One of the examples, from my recent pair of posts on how a new infrastructure can transform a talent market, is Kickstarter. In a recent interview on GigaOm, founder Perry Chen discusses some of these issues, including our tendency to think the old infrastructure of creativity is inevitable, and the effect of removing gatekeepers from the system:
I feel like we’re used to this industrial creative complex of movie studios, record labels and production houses. It wasn’t always that way. This is relatively recent in human history. People have been creating art for tens of thousands of years. Artists have always been hustlers, too.
In general, artists have always been extremely creative people both in art and in talking to audiences, and in hustling to get the things that they want done, to get their ideas out of their brains and expressed.
A lot of the things that you’re seeing on the web now, from YouTube to Twitter, and what we’re doing, are really just the tools so that creative people can get their things done and connect with other people. They don’t create the creativity. They don’t change the way creative people are.
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Yeah, any dent we can put into the machine we’re happy to do. I think we’re already seeing it. A lot of these things that are getting funded would not have been funded in any way. People are watching films that were made on Kickstarter and playing games that were made on Kickstarter. I think the big media companies are going to continue to have things that they’re going to keep making for the mass audiences, but we hope we’re eating away at the bad stuff.
Bad stuff gets made in the system. You get sequels. You get safe things. You get people with new ideas that don’t get funded. You get constrained funding so that one out of every thousand people can get a shot. You have systems that are based on who you know. That’s what we want to break apart. Good ideas can bubble up without these gatekeepers saying yes.
