How can you talk about this subject and ignore the biggest gifts - open source software? The heavy lifting of the digital age is done by Linux servers a free operating system. Apache web servers, MySQL databases and Python or PHP programming languages allow anyone to build a presence online. Gimp, Audacity, Blender and OBS put powerful creative tools in the hands of artists and creators, tools who's commercial equivalents cost thousands of dollar.
Just about every commercially available platform, program or tool has an open source equivalent. And each one of these efforts are labors of love from the originators, contributors and the open source community. Without this community, the digital economy would be in the hands of greedy corporations intent on keeping so-called "creativity" in the hands of Hollywood, the dying music industry, the legacy media and Silicon Valley behemoths.
True—I’ve used and contributed on a number of these platforms. And I’d add the help forums as gift giving venues as well—amazing generosity on sone of them.
What's difficult and depressing for me is at sixty I feel more creative sound better and am ready to get back out there and share my talents. But mentally I'm still in the cassette era. I'm working through it slowly but at times I feel isolated and lonely. Not because I can't play or don't enjoy listening but because I feel like...what's the point? Everyone is driving cars and here I am with my horse and buggy. Don't want to be a bummer just being honest
I gotta tell you that sixty is just nothing on the aging thing. It’s probably your last good decade so enjoy it. And then get ready for the next one! Nothing wrong with cassettes or horses and buggies. Perhaps what you’re feeling is freedom from the social pressures and enforced conformity. Your own creativity is what’s important. But, of course, what’s the point is always an issue. I thought I had the answers, but recent events have sure scrambled up my previous naive idealism. I guess you have to be nice to your horse and remember to rewind your cassettes. At least for a start - and then go for a ride on your horse, cars are so overrated, and then turn over your cassette and play the other side. Hopefully, I will remember to apply these exhortations to myself in the morning. Anyway, the point of the whole gift thing is that the gift must always move.
Whats the point? My answer to that is, i do it for the love. Bc what else is there to do here?
So you play music, but it feels like youre stuck in the past. Thats not a bad thing. We need people carrying that torch. Bc so many are doing it on the cutting edge of modernity, but look at the results of that shit! Its ruining everything we love. If you gave up your old ways and did it like everyone else, then youd be participating in the ruination.
I often say not knowing the "right way" is not a valid reason to do it the wrong way. Better to keep your integrity intact, and ready yourself, so when the right way presents itself you can get right on it. Youll be ahead of the game bc you wont have to extricate yourself from the wrong way.
Idk how that plays out in a real world way for what youre doing(im not a musician). Figuring that out is your journey. For me it means doing the things i love the way i know how. Eventually people will notice and appreciate the genuine article. But even if they dont, at least youll know you remained true to yourself, your values, and did it the best way you know how.
Tis lonely, no getting around that. But i bet theyre lonelier in their cars than you are in your horse and buggy. In fact i bet some folks would like to take a ride in your buggy(i love this metaphor, it plays so well).
Looked at this again tonight and couldn't help chuckling. I hear you. The highest compliment I've ever received as a drummer and I've heard it alot is that I have my own sound. I want to get a bit more up to date technically so I can at least speak the same language as my fellow players. I mention the word cassette to some of them and I get a oh yeah my parents used to talk about those etc
All in fun but yes one has to be oneself because I have never seen stranger times. And I've seen a few.
Playing live is the way to go. Less and less people can play live because even if they record they can do dozens overdubs- and they do them. Re-amping still requires a room and mic. It’s still unsurpassed imho. You could track on tape and mix too and only master digitally, landr.com does a great job at that actually. I would not publish on any big platform, just use bandcamp, all the other ‘musicians-sites’ have such huge drawbacks they’re not worth your time. I’ve learned the hard way.. Good luck and let me hear !!
You might be interested in Chad Whitacre's https://openpath.quest/ where he has started making videos about Open Source being part of the gift economy and getting companies/individuals to pay up.
Let's not forget that the musicians take care of their own, just as soldiers do. We play benefit concerts to offset a colleague's hospital bills. We give free and discounted lessons to deserving students who can't afford the fee. We play for kids. We volunteer our time and expertise for musician union events. We write articles for our music communities. We also play many benefit concerts for charities and causes we believe in. We play for each other. We play for birds and animals. We play for the gods.
We do all this because we can. I doubt if surgeons can do free operations, being tied up in the hospital and insurance systems. For now at least, musicians are sovereign beings who freely exercise their right to give. It is the natural, human way.
We give a lot. If only more listeners and businesses would also give, so we can receive. Balance must be maintained.
