Advanced Introduction to Creative Industries 9781839108938, 9781839108945, 9781839108952

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Advanced Introduction to Creative Industries

Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences and law, expertly written by the world’s leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas. The aims of the series are two-fold: to pinpoint essential principles of a particular field, and to offer insights that stimulate critical thinking. By distilling the vast and often technical corpus of information on the subject into a concise and meaningful form, the books serve as accessible introductions for undergraduate and graduate students coming to the subject for the first time. Importantly, they also develop well-informed, nuanced critiques of the field that will challenge and extend the understanding of advanced students, scholars and policy-makers. For a full list of titles in the series please see the back of the book. Recent titles in the series include: Global Administration Law Sabino Cassese

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Global Sports Law Stephen F. Ross

Mobilities Mimi Sheller

Public Policy B. Guy Peters

Technology Policy Albert N. Link and James Cunningham

Empirical Legal Research Herbert M. Kritzer

Urban Transport Planning Kevin J. Krizek and David A. King

Advanced Introduction to

Creative Industries JOHN HARTLEY

John Curtin Distinguished Emeritus Professor, Curtin University, Australia and Visiting Professor, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

Elgar Advanced Introductions

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© John Hartley 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2020950937

02

ISBN 978 1 83910 893 8 (cased) ISBN 978 1 83910 894 5 (eBook) ISBN 978 1 83910 895 2 (paperback)

Contents

List of figuresvi List of tablesvii Introduction: creative industries and coronavirus crisis – past the point of forgivenessviii 1

Navigating creative industries – knowledge and plays

1

2

Pop-up Globe – self to system, via story and semiosphere 15

3

Art to smart – creative content and digital connection

32

4

Copyright (lock it up!) – what does it mean, ‘to be’? Original, copy or piracy?

47

5

Creative cities – our complex system, or theirs?67

6

Clubs to cosmos – groups, scale, knowledge

7

All change! – time, duration, extinction

110

8

Constitution and consequences – the mediation of classes

124

9

Creative emergence – provocations and proposals

140

10

Circular regeneration, creative reabsorption – futures or fungus?

155

88

References173 Index185

v

Figures

0.1 0.2 2.1 3.1 3.2 4.1 9.1 10.1

vi

‘We had been warned’: ‘Coal Consumption Affecting Climate’ (17 July 1912), Picton Post, NSW xi Creative industries in the news. ‘Art Metiers and Exports’ (22 February 1963), Le Courrier Australien, NSW xii Pop-up Globe, Perth, Australia 2019. (a) Exterior, (b) A Midsummer Night’s Dream 21 Creative intensity by occupation 38 Nasdaq 45-year Historical Chart: Composite Index, 1970–202041 ‘Dafen Lisa’ by Meng Yan and 999 Dafen artists, for World Expo 2010 Shanghai, now displayed at Airport North Station in Fuyong, Shenzhen 50 Hagia Sophia (1880s) 152 Otto Scharmer’s ‘Four Stages of Systems Evolution, Four Operating Systems’ 170

Tables

3.1 5.1 5.2 5.3 7.1 9.1 9.2

Top ten tech tycoons (2019) 43 Richard Florida’s mega-regions 73 Four phases of the creative industries, from industry clusters and services to creative citizens and cities 77 Cities as media for mixing culture and economy 80 Change itself changes over time 118 Distance from Self: Edmund Leach’s (2000) model of how language ‘moulds our environment’ 142 Instagram’s top accounts (June 2020) 143

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Introduction: creative industries and coronavirus crisis – past the point of forgiveness

This book was written during the coronavirus pandemic, when many creative enterprises went out of business and many creative professionals lost their jobs, a fate I had recently shared. However, it is not presented as a chronicle of destruction, creative or calamitous, but as a pause for thought. The book works through the creative industries as that term has become prominent since the 1990s (Chapters 1–5), before detailing a new conceptualisation of a creative economy (Chapters 6–10), which aligns to the growing uncertainties of polarised societies beset by climate crisis and pandemics. The lessons to be learned from this exercise are that the issues confronting societies across the world now are by no means new, or newly reported, and that the ‘creative industries’ have been a part of the story from the outset. Indeed, they play a crucial role in mediating new meanings for changing societies, going well beyond the sectional boundaries of individual industries. Thus, ‘creative industries’ can refer to all kinds of productive enterprise, or just to one sector of the economy devoted to media, performance, creative arts, heritage, luxury and leisure pursuits. Both of these usages tell part of the truth. There is a further compelling reason for focusing on the creative industries. Whatever the crisis, the creativity of a country – and, as I argue, a species – rests on its culture, and its culture depends on a capacious and inclusive sense of identity and a group-binding narrative, within which diversity and divisions can be staged and navigated.

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These stories need to be told, across all media types, using many different creative skills and artistry, to such an extent that the mediation of collective identity and uncertainty must be considered as a constitutional part of any polity, event or identity, not as some luxury add-on. That story too has been a long time in the making, and you can’t say you were not warned.

Home truths I’m writing this book under lockdown, at home in Australia. You may not know it, but this is where the modern idea of the creative industries began. The date was 30 October 1994, when Prime Minister Paul Keating launched his government’s Creative Nation policy. Its permanent effects on Australia should not be forgotten: Creative Nation changed the way Australians saw themselves, and their place in the world. It defined ‘culture’, broadening out the concept beyond the confines of the high art elite. Most notably, the policy document reframed the cultural industries in economic terms. It changed the very language used to talk about Australia, its culture, its artistic expressions. (Hawkings, 2014)

According to historian Rebecca Hawkings, ‘Creative Nation defined “culture” as “that which gives us a sense of ourselves”’, and thereby ‘changed the way Australians saw themselves, and their place in the world … It changed the very language used to talk about Australia, its culture, its artistic expressions’. It made room for multicultural and Indigenous diversity, for popular culture and media as well as high arts, and for creative industries to count as wealth-creating, not just market failure or welfare economics. As the document put it: This cultural policy is also an economic policy. Culture creates wealth ... Culture employs … Culture adds value, it makes an essential contribution to innovation, marketing and design. It is a badge of our industry. The level of our creativity substantially determines our ability to adapt to new economic imperatives. It is a valuable export … It attracts tourists and students. It is essential to our economic success.1

It was the first ‘cultural policy’ ever developed by an Australian government. It soon proved to be an export success in itself. As soon as they’d won the 1997 UK election, ‘New Labour’ under Tony Blair and Gordon

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Brown inaugurated their own creative industries initiative (discussed in Chapter 3), which was widely copied around the world. In 2001, an Australian university launched the world’s first Creative Industries Faculty. Creative industries research was boosted in 2005 by the award of a multi-million dollar Australian Research Council ‘Centre of Excellence’ for creative industries and innovation.2 Not for the first time, an Australian invention was subsequently neglected at home while being scaled up overseas – the same can be said for many a good idea, from the combine harvester to Wi-Fi.3

Plus ça change? In June 2020, as the lockdown restrictions of the coronavirus pandemic began to ease in Australia (although the pandemic was still gathering pace globally), freelance journalist Celina Ribeiro wrote an article on the relaunch of Trove, a digital archive of Australian news and other media, coordinated by the National Library of Australia. Working at home, she decided to search the earliest references to climate change, partly because ‘the new site is geared towards use by ordinary people, not PhDs’, and partly because she had the ‘sickening sense that we had been warned’. She was right (Figure 0.1). It looks to be quite possibly the first general audience warning on human-induced climate change in Australia … I was consumed by a renewed, more urgent sense that our inaction and rhetoric on the subject has passed the point of forgiveness … But it was not very difficult to find. It took a free afternoon, sitting at home clicking on a search icon.4

Galvanised by her example, I searched for news items on past pandemics – especially efforts to stop them (and how these were thwarted). Here’s The Catholic Press (Sydney, 3 April 1919), with what remains a familiar complaint – and not just in Australia: Thanks to the criminal weakness of our State Government, the influenza pandemic has now gripped Sydney, and is extending its shadow over the whole State. Owing to the abolition of the restrictions at a time when the medical faculty had the disease well in hand, the pestilence has been allowed full play. The Government having failed to safeguard the interests of the community, the doctors are now helpless, contacts are no longer under control, and the people of New South Wales must rely on themselves, and be prepared for the worst.5

CREATIVE INDUSTRIES AND CORONAVIRUS CRISIS

Figure 0.1

xi

‘We had been warned’: ‘Coal Consumption Affecting Climate’ (17 July 1912), Picton Post, NSW (and numerous other papers)

Source: Trove (National Library of Australia).

