Musk buys Twitter, AIs replace artists, filmpreneurs rise, and mammoths live again | Creativity News 10/17
Monday Motion: Introducing a "journalism of creativity"
This is it folks.
The grand debut of the reformatted “Monday Motions.”
As promised, I am now covering news pertinent to creatives everywhere.
Before we get started, I’d like to tell you about the book of the week.
I’m not just saying this because this is an affiliate link, and I earn a lil something to keep the lights on if you buy with this link.
I’d recommend this book to anyone even if it didn’t get me anything.
Jacques Barzun is critically underdiscussed.
The man is probably the cultural historian of our times.
He writes in this collection about everything from opera to baseball to how the Romantics revived Shakespeare.
The fact of the matter is, this man isolated changes and identified catalysts.
Where better to look for a process for creativity than in the historic ebbs and flows that have so dramatically shaped our world?
Creating culture begins with understanding where it comes from.
As I was crafting the newsletter, I began assembling several stories relevant to the aim of bringing together these pieces of the news.
Some of them are not the most ripped from the headlines, but they still have lingering impacts to be felt.
Here’s what I’ve been collecting in the past several weeks.
Elon Musk is buying Twitter again.
Naturally, this is a big story for civic discourse reasons and for business and media business reasons.
What else, though, is interesting about the story is that Musk has talked about cleaning up Twitter with its bot problem.
He’s also talked about checkmarking all of us, which would be awfully nice, not gonna lie.
These sorts of changes would present Twitter as a more sincere place, one where people come to the public forum without masks.
That’s the theory at least.
Who knows if that’ll ever happen.
The ramifications though go to the creator economy as well.
In a way that is perhaps more understated to the broader public — though it might be quite clear to other creators — is that people are building empires on Twitter.
By establishing voice, brand, and message on Twitter, people are able to funnel their audience to other things.
How would a change to Twitter policy change the game for the creators?
Would it create more space for these guys?
Or would it create more problems with divisive leadership?
I would just end this portion about Musk by noting that he is also up to still more hijinks, announcing that he has now create a perfume that smells like burnt hair.
I guess if the owners of Harry Potter can sell disgusting jellybeans, Elon can make the world a more obnoxiously scented place.
Anyway, here’s a comparison between the Jester-King and the Money Magi, Warren Buffett.
Does AI art threaten “real artists”?
Does this AI artist actually threaten artists though?
Or does it equip new artists?
It’s not as though it’s as simple as waving a magic wand and — PRESTO! — you have a masterpiece.
AI art is creating a new category that conventional tests of skill are unfit to handle.
That’s because AI is a case where the skill and the tool occupy a different area from one another.
For the painter, the skill lies in a particular vision that they communicate through their brushstrokes and colors and textures and angles and dynamics.
The tools are the brush, paint, and canvas.
The AI artist has a skillset of a different kind. They have to be a “prompt whisperer.”
They have to put into words what they see in their mind — and they have to do it in such a way that the AI understands.
Just as we have outsourced large portions of our memory and knowledge-retention to the data storage of the internet, we are now outsourcing large portions of skill to machine learning.
I suspect though that the people who do it the old fashioned way will always get our respect.
They may well be even more respected because of that level of hard work and dedication.
I compare it to how Amish-madee furniture is the gold standard of craftsmanship.
How far would you go for your dream?
The last story I’m highlighting is about how one filmmaker worked their tail off to earn enough money to fund their $200,000 film.
The dedication is wonderful.
I think something else they write about as they tell their story on No Film School applies to the creator economy as well:
Funding is the biggest dilemma on all our minds, but the only answers we’re ever given are specific to the individual.
“My father’s rich.” “I won a contest.” “My best friend owns a castle.” Well what if we didn’t win the cinematic lottery? What are we supposed to do? Give up and die?
And don’t say grants, pitching, and Kickstarters. Anyone who’s tried those knows they’re a complete crapshoot. What we need is a consistent way to greenlight ourselves.
Well, although most of us weren’t born rich or well-connected, we do have specific gifts that can be exploited. Mine are patience, resilience, and good health. Outside of filmmaking, those are all I have to offer, and I found a way to leverage them into raising $200,000. I don’t recommend you necessarily try my methods, but hopefully, I can inspire you to develop your own.
That’s the nugget.
What we need is a consistent way to greenlight ourselves.
How do we create enough means to give ourselves the go-ahead?
All my work writing newsletter articles, making YouTube videos, producing podcasts — though I deeply love each of these — is building towards my dream of filmmaking.
For other filmmakers who are putting themselves in the traditional framework for getting their films picked up, I’d ask if they’d considered a more entrepreneurial route.
It’s a ripe time to find a market and disrupt it.
Film requires that now.
This filmmaker took a painstaking route.
But more power to them.
No part of blazing your own trail in an industry like that is gonna be easy.
We need people to show up and break through the barriers though.
This is a startup mentality.
The mentality of a filmpreneur.
If that’s the word we wanna use.
Today’s featured idea:
Do we bring back the wooly mammoth to solve ecological crises?
That’s the question some folks are trying to reach a conclusion on.
This really would be a twist on the Jurassic Park narrative though — bringing back an ancient species that actually saves the planet instead of terrorizing civilization.
I have segment where I talk about project concepts that allow for an interesting exploration of different ideas. We’ll call it Spitballing.
Spitballing:
For today’s spitball, let’s revisit the Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant.
In a nutshell, each blind man compares the elephant to something different.
One sees it as being like a rope because he is feeling its trunk.
One sees it as like a tree because he has found its leg.
Another sees it as like a wall because he has gotten a grip on its side.
So on and so forth.
What if you created an interactive art exhibit that played out this concept?
That is, helping to elucidate to people the gist of this story: that we all see the world differently based on the angle we approach it from.
You could, of course, create an elephant statue and make different blindfolded people going through the exhibit take a guess as to what they’re feeling.
Alternatively, you could take the textures, feel, scents, and features of an elephant as individual items and have non-blindfolded guests feel walls and objects that convey these aspects of an elephant.
Then you ask them: what do all these pieces add up to?
It doesn’t have to be an elephant, naturally.
And perhaps the parable ought to be flipped on its head.
Instead of making it about who is sighted and who’s non-sighted, we might make it about how we wear blinders like horses, and we see only what’s right in front of us.
Our cognitive biases make it hard for us to be take a complete 360 consideration of our surroundings.
But once we do, once we are able to worldview-pivot, we begin to approach our projects in new lights and from new angles.
And when we’re digesting these big problems, these multifaceted problems (as science is in the business of doing), we’re left simply having to compare things to other things.
These comparisons are thought out laterally.
They make connections between things that are similar.
Does an atom truly look like a cluster of marbles with other marbles in its orbit?
No.
But you take the route of metaphor, the route of poetry, to convey what needs to be expressed.
As such, you are able to create imagery about it.
There are many things an atom may be like.
But this particular image facilitates and communicates something needed.