Viewed from a different lens, I think it's important that I mention "My Internet Mea Culpa" from NewCo Shift almost a decade ago (currently searchable and find...-able(?) on medium). You can read more there but where I'm going is: We were the talented and gifted back in the mid-80s through the late "naughties" and the collective "We" spent a crap-ton of time and energy and vitality actually building the Internet. It is still largely true that our profession (the builders and tinkerers, the tradesmen and women in the information technology industry) is still fairly new. There are no licenses to practice. There are no professional accreditations. We were not (and still are not, obviously) held to the highest standards. There is no Hippocratic Oath for the Internet. We all ... just ... sort of ... showed up. And we were smart enough to comprehend and build and fix, over and over and over again, so they just sort of left us in charge. We were kids, but we were in charge. And, somehow, the Internet worked, and it grew. And we had lots of options for web sites and web rings and places to belong and games to play and things to do. And then the new Railroad Tycoons moved in, and they made the old batch of vicious opportunists from the late 1800s look like choir boys in comparison. We went from studious (academic and military) to commercialized (Piccadilly Circus, circa 1996) to walled gardens, Balkanization, and competing nation-states in under 30 years. And "We", the tinkerers, the tradesmen and women, and the "gifted" of that bygone era probably owe you an apology for the way the Internet itself worked out. We didn't factor in the worst of our race's impulses while we were building. And we didn't factor in the worse impulses of huge companies to foster addiction and dependence while also contemplating extortion and stealing as part of their particularly twisted carry trade. And it could be changed if the whole planet tried but, for the time being, "me culpa". Many of us do sincerely apologize for the way things worked out. Forty-some years later I'm pretty sure that not all voices need to be heard because we've seen what the crazy can do now. We're just lucky it hasn't started a world war yet or obliterated the whole race. But my point stands that the gifted of the planet in the nascent days of the Internet were happy to share, and we all wish we would have gotten paid a little better in retrospect.
Bryan, I found this profoundly important as I too remember the early days and how vibrant it felt and the potential it seemed to present for good. And yes, we were all naive but that is not a crime. As much to the point, this is really well written. Have you every composed or published a longer essay on this subject? Thanks.
Tony, I thank you for the kind words but, sadly, the wordsmithy comes in fourth or fifth in the daily grind of stuff to be done ...although I have entertained a muse about documenting my experiences with the very early years of personal computers and the evolving internet. (Let's call the working title "Empires of Foam", primarily because I've lived through so many of the bubbles.) I even have some banger stories about WinAmp back in the day before it was purchased by AOL/Time-Warner (back when AOL/Time-Warner was, itself, a flash in the pan) and I own "The TAP/WinAmp Memorial Hot Tub" to prove it.
But there are so many great memories; Ascend Communications, and DreamWorks, and Packeteer, and an LMI Lambda (a venerable LISP machine), and Silicon Graphics / SGI, and.... John Postel, John Moy, Eric Allman, Basam Halabi's first edition of Internet Routing Architectures. Those were heady times and I was in it to acquire as much knowledge as possible.
I guess the confelicity at watching/helping great new tech succeed was my endorphin rush when I was younger too. I even had a couple of people rip off (we call that the FreeBSD or MIT License these days) some of my best Classless Inter-Domain Routing work for subnetting and supernetting tutorials. That actually felt good that I understood enough of the details that someone else wanted to use my work. I dug into IPv6 in much the same fashion....
These days I generally tend to try to keep my name off of the 'net because I experienced a lot of the negative aspects of being WinAmp famous with none of the up-side. Fortunately the Internet actually does forget some things.
And being "dark talent" (as I like to call it) is easier if I want a slower pace in life. But then I foster new talent where I can as sort of a silent partner and my wife and I have patronized the arts our entire life. (And perhaps, just perhaps, I have one start-up left in me if the right opportunity pops up.)
Perhaps a ghost writer or a collaboration could be something to consider, I suppose. I never say no to just chatting about an opportunity. So many of us collected so many great, amazing, or "strange but true" stories in our early Internet adventures. It seems that they should be memorialized somehow, somewhere.
Unless you got a way to brainwash millions of people as effectively as say facebook or X or tiktok, i despair of these ideas going viral. Youve got sound logic and compelling ideas, but..
But im a naysayer, and that doest help anything either lol. Itd be nice to think some kind of grassroots movement could be started, or perhaps some benevolent supreme authority will stand up for "us", i just dont know if those solutions are really going to work this time. They really have found a way to control and manipulate peoples minds, and so many have already forgotten how to live.
They own this shit. They arent just going to sit back while people try to take control of their power and gold shitting goose.
And theyve got ai scabs now, which is just starting, it will not be the same thing a year from now, itll be "better" at doing what they want it to.
This reads more like a oh what we shouldve done, not a what we could actually do.
Idk, its crazy bc so many people are so ok living their lives in this way. And attempting to compromise, there is no compromise. At best its a delay tactic.
The revolution will not be posted, liked, shared, tweeted, tiktoked, or subscribed to. Bc if we're inside their shit, we're already losing.
But yeah if you wanna get any of that shit going, sign me up. Im all about the good fight, at least until it seems futile
You are among my favourite naysayers, Treeklir. Not that I agree with you much of the time, sometimes don’t even understand you, but you usually shine a strange light on the subject from a peculiar angle, producing dischordance (sic) along with illumination. That is your gift - and you are generous with it. You’re def right that the revolution will not be twixed (or whatever). The revolution must be in our heads and hearts. There may even be different revolutions according to our individual hearts/heads. About the ownership of the shit, don’t use their shit. It’s not so hard to maintain a healthy diet of more info than you want or need. Half a dozen free-range, well chosen Substacks are more than enough if you bother to actually digest their content. And about the “good fight,” Bob Marley had it right with “Run away to fight again another day.”
That is by far the best and most authentic compliment ive ever gotten from a stranger on the ol interwebs. And i take it for granted that im wrong with at least half the shit i say lol(if not more, idk). Its the thinking im after. We need to think differently, and we need to explore every facet. And we need to talk frankly about it. Thats generally my goal(though sometimes i do just vent frustration). But anyway, im glad you get something from it.
Tbh, its not like i feel like i know anything, like the "answer" or the "solution". Im as mixed up and confused as anyone. These things have such an impact on not just our lives, but our very innermost thoughts and feelings, and thoughts and feelings never get along well anyway:/
And totally, i dont use their shit. But i see how stuck people feel when they allow it into their lives, and thats a real problem with no obvious solution. The whole thing has this "normalized insanity" about it thats very exasperating.
