[P2P-F] Fwd: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: <nettime> The Creative Question--Nine Theses

Fri Nov 21 16:02:20 CET 2014

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Subject: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: <nettime> The Creative Question--Nine Theses
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*Resent-From:* nettime at kein.org
*From:* Geert Lovink <geert at xs4all.nl>
*Date:* 20 november 2014 07:46:28 CET
*Resent-To:* Nettime <nettime-l at kein.org>
*To:* nettime-l at kein.org
*Subject:* *<nettime> The Creative Question--Nine Theses*

On the Creative Question ??? Nine Theses

By Geert Lovink, Sebastian Olma and Ned Rossiter

(written for the #2 MyCreativity Sweatshop conference, organized by the
Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, November 20-21, 2014:
http://networkcultures.org/mycreativity/2-mycreativity/)

???Culture attracts the worst impulses of the moneyed, it has no honor, it
begs to be suburbanized and corrupted???. ??? Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

???We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars???.
??? Oscar Wilde

1. Goodbye to Creative Industries

A creepy discourse on creativity has captured cultural and economic policy.
Creativity invokes a certain pharmacological numbness among its spruikers
??? a special sub-species entirely unaware of how far removed their version
of creativity is from radical invention and social transformation. Their
claims around the science of economy are little more than a shoddy con.
While ???creativity??? is increasingly seen as a main driver of economic
development, the permanent reference to creative classes, creative cities,
creative industries, creative innovations and so on has rendered the notion
all but meaningless. Degraded to a commercial and political marketing tool,
the semantic content of creativity has been reduced to an insipid spread of
happy homogeneity ??? including the right amount of TED-styled fringe
misfits and subcultures ??? that can be bureaucratically regulated and
???valorized???. To this rhetoric corresponds a catalogue of ???sectors???
and ???clusters??? labelled as crea
tive industries: a radically disciplined and ordered subdomain of the
economy, a domesticated creative commons where ???innovators??? and
???creatives??? harmoniously co-mingle and develop their auto-predictive
???disruptions??? of self-quantification, sharing and gamification.
Conflict is anathema to the delicate sensibilities of personas trading in
creative consultancy.

2. Welcome to the Creative Question

The creative question has replaced the social question. In the 20th century
the consequences and problems of industrial capitalism found a temporary
solution in the class compromise of the welfare state. In digital
capitalism we have to address the social question in terms of the creative
question: what is today???s source of value and who owns it? We need to
turn the pompous, meaningless chatter on creativity into a debate on how to
come out on the positive side of the digital pharmakon (the nuanced
combination of all things good and evil). To those who tell you ???how we
are going to live twenty years from now???, shout them down with ideas of
how you want to live in twenty years!

3. Creativity without Abundance

We hear so much about the supposed ???economy of abundance??? in the age of
its digital reproducibility. Yet such abundance remains a phantom as long
as it is a surplus for the final few. We need to talk about the
redistribution of abundance. Piketty has to be updated for the internet
age. We urgently need to get a better understanding of how ???extreme
inequality??? translates into digital culture. The question here is no one
of ???selling out???. The new cultures of decentralized networks have
turned into an Bataillian orgy of generosity: a
???sharing-by-default-economy??? where the gift has lost its power of
social reciprocity. Today, the economy is no longer based on abundance or
redistribution of (common) wealth. Instead, there is a ???winner takes
all??? logic exacerbated by the speed of implementation and scaling.

4. Industry without Investment

Overall, capital has withdrawn from the creative sectors. This, despite the
predominance of the economy within the work of creativity. Creative
industries were all set to enter an economy of indistinction: the arts were
supposed to be no different from mining, agriculture or car manufacturing.
Except this didn???t happen. Though the factory did, and so the cognitariat
march on. With the withdrawal of public money the sector suffered from
overall disinvestment. Investments were never made, and perhaps never will
be due to the prevailing Ideology of the Free. But what???s our critique
beyond this banal observation of increasingly shrinking opportunities?
Gentrification? We know that???s a key part of the story. Pumping bucks
into infrastructure to support innovation? That still goes on in the IT
sector. But artists aren???t part of that world. Instead they migrate to
???maker culture??? ??? an economy entirely hooked into ???supply chain
capitalism??? (Tsing), as much as hipsters prefe
r the axiom of ???authenticity???. It is the old undercover story: artists
can only participate if they reinvent themselves and morph into another
role.

