Surviving the Culture Wars

Last week my friend Christopher randomly asked me to be part of his YouTube project, WEECY TV. I had an amazing conversation with two neighbors who I had never met, and Christopher did a great job editing it down to a few minutes. I could write about my current work, or the rest of that long, powerful conversation, but I'd rather let the video speak for itself:

My friend Steve commented on Facebook:

Hey Thom, the whole video was pretty cool. We had an Italian economist from the University of Rome come speak last night on the Italian and European economy, but he brought up the same line: there was a brilliant English economist (from the 19th century, the man's name escapes me, the article is titled something along the lines of: "A forecast for our Grandchildren") who wrote that come year 2030 (or so) the world will be at a point where greed will no longer exist because of the wealth will have increased 8-fold for the entire populous, and everybody (entrepreneurs specifically) will have satisfaction with their level of wealth.

Wealth in Europe has risen to that level, statistically it is 8-fold what it was then. But the world hasn't changed, and the Economist predicted the state of man a hundred years later incorrectly. This is because the driving factor of growth (entrepreneurs) was not the acquiring of wealth but rather success, that success is the basic human need which drove entrepreneurship and economics in general.

A crash course for the attention deficit:

Michael Wesch

Jonathan Zittrain

Lawrence Lessig

Okay, relatively short.

As to the title: some say that sew money in the United States is created out of debt. I don't pretend to understand this, but the 'Zeitgeist' movie series claims that money equals debt. Thinking about this differently, money is society's I.O.U. When you work, you do something for someone, and they pay you as if to say, "I owe you." I owe you food or clothing or shelter or service, but I trust you to know what it is you need most. So, in many ways, we can think of capitalism as sharing, a great series of officially printed IOU's floating around on pieces of paper.

So, for you, a new video: GreenXchange is an initiative to give corporations access to one anther's ideas. If Tom Friedman is correct in the assertion he makes in his talk (below) that "everything that can be done, will be done," then all of these ideas that currently sit unused by corporations could potentially be used by start-ups, or other corporations. Especially in the face of sustainability, which is a problem and a trend which we all currently face, GreenXchange could not be more valuable.


Now, for me: I grew up, as many do, learning that sharing is good. My parents said, "Share your toys," your knowledge, etc. In 8th grade, however, my private school started a laptop program. At the same time, Kazaa was blowing up, along with all peer to peer file sharing. Jonathan Zittran mentions Kazaa in his talk (below). During gym class, I'd walk around the track explaining to my classmates how file sharing on Kazaa was related to free speech. I told them, "Just imagine that I'm telling you the whole plot of a movie, or that I'm singing a song I like." I explained, "That's the same as a bunch of ones and zeroes being transferred across a computer network." Lawrence Lessig points out this similarity in his talk (also below), when he mentions John Phillips Sousa's objection to the "infernal machines." Those infernal machines have now been linked to the Internet, which increasingly dominates our lives, and the Internet has made the "people on the front porch singing the songs of the day" so much more powerful. There are roughly a billion and a half people on the Internet, and they have begun singing together, through Creative Commons.

If you liked the video, check out the rest at ThruYOU.

I will blog for two people, myself and you. As for myself, I will try to navigate the ethical contradictions in which I grew up, with an eye on the future of these ideas. As for you, you are interested in the ways to make money using free stuff.

I will blog to the target demographic which I believe has the highest demand but the smallest supply: open business models--how to make money with Creative Commons. The 'hybrid economy' is the strength of Joi Ito's talk at DLD (one of the Seven Movies of Destiny listed at the bottom of the page), and it is the subject of the following one:

Michael Masnick @ midem 2009 - NIN case study video: Connect with Fans + Reason to Buy


Then again, why try to guess at the NIN business model when Trent Reznor is perfectly transparent about it in a more recent video:

However, Change Congress is Lawrence Lessig's new project:

And Lawrence Lessig is my hero.