But theres gotta be a path forward. I like ted bc he seems to be genuinely looking for that path. Ive lost alot of hope over the years(maybe just normal aging? Idk), but i do still think we humans are better than all this, and we will find a way.
We saf do need to think differently and explore a lot of new facets 'cos what we've had for a long time is saf not working any longer. If it ever did. There are times I think this whole damn techno mess was inevitable from the time of the first fire-hardened stick given the nastiness of so much human nature. Our problem is that power-crazed socio/psychopaths bend the good of the rest of us to their perverse ends. Now, of course, there's more than one kind of power but I'm having a hard time seeing how we prevent the evil motherfuckers taking all the good stuff we've made away without adopting their own techniques. Why has there gotta be a path forward?
Having said that, I think that Ted's meditation on the gift and its deeper meaning and implications offers a worthwhile and valuable approach. At least my considerably younger and more idealistic self does. But, you know, read the news lately . . . ? Or Thom Hartmann today, https://hartmannreport.com/p/what-if-this-is-the-last-generation . Note his near final point: This fight isn’t over. It’s just changed.
Well, the path forward, that could be one of the things im wrong about lol. Certainly nothing is looking promising rn. Or is it? I mean, here we are..
When i say theres gotta be a path forward, i mean for our humanity. We may very well lose this war, but theres always survivors, and theyll carry with them that "good stuff", and itll blossom again in more fertile ground. Granted, im getting a little mushy here, but.. So theyre taking our "good stuff", our humanity, theyre crushing it and enslaving us. But they wouldnt bother to crush it if it wasnt powerful. And thats the way forward. When people want to feel alive again, when they want the good stuff more than they want tech addiction, some of them will search deeply, theyll want whats been lost. That i truely do believe, bc its something inherent in many of us. As much as the evil shit is inherent in others.
Idk i can get pretty pessimistic about this shit too. But ill tell you something, ive got ONE irl person ive found that sees what i see. I didnt have that a year ago. So in my real life experience, its growing. To me thats huge, bc for years i felt like the only one who even considered that this shit might be bad for us lol.
And i see something in just a tiny sliver of the youth, but some of them look at all this and see its fucked up. They dont even know what life was like before, but theyre wanting whats been lost.
Without fail, the hardest parts of my life have borne the sweetest fruits. The easy shits been quickly forgotten. This hard struggle is exactly what we need to bring out our finest qualities.
So while our good stuff is taking a beating, its not yet dead. Thats something, isnt it? That can be encouraged and nurtured, and it will grow.
Maybe im getting too... abstract? But its not an abstraction imo. Our beliefs dictate our choices, and its those choices that create our very real reality. Bc i hear alot of "oh we cant live without this shit", but we very much can. That idea is worth promoting, that the first thing we need to do is stop limiting ourselves to the choices they give us.
Ps, sorry that got so long:/ I even edited it twice to pare it down lol
So, just to cut through it (you’ll know what I mean ‘cos you think about trees and structure), it’s been a long time since I thought we have a jackshit chance of our precious western civilisation surviving for more than a few decades and from the American perspective we may be down to the years (months?). And anyway much of it is total bullshit and doesn’t deserve to survive. But humans are resourceful and resilient - and not all are Americans. What I think is important is lay down a new foundation to enable the best attributes of humanity to survive and start off down a new path after the shitstorm. There will be enormous emotional trauma; just look at Texas this week with a piddly number of deaths. This new path, or at least the foundation, is our gift to the future. That tiny sliver of the youth is who I’m thinking about and trying to understand what they will find useful. What Ted outlined in his essay is one way, several ways perhaps, of manifesting that gift. Your attitude seems likely to be another.
Lewis Hyde's book is a masterpiece, glad to see it here. One of the many themes is a world view of abundance (not the pop version currrently making the rounds) versus the ontology of scarcity that rules most of the economist's roost. Since this is a note on creativity --- another theme Hyde talks about is the gift from the gods -- the creative gift from the gods for which we can only prepare and cannot buy -- here is the best example I know of this -- a short Cindy Walker interview on creating "You Don't Know Me":https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjJFq-8tVZs&t=14s
Thank you so much for this wonderful piece. There are so many parallels between the experiences of creatives and those of unpaid/poorly paid caregivers (parents, elder care, health aides, teachers etc). These relationships are literally what constitutes our humanity. It is time for social and economic change that rewards rather than exploits these holy acts of care and giving.
On the flip side: I look back over a long career that made music and the music made money and everyone got paid and it was a beautiful gift. Creating with and supporting talented people was a joy I would have paid for. It, unfortunately, without anyone or thing to blame, doesn’t sum up the same without the money in the equation. The money said, “we value your gift of talent”. I still get thanked and the thanks feels good but the gift of creating because it feeds my soul is now an egoless, people-less experience. This stack is a gift of community and expression and it fills some of the gap but, damn, those were the days.
Spot on, Karen! Thank you for sharing that. I've played for pay at various churches since the early 2000s and I have nor guilt or regrets. The laborer is worthy of the hire.
For me it's similar in terms of live music. I loved all those good paying gigs and it's hard to communicate the shared value between musician and audience. Now as a producer/writer in a dissident frame no one will touch me. Yet I write on.
Loved this. When reading it, I could only think about bacteria.
