumb, but I also conceded too easily the idea that people who leave the sciences for the arts might be dumb too. I think that’s a great place to tighten up the argument and make it clearer that what looks from the other side to be evidence of stupidity really isn’t at all. Of course, there are dumb people in the world, and an account of how people pick fields has to make some allowance for what happens to them, but I agree with your criticism of the piece, and I definitely take it to heart.

In case you can see it, and would like to read the whole thread, here’s the link. I’d recommend it – apart from everything else Emily has a great description of an artist’s life as rewarding and exciting, if not always remunerative.

And Lainie sums up my whole argument in about two seconds

Lainie said this further down the same thread:

The main point that I hadn’t thought of before, that I’m excited about, is more about the system than about the nature of the people who take part in it: it’s easy to fail a math course, but I think often harder to fail a poetry course, even though both are demanding beautiful fields. I’d never thought of it that way, but I bet that’s where a lot of people’s prejudices come from.

Yup. That’s basically it. This weird prejudice about artists probably has about 47 different causes. And like any prejudice it’s really hard to think about clearly, and even harder to really fight.

But this difference in how US universities treat the training in technical and non-technical subjects seems to have something to do with it. There’s almost certainly more to it, and I’d love to hear any other ideas for where this all comes from, especially if there are suggestions for how to deal with the attitude.

Lastly

Having spilled so much ink on this small prejudice today I really need to finish by saying that we have much more important prejudices to be fighting than this one. I think that’s fairly obvious.

Almost my entire family and most of my friends are deeply technical, scientific, quantitative people. And I’m an artist. These people don’t think less of me for my choice of field, but there is an attitude in the sciences that the arts are just easier than technical work. That has been a big challenge in my life. And recently there’s been a study with the fairly obvious result that people drop out of math and science majors because they’re hard. And a lot of them wind up in the arts.

The study talks a lot about the “sink or swim” aspect of freshman year in technical fields. These people are taking brutal introductory courses in math, physics, computer science, and more, and if they aren’t well enough prepared, or if they don’t do well in all of them, they’re pushed out of the major. It’s a harsh way of cutting away the dead wood, and it’s certainly not a perfect way of doing it, but people who do survive the sink-or-swim treatment have in a real sense proven themselves.

So the math and science people who make it through this grueling treatment see their ‘lesser’ colleagues flee to the safe waters of the humanities. Then the technical people conclude that what I do is really easy, and the people who do it aren’t terribly clever, because the people they see going into it are distinguished only by their ‘failure’ in a technical field. Sometimes it’s an explicit prejudice, but at least in my life it’s mostly a background attitude that’s hard to pin down and hard to combat directly.

Of course I myself believe that what I do is supremely challenging and rewarding. Doing what I do at the highest level requires just as much intelligence and talent as doing math, science or engineering at the highest level. But I also understand where this attitude about artists comes from.

Excellence is Always Hard

It isn’t easier to excel in the arts than in the sciences. It’s harder to fail as a student. The arts and the humanities don’t have the same mechanisms for pushing people out of the field. There are a lot of reasons for this.

If you’re writing a poem in college, even if you have incredible potential and talent, odds are that your writing isn’t very good yet (see the Ira Glass quote above). Playwrights and composers in particular can count as ‘young’ or ‘emerging’ until their mid-40s. For a point of contrast, you can’t win the Fields medal, the highest award in mathematics, after the age of 40. But as a student artist you’re indistinguishable from all the other students, some of whom are brilliant and some of whom fled physics.

The nature of the endeavor is just such that it’s basically impossible to tell the wheat from the chaff at this point. So if you’re chaff, you’ll probably flee the hard sciences for the arts when you hit college, if you haven’t already. That does fill the arts majors with less talented people, but it doesn’t make being a great artist any easier than being a great scientist.

It’s worth pointing out something about university training vs. the job market in the arts vs. the sciences. If you think the freshman year technical courses are sink or swim, try spending your twenties eating ramen and writing poems waiting for $250 to come in the mail for a poem printed in the New Yorker. Then tell me about sink-or-swim. Neither of these systems is a good idea, but the idea that artists have it easy because they don’t flunk out of school enough is just silly.

Personally…

For me, the arts are a more exciting challenge than the sciences. In technical fields, you can tell if it works or if it doesn’t. You can test one variable at a time. The machine you’re building has parts and you can take it apart, check it, and put it back together again. On that side of the fence, Life Makes Sense.

In the arts you can try to do that. God knows I spend a lot of time studying my pieces to see if they really work. But it’s not a clear process. If I’ve got a marimba player on the stage and the lights a certain way and the costume a certain way and one character is moving upstage while another delivers a line, and I’ve picked the notes the marimba player is playing… does that work? Does it move you?

I can kind of tell. But I’m trying to test whether or not a fiendishly complex machine (the piece of working theater) will or won’t elicit a fiendishly complex emotional reaction in you, my audience. I love finding real data to show whether or not it worked, but there’s barely any of that to be found. And there certainly aren’t any controlled experiments. I can’t have a control group that isn’t going to see a play and test group that is. I can’t tell my actors to give a lackluster performance one night and their A-game the next. Also, you, the audience, might be hungry, or tired, or cold, or if this is the Edinburgh Fringe, usually damp.

So I’ve got to build rather unscientific tools to make my decisions, study the problem, and then try my best to make something magical. It absolutely doesn’t make sense. But sometimes it works, and a roomful of people feel something they’ll never forget. And you’ll never understand how it worked.

That’s what makes art so exciting. That’s what makes it so challenging. Remember that the next time one of your relatives picks a field with no job prospects.

Late Update: After I posted this, there was some great discussion on Facebook, including some really good criticism that I completely agreed with. I wrote up the critiques over here.