Turning to the theme of this book, a search for ‘creative industries’ turned up many news entries that were much older than expected, given how the term is currently used. The first mention I found was from The Monitor (Sydney, 29 March 1828), in an article complaining about the Colony’s tax budget: ‘Suffice it here to say, taxes should never be laid on creative industry; especially infantile attempts.’6 The distinction being made here is between ‘productive and creative industry’ (which makes things) and burdensome government or banks (which don’t). The idea that all industries must be creative still persists: ‘Little of our era will enter the history of ideas. Twittering on about creative industries makes no difference if our industries are not creative.’7

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Figure 0.2

Creative industries in the news. ‘Art Metiers and Exports’ (22 February 1963), Le Courrier Australien, NSW

Source: Trove (National Library of Australia).

Interestingly, the first mention of the ‘creative industries’ in the contemporary sense is from ‘the oldest foreign newspaper in Australia’, Le Courrier Australien, which was printed from 1892 to 2011 and is now published online. Well over half a century ago, it published a full-page

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feature on ‘Modern France: Arts and Techniques’ (Figure 0.2), including this report (22 February 1963): THE Comité Colbert which includes the principal representatives of French art, fashion and creative industries has just published statistics relative to exports. France benefited a great deal from exports by these industries …8

Le Courrier Australien’s list of creative industries was: –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– ––

Perfume Jewellery and goldwork Dresses and accessories Lace and embroidery Crystal and glass Furs Leather goods Pottery and decoration Upholstery Musical instruments Arts works – Engravings.

Some of these sectors remain much the same, including French leadership under the mighty LVMH group (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy), which maintains divisions for Fashion, Wines and Spirits, Perfumes and Cosmetics, Watches and Jewelry. LVMH’s chair and CEO Bernard Arnault is one of the world’s richest billionaires, despite taking a multibillion dollar pounding during the 2020 coronavirus downturn.9 What a pity that this modest item in a 1963 ‘foreign newspaper’, with a long history in Australia,10 was not noticed more widely at the time. It predated Creative Nation by 30 years. It’s important not to lose sight of the role played by media and archives in creating the ‘community of knowledge’ that binds our various identities. In a ‘knowledge economy’, there is no more creative industry than that. Celina Ribeiro puts it well in her article: We start from the same point, the same object of truth. At a time when our understanding of the world is increasingly fragmented and hyper-partisan, this kind of resource reflects a community of knowledge which binds us as Australians.

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Here, in yet another sector of the creative industries called GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, museums), we can unearth ‘century-old stories foretelling our current calamity’. With Ribeiro, I feel ‘a renewed, more urgent sense that our inaction and rhetoric on the subject has passed the point of forgiveness’. As I hope to show, here’s where strategies for post-calamity recovery are already being rehearsed. That’s a good rationale for continuing to study the creative industries. John Hartley Fremantle, July 2020

Notes 1. ‘The report emphasised culture’s importance to national identity, and defined culture more broadly than earlier conceptions, by including film, radio, libraries and more. It also stressed the economic potential of cultural activity and arts’, and budgeted over $250m of new funding for the sector. See: https://​apo​.org​.au/​node/​29704 (accessed 5 October 2020). 2. I was foundation dean of QUT Creative Industries (2000–05), co-founder and research director of the ARC Centre of Excellence (2005–12). 3. Combine harvester: https://​www​.abc​.net​.au/​news/​2018​-09​-18/​headlie​-taylor​ -father​-of​-the​-modern​-header​-harvester​-statue/​10256308; Wi-Fi: https://​ www ​ . csiro ​ . au/ ​ e n/​ R esearch/​ T echnology/​ T elecommunications/​ W ireless​ -LAN (accessed 5 October 2020). 4. Celina Ribeiro (28 June 2020), ‘Beyond Google: my afternoon trawling Trove for the first mentions of climate change’. Guardian: https://​www​.theguardian​ .com/ ​ b ooks/ ​ 2 020/ ​ j un/ ​ 2 8/ ​ b eyond ​ - google ​ - my ​ - afternoon ​ - trawling ​ - trove​ -for​-the​-first​-mentions​-of​-climate​-change​?CMP​=​Share​_iOSApp​_Other (accessed 5 October 2020). Illustration source: Trove: https://​trove​.nla​.gov​ .au/​ newspaper/​ article/​ 100645214. Similarly, an attempt by the Pasteur Institute to produce a vaccine was thwarted when the authorities refused access to quarantine stations (Evening News, Sydney, 25 November 1920): https://​trove​.nla​.gov​.au/​newspaper/​article/​117297243 (accessed 5 October 2020). 5. Source: Trove: https://​trove​.nla​.gov​.au/​newspaper/​article/​106079765 (accessed 5 October 2020). 6. Source: Trove: https://​trove​.nla​.gov​.au/​newspaper/​article/​31759705 (accessed 5 October 2020). 7. Peter Murphy, The Conversation, October 2013: http://​theconversation​.com/​ go​-on​-then​-what​-are​-the​-creative​-industries​-18958 (accessed 5 October 2020).

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8.

xv

Source: Trove: https://​trove​.nla​.gov​.au/​newspaper/​article/​225614548/​ 24847592 (accessed 5 October 2020). 9. See: https://​www​.businessinsider​.com​.au/​who​-is​-bernard​-arnault​-richest​ -person​-in​-europe​-lvmh​-life​-photos​-2019​-1​?r​=​US​&​IR​=​T (accessed 5 October 2020). 10. The masthead continues online: https://​www​.lecourrieraustralien​.com/​?lang​ =​en. See also: https://​thefrenchmarket​.com​.au/​collections/​collector​-book (accessed 5 October 2020).

1.

Navigating creative industries – knowledge and plays

‘Trying to figure out …’ What are the creative industries? The ground is by no means clear; the direction uncertain. Even the name is contentious: creative industries or economy; creative or cultural industries? How do we know about these domains: via the arts (practice, criticism, interpretation) or economics (production, distribution, consumption)? Which industries, countries, regions or firms are creative, and which are not? In what follows, these are open questions. At this stage of development, the ‘creative industries’ are as much a group of enquirers as a phenomenon in the world: it is a conversation – among policymakers, disciplines, consultancies and think-tanks (Hartley, Wen and Li, 2015: 25–7). Nevertheless, that conversation is professional and purposeful, seeking to integrate various inputs, exclude various errors, and so to create a conceptual tool that will transform the terrain even as it describes it, opening up new resources for understanding, extending and applying creative practices, to populations, places … and the planet. This book is therefore ‘navigational’ – like ‘the knowledge’ required of London black cab drivers since 1865. The book proposes to introduce you – the advanced reader – to the creative industries, but that is inevitably a project about knowledge, and how knowledge is created under uncertainty. Of course, ‘like ‘creativity’, ‘knowledge’ too is an uncertain term. Both include elements of interpretation and science. A navigational approach is needed because it is not (yet) possible to separate these differences out, for example, to say that creativity is the realm of interpretation, 1

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ADVANCED INTRODUCTION TO CREATIVE INDUSTRIES

as studied in the humanities, while knowledge is the realm of the natural and mathematical sciences. That was a tendency in equilibrium economics, which sought to shift from interpretative to mathematical knowledge (Walras), abandoning the ‘moral’ (interpretative) component of its own founders’ work (Smith, Darwin), until the natural and biosciences pushed back, foregrounding evolution and cooperation (Deacon, 2015; Fuchs, 2011; Hall and Kirdina-Chandler, 2017; Hodgson, 2016; Potts, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2019). Both evolution and cooperation assume a ‘population’ or group causal agent rather than an abstract individual causal agent. They allow for collective agency (cooperation and mutual aid) as well as individual competition and struggle. Creativity/knowledge; moral interpretation/natural phenomena; humanities/sciences; collective/individualist; cooperation/competition – these contending approaches and concepts have not yet achieved intellectual integration. Historically, there is a tendency for knowledge systems like economics to start out in the humanities and to migrate to the sciences, a process that may take centuries. This has happened to other disciplines, from mathematics and geography to biology and psychology. In such circumstances, it is not right to pre-empt or presume a destination. Instead, differences and debates can be explored, so that the reader can orient themselves to the field, following path-dependent directions without ending up back where they started. In short, this book ‘navigates’ both interpretative and systematic approaches to creativity, with a view to a destination that integrates creativity with knowledge systems and natural systems alike. It may be that you won’t recognise the terrain when you get there (it’s not ‘creative industries’ as we know it, Jim), but nevertheless it describes a real landscape, in which moral interpretation and natural phenomena remain in dialogue.