These microscopic creatures have lived for billions of years through gifting. Ours is a more constrained version, while theirs is more open source and open access. I'm talking about lateral gene transfer, the mechanism that allows them to build resistance against antibiotics.
Pictured as gifts, the genes 'created' by a single bacterium become shared by the entire colony, and are amplified the moment they are shared. It did not begin with human communities; it began with life itself. And true to their modus operandi, it is the reason bacteria still exist to date. It's through gifting.
As someone who values insights from the microcosmos, I felt this message in different layers. Now I know what I'm going to do. This article has liberated me from the tyranny I have always had. So, thank you so much, Ted.
Great article. There are as yet unseen, unknown realms in which we will soon participate that are not subject to the vicissitudes of commodification or monetized transaction. Until those take root, flower and bear fruit, we will remain on this kind of downward spiral of completely miscomprehending what Life & the Universe truly are.
You had me at Assisi! I visited when I was in high school and found it to be mystical, calming, heavenly. In my memory there were different levels of greenery surrounding me and the sky above. It's hard to compare this with the internet and artistry but I take your point. ( I think of Mark Zuckerberg as the Bernie Madoff of social media... the idea of friendship is such a misnomer for any enterprise in which he's involved.) Inspiration and creativity cannot be quantified and boxed. The theft of creative output is unforgivable. Musicians should own their music, writers should own their ideas (and in a perfect world, the singular cadence with which they express them). Great essay, Ted. Thanks. KB
I also have dear memories of the place. I remember a friend once telling me that if I leaned against the wall of the Porziuncola, the small chapel nestled at the center of the vast Santa Maria degli Angeli church, I could see the same sky St. Francis once saw, through a window.
Many years ago I went to Assisi and carry two strong memories still 60 years later.
I met a fellow young man who told me about how he and others were smuggling bibles across the Iron Curtain and several miraculous escapes from detection which could only have be from Divine intervention AND the presence of pornographic pictures and figurines of monks and nuns in lewd sexual exposure and postures.
I'm probably a bit retro in that all my writing I have published on my website, I have done for years.
It doesn't get many 'views' as such, but that's not the point because my satisfaction is derived from writing for myself.
I doubt I'm alone in this way of thinking as I'm sure there are others who write for their own personal therapy.
I am planning to stick one piece of work above the parapet to see what happens. It's a poem I wrote some time ago and I have collaborated with some musicians to create a song. We will be going into the studio to record it some time in August, it will be released on one of the behemoths mentioned in the article before it heads off into the tumbleweed twilight ne'er to be heard again. But if it makes me happy, then why not :-)
The fact that this is in any way mind-boggling to you (cf. “I am rarely left speechless, but I didn’t know quite how to respond to this introduction. To be honest, I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.”) highlights the fact that the “science” of economics — and let’s be clear: it isn’t a science, and there’s no Nobel Prize given for it — has done a fantastic job of forcing Capitalist Realism down the throats of even the most liberal thinkers.
It also suggests to me that you aren’t neurodivergent (like me), since my way of moving through the world is almost entirely driven by my interest-based nervous system (q.v. ADHD), with — for better or worse — very little concern for “economics” in the traditional capitalist sense (cf. importance-based nervous systems).
Me too. I’ve felt inadequate all my life because I couldn’t motivate myself to do things I didn’t enjoy to make money and so never built a career. But I survived and I have enough to live on in my old age and I am loving teaching creative writing for very little money ( because the economy doesn’t value it though my students really do), gifting love to my children and grandchildren, and mentoring young writers in Gaza while giving what I can financially to support them with the help of friends. And I love my life and feel a deep satisfaction with it even though AI has scraped my novel and Amazon has taken most of the money from my book sales. I hope this younger generation will reject our society’s values, refuse to participate in it and build an alternative society based on mutual aid.
Thank you Ted, I read Hyde's book this year and found it transformative in thinking about my work managing a sculpture studio for artist David Robinson. We already had very stringent values in our approach to his work but Hyde's description of art as belonging to a gift economy has had me turning myself inside out reconsidering our business model.
Sculpture is an odd duck in that it can't be digitized in the way many other arts can. A photo of sculpture is much farther removed from sculpture than a photo of a painting, or a video of a musical performance. Sculpture must be experienced viscerally, in 3D space or it isn't really sculpture.
I guess that insulates us from the exploitation you describe, but it also limits our options in a world that increasingly relies on the digital. The legacy of David's studio is not merely his artwork but how it't made - the skills taught to our studio techs, the exploration of tools and materials, the broad network of local suppliers and subcontractors, the relationships between patrons and viewers and the public who love the work, the mentorship and the conservation of analogue techniques... These things all rely on real-world interactions and cannot be digitized or made viral.
As I look at the future, hearing voices such as McGilchrist's predict civilizational collapse, I wonder if fine art sculpture will go the way of the Dodo. If so I'm grateful to have had a turn at the wheel.
Every attempt I have made as an artist (poet, singer-songwriter) to find effective platforms has yielded limited results. There are not enough people who CHOOSE to support artists they receive gifts from. This group of folks is small but critical to our early ability to survive and have a voice that lives.
How can you talk about this subject and ignore the biggest gifts - open source software? The heavy lifting of the digital age is done by Linux servers a free operating system. Apache web servers, MySQL databases and Python or PHP programming languages allow anyone to build a presence online. Gimp, Audacity, Blender and OBS put powerful creative tools in the hands of artists and creators, tools who's commercial equivalents cost thousands of dollar.
