CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE
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Today is Key Day For Capitalism–Crowdfunding Takes Off With The Jobs Act
It was buried in the New York Times and absent from the Financial Times, but today the official JOBS Act went into effect–expanding crowd funding from a niche to a platform scaler of creativity. This is a very big deal. I repeat–this is a very big deal. With Kickstarter and Indiegogo, we can act as patrons, participate in creativity and get a “thingie,” a product in return. With the JOBS Act, we can put our money into something and get a monetary return on it, not just a product. This allows all of us to be venture capitalists.
I call this Indie Capitalism and it amounts to the resocialization of capitalism. We have been living in Financial Capitalism for the past 20 years, where the economic system was all about market transactions for money. Financial Capitalism made nearly all of us consumerists–we simply bought stuff on the market and defined our lives, our status, out culture by what we consumed and money.
Indie Capitalism, Kickstarter and crowdfunding will change us into Makers and Participants in a different sort of system, an Engagement Economy. We can all be investors, creators, participators and consumers at the same time. We can take the power away from distant finance people and claim it as our own.
The JOBS Act was delayed by a year by government regulators afraid of fraud in crowd funding. They worried that naive people would invest in bad or phony businesses. Given the fraud of the prevailing Finance Economy by the banks, ratings companies and investment bankers that brought on the Great Recession, this concern is laughable while laudable. Banks had to pay fines for their dastardly deeds, but were allowed to deny any guilt. CEOs received bonuses, not prison sentences. Let’s hope the regulation for crowd funding is better.
For real coverage of crowd funding, check out Amy Cortese.
https://twitter.com/Locavesting
Amy’s book, Locavesting, is the best analysis around of this new–and hopefully better- form of capitalism.
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What Am I Teaching in My Creativity Class? Ritual & Play.
I’m about to start the second unit of my Creativity and Capitalism course at Parsons which will focus on ritual and play as the paths to understanding the existential and the deep meaning of cultures.
For the business folks, we will focus on Branding and how the successful brand succeeds in mining the existential–how it succeeds in understanding and representing what is meaningful to the culture of its audience.
Its not about satisfying needs or even wants. A great brand speaks to the higher order desires of people. No focus group or marketing research can get to these higher order desires of people because they are usually tacit and unexpressed–yet real and meaningful.
So we read the following together and talk about stuff:
Readings Unit Two:
for March 18:
Lewis Hyde “The Bones of the Dead” from The Gift
David Foster Wallace “Federer as Religious Experience”
following, in yet-to-be-determined order:
Dreyfus and Kelly, “Our Contemporary Nihilism” from All Things Shining
Dreyfus, “Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology and Politics”
Barthes, Selections from Mythologies
Cowbird, especially the Pine Ridge Community Storytelling Project
to be read in prep for April 1st (Annie Correal guest)
Vygotsky, “The Role of Play in Development”