the Onda

It's really happening: the creatives are taking over. There is no question about it-- whether it's the mantra of free-agent nation, the impetus behind the Long Tail, or the success of sites that distribute indie music, it's pretty clear that the tools, the network, and the inspiration is there for stuff to be created by the people instead of for the people.

Amen to that. However, it would seem that our economic institutions (by which I mean mainly contracts, both between investors and corporate entities, and more importantly between employers and employees) are woefully out of date.

This is an obvious thing to all of my trend-spotting friends who are currently struggling with trying to understand how this massive change is going to ripple through the economy. Just this past week, I was having breakfast with Kellan and talking about models for patronage applied to the modern age. Specifically, he's got a cool idea for a web services that a lot of companies should be willing to invest in. Since he doesn't want to start his own company at the moment (a well understood model for harnessing economic energy), it would be great if there was a way that he could be "sponsored" by some entity to get his idea to see the light of day. Unfortunately, the economic structures just don't exist for that today. In software, the closest I've seen is corporate sponsorship of open source projects; however, this doesn't always work and to boot, a software license is increasingly less relevant to some of the cooler ideas I come across these days.

Someone needs to work this out and pronto. Here's why: the folks that want to participate under this new model are some of the most creative high-energy people that I know. Furthermore, I would love to find a way to get them involved in my project, as would most of the other funded entrepreneurs I know. And yet professional investors (by which I mean VCs) raise valid objections to the "contractor" model of building stuff (which is incidentally the only structure in place today for this type of work arrangement). As R0ml has pointed out, software is just as much about the people who build it as it is about the source files so it's understandable that the folks underwriting the projects would been uneasy about the talent just walking out the door at the end of the contract.

It would seem that Hollywood has figured this out in the way that the studio model works to bring creative folks together for projects with a finite length to them and clear objectives. A musician friend of mine recently suggested I take a look at Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce, a recent book by Richard Caves, an economics professor we had in college who was insightful on industrial organization, but dry as sawdust. Caves apparently got a mid-tenure crisis and decided to look at how creative industries organize themselves for kicks. I'm hoping that the book educates me a little bit in how folks in Hollywood have managed to adapt the patronage model to the modern age.

We'll figure this out as an economy. In the meantime though, I sure am glad that these are the questions we get to struggle with. Imagine thinking about "how to trade-off capital and labor" or the 'union factor" instead.

It's a good time to be alive.

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