Just about every commercially available platform, program or tool has an open source equivalent. And each one of these efforts are labors of love from the originators, contributors and the open source community. Without this community, the digital economy would be in the hands of greedy corporations intent on keeping so-called "creativity" in the hands of Hollywood, the dying music industry, the legacy media and Silicon Valley behemoths.
True—I’ve used and contributed on a number of these platforms. And I’d add the help forums as gift giving venues as well—amazing generosity on sone of them.
What's difficult and depressing for me is at sixty I feel more creative sound better and am ready to get back out there and share my talents. But mentally I'm still in the cassette era. I'm working through it slowly but at times I feel isolated and lonely. Not because I can't play or don't enjoy listening but because I feel like...what's the point? Everyone is driving cars and here I am with my horse and buggy. Don't want to be a bummer just being honest
I gotta tell you that sixty is just nothing on the aging thing. It’s probably your last good decade so enjoy it. And then get ready for the next one! Nothing wrong with cassettes or horses and buggies. Perhaps what you’re feeling is freedom from the social pressures and enforced conformity. Your own creativity is what’s important. But, of course, what’s the point is always an issue. I thought I had the answers, but recent events have sure scrambled up my previous naive idealism. I guess you have to be nice to your horse and remember to rewind your cassettes. At least for a start - and then go for a ride on your horse, cars are so overrated, and then turn over your cassette and play the other side. Hopefully, I will remember to apply these exhortations to myself in the morning. Anyway, the point of the whole gift thing is that the gift must always move.
Moving very well last few days. Thanks again. Onward.
Whats the point? My answer to that is, i do it for the love. Bc what else is there to do here?
So you play music, but it feels like youre stuck in the past. Thats not a bad thing. We need people carrying that torch. Bc so many are doing it on the cutting edge of modernity, but look at the results of that shit! Its ruining everything we love. If you gave up your old ways and did it like everyone else, then youd be participating in the ruination.
I often say not knowing the "right way" is not a valid reason to do it the wrong way. Better to keep your integrity intact, and ready yourself, so when the right way presents itself you can get right on it. Youll be ahead of the game bc you wont have to extricate yourself from the wrong way.
Idk how that plays out in a real world way for what youre doing(im not a musician). Figuring that out is your journey. For me it means doing the things i love the way i know how. Eventually people will notice and appreciate the genuine article. But even if they dont, at least youll know you remained true to yourself, your values, and did it the best way you know how.
Tis lonely, no getting around that. But i bet theyre lonelier in their cars than you are in your horse and buggy. In fact i bet some folks would like to take a ride in your buggy(i love this metaphor, it plays so well).
Looked at this again tonight and couldn't help chuckling. I hear you. The highest compliment I've ever received as a drummer and I've heard it alot is that I have my own sound. I want to get a bit more up to date technically so I can at least speak the same language as my fellow players. I mention the word cassette to some of them and I get a oh yeah my parents used to talk about those etc
All in fun but yes one has to be oneself because I have never seen stranger times. And I've seen a few.
Playing live is the way to go. Less and less people can play live because even if they record they can do dozens overdubs- and they do them. Re-amping still requires a room and mic. It’s still unsurpassed imho. You could track on tape and mix too and only master digitally, landr.com does a great job at that actually. I would not publish on any big platform, just use bandcamp, all the other ‘musicians-sites’ have such huge drawbacks they’re not worth your time. I’ve learned the hard way.. Good luck and let me hear !!
Thank you for the kind words. Much appreciated.
You might be interested in Chad Whitacre's https://openpath.quest/ where he has started making videos about Open Source being part of the gift economy and getting companies/individuals to pay up.
Let's not forget that the musicians take care of their own, just as soldiers do. We play benefit concerts to offset a colleague's hospital bills. We give free and discounted lessons to deserving students who can't afford the fee. We play for kids. We volunteer our time and expertise for musician union events. We write articles for our music communities. We also play many benefit concerts for charities and causes we believe in. We play for each other. We play for birds and animals. We play for the gods.
We do all this because we can. I doubt if surgeons can do free operations, being tied up in the hospital and insurance systems. For now at least, musicians are sovereign beings who freely exercise their right to give. It is the natural, human way.
We give a lot. If only more listeners and businesses would also give, so we can receive. Balance must be maintained.
Viewed from a different lens, I think it's important that I mention "My Internet Mea Culpa" from NewCo Shift almost a decade ago (currently searchable and find...-able(?) on medium). You can read more there but where I'm going is: We were the talented and gifted back in the mid-80s through the late "naughties" and the collective "We" spent a crap-ton of time and energy and vitality actually building the Internet. It is still largely true that our profession (the builders and tinkerers, the tradesmen and women in the information technology industry) is still fairly new. There are no licenses to practice. There are no professional accreditations. We were not (and still are not, obviously) held to the highest standards. There is no Hippocratic Oath for the Internet. We all ... just ... sort of ... showed up. And we were smart enough to comprehend and build and fix, over and over and over again, so they just sort of left us in charge. We were kids, but we were in charge. And, somehow, the Internet worked, and it grew. And we had lots of options for web sites and web rings and places to belong and games to play and things to do. And then the new Railroad Tycoons moved in, and they made the old batch of vicious opportunists from the late 1800s look like choir boys in comparison. We went from studious (academic and military) to commercialized (Piccadilly Circus, circa 1996) to walled gardens, Balkanization, and competing nation-states in under 30 years. And "We", the tinkerers, the tradesmen and women, and the "gifted" of that bygone era probably owe you an apology for the way the Internet itself worked out. We didn't factor in the worst of our race's impulses while we were building. And we didn't factor in the worse impulses of huge companies to foster addiction and dependence while also contemplating extortion and stealing as part of their particularly twisted carry trade. And it could be changed if the whole planet tried but, for the time being, "me culpa". Many of us do sincerely apologize for the way things worked out. Forty-some years later I'm pretty sure that not all voices need to be heard because we've seen what the crazy can do now. We're just lucky it hasn't started a world war yet or obliterated the whole race. But my point stands that the gifted of the planet in the nascent days of the Internet were happy to share, and we all wish we would have gotten paid a little better in retrospect.