The knowledge For cabbies, extensive practical know-how is held in each individual driver’s head after a long apprenticeship.1 ‘The knowledge’ enables useful connections across multiple differences in a complex system that is independent of any one individual driver but dependent on all of them. Each black cab communicates a given meaning across the city’s intricate synapses, each fare a pulse that re-establishes the network as it carries

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each information package to a unique destination, there to create new meanings. At the same time, the black-cab itself becomes an icon of ‘the knowledge’ and thus a signal of ‘London-ness’ for those ‘in the know’. So let’s take a trip around this system of creativity, past some well-lit, familiar landmarks, featureless, neglected waste-ground and shadowy, risky places, to see what the system they serve creates. Creative industries produce – and are the product of – more than goods and services. They’re not just creative and they’re not just industries. Economic modelling alone does not capture their value. There can be no demand for their products until after they are supplied. Their goods are not manufactured at scale: some make ‘immaterial’ products, not selling many units but selling the same unit many times (and still owning it afterwards); while others can set premium prices on customised goods that send a certain signal. Nevertheless, what they make is material, albeit in the medium of semiosis: what they make is the stuff by which we orient our individual and collective selves to the ‘exigencies of modern associated life and the mechanical industries’, as Thorstein Veblen perspicaciously put it (1899: 177). The creative industries produce communicable and thereby tradable versions of difference, newness, pattern, meaningfulness, relationship and identity. More than that, they offer a place, ‘scene’ or ‘club’ (Chapters 4 and 5) for experimentation, knowledge-sharing, remix and discovery (Potts, 2019: 217), including new combinations and uses for creative hardware (technology) and software (genre, form). Their characteristic output addresses uncertainty (the vicissitudes of identity, love, power, purpose). Their mode is ‘groupish’ – from pop group, band, orchestra, performance and audience in music to the clubs, halls and urban districts (or country towns) where groups can gather. For example, Mullumbimby in rural New South Wales (Australia) was the unlikely ‘scene’ for ‘Dustyesky’, an amateur men’s choir singing proletarian Russian songs, which became a big hit … in Russia! The name Dustyesky brings together ‘Dusty’ (legendary Aussie country singer Slim Dusty) and ‘Esky’ (portable icebox for beer) for a uniquely Australian homage to Dostoevsky (The Idiot). They refer to their hometown as Mullumgrad.2 Here’s an entirely new cluster and scene, where difference is tolerated, so newness can emerge and be rehearsed, shared and honed, potentially for wider distribution, both directly (in street or stadium) or virtually (in broadcast or

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social media). In short, the cultural productivity of the creative industries comes from their ability to call populations together, as gathering places to stage ceremonies, feasts and singing-dancing-ritual has been since the invention of stone circles in Göbekli Tepe 12,000 years ago. The resources of the creative industries are not ‘land and capital’ as in other businesses, but ‘language and culture’. Their product goes beyond ‘content’ to uses of it among groups large and small – audiences, the public, citizens, consumers, where what is ‘made’ – well away from any factory floor, unless that’s repurposed as a rave club – may include changes in individual thought, social perception and cultural experience. They appeal not to rational-choice calculations but to group-identities, existential uncertainties and to the love of shared fun, fear, adventure, exploit, companionship, amusement, knowledge. Unlike incumbent industries that prosper under certainty, calculate with reason and predict with precision, they are most productive when circumstances are least certain, prospering in the chaotic connections among incommensurate and clashing systems, both sociocultural and technoeconomic, chafing at control even as they establish new rules for what we mean and how that is communicated. Like poppies and matsutake mushrooms (Tsing, 2015), they flourish best in disturbed ground.3 The creative industries are a multivalent, multimedia interzone of disruption, turbulence, innovation and renewal. They are contradictory: at the cutting edge of innovation, adaptation and new ideas, they are strong connectors to collective memory, heritage, tradition and custom. This includes calling attention to the ‘disturbed ground’ of memory, where conflict, inequality and power have left their poppy-red mark. They require skill, craft, artistry and performance expertise, but they are also user-created, where untutored authenticity (however artfully performed) may be more successful than elaborate professionalism. Their value is set by users, not producers, making them the classic ‘social network market’ (Potts et al., 2008), where price is determined by prestige, reputation, and by the choices of prominent, well-connected others in the system, without regard to utility or efficiencies of scale. In short, the creative industries are the cultural-economic zone that deals with uncertainty. Understanding the creative industries will not follow from a ‘particle’ model of material things: you can’t find a ‘smallest unit’ of creativity. Instead you need a systems model. Here, a significant unit is

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defined by its position, function and use in a system of difference, and its difference from other systems, like signs in a semiotic system. Systems do not rely on any internal properties of an object (unit) to determine how it is placed or what it means, since it creates relational ‘mentifacts’ and ‘sociofacts’ (Huxley, 1955: 10), using physical ‘artefacts’ for the purpose, from bits of wood and stone to pixels and thin air. That explains how showbiz can make tinsel and flim-flam more valuable than gold. And this is why the cultural part (‘creative’) directs the economic part (‘industries’). Culture has been defined as the ‘whole way of life’ or ‘common meanings’ of a changing community, together with ‘arts and learning’ – the ‘special processes of discovery and creative effort’ (Williams, 1958b: 54). Culture is the system that establishes the groups, codes, rules and relationships of trust and distrust within which economic activity can be arranged and conducted. When the economy falters, all that’s left is ‘culture’ in this sense, as the recent coronavirus crisis has demonstrated. Putting the economy on hold was a devastating blow for the entire workforce, industrial and otherwise, including arts organisations and creative enterprises dependent upon live performance or analogue presence. But, at the same time, the ‘social distancing’ enforced by COVID-19 provoked a population-wide burst of creative endeavour, as locked-down citizens turned to arts, crafts, invention and innovation to make do, occupy their time, amuse friends, and to share these experiences widely on social media. In the process, the public co-created numerous new ‘common meanings’. Professional artists, agencies and organisations joined in, offering many different types of online productions, tutorials and opportunities for discussion, often free, despite their own precarious predicament. In the end, the ‘creative industries’ amount to communicable culture, not private profit. The Australian Academy of the Humanities pointed out the lesson for that country’s policy-elite to draw from COVID-19: Thankfully, even in the midst of this crushing global crisis, Australia’s creatives continue to do what they do best, by getting creative – online, on canvas, and even on balconies and in their lounge rooms, bedrooms and driveways. Galleries, libraries, archives and museums are demonstrating their digital innovation and ingenuity to meet public demand for their services … It is worth us all imagining what this time would be like without access to books, movies, music, and other cultural activities and content. Our creative and cultural researchers will also be at the forefront of addressing the challenges of recovery.4

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As well as ‘Australia’s creatives’, the Academy mentions ‘creative and cultural researchers’ – they are the conversational or ‘learning’ part of Raymond Williams’s ‘arts and learning’. They make a special form of creative output that is also in demand in times of crisis: knowledge. To show how they do it is the purpose of this book. To start with, because we’re investigating systems, relations and dynamics (directive of units, identity and structures), it’s advisable not to concentrate on any one sector, form or country, but to explore how creativity answers to more fundamental cultural functions, whether it employs personal talent or the most advanced technological resources, organisational efficiency and skilled personnel of the day. To investigate culture’s functions, it’s best to focus on the relations among and between contested borderlands. Here, the clash of difference may reveal what those functions are, and how they operate (or fail) under conditions of uncertainty that they can’t control. Look at the playful, contested or disregarded edges of systems, between, for instance: –– –– –– –– –– –– –– ––

the arts and media entertainment national and global policy communitarian and corporate politics enterprise and insurrection culture and technology analogue and digital communication humanities and scientific disciplines economics/law and biosciences/semiotics.

Productive clashes between different knowledge systems – such as arts and sciences, practical and theoretical, libertarian or communitarian – necessitate an interdisciplinary approach, where the object is not to choose whose position is correct but to understand how such difference may, when compared, be overlapped and set into a wider context, to produce a reliable map of what creativity is for. If the usual models of industrial or economic analysis are inadequate to encompass the creative industries, does it mean that this sector is too chaotic, contested and contradictory to be ‘known’ at all as a coherent system? No, it does not. The problem is not in the creative industries but in the mode of knowing that mainstream economics brings to the task. It is necessary to amend the model, not to abandon the project.

