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Is the Creative Class Engine Sputtering?
Geoffrey.landis writes "The 'creative class' was supposed to be the new engine of the United States economy, but according to Scott Timberg, writing in Salon, that engine is sputtering. While a very few technologists have become very wealthy, for most creative workers, the rise of amateurs and enthusiasts means that few are actually making a living. The new economy is good for the elite who own the servers, but, for most, 'the dream of a laptop-powered "knowledge class" is dead,' he says."
it's called "patent trolling," "eternal copyright," and "software patents."
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
I seem to making a decent living designing chips and I know lots of other people in a similar situation. If you're a 'creative worker' create something that people need.
Evil people are out to get you.
." Book editors, journalists, video store clerks, musicians, novelists without tenure". A lot of the 'jobs' he's talking about are radically changing or weren't worth anything to begin with. The article doesn't really have a concrete, well laid out argument. It sounds like yet another generalized complaint I've kept hearing for the past couple years: the elite are taking all my money and I'm a poor starving average joe. Except here it is some ill defined "creative class". Adapt to the world around you and use your money wisely. Same age old problem, same age old solution.
The author puts "book editors, journalists, video store clerks" into that creative class. It's hard to see why a video store clerk (what is a video store?) is a creative persona. He is merely shining the scanner on your purchases. He can be illiterate for all practical purposes.
Musicians? Well, those that are good are doing OK. The rest... perhaps they are in the wrong business. Same applies to "aspiring novelists" - there is always ten graphomaniacs for one semi-decent writer. Good writers are even more rare.
Computer programmers are also like that. Those who write simple, boring code - but lots of it - will lose to their Chinese and Indian competition. Those who write difficult code remain in business. I personally specialize in microcontrollers, hardware, FPGA, real-time and high speed stuff. There is plenty of work in this area.
To summarize, if you are truly creative in what is in demand then there will be always someone willing - and desperate - to pay you.
No-one makes money from 'creativity'. You make money from what economists call 'rent-seeking' from creative output, be it yours or someone else's. The people who get rich (or even just make a decent living) are those who are good at rent seeking, and those people aren't necessarily the same people who are good at 'creating'. Hence Disney inc still aggressively rent-seeking from the creative output of illustrators, animators, voice artists etc 70 years after the creative act, and you can bet those creatives or their descendants aren't making any ongoing money from it.
Being able to work at home or from your local cafe on your laptop doesn't magically free you from the need to either have a lot of capital to promote and exploit your creative output, or alternately the need to sell your creative labor to someone who does, it just frees those with that capital from the need to supply the infrastructure of an OSHA-compliant workplace.
The creative class as a driver of the local economy was always a big stretch. If a guy (or girl) sitting in a coffee shop in Seattle can do something for $X, it's likely that a guy (or girl) sitting in a coffee shop in Estonia can do the same thing for a fraction of $X. Smart people that make up the creative class are evenly distributed across the planet. There will be places where you can support yourself on a creative class income, but it's not likely to be most of the places that people read /.
Until recently the 'creative class' would be distributed between struggling (70%), getting by (25%) and going great (5%). This applied to photographers, artists, writers, glass workers, a whole swathe of people. But with the rise of the internet all but the last one are being undermined financially by virtually free distribution of material from amateurs, as well as the effects of digitial copying.
Economics suggests that the price of an item will tend towards the marginal cost of production, particulaly with large scale production. So, for all those items which can be reproduced digitally at almost no cost, the price will tend towards zero.
So, the 'creative classes' need to think about new ways of making money from their skills. These days I see many top notch photographers are running workshops, which I think shows more forward thinking. Instead of bemoaning the way digital reproduction has undermined their art, they have started teaching others how to produce great images. This benefits them (we pay $$$) as well as improving the overall body of photographic work.
Maybe some of the other 'creative classes' need to re-assess how to make a living from their skills.
Well, you know man, I had a laptop before it was cool.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
It's easier (and more lucrative) for existing companies to use lawyers to bankrupt anyone with a creative idea that might threaten those companies.
The moment you try to capitalize on your idea, you'll be looking at cease-and-desist letters and lawsuits claiming some kind of infringement.
The entire system needs an overhaul.
The creative class is failing because the middle class who would support them is shrinking. Instead of money going to thousands and thousands of small creative enterprises, it is going to only a few dozen large enterprises (i.e. the 'job creators').
Its not the creative class that's failing, its the middle class.
Machines made manual labor a cheap commodity, and offshoring made brains a cheap commodity. There's fewer and fewer new organs to economically milk. Maybe our yankers will give us another decade or two.....if you have a good one.