Bryan, I found this profoundly important as I too remember the early days and how vibrant it felt and the potential it seemed to present for good. And yes, we were all naive but that is not a crime. As much to the point, this is really well written. Have you every composed or published a longer essay on this subject? Thanks.
Tony, I thank you for the kind words but, sadly, the wordsmithy comes in fourth or fifth in the daily grind of stuff to be done ...although I have entertained a muse about documenting my experiences with the very early years of personal computers and the evolving internet. (Let's call the working title "Empires of Foam", primarily because I've lived through so many of the bubbles.) I even have some banger stories about WinAmp back in the day before it was purchased by AOL/Time-Warner (back when AOL/Time-Warner was, itself, a flash in the pan) and I own "The TAP/WinAmp Memorial Hot Tub" to prove it.
But there are so many great memories; Ascend Communications, and DreamWorks, and Packeteer, and an LMI Lambda (a venerable LISP machine), and Silicon Graphics / SGI, and.... John Postel, John Moy, Eric Allman, Basam Halabi's first edition of Internet Routing Architectures. Those were heady times and I was in it to acquire as much knowledge as possible.
I guess the confelicity at watching/helping great new tech succeed was my endorphin rush when I was younger too. I even had a couple of people rip off (we call that the FreeBSD or MIT License these days) some of my best Classless Inter-Domain Routing work for subnetting and supernetting tutorials. That actually felt good that I understood enough of the details that someone else wanted to use my work. I dug into IPv6 in much the same fashion....
These days I generally tend to try to keep my name off of the 'net because I experienced a lot of the negative aspects of being WinAmp famous with none of the up-side. Fortunately the Internet actually does forget some things.
And being "dark talent" (as I like to call it) is easier if I want a slower pace in life. But then I foster new talent where I can as sort of a silent partner and my wife and I have patronized the arts our entire life. (And perhaps, just perhaps, I have one start-up left in me if the right opportunity pops up.)
Perhaps a ghost writer or a collaboration could be something to consider, I suppose. I never say no to just chatting about an opportunity. So many of us collected so many great, amazing, or "strange but true" stories in our early Internet adventures. It seems that they should be memorialized somehow, somewhere.
Unless you got a way to brainwash millions of people as effectively as say facebook or X or tiktok, i despair of these ideas going viral. Youve got sound logic and compelling ideas, but..
But im a naysayer, and that doest help anything either lol. Itd be nice to think some kind of grassroots movement could be started, or perhaps some benevolent supreme authority will stand up for "us", i just dont know if those solutions are really going to work this time. They really have found a way to control and manipulate peoples minds, and so many have already forgotten how to live.
They own this shit. They arent just going to sit back while people try to take control of their power and gold shitting goose.
And theyve got ai scabs now, which is just starting, it will not be the same thing a year from now, itll be "better" at doing what they want it to.
This reads more like a oh what we shouldve done, not a what we could actually do.
Idk, its crazy bc so many people are so ok living their lives in this way. And attempting to compromise, there is no compromise. At best its a delay tactic.
The revolution will not be posted, liked, shared, tweeted, tiktoked, or subscribed to. Bc if we're inside their shit, we're already losing.
But yeah if you wanna get any of that shit going, sign me up. Im all about the good fight, at least until it seems futile
You are among my favourite naysayers, Treeklir. Not that I agree with you much of the time, sometimes don’t even understand you, but you usually shine a strange light on the subject from a peculiar angle, producing dischordance (sic) along with illumination. That is your gift - and you are generous with it. You’re def right that the revolution will not be twixed (or whatever). The revolution must be in our heads and hearts. There may even be different revolutions according to our individual hearts/heads. About the ownership of the shit, don’t use their shit. It’s not so hard to maintain a healthy diet of more info than you want or need. Half a dozen free-range, well chosen Substacks are more than enough if you bother to actually digest their content. And about the “good fight,” Bob Marley had it right with “Run away to fight again another day.”
That is by far the best and most authentic compliment ive ever gotten from a stranger on the ol interwebs. And i take it for granted that im wrong with at least half the shit i say lol(if not more, idk). Its the thinking im after. We need to think differently, and we need to explore every facet. And we need to talk frankly about it. Thats generally my goal(though sometimes i do just vent frustration). But anyway, im glad you get something from it.
Tbh, its not like i feel like i know anything, like the "answer" or the "solution". Im as mixed up and confused as anyone. These things have such an impact on not just our lives, but our very innermost thoughts and feelings, and thoughts and feelings never get along well anyway:/
And totally, i dont use their shit. But i see how stuck people feel when they allow it into their lives, and thats a real problem with no obvious solution. The whole thing has this "normalized insanity" about it thats very exasperating.