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Finding one’s way around is a form of knowledge, and being able to hold that knowledge in one’s head makes economic sense for cab drivers. However, the idea that ‘knowledge’ is confined to the space between the ears of individual ‘knowing subjects’ is no longer tenable, even though it occupies a prominent place in epistemology. For instance, it was axiomatic for modernist economic theorists, from Hayek (1945) and the Vienna School (Dekker, 2016) to J.S. Metcalfe (1998) and the evolutionary economists (Potts, 2009). For them (following Adam Smith), the division and growth of knowledge (including ideas and rules) constitute economic operations. However, for them, knowledge requires an actor – the Schumpeterian entrepreneur, not the Shakespearean tragedian – to mobilise knowledge of technologies and objects, markets and agents, in order to make innovation (which, for them, is the ‘unit’ of economic evolution). In this view, the important bit of knowledge is what a given actor does with it; and therefore the knowing subject is the key economic actor in ‘cultural entrepreneurship’ (Swedberg, 2006). But as London cabbies have discovered, times change, and knowledge escapes the confines of the individual cranium. Competitors to the black-cab system, such as Uber or Ola and others,5 can manage without ‘the knowledge’ by using a digital, satellite-dependent Global Positioning System (GPS) Navigator. What a GPS ‘knows’ exceeds what any individual human could remember, so individual drivers need to know very little at all, yet can still navigate the system effectively. Knowledge is increasingly located outside the actor, and yet actions require its deployment. The evolutionary economists have ‘solved’ this problem by making a distinction between knowledge (individual, private) and ‘social understanding’ (a ‘socially distributed process’): Recognising that understanding is necessarily distributed leads to the insight that economic activity, which is necessarily social, depends on shared understandings, that is to say, correlated knowledge. This provides a clue as to the unpredictability and unevenness of knowledge accumulation, and of course the unpredictability of capitalism as a knowledge driven system. (Metcalfe and Ramlogan, 2005: 655)

Capitalism is a ‘knowledge driven system’, and it’s also ‘restless’. But it is a mistake to separate ‘knowledge’ and ‘social understanding’ because, as Metcalfe’s formula recognises, understanding is ‘necessarily distributed’ and knowledge is ‘correlated’. Each is both individual and networked at once, although it took quite a while for technology to catch up, enabling

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knowledge systems to accompany knowing subjects wherever they go, via personal devices, including browsers, apps and GPS. Mobility and unpredictability turn into a task – you don’t have to know where you are or where you’re going; you have to know how to search. For the purposes of this book, ‘knowledge’ covers both what is known and the social process of deploying and accessing it, because only by holding ‘social understanding’ together with ‘knowing subjects’ can we appreciate the social nature of knowledge itself. It does not originate ‘between the ears’ of individuals but in the ‘shared understandings’ of situated actors, who proceed without perfect knowledge; indeed, often enough without any at all. Further, knowledge has been institutionalised and encoded over many eons, in writing, archives, libraries, museums and among specialist professionals (bards, priests, singers, sages, gurus and poets). The latest step-changes in the technologies of knowledge, which have accelerated since the invention of the rotary press, electronic information storage (computation), broadcasting and the internet, have taken knowledge into the digital era, where it is even more radically decentralised. It can be accessed, processed, made and marred by just about anyone or, more important, by any purposeful group (‘knowledge club’). Individual ‘knowing subjects’ have to be literate in navigating knowledge systems without knowing their content, provenance or purposes directly, careful of faking and fabrication in any medium, practising scepticism of every ‘actor’ involved, including themselves. In short, knowledge cannot be divided into ‘private’ and ‘social’, except for the purpose of appropriating it as property. In reality, if not in economic legal fiction, all knowledge is social, which means it is imperial as well as personal (Richards, 1993).

‘And also plays’ What then is the unit of analysis for knowledge and creativity? At the very least, it is ‘two people, not one’. In this simple formula by playwright Tony Kushner (1995), the atomised ‘human unit’ is replaced by drama: ‘and also plays’: Together we organize the world for ourselves, or at least we organize our understanding of it ... Marx was right: The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs. And also plays. (Kushner, 1995: 40)6

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This ‘smallest indivisible human unit’ – the dyad – refutes the powerful tradition of the individual (unit) as the wellspring of ‘human life’ (system), in economics, psychology and the reductive social sciences (where reductive = explaining upwards from the ‘smallest particle’), not to mention in American national ideology, where the individual is always rugged, masculine and ungoverned. Referential to self-reflexive. Drama demands a different kind of knowledge: not based on assumed abstract universals (‘the brain’, ‘behaviour’), but on organised (systemic) context and plotted (dynamic) situation, where anything uttered has a point of view, that of the character speaking, ‘motivated’ not by the psyche but by the ‘plot’, or sequence of events, and intelligible only to the un-staged observer. This kind of knowledge tells about the relations and space between people as well as something about people themselves. Drama demands a reflexive and multiconscious understanding of itself as text – story, make-believe, putting on a performance. The actor’s mask signals that the ‘persona’ adopted is inevitably distant from the self who performs it. That meta or self-referential level also presumes the constant presence of deceit and lies (which is what a ‘play’ is made of) in the very place where truth is sought, and an understanding of conflicted opposition as a generative force. Or, as poet W.B. Yeats once put it, Love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement. For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent.7

Precision to probability. ‘Two people, not one’ is a formula for systems thinking, for non-linear causation, complexity and dynamic evolution, as opposed to mechanical causation, atomised units and equilibrium. Explanation that works up from the smallest unit aims at precision and predictability, while complex-adaptive systems yield stochastic probabilities. With the ascendance of the biosciences, computer sciences and big data, it is now unproblematic to say that reductive (‘smallest-unit’) sciences and complex-adaptive statistical (systems) sciences are both scientific. Equally, they generate different kinds of knowledge: one linear and law-forming (where change is explained as ‘exogenous shock’); the other networked and dealing in uncertainty (where change is integrated into ‘endogenous growth’).

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The first type seeks to achieve universal abstraction, independent of the analyst, where reality is one thing and knowledge another; the other recognises knowledge as part of the equation – endogenous to the system – including the language in which it is encoded and reflexive self-knowledge. It could be argued that ‘drama’ is now and always has been a ‘systems science’, using learned formulae in social settings to test complex systems for probable outcomes, which is why drama was part of government, from the Greeks to the Elizabethans, and why drama-media are so central to democratic and mass societies. Individual to social. However, as Erving Goffman (1959) demonstrated at length, drama and performance are the stuff of everyday life as well as Shakespearean tragedy, and everyone participates. In short, drama is cultural and social, whereas economics and psychology are individual and behavioural. Because this is so, we should not be surprised that the creative and performing arts, where drama achieves its most elaborate and professionalised forms, have often proven more responsive to cultural-social and textual-discursive analysis (i.e. to explanations based on relations and meanings) than to economic modelling and psychological experiment (i.e. to explanations based on choice and motivation). Public/private to art-science. It may be that using classical economics to analyse creative performance misses important aspects, resulting in an intellectually impoverished and often nonsensical reduction of drama to ‘the arts industry’ (Hewison, 2014), ‘bums on seats’, and irresolvable argument about whether the creative sector is a public good, precipitating national theatre companies, public broadcasters and philosophical discourses about truth and comportment, or a form of private consumption, invoking the entertainment industry, platform capitalism and economic discourses about price and profit. It may also turn out that confining ‘science’ to reductive, linear processes misses something important about drama, cultural and social life. Confining these to the arts and humanities (values), rather than opening what they are and what they do to the sciences (facts), is not the answer. It would be better to bring the two knowledge domains into mutual dialogue, for each to learn from the other. This move is in fact well overdue, because if we accept that there is more than one kind of science, and that probabilities/complexity are just as scientific as precision/units, then the necessary concepts and analytical

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tools are to hand, and the lengthy stand-off between the sciences and humanities can be resolved, to the benefit of both. This is one reason why studying the creative industries is worthwhile, because it is a practical domain in which these issues can be worked through. First, though, we must give up the idea that the creative industries are best studied by applying the existing axioms and methods of reductive science to them. What’s needed is mutuality and dialogue, where each type of knowledge has something to teach the other. That’s the aim of this book.

Behaviour to performance The ‘presentation of self’ as a group-performance (rather than as individual behaviour) has been analysed systematically at least since Erving Goffman (1959), who broached a ‘dramaturgical perspective’ for sociology to analyse social orders and interactions. This applies not only to the face-to-face ‘dyad’ of interpersonal communication, but also to the industrial-scale appropriation of the relevant codes in corporate mass media. Espen Ytreberg (2002) has argued that Goffman is in fact a media theorist as well as a social scientist. His insights into everyday life illuminate (and at the same time learn from) the scale, professionalism and organisational complexity of media institutions, where both professional broadcasters and their untutored media audiences must navigate largely unwritten rules about the performance of the self (Ytreberg, 2010) in order to communicate authenticity, ‘truthiness’ and thence reality to social as well as individual ‘units’. One of those unwritten rules is that drama is one thing (creative; don’t look at the camera) and reality is another (journalism; look them in the eye). Of course broadcasting, like print media before it and social media after it, has observed that rule only in the breach, as media studies has been pointing out for several decades. The most militant realism still needs to attract inattentive audiences before it can tell them any truth, let alone an inconvenient one. In short, drama, story and performance are ‘encoded’ by professionals and ‘decoded’ by audiences in the same way that everyday life is encountered and presented, such that truth, transparency and authenticity are rhetorical effects of well-coded social interaction and skilled performances, oriented to particular taste-constituencies.