5. There is no Creative Ecology

Creative industries policy started with the ambition of setting up creative
ecologies where ideas and innovation can be born, mature and thrive.
However, these creative ecologies rarely materialize beyond the one-off
success story. The massive invention of new business models for artists and
cultural producers has not yet happened. As soon as original concepts were
???hatched???, these creative ideas took flight to the highest bidder. In
the digital real-time economy, prototype practices are left naked and
abandoned, without the means to develop an auto-immune system to protect
against the predatory speed of vulture capitalism. How, then, to
proliferate the concept so that it holds a transformative effect in ways
that refuse accountability? Memes, remixes and viral culture are now so
well established within the repertoire of dispersal that they???ve become
mainstreamed into oblivion. Shadow worlds without PRISM staring down your
most radical gesture are now on the agenda. Invert the
Right to Forget and we get a memory that cannot be contained. Storage
without a trace is a key strategy for practices of anonymity and a commons
beyond expropriation. USB libraries, blue-tooth networks, off-the-grid
computing ??? these are just some of the options that register radical
practice outside the stack.

6. Shadow and Time

We suggest two principles here: shadow and time. Shadow is an unintended
consequence, an event vacuum, which remains invisible for passers-by. It
does not register on the development maps of the managerial class. Time is
needed in order for the substantially different to grow. Maturation, which
is creative growth, requires time. Don???t be afraid of the cycle. Who???s
afraid of the longue dur??e? The time of creativity is that of idleness and
procrastination, indeed otium. This turns out to be the opposite of frantic
entrepreneurship and instant valorization. This is why creative industries
policy can only propose fixed formats and known concepts: template
capitalism. Maker labs, with their standard 3D printers and software, can
only produce more of the same. Open source is not the solution to this
problem. Neither is it sufficient to place the wild, weird boh??me at the
helm.

7. Sharing without Caring

Right now there is a structural dissonance between the wonderful ideas of
our creatives and their social and economic efficacy. The lack of creative
ecology means that today???s great idea for a better society turns into
tomorrow???s unemployed taxi drivers and homeless city dwellers. Welcome to
platform monopoly capitalism. Groupon, AirBNB, Uber, MyWheels and countless
others. Here, we do not witness so much a gross violation of the rules of
appropriation as an attempt to reshape existing economic activities and
drive labour to its bones: a disruption without a cause. Let???s not delude
ourselves: we are not sharing anything when we rate the last wretched soul
who gave us a cheap lift with his Uber cab. We do not share anything when
we drive a Hertz or Avis rental car (except our likes). Sharing only
happens in the absence of market transactions. And it doesn???t have to
???scale???. This begs the question: can we still speak of creative
industries, which in Europe???s policy world
(and beyond) rests on the economization of culture? Everyone is keenly
aware of the fact that Creative Industries as a policy meme has passed its
use-by date. This is why we need to warn ourselves: changing labels will
not help us much. This makes deconstruction of the term by itself into such
an impotent gesture. The problem of economy, of life, of invention persist
no matter what the paradigm.

8. Save Our Social Innovation

???Social innovation??? is a great buzzword in the global consultancy
class. In spite of its rhetoric, it means imposing innovation through
market and semi-marketization mechanisms. Design thinking is hauled in to
solve problems that the existing political class is unable to deal with.
Concept maps are drawn, emptied of aesthetics. Social innovation is not so
much a class war instrument to destroy rebellious militants but rather a
smoke screen, a theatre play. It amounts to ???social solutionism??? ??? a
Baudrillardian performance in which the signifiers are no longer
autonomous, living entities but have progressed into diligent workers
exhausting themselves in fervent gymnastics of simulated salvation. We
should not think of Artaud or Beckett, but rather of a bureaucratic
variation of a reality TV show featuring best practice examples as positive
change heroes. Instead of this performative project focus on processual
management we should celebrate the mystery of the social as event.

9. Creative Political Recovery

Let???s conclude that the market cannot respond effectively to the
challenges presented by the Creative Question. Substituting democratic
politics with collaborative design solutions exacerbates the problems.
Taking ???social innovation??? seriously means to think about the design of
non-scalable communities, creative save-havens and post-digital makers.
These are emphatically political challenges. Circumventing politics by way
of social design is a dead-end. It repeats the technocratic mistakes that
have lead to the incapacitation of politics in the first place. To regain
efficacy requires a shift into high risk politics, a politics that has the
guts to take decisions about our injured future. No more matching. No more
outsourcing of liabilities to third parties. We need a creative political
recovery that dreams up new organizational forms able to confront the
Creative Question.

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