But theres gotta be a path forward. I like ted bc he seems to be genuinely looking for that path. Ive lost alot of hope over the years(maybe just normal aging? Idk), but i do still think we humans are better than all this, and we will find a way.
We saf do need to think differently and explore a lot of new facets 'cos what we've had for a long time is saf not working any longer. If it ever did. There are times I think this whole damn techno mess was inevitable from the time of the first fire-hardened stick given the nastiness of so much human nature. Our problem is that power-crazed socio/psychopaths bend the good of the rest of us to their perverse ends. Now, of course, there's more than one kind of power but I'm having a hard time seeing how we prevent the evil motherfuckers taking all the good stuff we've made away without adopting their own techniques. Why has there gotta be a path forward?
Having said that, I think that Ted's meditation on the gift and its deeper meaning and implications offers a worthwhile and valuable approach. At least my considerably younger and more idealistic self does. But, you know, read the news lately . . . ? Or Thom Hartmann today, https://hartmannreport.com/p/what-if-this-is-the-last-generation . Note his near final point: This fight isn’t over. It’s just changed.
Well, the path forward, that could be one of the things im wrong about lol. Certainly nothing is looking promising rn. Or is it? I mean, here we are..
When i say theres gotta be a path forward, i mean for our humanity. We may very well lose this war, but theres always survivors, and theyll carry with them that "good stuff", and itll blossom again in more fertile ground. Granted, im getting a little mushy here, but.. So theyre taking our "good stuff", our humanity, theyre crushing it and enslaving us. But they wouldnt bother to crush it if it wasnt powerful. And thats the way forward. When people want to feel alive again, when they want the good stuff more than they want tech addiction, some of them will search deeply, theyll want whats been lost. That i truely do believe, bc its something inherent in many of us. As much as the evil shit is inherent in others.
Idk i can get pretty pessimistic about this shit too. But ill tell you something, ive got ONE irl person ive found that sees what i see. I didnt have that a year ago. So in my real life experience, its growing. To me thats huge, bc for years i felt like the only one who even considered that this shit might be bad for us lol.
And i see something in just a tiny sliver of the youth, but some of them look at all this and see its fucked up. They dont even know what life was like before, but theyre wanting whats been lost.
Without fail, the hardest parts of my life have borne the sweetest fruits. The easy shits been quickly forgotten. This hard struggle is exactly what we need to bring out our finest qualities.
So while our good stuff is taking a beating, its not yet dead. Thats something, isnt it? That can be encouraged and nurtured, and it will grow.
Maybe im getting too... abstract? But its not an abstraction imo. Our beliefs dictate our choices, and its those choices that create our very real reality. Bc i hear alot of "oh we cant live without this shit", but we very much can. That idea is worth promoting, that the first thing we need to do is stop limiting ourselves to the choices they give us.
Ps, sorry that got so long:/ I even edited it twice to pare it down lol
So, just to cut through it (you’ll know what I mean ‘cos you think about trees and structure), it’s been a long time since I thought we have a jackshit chance of our precious western civilisation surviving for more than a few decades and from the American perspective we may be down to the years (months?). And anyway much of it is total bullshit and doesn’t deserve to survive. But humans are resourceful and resilient - and not all are Americans. What I think is important is lay down a new foundation to enable the best attributes of humanity to survive and start off down a new path after the shitstorm. There will be enormous emotional trauma; just look at Texas this week with a piddly number of deaths. This new path, or at least the foundation, is our gift to the future. That tiny sliver of the youth is who I’m thinking about and trying to understand what they will find useful. What Ted outlined in his essay is one way, several ways perhaps, of manifesting that gift. Your attitude seems likely to be another.
Lewis Hyde's book is a masterpiece, glad to see it here. One of the many themes is a world view of abundance (not the pop version currrently making the rounds) versus the ontology of scarcity that rules most of the economist's roost. Since this is a note on creativity --- another theme Hyde talks about is the gift from the gods -- the creative gift from the gods for which we can only prepare and cannot buy -- here is the best example I know of this -- a short Cindy Walker interview on creating "You Don't Know Me":https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjJFq-8tVZs&t=14s
Thank you so much for this wonderful piece. There are so many parallels between the experiences of creatives and those of unpaid/poorly paid caregivers (parents, elder care, health aides, teachers etc). These relationships are literally what constitutes our humanity. It is time for social and economic change that rewards rather than exploits these holy acts of care and giving.
On the flip side: I look back over a long career that made music and the music made money and everyone got paid and it was a beautiful gift. Creating with and supporting talented people was a joy I would have paid for. It, unfortunately, without anyone or thing to blame, doesn’t sum up the same without the money in the equation. The money said, “we value your gift of talent”. I still get thanked and the thanks feels good but the gift of creating because it feeds my soul is now an egoless, people-less experience. This stack is a gift of community and expression and it fills some of the gap but, damn, those were the days.
Can’t count the number of people who surprised a professional musician employed by a church is actually paid.
Spot on, Karen! Thank you for sharing that. I've played for pay at various churches since the early 2000s and I have nor guilt or regrets. The laborer is worthy of the hire.
I used to say I was a mercenary Christian.
For me it's similar in terms of live music. I loved all those good paying gigs and it's hard to communicate the shared value between musician and audience. Now as a producer/writer in a dissident frame no one will touch me. Yet I write on.
The latest
https://open.substack.com/pub/thumbnailgreen/p/the-vampire-ball-is-ending?r=nv8me&utm_medium=ios
Loved this. When reading it, I could only think about bacteria.