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Peter Kivisto and Dan Pittman (2013) remind us that these professionalised selves are now common in everyday life, not just in media and drama. They show ‘how people create alternate realities’ in order to do their job, in this case insurance agents, Disney employees, flight attendants and car salespeople. Kivisto and Pittman analysed the dramaturgy deployed by these agents by observing them as actors: the situation (or frame), role, script, costume; the extent of deceit involved (does the actor perform their role as a realism, or cynically?); conflict (within the agent, between management and agent, and between agent and prospect); and the extent to which they reconcile these conflicts by acting professionally – putting on a good show for the purposes required, knowing that this is not who they are in real life. But, by that very token, the professionally performing self reduces any distinction between drama and reality. Kivisto and Pittman conclude that ‘social reality is a performed event’ – not ‘alternate’ at all but the thing itself. Social reality requires ‘two people, not one’ – and all that a systems approach implies. Written by a playwright like Tony Kushner, such a view could be dismissed as self-serving or special-pleading. Alternatively, if you take it seriously – as dialogue not monologue, involving not one but at least two interlocutors – then the author’s self-estimation or purpose is not the main point; it only matters when integrated with an interlocutor’s uptake and use of it. For instance, Kushner’s remark has been quoted several times by Tavi Gevinson, who has pursued a remarkable career as child fashion-blogger, teenage magazine editor and 20-something actor, most recently for a reboot of Gossip Girls. Gevinson experiments with different media, social and analogue, to share her interests and insights. Writing as editor of Rookiemag, which she founded at 15 to build a co-creative community for teen-girls, she wondered about her own legacy. She quoted Kushner’s critique of the ‘myth of the Individual’ in order to shift the question of legacy from ‘how good am I?’ based on ‘what others think of me’, to ‘leaving other people a blueprint for living truthfully. Showing people another way to exist, rather than proving something about yourself.’8 ‘Living truthfully’ and ‘showing people another way’; that’s the offer of drama. Kushner has been quoted as making a distinction between two types of dramatist: those ‘who ask small questions but give great answers (the traditionalists) and the ones who ask huge questions and often … fail … (the experimentalists, the vessel-breakers)’ (Fisher, 2002: x). Although

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conceding that ‘both are necessary’, Kushner’s ‘true persona’ is that of the ‘political’ writer, making ‘bold political statements’. He remains ‘committed to live theater’ and ‘truly requires the immediacy inherent in the platform live theater provides’ (p. x). Perhaps that explains the path Gevinson chose when she quit the world of selves (fashion, magazines and teen culture) to join that of stories (writing, acting and Mündigkeit), setting her direction by Kushner’s light, even though his essay was written before she was born. She entered into a dramatic dialogue with it, ensuring that it reverberated well beyond the theatrical world. She was not alone: Kushner’s ideas – and the quotation about ‘two people, not one’ – have been taken up in political philosophy, in discussions of human rights and the differences between individualism and citizenship, and in the question of what separates a consumer from a citizen, where they rub shoulders with Aristotle, Marx and Dewey (see Ahmed, 2018; Ferriter, 2018). Here we can see the dramatic clash between different systems of knowledge: ‘behavioural’ and ‘performative’. Behaviour is deemed to be inadvertent, untutored, naturalistic and can therefore be taken (by an external observer) as evidence of universal human motivations and actions for scientific purposes. Performance, on the other hand, is ‘knowing’, professional, self-reflexive and likely to have been rehearsed. It pervades society and selves – for example, via ‘gender performance’ and ‘acting in concert’ (Butler, 1990, 2004), or ‘passing’, including racial passing (Ginsburg, 1996; Nerad, 2014).9 It tells us about the relations between friend and foe, truth and lies; about how everyone is masked (careful about how and by whom they are ‘read’); how everyone is duplicitous (which need not be malicious; parents are adept) and yet unable to resolve the meaning of their own actions without the social and linguistic encounters in which they are encoded. A question for this book, and for any attempt to account for the creative industries, is whether the analyst is interested in ‘science’ or ‘friends’; profit or truth (Ramírez-i-Ollé, 2019)? As Kushner says, ‘both are necessary’ – the clash of dialogue and antagonistic systems yielding new knowledge.

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Notes 1.

For ‘The knowledge’, see: https://​tfl​.gov​.uk/​info​-for/​taxis​-and​-private​-hire/​ licensing/​learn​-the​-knowledge​-of​-london (accessed 5 October 2020). 2. See: https://​www​.abc​.net​.au/​news/​2020​-05​-25/​australian​-fake​-russian​-choir​ -dustyesky​-goes​-viral​-mullumbimby/​12270670 (accessed 5 October 2020); and https://​www​.northernstar​.com​.au/​videos/​dustyesky​-mullumgrad/​ 55509/​(accessed 5 October 2020). 3. For poppies, see: https://​www​.smithsonianmag​.com/​blogs/​national​ -museum​-of​-natural​-history/​2018/​11/​09/​100​-years​-ago​-poppies​-became​ -more​-just​-flowers/​(accessed 5 October 2020). 4. ‘Our cultural and creative future at the crossroads.’ Australian Academy of Humanities, 9 April 2020: https://​www​.humanities​.org​.au/​2020/​04/​09/​our​ -cultural​-and​-creative​-future​-at​-the​-crossroads/​ (accessed 5 October 2020). 5. See: https://​www​.standard​.co​.uk/​tech/​uber​-app​-alternatives​-london​-bolt​ -kapten​ -viavan​ -wheely​ -a4357906​ .html (accessed 5 October 2020). The cabbies’ co-op countered this move with their own ride-hailing app: https://​ www​.taxiapp​.uk​.com/​ (accessed 5 October 2020). 6. Tony Kushner’s best-known play is the Pulitzer and Tony award-winning Angels in America (1991–93), later a miniseries for HBO (2003). He is not related to Jared Kushner. 7. Source: https://​www​.poetryfoundation​.org/​poems/​43295/​crazy​-jane​-talks​ -with​-the​-bishop (accessed 5 October 2020). 8. ‘Work in progress’, Rookiemag, August 2018: https://​www​.rookiemag​.com/​ 2018/​08/​editors​-letter​-82/​(accessed 5 October 2020). Talk of legacy was significant: Gevinson closed Rookiemag later in 2018: https://​www​.rookiemag​ .com/​theme/​(accessed 5 October 2020). 9. For a revival of this theme in movies, see: https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​ film/​2018/​aug/​20/​passing​-film​-rebecca​-hall​-black​-white​-us​-rac (accessed 5 October 2020).

2.

Pop-up Globe – self to system, via story and semiosphere

Elgar’s Advanced Introduction titles are billed as ‘stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences … and law’. Already we are on uncertain ground. Some would see social sciences and law as one thing, creativity and the creative industries another, and academic specialisation continually draws these disciplines further apart. In the social sciences, ‘cultural industries’ is often the preferred term (Hesmondhalgh, 2019); in law, ‘copyright industries’ is more accurate (Viswanathan, 2019). For its part, ‘creative industries’ as a concept is an invention of practical politics, more taxicab knowledge than disciplinary science. Further, those who have written it up are ‘undisciplined’, in the sense that the study of creative industriousness, whether in individuals or in groups and places at scale, exceeds the methodological reach of any one discipline. Writing about creativity has itself tended towards creativity; to use an inductive method, more essay than experiment, placing the writing itself in the humanities or literary (or journalistic) domain, rather than in the precise sciences.

Radical romantic A good example of this is the work of the famous urbanist Jane Jacobs, which has proven widely influential in relation to the ‘creative city’ (see

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Chapter 5). When she died in 2006, her work was critically – and admiringly – appraised by Gert-Jan Hospers (2006), who comments: Jacobs used a large number of sources; she did not get her inspiration from the most recent scientific article, but in contrast, from classical works, popular-scientific bestsellers, autobiographies and national newspapers. (Hospers, 2006: 731)

Such an unsystematic approach meant that Jacobs was ‘anything but a city planner, economist or social scientist’. Hospers remarks that her methods were both ‘radical’ and ‘romantic’ (in the sense discussed below: see Chapter 4): ‘the most important motive for her to write a book was always dissatisfaction with the prevailing views’ (p.  731). Her ‘method’ was to redirect critical attention, both scientific and political, not to contribute ‘the most recent scientific article’. The idea was to cut through. Hospers lists ways in which her approach has, in turn, affected numerous sciences: –– Science: ‘bio mimicry’, using nature as a model for other systems. –– Economics: evolutionary economics. –– Exact subjects apply the evolutionary approach; from the workings of markets to city development. –– Urban planning: her vision of city diversity is of crucial importance. (Hospers, 2006: 732) The value of a creative approach to creative industries, then, is to integrate different types of knowledge: critical and romantic with scientific and political; theoretical and practical. Here, as in other circumstances, ‘the convergence of the twain’ (Thomas Hardy, 1912)1 may not feel very convergent. It may feel more like a clash of antagonists: not so much ‘sciences and law’ as ‘creative destruction’ (Schumpeter, 1942; see also Metcalfe, 1998). That is why a treatment such as this needs to be somewhat ‘undisciplined’. We need to break disciplinary bounds and explore knowledge systems beyond those of the formal disciplines in order to understand the sometimes painful and destructive creation of ‘newness’ (Hutter, 2018).2

