That's phrased perfectly, and exactly what I came here to say. For the 'marginal careerist', one with just enough opportunity to get ahead, but not enough to float by (e.g., possessing rich relatives) there isn't an easy choice. Staying ahead of a changing job market, increasing barriers to entry (credentialism and other funnel-narrowing HR filters), ageism, and the knowledge that the tattered safety net isn't going to help them very much if they fall out means they won't necessarily have the luxury of saying 'no' to every dubious opportunity presented to them.
It's no longer just about winning the rat race. For many of today's rats, it's now about staying on the ship at all.
The original article is one of those feel-good articles that I want to agree with. It's earnest and idealistic, and brings up several important points. For those who are able to do what Mr. Kickstarter is able to do (to make those socially responsible choices that maximize for self-interest AND social good [i.e, enlightened self-interest] instead of maximizing for selfishness) that's actually all great and beneficial. I like it. Many of his observations, too, are spot on. His recommendation however, that tells people to 'do that' reveals a lack of perspective on the actual lived experience of many people functioning within the modern reality. Collective action problems can't be solved by individuals, nor by socially conscious companies (as nice as those may be.)
The trouble is getting people to talk about this stuff. Sure, if you follow the media, there's drips and bits of chatter about how incomes are stagnant and cost of living is rising, but there's not really enough data on decisions that people made as a result of decreasing opportunity. How many people are forgoing college in favor of skills training? How many people are turning down offers to join new art galleries or other conventionally not-super-profitable ventures? I think the danger here is that 20 years from now we have a cultural lost era because we didn't have enough money to fund people to just sit around and be creative. It doesn't sound so bad, but it'd be quite empty.
i feel like the moment selling out became okay culturally coincided w/ file-sharing decimating the music industry and we all unconsciously thought, "well shit musicians have to make a living somehow" and then pop/indie/classic rock was in commercials and everyone was generally cool with it. and i don't have a big issue with it, and absolutely want to live in a world where artists can have sustainable lives through their craft and don't want certain avenues to be off-limits because they seem cheaper than others
but played out to the nth degree it just all becomes overwhelming and dispiriting. anyway, just wanted to say i really appreciated reading these two thoughts. i very much agree
Relatedly, I sometimes wonder about how much of the compromised musical vision (AKA selling out) is actually a myth in terms of pop music itself. The counterfactual is something like: artist X, who is making some kind of music, would have made some other kind of music that they would have preferred to make (because it was more in line with their vision) if they had the economic freedom to do so. Is that really right, or are they 'making' what they would have made anyway? I quote 'making' because of the number of non-music writing pop stars (the aforementioned four guys with all the top 40 hits who are the ones actually writing the songs) is larger than many might imagine. Are those pop stars really just 'celebrities who specialized in music', rather than 'musicians who compromised their visions'? Tool managed to break through the niche->pop barrier in the 1990s despite their decidedly non-mainstream, aurally challenging (and compelling) sound, but does anyone believe there are little Tools just hiding inside of Justin Timberlake, let's say? If someone like that becomes elevator muzak, is that really a 'sellout' when it's designed that way from the outset? This one is hard to disentangle.
Maybe there's another way to frame it. Maybe the problem isn't 'selling out', per se, but that niche audiences, unless you are somehow able to get to the "100 really super duper true fans" or its equivalent, just don't pay the bills very well. We have your Kickstarter and we have Patreon, and we have all that, but does that sustain the number of potential artists - some of whom may create incredible works - in the modern economy? Did it ever? (I'm sure some would-be musicians starved during the actual patron eras, too.)
The Superstar effect (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/business/winners-take-all-..., http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/win...) is real and cross-cuts industries; an economy-wide phenomenon. I think it's going to be difficult for these platforms to serve as a real counterweight to that, as much as I'd really like them to, because they're swamped by much larger forces. We've democratized distribution, and some of the platforms /have/ widened the economic net a bit, and I'm glad about that, but the forces are larger than I think they'll ever be able to handle, at least in the US.
That brings us to the next question: is the story the same in still relatively-low-cost-of-living Berlin (where a Kickstarter/Patreon might actually be able to replace serving coffee, giving the artist the ability to work on art full time), for example? This is especially important for collaborative styles of music. We can tell a starving artist "just live go somewhere cheap", but rural Minnesota is probably not going to have the kind of music scene necessary to engender the collaborative creativity / connections that you're going to get in Berlin (or once upon a time, on the Lower East Side/East Village in New York), and also have a receptive local audience interested in things like live music.
