Creating Culture

How to cultivate the arts when the old rules need not apply.

Nick Gillespie, Jesse Walker, Brian Doherty, Charles Paul Freund, Charles Oliver & Frederick Turner from the December 1997 issue

(Page 2 of 6)

Omar Wasow

Andrea Rich, publisher of Laissez-Faire Books, once recalled the covert joy of reading early libertarian book galleys before they hit the press and pitied my generation's lack of any equivalent insider experience. Stumbling on George Gilder's Web archive of recent writing, however, evoked precisely that same private exhilaration. Published originally in Forbes ASAP as a serialized version of his forthcoming book Telecosm, the Web archive gave me the sense of having discovered a secret gold mine. Though Telecosm is primarily about technology--and thankfully steers clear of Gilder's more peculiar notions of race and gender--Gilder fully understands the symbiotic relationship between high-tech and the creation of culture. Gilder hammers home the point that plummeting chip prices increase access to the toys of cultural production.

I first found Gilder's site a few days before a conference in Martinique. Curious about his work, I printed out the entire series of articles and lugged several hundred pages to the French West Indies. Between excursions to the gorgeous beaches, I devoured articles with titles only a nerd could love: pieces such as "Into The Fibersphere" and "The New Rule of Wireless." Unlike most technology writers, Gilder has a clear passion for the underlying scientific forces driving innovation. With arrogance and poetry, he brilliantly articulates a vision of the future of computing and communications.

Gilder leans heavily on the phenomenon of Moore's Law (which posits that chip prices will halve every 18 months). But his true insights revolve around dramatic
improvements in communications technology (and the less dramatic, though nevertheless beneficial, changes in regulatory policy). Gilder argues that bandwidth costs are now falling even faster than chip prices, which in turn are leading to a "bandwidth tidal wave." As communication costs approach zero, the costs of distributing text, music, movies, and newer media will also drop precipitously. In the section "Life After Television, Updated" Gilder notes, "Today some 70 percent of the costs of a film go to distribution and advertising. In every industry--from retailing to insurance--the key impact of the computer networking revolution is to collapse the costs of distribution and remove the middlemen."

Will film studios, record labels, and book publishers disappear? I doubt it, but certainly ownership of shelf space, trucks, and burly men to move product will decline in importance, allowing for a far greater variety of creative content to reach mass audiences. In fact, I think we are about to witness an inversion of the meaning of "mass media." Where once mass media meant made for the masses, increasingly it will mean made by the masses. Whether you're looking at the impact of desktop publishing in nurturing underground 'zine culture or weighing how cheap synthesizers and DSP chips allowed multi-platinum rap acts to emerge from basement parties, it is clear that as the cost of creation and distribution gets cheaper, everyone becomes a media maker.

Gilder does a superb job of weaving into each tale of tech breakthrough a case for the moral and intellectual basis of free markets. Though he's too exuberant at times (one critic hilariously complains that "Gilder never met a technology he didn't like"), I found his energy intoxicating. Check out the site. Then do what I did. Go buy and read the rest of his books the old-fashioned way.

Omar Wasow is the founder and president of the Web site developer New York Online and a regular contributor on the cable TV channel MSNBC.

Jesse Walker

The standard map of cultural production is vaguely Marxist. There is high culture, which is upper-class, individual, and arty. There is the people's culture: working-class, communal, and folky. And there is pop culture: middle-class, commercial, and crappy. In this model, pop culture is a parasite; it steals from both of its rivals, waters the booty down, and sells it all back to the compliant masses.

Let's start by admitting that there's some truth to that picture. But as relentlessly mediocre as the culture industry's products can be, some very good, very individualistic art does get made in those allegedly unlikely pop-culture settings. Spike Jones, Alfred Hitchcock, Philip K. Dick--there's a lot of great stuff out there in the so-called trash.

So the first "book" I'm recommending isn't a book at all. It's a CD, albeit with lengthy liner notes. The Carl Stalling Project (1990) collects scores composed for the great Warner Brothers cartoons of the '30s, '40s, and '50s. Performed in a symphony hall, this music would be considered wildly experimental--and some of today's most interesting avant-garde composers, such as John Zorn, have cited Stalling as an influence. Yet it is remarkably accessible listening.

The model breaks down in other places, too. It isn't just popular culture that raids its rivals for inspiration; highbrow and folk arts happily steal from commercial culture (and each other) as well. Actually existing communities (as opposed to the static entities of media myth) often appropriate the pop icons that they supposedly just docilely consume. In Invisible Governance: The Art of African Micropolitics (1994), David Hecht and Maliqalim Simone explore how Western pop detritus has fluidly mixed with African folk cultures, to the point where images from The Little Mermaid turn up at shrines to the mer-goddess Mami Wata.

But the greatest problem with the semi-Marxist schema is that it ignores art that is both autonomous and individual. Folk art must be communal and anonymous, the thinking goes; creative individuals require commercial sponsorship or aristocratic patronage. (The National Endowment for the Arts has presumably taken over the latter role.) So I'm tempted to suggest, instead of a third book, that you find a store that sells 'zines and there browse the wares of America's self-directed self-publishers. A lot of their stuff is crap, of course, but then, so are a lot of Random House titles.

But I do have a third book for you--a guide, of sorts, to the 'zine world. Bob Black's Beneath the Underground (1994) subjects the "marginals" scene to the kind of critical scrutiny it has thus far mostly escaped, and while I disagree with some of his conclusions, I nonetheless enjoy watching him reach them. Whatever you may think of Black's ideology or personal behavior, he approaches the critic's tasks with the well-honed, witty knife of a Twain, Bierce, or Mencken.

None of whom really fit into the standard cultural map either--but that's a topic for another time.