‘We have nothing to lose but our future’ Although ‘creative industries’ is no longer a foot-in-the-door buzzword for policy consultants, the downturn in the concept’s intellectual stock

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value as an organising principle for short-term planning tells us little about its future potential. An advanced approach needs to focus on long-term investment strategy. Rather than moving along with the hype from creative industries (analogue arts) to, say, ‘smart cities’ (digital fluidity), I would like to hold the creative and digital together, to argue that a future-facing approach will integrate these inputs, a process that is still unfolding. Thus, for instance, with Jason Potts, I have proposed two ‘new’ creative industries, namely, blockchain and ‘staged conflict’.3 Potts, Rennie and Pochesneva (2019) have reported on ‘opportunities that can arise in a creative industries blockchain economy’. I mention them here simply to indicate that the full implications and potential of innovation will take time to unfurl. Transformational change at system scale cannot be predicted with precision. It emerges out of contextual probabilities, unimaginable when creative policy first flexed its muscles in city halls and ministerial boardrooms. New ideas can literally ‘pop up’ – from innovative art installations and entertainments to flash mobs and fashion-forward retail startups. We live in an age of pop-ups. Philosophy itself can return to its classical roots, when the Peripatetic (walking) School of philosophers, Aristotle and Plato among them, strolled the groves (for which the Greek word is ‘academy’) outside Athens, teaching citizens at leisure (for which the Greek word is ‘school’), who were ‘loitering and prating’ (as Thomas Hobbes put it in Leviathan: André Spicer positioned his folding chair outside numerous ‘stupidity-intensive spots’ around London), arguing their way into systematic thought. Now, after a long sequestration of philosophy into print and closed professional groups, it’s back on the streets.4 I wondered what a space where people could just think might look like … That’s how my experiment in pop-up philosophy began … I heard a voice coming from a white delivery van. ‘So what is truth?’ the driver yelled. ‘That’s what I’m trying to figure out,’ I replied before the lights changed and he drove away. (Spicer, 2017)

If philosophy can reinvent itself for the pop-up age, challenging the relations between producer and consumer, sage and scholar, we will need to be cautious about deciding in advance what constitutes a new creative industry. Consumer to producer. We will need to rethink ‘the consumer’ as an interlocutor, not just as the passive recipient of production, or even simply a ‘user’. Indeed, in the context of digital and technological acceleration, and

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the disruptions to modern, industrial and manufacturing societies that follow from the knowledge economy, consumer-creativity is a force of production – of both ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ (Beck, 2015). First, creative industries are not just a first-world booster phenomenon. Emergent and developing countries have used creative industries policy for development purposes. For them, ‘globalisation’ is not merely a Western ruse to hang on to declining world power, or an attempt to revivify rust-belt regions. Instead, creativity and the creative industries – as a policy lever – play the role that machine tools (as distinct from what those tools manufacture) play in industrial economies. They are not outputs but inputs to development. When China and other emergent economies invested big-time in a creative industries policy in the 2000s, it was not so that they could make yet more novel trinkets. It was to beat the Americans. It worked. Second and more important, a creative economy is just what is needed to confront global problems that affect ‘us’ all, as a species, especially our relations with the biosphere and the planet. In other words, ‘creative industries’ are an experimental platform for whole economies to work through what’s necessary to achieve sustainability, a regenerative economy, and to counter waste in the unfolding Anthropocene epoch. The shock-waves generated by the anticipation of global catastrophe, especially among youth movements like Fridays For Future or Extinction Rebellion, in turn generate new ideas, new groups and alliances (or commons), and new ‘policy’ objectives – ‘climate justice’, for instance. Meaning work to activism. Here, it is clear that creativity is an input into much more than business systems. It may be an agent of transformation for societies as a whole. But that is not an automatic or inevitable process. It requires what risk sociologist Ulrich Beck (2015: 80–81) calls ‘cultural work’ and ‘meaning work’. He writes: This meaning-work was to provide answers to the following questions: what is the nature of the threat? Is it death, health, economic breakdown, moral devastation? Who are the victims? How do they relate to the publics involved? Who is made responsible? And last but not least, what should the global community and individuals, communities and organizations, wherever they are now, be doing in response?

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His example is Hurricane Katrina (2005), which precipitated previously unthought of connections linking climate change, racial inequality and global justice, resulting in a prolonged and intense bout of ‘meaning work’ that itself precipitated further change. The relations among business, culture and politics, and between industry (human work) and environment (the Earth-system), were opened to a radical rethink, to the formation of new groups, for example, Common Ground Collective (Ilel, 2006), on to new modes of eco-activism and out to community-organised but globally synchronised protest action and climate strikes. From these emerged a new generation of leaders, of whom the best-known is Greta Thunberg (2019). One of her constant companions, the German climate activist Luisa Neubauer, was featured on the cover of the March 2020 edition of Rolling Stone, where she answers Ulrich Beck’s list of questions by posing a more urgent one: Why are things the way they are when they could have been different? We ask that at full volume, because we have nothing to lose – except our future.5

Top-down to bottom-up. The need for action outside the established institutions of deliberation and decision-making is spurred on by accelerating polarisation between authoritarian regimes and insurrectionary citizens. ‘Creative solutions’ are being imagined, demanded and implemented not simply by top-down policy (benefiting incumbent corporations and groups) but also by bottom-up agency (instituting population-wide dynamic change). Problems requiring ‘creative innovation’ within and beyond incumbent (and often sclerotic) institutions include: –– social divides (inequality) –– authoritarian control (technical, political, commercial) –– unsustainable waste (of people, planet and words). Rather than capturing creativity and the economy to benefit individual winners, unaccountable enterprises and aggressive-parochial ‘we’-groups, as the current version of libertarian liberalism wants, ‘open-source’ solutions can prioritise: –– openness (as part of regulated control) –– proportion (as a guide to sustainability) –– knowledge (as the test of inequality) across whole populations, and between Global North and South.

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In this context, the domain of ‘public thought’ is itself a ‘creative industry’, where innovation from the margin and translation across hostile borders may be seen as vital components of future-facing economic theory and practice in general (Hartley, Wen and Li, 2015). In this book I adapt this general perspective to the creative economy as it has been conceptualised and utilised so far, to arrive at what may seem an unexpected new horizon: not the arts-trained, tech-dependent public/private sector of the growth economy, but some of the new work being done around ‘circular economics’ and ‘regenerative culture’. This is where the creative industries are heading, not always knowingly and, sometimes, by taking new ideas not to the academy or marketplace but to the streets.

Bottom-up analysis, Pop-up Globe Perhaps we can start by integrating ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches. Indeed, we can start literally at Bottom, for that is the name that the English-speaking world’s top creative artist, William Shakespeare, gave to one of his most endearing and enduring characters. Nick Bottom, weaver and ‘rude mechanical’, is a character (and ham actor) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, still regularly produced around the world after more than 400 years. I recommend Michael Hoffman’s 1999 film version, which is faithful, funny and fantastical, with Kevin Kline as Bottom, Stanley Tucci as Puck, and the all-important women’s parts played by Michelle Pfeiffer, Calista Flockhart, Anna Friel and Sophie Marceau.6 The play itself abounds in top/bottom fun and trickery, as courtiers, fairies and tradesmen ‘jostle each other in glorious juxtaposition’, as director Miles Gregory has put it. He makes the point: In Athens there are a group of tradesmen, often called the ‘mechanicals’, ‘hard-handed men’ who are honest, everyday people. In our production they wear modern dress as ‘tradies’. In some ways these supposedly ‘comic’ characters are the most truthful in the play. They are earnest, kind, people, who are in awe of the dramatic possibilities of the play. (Pop-up Globe Programme, 2019) 7

POP-UP GLOBE

Figure 2.1

Pop-up Globe, Perth, Australia 2019. (a) Exterior, (b) A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Source: Photos by author.

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The production Miles Gregory refers to was performed in his own Pop-up Globe, which is itself a terrific example of creative newness. As always, it is a ‘convergence’ of many elements, combined in new ways to produce something unique. The building is a reimagined-replica of Shakespeare’s second Globe Theatre of 1613, except that this one is made of 16,000 individual pieces of scaffolding, clad with advertising-vinyl printed with Shakespeare’s verses. The stage, together with its doors, galleries, pillars, roofed ‘heavens’ and classical ‘frons scenae’, is at once minimalist and convincing (Figure 2.1). The whole edifice is large, impressive – and portable. Like an old-fashioned Big-Top circus, it comes to town (in mine it was erected in the car park of the local casino), puts on a varied repertoire, then packs up and leaves. Or, as Shakespeare put it in The Tempest (IV:1): These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind.

