SpiralTruth

Just the word “collective” makes me shudder. Every time I hear one described, I can’t help but think about the failed experiments of communism and hippy communes. Just mention the former and you’ll get any serious right-wing American frothing at the mouth, and the latter has been a punchline almost since it was conceived. At the centre of our distrust seems to be a fundamental rule: people tend to look out for themselves.

Yes, there are and always will be plenty examples of altruism out there. But the only ones we can really be sure about require someone to toss a grenade and someone else to jump on it. If the threat is not immediate, we just have too much time to wonder about the players and the game they may or may not be playing.

So when bloggers talk about the evils of the more established media industry and band together, guest-blogging, re-blogging, etc., are we really doing it because we truly believe in the cause? Or do we believe that the established media has no place for us while new media does? Are the loudest, most eloquent spokespeople for new media talking about it because they believe it to be better, or because it’s been better for them?

Perhaps the generations that follow mine won’t have to grapple with this particular question because new media will then be the status quo. But for my generation, whose artists grew up with the notion of getting signed by a record label or picked up by a publisher as the one road to making a living doing what you love, new media ventures represent a scary new world. We see the old world crumbling around us while the new one hasn’t even fully formed and we sometimes wonder if we’re crazy to bother. Wouldn’t it be a lot more enjoyable to just sit back and watch the show?

Well Transition Generation, I’m going to make a humble suggestion that may or may not work for us. I haven’t even tried it out myself, but in the spirit of the New World, I’m going to publish it anyway. Here’s the suggestion: We should embrace collectives for what they are – a low overhead and potentially more equitable alternative to corporations. The goal of each: to reach a critical mass through which the ideas of individual members can be promoted more effectively than on their own.

Everyone’s still going to have their own agenda, and the people running the collective (no matter how much they preach decentralization, some small group of people are still going to be calling the shots) are still probably going to do better than the average member. But the collective has no contract. You can leave and start your own if you think it is unfairly weighted. And this will keep the operators honest to an extent. Theoretically, an unhealthy collective can die quickly and give birth to healthier pre-populated collectives just as quickly. That is, so long as the members of the collective don’t see it as an end in itself. That’s the mistake of the USSR and people who named their kids Sunshine and Rainbow.

I’ve stumbled upon a couple of collectives for writers: Year Zero Writers and The Nervous Breakdown. Neither seems too interested in new members, making them stark contrasts to something like HarperCollins’ Authonomy, which is open to anyone who fancies himself a novelist, whether he or she has a complete novel or not. I predict that Authonomy will fail as a model. There’s a reason the publishing industry is weary of technology. The publishing industry, as cumbersome and antiquated as it is, still does something that we haven’t been able to teach a computer: it finds talent. Now, it might throw away a ton of talent in the process and publish a lot of crap in the process, but occasionally it works. It may have a shitty batting average, but it’s still a pro-level batting average. Authonomy’s problem is that its population consists mainly of hopeful authors and yet its promise is to produce the best writing for readers. As an author signing up for the site, my goal is not to help the site find the best writing and push it to the top. My goal is for it to find my writing and push it to the top. And I think that’s probably the goal of every other member, whether they choose to admit it or not.

Notice the difference between member comments left on Authonomy pages and The Nervous Breakdown pages. In both cases comments are usually positive. But whereas on Authonomy, the member comments (which are the only comments allowed) smack of ingenuousness (“Great reading! Be sure to check out my book, ____________, too!”), on The Nervous Breakdown, the member comments sound more like a community (because the site is a real community). Their purpose is not to get the commenter bumped up in ratings by other authors. Rather, it’s to contribute to an active site that will draw readers from the outside. Possibly it’s to encourage those readers to comment as well. No one wants to get up on an empty dance floor. The comments are often creative in and of themselves. You get the sense that the people here are jamming with each other, and from the perspective of someone who just stumbled on their site, it’s refreshing.

I think collectives like these will continue to emerge and play a more dominant role in the arts as traditional institutions fade away. I don’t think they are mutually exclusive from wisdom of crowds type approaches (like Authonomy) in helping independent artists attempt to make a living, but they do provide something that wisdom of crowds solutions can never provide: non-viral legitimacy. If I like one writer on The Nervous Breakdown, chances are I will like others – because they’re a group of people who like each others’ writing. They don’t just let anyone in. So if the collective gains any sort of legitimacy, that legitimacy trickles down to its members. Not so with a wisdom of crowds site. YouTube’s legitimacy as a great video site does not mean that a random member of the site is likely to produce great videos.

It’s an exciting and chaotic time, and there are many reasons to be excited about the democratizing influence of the crowd in traditionally top-down industries, but as with anything in life, the best solutions seem to lie in the middle. Social networks and personal blogs have opened us up to the power of the individual. Now lets see what can happen when that individual gets together with a few friends…