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Bill Lacey's avatar

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.

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Alex Valentine's avatar

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.

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Jay Anderson's avatar

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

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Treekllr's avatar

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).

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Jonathan Evelegh's avatar

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.

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Su Terry's avatar

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.

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Treekllr's avatar

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

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Jonathan Evelegh's avatar

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.”

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Treekllr's avatar

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.

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Jonathan Evelegh's avatar

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.

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Treekllr's avatar

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

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Jonathan Evelegh's avatar

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.

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Bryan Manske's avatar

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.

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Tony Fletcher's avatar

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.

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VMark's avatar
14hEdited

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.

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Karen Walter's avatar

Can’t count the number of people who surprised a professional musician employed by a church is actually paid.

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MARSHAL J MCKITRICK's avatar

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.

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Karen Walter's avatar

I used to say I was a mercenary Christian.

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Thumbnail Green's avatar

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

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Peter in Toronto's avatar

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

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Alma Drake's avatar

This is why I put my music above the paywall. I want people to hear it.

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Jovino Santos Neto's avatar

Hermeto Pascoal always said that his teacher is his Gift.

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Bob Metivier's avatar

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.

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YourBonusMom's avatar

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.

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Steven Moffic's avatar

Since I "retired", I am now a pro bono private community psychiatrists. Meaning I don't charge for anything except being an expert witness for lawyers because they have so much money already available. And I feel so blessed and grateful to be pro bono without financial interchange. Part of that is also creatively writing 4 weekday brief social psychiatric columns for Psychiatric Times, which has no pay wall, knowing they use their pharmaceutical ads to make money.

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Cornelius Boots's avatar

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.

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Jonathan Evelegh's avatar

Thank you for your gift, Ted. A brilliant essay that has much to give. I shall think upon it repeatedly in greater depth and share it with my creative friends.

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Karen Bennett's avatar

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

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Valentina Sertić's avatar

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.

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Dr Phillip Chalmers's avatar

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.

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Kieren MacMillan's avatar

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 is no Nobel Prize in 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).

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Umi Sinha's avatar

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.

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The One Alternative View's avatar

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.

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