The plays are both ‘straight’, true to the text, and ‘modified’, with production routines that ‘make Shakespeare playful, subversive’, and in ‘direct connection with our audience’. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream,8 for instance, the three worlds of that play – courtiers, fairies and mechanicals – are reimagined for a modern antipodean audience. The courtiers, including the spellbound lovers, are costumed in ‘traditional’ Elizabethan style. The tradies, including Bottom, wear hi-vis jackets and hardhats. Most innovatively, although not without criticism (Hyland, 2018), the spirits of the forest are translocated to Aotearoa New Zealand, where Pop-up Globe originates. Titania, Oberon and Puck are played by Māori actors, who utter no word in English: ‘Māori actors wearing approximations of pre-contact native dress, adorned with feathers and carvings, waving patu and rākau. Large passages of text are uttered in te reo Māori’ (Mazer, 2019: 3).9 Class, colonialism, sexism are as contested issues now as they were in Shakespeare’s day. Here they are given a new twist, albeit in a play that

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starts with forebodings of tragedy and ends with reconciliation, love and marriage. The production is played for comedy but its staging reminds audiences of inconvenient truths hiding in plain sight. Because of the precarious status of Indigenous languages in Aotearoa and even more so in Australia, and because Shakespearean drama has been a ritual of the coloniser populations, contemporary entertainment rarely uses Indigenous languages. Times may be changing. Noongar actor Kylie Farmer performed her translation into Noongar language of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’) at the ‘Sonnet Olympics’ in London’s Globe Theatre in 2012. As Kylie Bracknell, working with Noongar artist Clint Bracknell, she initiated the ‘Noongar Shakespeare Project’, including a full-length translation of Macbeth, performed in 2020 by the Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company under the title of Hecate.10 In the Pop-up Globe, audiences are treated to ‘spectacular fight sequences, blood spattering the crowd. Laugh out loud comedies and breathtaking dance sequences’. They are presented with ‘expert storytelling’ designed to make the experience ‘like a party’. In short, ‘we make Shakespeare that is playful, subversive, and makes a direct connection with our audience’ (Miles Gregory, programme note). But of course audiences bring a contemporary sensibility and literacy – and digital devices – to the performance. They may be reminded of other pop-culture treatments, such as: –– British TV sitcom: Upstart Crow (2016–20), where Shakespeare’s housekeeper is called Ned Bottom –– a Barbadian adaptation: A Caribbean Dream (2017) –– various genre movies like romcom Get Over It with Kirsten Dunst (2001) –– teen romance: A Midsummer Night’s Rave (2002) –– horror movie: A Midsummer’s Nightmare, with Courtney Love (2017). Contemporary audiences may know nothing of Shakespeare’s life or times. No matter: the Pop-up Globe caters for all. They even allow visitors to take photos or videos. The ambience (and the stage-set) is more Glastonbury than Stratford. Shakespeare remains the main attraction, however. The daring staging, casting and choreography are all purposed towards a ‘direct’ experience of the plays, bringing new life to them for many visitors (over 650,000 from 2016 to 2019). The model is not ‘theatre’ but ‘touring music’, which

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is itself (at least until COVID-19) a vibrant component of the creative industries, where musicians and singers earn most of their revenue.11 By 2020 the Pop-up Globe itself was ready to go global.12 I invoke it here to draw attention to different ways in which it, and the creative industries more generally, can be characterised as global. –– Representational: ‘The Globe’ and the goings-on within it represent humanity in microcosm, as did the original London theatre. –– Temporal: it travels the globe as a migrant playhouse, with an international cast playing multiple roles. The building itself is recyclable and regenerative. –– Institutional-economic: like education, tourism and welfare services, the creative arts and cultural industries have had to globalise their productions to stay afloat. –– Professional: the players and crew are what was called in Elizabethan times ‘vagrants’, people untethered from parish or class, or even gender, who promote cosmopolitanism as an everyday practice. The Pop-up Globe is an analogue experience, like the festival industry, where roadies, stage designers, constructors and a multitasking travelling company take centre stage, and where the audience experiences sociality with one another as well as a professional production. The digital element is supplied by the audience, sharing their videos or pictures on Instagram and so on, where #popupglobe had collected 16,500 posts when I last looked. Pop-up – or pot up? Soon, the coronavirus crisis put paid to live performance and massed audiences across the globe, along with many other analogue manifestations of human sociality. One response to that was to convert participation into digital form, with virtual ensembles playing or singing in separate places, with their performances ‘orchestrated’ through Zoom, Webex and others. One version hosted by the Sydney Opera House staged Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ (from his Ninth Symphony) as a community choral event. The chorus attended the live workshop via the Opera House website or Facebook, while the soloists and accompanists played on the Joan Sutherland Theatre stage.13 Not to be outdone, Madrid-based artist Eugenio Ampudia and the Max Estrella gallery took over the plush Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, to mount what was billed as ‘its first performance with a live audience

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post-coronavirus’. A string quartet played Puccini to a live audience, but the organisms luxuriating in the red velvet seats and among the gold balconies were not people but ‘2,292 palms, ficus trees, and Swiss-cheese plants’. This was a ‘Concert for the Biocene’, perhaps the first of that name. Artist Eugenio Ampudia was quoted as saying: I thought why don’t we go into the Liceu like weeds, take it over and let nature start growing everywhere and turn it into something alive even when there are no people. (Colossal)14

After this pioneering post-human performance, the pot plants were donated to healthcare workers who’d been battling the virus.

From story to semiosphere Is it possible to capture the ways in which creative performances are organised and coordinated at scale? So far we have noted that creativity is social, dialogic, contextual and global. Given that it is not only performed in professional productions with capital-intensive budgets but also in everyday social practices common to the entire species, the question of what is meant by ‘global’ in relation to creativity cannot be dodged. Can ‘creative industries’ be a viable concept at global scale, with respect to both ‘creative’ and ‘industries’? Global industries? ‘Globalisation’ as an analytic concept has routinely been confined to the ‘industrial’ component: the internationalisation of trade (on terms favourable to hegemonic countries), in economics, business studies and law (e.g. Caves, 2000; Frey, 2003; Howkins, 2009; Towse, 2020; Throsby, 2001). One viewpoint, held strongly in the European Union (EU), founded on the debris of two World Wars and a Cold War, holds that the internationalisation of trade promotes world peace. As economist Martin Kocher has put it: ‘economic integration is empirically by far the best means for reducing the chance of violent conflict between jurisdictions’ (2020). This perspective certainly goes beyond the narrowly industrial, but it makes everything non-economic (‘world peace’) dependent on economics – a classic linear view.

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Kocher goes on to say that, unfortunately, ‘there are signs we have reached a political limit’. He names three developments that have provoked resistance to globalisation: –– protectionism and nationalism –– environmental conservation and climate change –– digitalisation and Asian catch-up. The ‘political limit’ is, however, unevenly distributed among international populations. Those who benefit from globalisation and those who are disadvantaged by it (to say nothing of those who oppose it politically while benefiting from it socioeconomically) are now kept apart by something other than national boundaries. ‘The dividing lines are less and less between countries and more and more within countries.’ Globalisation and digitalisation benefit the ‘well educated’ and ‘seem to hurt those who are less educated and mobile’. For Kocher (2020), the ‘key to making globalization more inclusive is education’. Economically, globalisation needs to be ‘reformed and reframed’. ‘The outcome could be a positive notion and connotation of “re-globalization” meaning, in essence, “better globalization.”’ Globalisation ceases to be an economic or even a political problem: education, mobility, flexibility, ‘positive notions’ and ‘connotations’ all belong to culture and language, the glue of groups. One of the things for which globalisation (of trade) seems to be responsible is the ‘creative destruction’ of groups at scale – nation-states, classes, language-communities; they’re all chucked in the melting-pot. Populations are irreducibly multicultural, multi-ethnic and culturally diverse. Cities, international firms and global media platforms are more salient from their point of view than formal ‘jurisdiction’ (national legislatures, law enforcement and taxation). What it means to be a citizen is now a rhetorical and semiotic matter, not one of ethnoterritorial descent or common language and culture. Global cultures? Here’s where the ‘creative’ element re-enters the picture with a vengeance. Of course, culture was being theorised at global scale long before the concept of the creative industries was weaponised, as it were, in public policy in the 1990s. Culture was already seen as the chief means to bond populations and to signal personal and group-identity. One may say that the humanities – that branch of knowledge that first broke from ‘the divinities’ and then from ‘the sciences’ – has been thinking collectively about creativity of this type for over 400 years, since the

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emergence of modern textual and dramatic criticism (e.g. of Shakespeare), philosophical interest in selfhood (e.g. Bacon, Hobbes) and the uptake of Cicero’s creative view of history: History is indeed the witness of time, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity: by what other voice, than that of the orator, can it be passed into immortality?15