So maybe we add another qualifier: "enough to live in a collaborative, musically vibrant place." Can these platforms ever do that? I don't think by themselves they can really solve that problem. Not all, gloom, though, as I think there might be external solutions worth entertaining:
1) Artist subsidies or tax credits. Hate this one, and lots of other people like do too, as incentives and administration are mess, but worth mentioning since I've seen it proffered before.
2) GBI. Possible superb fix, not going to happen any time soon.
3) Massive development leading to lower rents in desirable areas, so the next wave of those to be pushed out could stay (Ridgewood, Queens is a good example of cheap and artist friendly now, but possibly at risk in 5-10 years.) I wrote a whole post on this (https://medium.com/@opirmusic/fixing-the-nyc-rent-crisis-or-...) Most powerful one, in my opinion.
4) Artist housing: something that has been tried before, and I think is worth considering again. Administration would be the tricky part, but it at least seems possible.
5) Generalized cheap co-housing with shared amenities. I know some companies are working on this, but it remains to be seen if they can make the numbers work in an NYC or an SF. I really like this one, and I hope someone makes it work.
Finally, I'd also add that my original reply was generalized to the job market as a whole; it applies just as much to your C++ hacker who would rather be making interactive art rather than writing device drivers, or to a marketer that is actually good at what they do and would rather being working in politics or something, but takes a job at an ad agency helping to advertise soft drinks to keep their little rat body from going overboard.
To use an example in technology: I understand the appeal of working on complicated distributed setups, using cool algorithms at scale, etc., but how many people really want to work on "thinking about how to make people click ads", and how many are there because that's how you make good money (and by extension, achieve financial safety and independence)?
"At some point in the past ten years, selling out lost its stigma. I come from the Kurt Cobain/“corporate rock still sucks” school where selling out was the worst thing you could ever do. We should return to that. Don’t sell out your values, don’t sell out your community, don’t sell out the long term for the short term. Do something because you believe it’s wonderful and beneficial, not to get rich."
In the past ten years, the tension between "not selling out" and "feeding myself and paying my student loans" has reached a breaking point where increasingly few people can maintain an acceptable standard of living and not take lucrative opportunities. In other words: the opportunity cost of "not selling out" has skyrocketed to unsustainable levels. This is caused by many factors, and will not reverse itself until we have some form of major scale resource redistribution. The realistic summary is that doing wonderful and beneficial things leads to the poorhouse, and "selling out" for most people leads to a middling barely-financially-secure existence that falls far short of getting rich and still doesn't have enough resources to plan for the long term.
"Don’t sink into the morass of “industry standards.” Don’t succumb to the inertia of the status quo. Don’t stop exploring new ideas. A small number of people can change how society works. It’s happened before and it will happen again."
I doubt that many of us want to sink to the median, but the status quo has a way of smashing down people who try to explore new perspectives, and the economics of this fact are especially fierce right now. This is part of the problem, of course: the accumulated capital has an overwhelming interest to maintain the status quo of their wealth, and has many resources to kneecap change. Then (because this is related to Kickstarter, I am obligated to write this) there's the fallacy that inventing a new toy or app will change society-- sometimes it's possible, but on average it doesn't happen. I'd like an app for social change, but even something as simple as an app which lists what companies to boycott on a given day would probably run into legal trouble very quickly.
"Look at the language on that cover: “be paranoid,” “go to war.” Its violence suggests that being ruthless is the only way to survive. We all hear this tone all around us."
Yes, I have noticed the terms of violence / natural selection being pushed in order to make people more vicious toward each other in their pursuit of making a living. Largely, this language-shifting effort has worked, and people view each other as competitors for resources rather than potential allies to increase the wealth of the community. I will state that this kind of anarchistic worldview benefits employers and corporations a tremendous amount, and benefits the public not at all. I suspect this is one of the contributing factors to reduced mental health in the US, and also one of the contributing factors toward people shunning union work. And yes, the prioritization of money above all other considerations is one of the major problems that has almost always existed in America. The people with the most money have lived here through the modern era, and have shaped the USA to funnel money into their coffers. Rather than lament about how we can't kill these people and take their cash, I think it's more productive to think about the policies we can specifically ask for which would prevent radical wealth accumulation in the first place.
Right now I think the best path forward is to come up with a scheme which redistributes capital downward and breaks up the largest clumps of stagnant money. I have no idea how the math on this is going to work out, but the sooner we get the political wheels in motion (Bernie Sanders is a good start, but we need about 300 more of his type before we can make headway) the sooner we can start to undo the damage caused by the crony-capitalism economic policy of the last 40 years. Rather than prioritizing the ability for people to make vast sums of money (and make no mistake, we have prioritized this), we should prioritize raising the standard of living of the median citizen and ensuring equality of opportunity. I guess this means either a negative income tax or UBI.