The Rise of the Creative Class
Published April 16, 2003
In fact, the percentage of revenues destined for "creators," such as programmers and recording artists, is negligible, as is the cost of producing physical copies of digital information. The high cost of proprietary software and other media is simply the result of a monopolistic cartel centered in the United States and Europe, and raises significant economic barriers to participation in the nations of the so-called global South.
[From an article by Project Ciranda.]
The growing class of "knowledge worker," however, who directly benefits from the monopoly rents collected by copyright holders, has little incentive to engage in traditional labor activism, he says. That is, the "creative," enjoying the kind of cultural prestige that makes realtors drool, as hyped by Florida — along with a high salary, gentrified surroundings, and freedom from bureaucratic hassles such as business-formal dress codes — is not aware that she is an information-economy proletarian.
Case in point: The National Writers Union's beef [PDF] with AOL-Time Warner over the latter's policy of requiring contract freelancer writers to sign over all republication rights to their content in return for the fee they receive.
Florida's aim in writing this book, he says in his preface, was to raise class-consciousness among "creatives."
... the members of the Creative class do not see themselves as a class — a coherent group of people with common traits and concerns ... we thus find ourselves in the puzzling situation of having the dominant class in America — whose members occupy the power centers of industry, media, and government, as well as the arts and popular culture — virtually unaware of its own existence and thus unable to consciously influence the course of the society it largely leads.
With this I agree to a point — class consciousness is called for — but the incoherence of the highlighted phrase above is symptomatic of the problem with the entire book. Creatives lead society but do not consciously influence it? What about the RIAA, with its lobbying and its agressive legal defense of the creative property rights of "artists"? Think of the marvelous documentary film, Standing in the Shadows of Motown, about the studio musicians who contributed so much to the Motown sound. These talented creatives were originally paid a weekly salary to perform a service in the studio, although some of them later managed, independently, to negotiate some royalty participation. Service class or creative class? Or providers of creative services? Florida's argument glibly glosses over these crucial definitional issues.
- The Rise of the Creative Class
- Published: April 16, 2003
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- Section: Books
- Filed Under: Books: Business
- Writer: Colin Brayton
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Three quotes (though I remember when I worked for a web company going to a seminar where we were told "everybody is creative" which is just a lie, most people are not creative - as the Refreshments sung, "the world is filled with stupid people")
"Bohemias. Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial aspect of industrial civilization in the two past centuries. They were where industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of unconscious R&D, exploring alternate societal strategies. Each one would have a dress code, characteristic forms of artistic expression, a substance or substances of choice, and as set of sexual values at odds with those of the culture at large. And they did, frequently, have locales with which they became associated. But they became extinct."
-- William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties
"Today's talkers and thinkers value the conception of ideas, not their fulfillment. They give credit to the catalogue, but not the postman who delivered it, or to the road he travelled on. The new economy was supposed to erase all hierarchies. Instead, it has devised another one. On the front end, there are visionaries. On the back end, there are drones."
-- Malcolm Gladwell
Read Wired, for example, and you'd think the only work that gets done anymore is done by entrepreneurs and software designers. In fact, it takes a whole lot of lifting, bending, scrubbing, carting, sorting, and caring to make the world as we know it happen every day. And are people forgetting that those computer chips are made by someone--a low-paid immigrant in Silicon Valley or a teenage girl in Malaysia?
-- Barbara Ehrenreich
Colin! Thank you for this post. What a lot of exciting ideas.
One thing this makes me think of, in terms of the urban planning for attracting creatives, is that sometimes people miss the point.
It is easy to go for the form without the function. For Example: Starbucks.
Espresso has long been associated with bohemianism. And Starbucks jumped on that bandwagon. We have McHip(tm) at the Starbucks nearest you! Prefab designs, mass-produced funky chairs, corporately distributed art.
So the facade of creativity is there, the way one can order it from a pottery barn catalogue.
But the function of the coffee shop, as a place where creative people meet to converse and be exposed to new ideas, has been largely left behind.
In the sense that people can meet and comfortably converse, Starbucks does fill the function.
But the other aspects of the bohemian coffee shops, as in the local artists work on display, or the open mic performances, the scribble-a-note guestbook for all the read, the free paperback bookshelf, these are left behind.
And in fact, places where creativity can be nurtured are being driven out of business by the McHip(tm) establishments.
To me, this says that new forms will be derived to achieve the necessary functions.
We truly do need to foster creativity, on a broad scale. Even if it's not immediately profitable.
Such interesting comments, Murphy -- but the irony is glaring to me, so I'll point it out. (It fits into the larger picture of Globalization, but I'll leave that for another discussion.)
Starbucks does a great job of taking the elements of the Bourgeois-Bohemian culture, sanitizing them, and spreading them far and wide. However, in being successful at that dissemination, Starbucks discards the scruffy edges of the culture that make individual coffee shops so interesting. Starbucks favors the smoothness of repeatability for the sake of business viability, and, in so doing, loses much of the cultural value of the business. That's the first irony, which you identify.
The second irony, which I say is both in itself ironic and also when compared to the first irony, is that the Bourgeois-Bohemian coffee culture would not have had its present resurgence to the extent that it does had Starbucks not enjoyed such commercial success! In other words, had Starbucks not raised the tide for all coffee shops, then far fewer of the interesting scruffy coffee shops would have made it. It's the effect of market forces buoying the culture (which in turn despises it for doing so). The Arts wouldn't exist without patrons, and I say that in the same way interesting little coffee shops wouldn't exist to the extent that they do without Starbucks.
(The link to Globalization, by the way, is the principle that I mentioned parenthetically: the recipient of the benefit despises the benefactor for providing it. But, as I said, that's another discussion.)
Another way to look at it is that people who do not like Starbucks should avoid Starbucks. And they do, providing an informed market for lots of independents.
Btw, Starbucks started with only one store.
True, that metaphor is based on a popular prejudice against franchise culture. In my neighborhood, the Connecticut Muffin franchise, which is a little bit plastic, is owned by local folks and supported by local folks as such.
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"In terms of urban planning, the 'creative economy' meme is, as far as I can see, a form of Newspeak for 'gentrification,'..." Exactly. This is an entirely new definition of the term "creative." Some time ago, I read an article about the rise of the creative class and cities most attractive to that class. I was surprised to discover that a siginficant portion of the ranking system was based on the technology job markets in urban areas. While certainly some technology workers are creative, the bulk of technology labor is not in design, but implementation, not a particularly creative endeavor. In this case, I think "creative" is a rather odd usage that can be defined as "young, highly-paid semi-professionals with off-the-shelf educations."