Dispatch from Creator Culture
The Personal & Creative Power of Daily Life
(This note was spawned from an email exchange with Damien Walter. Thank you, Damien.)
I’m not surprised that the idea of Creator Culture is surfacing. A decade of massive wealth extraction has been brutally destructive in terms of local vitality, jobs, school funding — general public wealth has greatly suffered. In the same stretch of time, an equally massive distributed social communication has occurred. Through distributed communication something has happened. In the sharing of ideas, processes and production people’s lives as creators is made more widely evident and loosely joined.
See the person next to you or nearby — no matter age, gender, class, culture or race — as a creator, not a consumer. What ensues is a simple, though radical form of interconnected and human justice.
Though this perspective doesn’t of itself redistribute wealth, it does redistribute real and apparent contexts of power: power that occurs at the moments of “nearby” individual, community and intracommunity creativity. But, what are the seeds of this redistribution?
Seems a couple of things happen in a distributed culture: we come to rely more on instinct— visceral and personal manifestations of creativity, and we (can) come to rely more upon each other. We can form collectively larger and longer-term, though sometimes individually ephemeral, social relationships. Loosely and massively gathered people (can) foster the opposite of alienation or depressed miasma of loss and consumerism. Loosely and massively gathered people can sense, actualize and create new ways of shared imagination and a more fully shared sense of being.
Couple the stripping of wealth from communities with the crumbling of effective federal democracy and there comes a greater need for and acknowledgement of creative social autonomy.
Arts & Ideas published an excerpt of an essay by Moisés Naím’s The End of Power in the most recent issue. His premise: more people, more mobility and greater knowledge globally increase the tendency toward destabilized state governments. By extension, we could say the inverse; it has increased the capacity for (some) people to see/create life independent of state-sponsored ideology. Naím’s argument can be faulted for defining Power more as an apparatus of the state and less as the creative instinct of people. However, his is an incredibly useful ‘lens’ through which we can look at flows of power from consumer-based post-industrial ideology to creator-based idea.
Creator Culture could signal the possible passing of consumer culture thinking. Sharing in, celebrating and acknowledging everyone’s creative capacity is a fundamental realignment of power.
This simple shift, of seeing and being with everyone as creators, is both wholly transformative and simply available— at a blink. What we do with this blink is important.
Poetically and politically, our collection of blinks witnessing daily creative living in the people around us is much more than an anthology of ephemera and loss— the fleeting awareness of creativity squashed. These blinks, at a diner, on the street or on a bus affirm our continuously living creativity. In the process, these blinks don’t just give hope; they connect us as creators to each other and to an already and always existing process of life.
Creator Culture aligns social interaction with individual and social power at the moment of shared creativity— a connection that loosely though essentially binds us together.
My feelings for this person (pictured above) are utterly abstract, until I elect to live within the power of shared creativity. The same is true of my relationship to my self, my wife and family, my friends and colleagues/co-creators. Within Creator Culture there is a constantly exchanged, almost universally present and in-extractible human power that hums.