Table-ized A.I.
The true creative class is the people who are willing to put forth the hard work to study particle physics, microbiology, colloid science, differential equations, managerial accounting, and parallel algorithms. Their dedication is what makes carrying out their creative dreams possible. As the article states, they're doing well, as there's still scarcity in that market. Their competition in overseas diploma mills that teach to the test do not produce the same results.
What this article is referring to is the so-called "creative class" who thought they could start a grunge band by learning power chords, buy a Canon EOS and become a professional photographer, or become a psychologist because they were interested in their bad teenage relationships. They are the types who thought they'd win the lottery and become rock stars without the serious learning required to invent, build, and deploy something new.
Those people in the so-called "creative class" locked in an entitlement mentality are a dime a dozen.It may have worked in the 1990s when they and their friends were given unlimited subsidy by coddling baby boomer parents, but these days, you're on your own and actually have to know your shit. Universities today aren't full of ambitious engineers who will take full advantage of their $50K in student loans, they're full of future waitresses and customer service reps with a piece of paper.
A better article would be "Why did 17 million people go to college?" -- http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/why-did-17-million-students-go-to-college/27634
Well, you know man, I had a laptop before it was cool.
I've still got one now it isn't cool any more you insensitive clod.
So, the problem highlighted is that 'creative' people - and lets for the moment give them the benefit of the doubt on the level of their creativity - cannot find paid employment that allows them to produce new the new ideas and culture that keeps a society from stagnating.
My question is, why does everyone have to work?
We are trapped by absurd, outdated Protestant work ethics. Failure to bust your gut 50 hours a week is a sign of moral weakness, according to our leaders (most of whom have only ever worked through choice, not necessity) and our newspapers - sometimes even our teachers and parents.
This ethic is reflected in a society that is structured in a way that survival is next to impossible without work. Don't fool yourselves - even social safety nets here in Europe are specifically designed to make lack of full time employment unsustainable over the long term. What we need is to provide people with a decent living regardless of what they do, and make anything earned through work a bonus.
Maybe its time to stop blindly forcing the square pegs of our society (and everyone else) into the round hole of clock punching, just to serve some ancient disgust at the supposed 'fecklessness' of those who don't like the 8-6 run (I think its safe to say 9-5 is mostly a fantasy in the west now)
Its a valid question of how to pay for this; but not actually a difficult one. The simplest is to go after the rent-seekers; money earned by not doing anything can't possibly be created due to an incentive for the person earning it to do anything, so lets have it. Start with the Earth's natural resources - I have always considered the notion of a creature with a maximum lifespan barely over 100 years claiming that part of a 4 billion year old planet is his and his only to exploit.
Might it not work? Sure. But considering the current economic order is grinding to a halt, it is certainly worth a shot.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
The issue here as far as I am concerned is that the article supposes a values system based on money and profit. The phrase "the rise of amateurs and enthusiasts means that few are actually making a living. " is a good example. Personally as someone who's values are based on quality of life and advancement of the human race's knowledge and experience, I would say the creative class is booming and the amateurs and enthusiasts are the main engine for that. I personally am an amateur and an enthusiast in the area of game development, and although my own offerings are minimal as yet, it seems that the majority of innovation in the field and also the majority of value added (my values, not money) are coming from the independents, amateurs and enthusiasts. If major game studios were bringing out anything that broke new ground it would be a different story but they seem to be operating on the premise that you make more money from a tried and true formula, than from trying new things. They may even be right about this. This is why I believe that a system of values based on money is flawed. All in all, I hear only good news from the creative sector recently (apart from copyright lawsuits), and the fact that people aren't making a living is more of the same. The less money there is in it, the more the people involved will be working towards other goals, goals like "because I love my art". This increases the quality of the products and decreases the cost to society for enjoying them. I realise it sucks for people who live in countries without a real social welfare system, starving to death for your art, while a time honoured tradition, is not a lot of fun.
In the old days, most new ventures failed. Only a very few people could be at the top when an idea exploded. That wasn't a big problem. Fully exploiting those ideas required hiring lots of people. And thats how most people made their living. They didn't have to make a big win themselves. They just needed to be useful those who did.
Enter the economy of today. Most new ventures still fail. Occasionally, one still wins. But when it comes time to hire all those people to exploit the idea, they don't. Either the need for large numbers of employers never materializes due to automation and the non-physical nature of the work or, if they really must hire, they hire overseas.
