We are all “creative.” Just witness a child at play — every single one of them is creative and imaginative.

A question: What happens to that creativity and imagination as we grow up? One answer: it is repressed, first by our parents, then by our schools, and finally by our work-a-day lives. Your answer?

Another question: Is every creative act worth saving? An answer: history, not us, will show whether our creative acts today are worth considering tomorrow. Your answer?

There is nothing we can do about history — it is littered with the forgotten and unrecorded. That doesn’t mean that our creative acts today are meaningless, it only fulfills the aphorism, “Time edits with a heavy hand.”

If you make something, but anyone can copy it, means you’re gonna have a really tough time making any money from it, and since you still need money to buy food, shelter, clothing, etc, it’s going to destroy all sorts of economies. I fear that going forward, people/micro celebrities will have to stay below a certain size otherwise they could become a target of piracy and lose much of their ability to make money from their creations, when they can be replicated for very little.

What that means is that people who want to make money have to enforce some sort of artificial sort of scarcity so that they can still profit from their work. That’s where copyright comes in, it gives people who’s work has a physical value of very little (even Sheakespeare’s writings are nothing by scratches on paper).

It reminds me of one of the earliest film makers, Melies I think, he made A Trip to the Moon, and never made much from it because pirates copied his film (including Edison–famous man but really quite a jerk).

All in all, I’d say that while very cool: mating a world of abundance with a world of scarcity is and will remain a challenge. Artists may get to share their works with teh world for very little, but they still need to eat. If/when technology further reduces the costs of physical needs, then we’ll really see an amazing world.

That’s really unfortunate view. And it shows in your writing, as it is quite difficult to have an intelligent conversation on the Creative Class when you don’t know who you are referencing- Richard Florida, the man who came up with the concept.

Interestingly enough, Florida may not totally disagree with some of your views, but too bad you did not take into account a person whose done decades of research on the subject before forming an opinion.

That’s the problem with the internet- its a dearth of unfounded opinion, lack of actual information. The echo chamber is actually this posting- someone talking just to hear themselves speak.

“Hildi, get me rewrite!”

Ignoring the crap is only half the problem. The other half of the problem is making sure there are enough people motivated to do the hard work of writing the good stuff.

The true test of the Google age will be whether it can produce solutions to those fundamental issues rather than the crowdsourcing of a car colour.

The concept is not far off from what I’ve written before about digital enabling a return to “campfire media” — media on a very human scale, personal and as much about community and communication.