These microscopic creatures have lived for billions of years through gifting. Ours is a more constrained version, while theirs is more open source and open access. I'm talking about lateral gene transfer, the mechanism that allows them to build resistance against antibiotics.
Pictured as gifts, the genes 'created' by a single bacterium become shared by the entire colony, and are amplified the moment they are shared. It did not begin with human communities; it began with life itself. And true to their modus operandi, it is the reason bacteria still exist to date. It's through gifting.
As someone who values insights from the microcosmos, I felt this message in different layers. Now I know what I'm going to do. This article has liberated me from the tyranny I have always had. So, thank you so much, Ted.
This is why I put my music above the paywall. I want people to hear it.
Me too
https://open.substack.com/pub/thumbnailgreen/p/the-vampire-ball-is-ending?r=nv8me&utm_medium=ios
Great article. There are as yet unseen, unknown realms in which we will soon participate that are not subject to the vicissitudes of commodification or monetized transaction. Until those take root, flower and bear fruit, we will remain on this kind of downward spiral of completely miscomprehending what Life & the Universe truly are.
You had me at Assisi! I visited when I was in high school and found it to be mystical, calming, heavenly. In my memory there were different levels of greenery surrounding me and the sky above. It's hard to compare this with the internet and artistry but I take your point. ( I think of Mark Zuckerberg as the Bernie Madoff of social media... the idea of friendship is such a misnomer for any enterprise in which he's involved.) Inspiration and creativity cannot be quantified and boxed. The theft of creative output is unforgivable. Musicians should own their music, writers should own their ideas (and in a perfect world, the singular cadence with which they express them). Great essay, Ted. Thanks. KB
I also have dear memories of the place. I remember a friend once telling me that if I leaned against the wall of the Porziuncola, the small chapel nestled at the center of the vast Santa Maria degli Angeli church, I could see the same sky St. Francis once saw, through a window.
Many years ago I went to Assisi and carry two strong memories still 60 years later.
I met a fellow young man who told me about how he and others were smuggling bibles across the Iron Curtain and several miraculous escapes from detection which could only have be from Divine intervention AND the presence of pornographic pictures and figurines of monks and nuns in lewd sexual exposure and postures.
I'm probably a bit retro in that all my writing I have published on my website, I have done for years.
It doesn't get many 'views' as such, but that's not the point because my satisfaction is derived from writing for myself.
I doubt I'm alone in this way of thinking as I'm sure there are others who write for their own personal therapy.
I am planning to stick one piece of work above the parapet to see what happens. It's a poem I wrote some time ago and I have collaborated with some musicians to create a song. We will be going into the studio to record it some time in August, it will be released on one of the behemoths mentioned in the article before it heads off into the tumbleweed twilight ne'er to be heard again. But if it makes me happy, then why not :-)
The fact that this is in any way mind-boggling to you (cf. “I am rarely left speechless, but I didn’t know quite how to respond to this introduction. To be honest, I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.”) highlights the fact that the “science” of economics — and let’s be clear: it isn’t a science, and there’s no Nobel Prize given for it — has done a fantastic job of forcing Capitalist Realism down the throats of even the most liberal thinkers.
It also suggests to me that you aren’t neurodivergent (like me), since my way of moving through the world is almost entirely driven by my interest-based nervous system (q.v. ADHD), with — for better or worse — very little concern for “economics” in the traditional capitalist sense (cf. importance-based nervous systems).
Me too. I’ve felt inadequate all my life because I couldn’t motivate myself to do things I didn’t enjoy to make money and so never built a career. But I survived and I have enough to live on in my old age and I am loving teaching creative writing for very little money ( because the economy doesn’t value it though my students really do), gifting love to my children and grandchildren, and mentoring young writers in Gaza while giving what I can financially to support them with the help of friends. And I love my life and feel a deep satisfaction with it even though AI has scraped my novel and Amazon has taken most of the money from my book sales. I hope this younger generation will reject our society’s values, refuse to participate in it and build an alternative society based on mutual aid.
Thank you Ted, I read Hyde's book this year and found it transformative in thinking about my work managing a sculpture studio for artist David Robinson. We already had very stringent values in our approach to his work but Hyde's description of art as belonging to a gift economy has had me turning myself inside out reconsidering our business model.
Sculpture is an odd duck in that it can't be digitized in the way many other arts can. A photo of sculpture is much farther removed from sculpture than a photo of a painting, or a video of a musical performance. Sculpture must be experienced viscerally, in 3D space or it isn't really sculpture.
I guess that insulates us from the exploitation you describe, but it also limits our options in a world that increasingly relies on the digital. The legacy of David's studio is not merely his artwork but how it't made - the skills taught to our studio techs, the exploration of tools and materials, the broad network of local suppliers and subcontractors, the relationships between patrons and viewers and the public who love the work, the mentorship and the conservation of analogue techniques... These things all rely on real-world interactions and cannot be digitized or made viral.
As I look at the future, hearing voices such as McGilchrist's predict civilizational collapse, I wonder if fine art sculpture will go the way of the Dodo. If so I'm grateful to have had a turn at the wheel.
https://sagemacg.substack.com/p/fine-art-sculpture-in-the-age-of
Hermeto Pascoal always said that his teacher is his Gift.
Every attempt I have made as an artist (poet, singer-songwriter) to find effective platforms has yielded limited results. There are not enough people who CHOOSE to support artists they receive gifts from. This group of folks is small but critical to our early ability to survive and have a voice that lives.