The myth of the creative class was created out of need to believe we had an out. It was obvious to anyone that the American dream could no longer be supported by manufacturing. And I don't think anyone really believed that retail and burger flipping was an option. There needed to be something that was productive but different from what goes on in the emerging world and, therefore, safe. Well, it isn't all that different and it isn't safe. Employment security in the info economy didn't even survive beyond the business cycle in which it was born.
There has to BE a new economy before anybody, creative or otherwise, can be an "engine" for it.
Unfortunately, as we have seen, our economy has been (so far) too full of old greedy curmudgeons who will exploit anybody, including the government and the innocent, to keep the old economy going for just a few more years so they can continue to line their pockets.
I have homebrew business ideas that I've been developing and I wanted to own my own servers and learn how to rack and manage them. I could have rented time on a cloud or PHP hosting site or whatever. But I figure that controlling my server infrastructure means controlling my costs. I consider that to be like owning my means of production if you wanna get all marxist about it.
I'm no sysadmin, but I know enough to get around Linux. I'm not doing an awesome job of it, and I have a big meltdown failure once every two years or so. Usually just a harddrive failure that I can recover from, but sometimes it's more serious. My sites haven't earned enough popularity to get sustained intense internet traffic yet; so far, my boxes have done okay with the occasional big burst of traffic for my sites ( https://clubcompy.com/ and http://cardmeeting.com/ ) that I get from Slashdot or some random blog.
I negotiated my costs as a fixed $150/mo for 4U and throttled monthly bandwidth. And I'm not alone, in the colocation facility I rent at, I see a lot of homebrew rigs racked up with google and yahoo-owned servers (obviously not in the same rack and not as well cooled, heh.) I had no idea what I was doing, and the techs at the facility were totally cool and taught me how to rack my boxes and helped hold them up for me while I mounted them to the rails. The server and network hardware that I have probably totals about 4K and I built them up over years. I've still got 2U free for future expansion. I use only mini-ITX form factor mobos because I want to rack them in teensy enclosures so I can max out my rackspace, and those motherboards run cool so they go for years without any failure - heat kills. I buy passively cooled MB's whenever they're available and still meet my requirements. I have found Intel Atom boards to be extremely reliable in 24/7 operation. CPU-wise they stink, and I wish I could go 64-bit with more RAM, but I just need cheep life support for SATA and ethernet at this stage. I've had DIMM's die before motherboards, I don't mind spending extra for the best manufacturing quality there.
If you have a steady, good paying job and you're a developer, you should have a homebrew project that you hope/wish/dream will someday blow up and become your livelihood. No excuses about cost if you have even a couple hundred dollars a month of discretionary funds to burn. If anything, do it for fun and chalk the costs up to hobby expenses and do it to learn new things. Make it a long term project - over years - and you can pay for it yourself. You don't need magical silicon valley angel vc startup capital to do very cool things on the internet or in wireless apps.
Dave
so many starving artists/musicians/actors/etc.?
Because you think that creativity automatically confers wealth. That's not true. Wealthy musicians/artists/actors have a combination of acting skills as well as a great deal of luck in "getting that part" that everyone wanted that resulted in the breakthrough etc etc etc. Not everyone can be at the top of the pyramid at the same time - there is simply no room. But being at the top is easy. And not everyone at the bottom sucks, a lot of them are simply not at the right place at the right time to move up the pyramid.
Next time you are near a street musician or some street theater, or are listening to some unknown band in a bar/club, stop a while and pay attention to the talent. Yeah maybe the singer is a little off but the guitarist is really good, etc. There is talent everywhere.
I count myself firmly in the uncreative group
Why? Do you have no skills whatsoever? Aren't you good at what you do, or any hobby of yours? Myself I can't draw worth a damn, I'm a pretty awful piano player, a fair singer, but boy I have a talent for abstraction that stuns everyone around me. I built my wife a garden, complete with stairs and storm drainage system and electrical wiring, deck, stone floor, planters - a place she is absolutely in love with. Am I a landscaper or a contractor? No. I'm a doctor. But it seemed logical to me what should go where, and building is fairly simple. I insist that everyone has latent talent somewhere. Maybe you just haven't found yours yet.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The irony of course is that people will be saying that global warming was manufactured by Exxon and other big corporations to distract us from the far more severe problem of the contraction of meaningful wages.
Not everyone can be at the top of the pyramid at the same time - there is simply no room. But being at the top is easy. And not everyone at the bottom sucks, a lot of them are simply not at the right place at the right time to move up the pyramid.
Next time you are near a street musician or some street theater, or are listening to some unknown band in a bar/club, stop a while and pay attention to the talent. Yeah maybe the singer is a little off but the guitarist is really good, etc. There is talent everywhere.
I think that more frequent recognition of this fact is critical to driving innovation and cultural evolution. Right now, I feel like we're saddled with the myth of the market. The American narrative states that anybody with talent and drive will make it to the top if only they work hard enough. I agree with what you've said, however; that narrative is untrue. Yes, hard work is required but it's observation bias to assume that just because most people who made it to the top worked hard that it was the cause of their success.
In both the arts and the sciences, I think that the cost to society of this mentality is huge. Yes, the rise of amateurs in the creative fields has been a blow to professionals. That's at least in part because traditional barriers to entry have been torn down. Unfortunately, as this article highlights, while the barriers to entry may be gone, the barriers to success, as traditionally defined in a capitalist market economy, are higher than ever. In my opinion, this is a huge failure of the market. Innovation and culture are extremely valuable but the market can't always put a price on them. If we demand of our innovators and artists that they either 1) create something that the market will buy, 2) have a day job that cuts into their creative time and energy, or 3) suffer poverty for the sake of creating innovations or art that will enrich everybody else, we are doing a disservice to those innovators and artists and making ourselves, as a society, poorer as a result.
To put it a different way, innovation and creativity shouldn't be a lottery. We can't really know what "the next big thing" will be and it seems disingenuous to punish the 9 cultural experimenters who didn't hit the right combination before going bankrupt or burning out and then reward the 1 who came along after them, studied what they did, and devised the right combination from their failures. There was valuable work done by those 9 people but only the 10th was able to create a marketable invention or service. I think that holding out the hope of being that 10th person as the incentive for innovators and artists to keep doing their thing is a TERRIBLE way to say that we value the contributions they make.
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
The real problem is that creative people often lack business skills, and marketers have found a way to exploit that by marketing other peoples' products without actually paying for the product that they market.
I don't know whether to blame this on the ignorance of creative people or the greed of sales people. I'm inclined to blame the latter because this has been an ongoing problem (e.g. music publishers) and we can't be specialists in everything (e.g. most people are good at producing content or good at marketing, but few are great at both).
No, he's partly right. There are lots of places to live where $10,000 a year is enough to survive. For someone in the creative class, with a solid foundation in a technical or artistic field which can be performed mostly via remote, can certainly make that kind of money in a 10 hour work week.
The problem is that most people don't want to live where $10,000 can be stretched for a year, nor do they want to live in a manner which requires they stretch $10,000 to last for a year. The problem is compounded in that if they are truly good enough, and have the business savvy, to "create" valuable intellectual goods to make $10,000 a year consistently, they're probably going to get more and more clients and find themselves with $100,000+ a year and a 60 hours workweek. Telling people you are too busy, or declining most work, takes you off the "active" list for most clients. Which makes it hard to sustain that continuous $10k.
Besides, living on $10k a year is a great idea when you're 25 and healthy. Living on $10k a year sucks if you find yourself with a medical condition and no health insurance (which can cost that $10k very easily). Again, if you're willing to live life simply, and die quickly, it's not a problem.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
So an industry sector was made obsolete due to more innovative ways of distributing content. And?
This is why History and in particular U.S. Economic History needs to be taught more.
Things change. Industries die, new ones are created. Markets shift. New markets created
Get the fuck over it.
Or, you could go Occupy something a whine that you can't fine a decent job with your Liberal Studies degree.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The problem is the new markets don't always fulfill the economic needs of the country as well as the old ones.
One trend with technology is that it allows more to be accomplished with less labor. But the labor force is still there and needs something to sustain it. We no longer need a factory worker to put a door on a car, and another to put the hood on, and another to do the windshield. We just need one to supervise the robot that does all of this. You can't just expect a large portion of the population to commit suicide because there's no longer an economic use for them. Or maybe, as you suggest, they should just 'get the fuck over' the fact that they have no job and no money and are only alive because of food stamps.
If only someone had warned us. Oh, wait, Kurt Vonnegut did when he wrote Player Piano half a century ago. Bill Joy did when he wrote Why The Future Doesn't Need Us a decade ago. Ray Bradbury with Fahrenheit 451. Each of these warnings were brushed aside as implausibly dystopian. Of course, there are no easy solutions and none of them involve 'getting the fuck over it.'
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Ferriers
Blacksmiths
Typesetters
Lamplighters
Elevator Operators
Milkman
Stables
etc.
I don't recall any mass suicides when each of these occupations were rendered obsolete.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.