The last ‘Renaissance man’, swashbuckling Sir Walter Raleigh, who colonised Virginia and Guiana, among other experiments in globalisation, was also one of the first modern historians, oratorical messenger of antiquity at the exact moment when modernity destroyed it (Hawkes, 2002). He prefaced his History of the World (1614), written while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London, with a nod to these words of Cicero (the last Roman Republican, whose extrajudicial beheading ushered in the Empire).16 Raleigh also remarked: ‘Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.’ So he posed this question: ‘may it not be said that, in speaking of the past, I point at the present, and tax the vices of those that are yet living, in their persons that are long since dead?’ Answer: if anyone – like King James I, who eventually had him beheaded (1618) – finds themselves ‘spotted like the tigers of old time … they shall therein accuse themselves justly’ (Tytler, 1833: 335): In a word, we may gather out of history a policy no less wise than eternal, by the application and comparison of other men’s forepast miseries with our own like errors and ill-deservings. (quoted in Tytler, 1833: 337)

Learning policy from the past is a wise move, but Cicero’s voice of truth was apt to cost early modern orators their teeth, or eventually their head. The arts of writing and knowledge are also weapons in power politics. Even after 400 years, it seems that ‘the tigers of old’ may still pack a punch, so it takes creativity to tell stories in such a way that the truth may be told, the lesson learned, and the creative artist keep their teeth. Inevitably, over the intervening centuries, the arts of rhetoric (oratory) have migrated towards the methods of science, where evidence does the talking. Those who wish to ‘speak truth to power’ remain well advised to present the ‘magistra vitae’, ‘teacher of life’, as an objective, dispassionate scientist, not as a partisan opponent. This trend has certainly altered the balance between the humanities and sciences. Economics uses the mathe-

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matical rhetoric of sciences, while creativity is still relying on what cynical observers call ‘virtue-signalling’ (Miller, 2019). Economics may not grasp the whole story, but it has the ear of government. The humanities may lean towards the ‘light of truth, life of memory and message of the past’, but in the corridors of power they are regarded with suspicion as unreliable witnesses – leaning too much on values and ideologies that are of little practical use to states, bureaucracies and governors.

Systems science for global culture Nevertheless, it is from the most literary and text-centred branch of the humanities that the most compelling global model of creative human expression has come. This is cultural semiotician Yuri Lotman’s (1984 [2005], 1990) concept of the semiosphere (see Hartley, Ibrus and Ojamaa, 2020). Lotman coined the term to match and extend the concept of the biosphere, developed early in the twentieth century by biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky. Vernadsky visualised the Earth-system in geological or mineralogical terms, as a sequence of overlaying strata, conforming to the geological time scale, which has subsequently become much more precise and more widely accepted.17 Lotman’s innovation, which is still better known in literary studies than in the sciences where it also belongs, is to overlay the biosphere with the semiosphere. Just as archaeology followed geology in correlating time and strata, and Vernadsky conceptualised the biosphere as a thin layer or envelope of planetary extent, so Lotman defined the semiosphere as a planetary system. He quotes Vernadsky’s case for the ‘primacy of the biosphere’ as a system that includes all living organisms and their interrelationships, including ‘thinking beings’, and concludes: The semiotic universe may be regarded as the totality of individual texts and isolated languages as they relate to each other … All semiotic space may be regarded as a unified mechanism (if not organism). In this case, primacy does not lie in one or another sign, but in the ‘greater system’, namely the semiosphere. The semiosphere is that same semiotic space, outside of which semiosis itself cannot exist. (Lotman, 1984 [2005]: 207–8)

This establishes the study of the semiosphere as a ‘system science’, whose object of study is not just individual texts (or species) but their ‘totality …

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as they relate to each other’ – in other words, the space of possibility for meaningfulness (not just an aggregate of meanings).18 Lotman explains the difference: Just as, by sticking together individual steaks, we don’t obtain a calf, but by cutting up a calf, we may obtain steaks, – in summarizing separate semiotic acts, we don’t obtain a semiotic universe. On the contrary, only the existence of such a universe – the semiosphere – makes the specific signatory act real. (Lotman, 1984 [2005]: 208)

A ‘semiotic universe’ is the ‘unit’ of analysis for all ‘semiosis’, including creative expression and its communication at planetary scale, via globalised human interaction and digital technologies. The implication for the study of the creative industries is clear: it’s not sufficient to concentrate on one individual talent or one sector or product (it’s just a steak); if we are to understand what the creative industries make, what they are for, and how they have evolved over ‘deep time’, then we must view them as a whole (like the calf), and focus on their systemic relationships, cultural functions and mechanisms. I have laboured this point throughout this chapter, because, oh dear, historical actuality took a different turn. As it entered policy discourse, academic institutionalisation and practical common sense, ‘creative industries’ was imagined not as a cultural system but as alienable property. Each creative artefact, mentifact or sociofact was reduced to something that a person (or ‘legal person’, i.e. a firm) could own and exploit in private competition with the community for which its creative potential held value. It was like someone saying the atmosphere is property, then telling you what you have to pay for every breath you take. We will return later on to the implications of choosing ‘self’ over ‘system’, ‘privatising’ the ‘common meanings’ of the semiosphere. First, it is time to turn to the history that actually transpired, once that crucial choice was made.

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Notes 1.

2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ was written to commemorate the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912. See Mark Richardson, The Dabbler, 30 April 2012: http://​thedabbler​.co​.uk/​2012/​04/​convergence​ -of​ -the​ -twain/​(accessed 5 October 2020). For the poem, see: https://​ www​.poetryfoundation​.org/​poems/​47266/​the​-convergence​-of​-the​-twain (accessed 5 October 2020). For a systematic model of the concept of the ‘cultural sources of newness’, see the discussion paper by Michael Hutter (WZB) and colleagues: https://​ bibliothek​.wzb​.eu/​pdf/​2010/​iii10​-405​.pdf (accessed 5 October 2020). See: https://​medium​.com/​@​jason​.potts/​two​-new​-creative​-industries​ -blockchain​-and​-staged​-conflict​-830c2e9a5c24 pdf (accessed 5 October 2020). See also Hartley, Ibrus and Ojamaa (2020). See also the recent vogue for walking meetings: https://​www​.arthurholm​ .com/​aristotle​-wearables​-joy​-walking​-meetings/​ pdf (accessed 5 October 2020). See also: https://​www​.iep​.utm​.edu/​academy/​pdf (accessed 5 October 2020). Source, Instagram @luisaneubauer: https://​www​.instagram​.com/​p/​ B9laD0QK3AW/​?igshid​=​cqwosxt7hlzf (in German, pdf) (accessed 5 October 2020). See: https://​www​.imdb​.com/​title/​tt0140379/​(you can find it on Prime) pdf (accessed 5 October 2020). Gregory explains: ‘I was reading Nancy, my daughter, a bedtime story. It was a picture pop-up book and one of the pop-ups was the Globe theatre. Nancy asked whether we could go there. I said, “we can’t. The nearest Globe replica is a long way away ...” Then I stopped and thought ... a Pop-up Globe ... And now here we are’ (https://​blakenz​.org/​posts/​2018/​6/​7/​miles​-gregory, pdf, accessed 5 October 2020) See: https://​isolatednation​.com/​articles/​2019/​10/​25/​theatre​-review​-pop​ -up​-globes​-midsummer​-is​-an​-antipodean​-dream pdf (accessed 5 October 2020). The programme notes: ‘We are very fortunate to have secured a brilliant new translation of these elements of the play by Pierre Lyndon, who has worked with Associate Director Te Kohe Tuhaka; Designer, Shona Tawhaio; and a team of creative consultants and talented actors to bring the fairies to life’ (Miles Gregory). https://​yirrayaakin​.com​.au/​production/​the​-noongar​-shakespeare​ See: -project/​. For Hecate, see: https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​culture/​2020/​feb/​ 11/​hecate​-is​-often​-erased​-from​-shakespeares​-macbeth​-now​-shes​-centre​ -stage​-in​-noongar​-language pdf (accessed 5 October 2020). For the sonnet, see this TEDx talk by Kylie, who performs the poem at the end of the talk: https://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​IrvDQB9ql3w pdf (accessed 5 October 2020). See, for instance, https://​www​.businessinsider​.com​.au/​how​-do​-musicians​ -make​-money​-2018​-10​?r​=​US​&​IR​=​T pdf (accessed 5 October 2020).

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12. See: https://​www​.ausleisure​.com​.au/​news/​pop​-up​-globe​-to​-be​-seen​-by​ -international​-audiences​-as​-of​-2020/​ pdf (accessed 5 October 2020). 13. See ‘Learn to sing “Ode to Joy” with the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs | Digital Season’: https://​www​.sydneyoperahouse​.com/​digital/​season/​classical​-music/​ make​-music​-day​-workshop​-spc​-live​.html pdf (accessed 5 October 2020). 14. Source: Colossal (23 June 2020): https://​www​.thisiscolossal​.com/​2020/​06/​ liceu​-plant​-performance/​pdf (accessed 5 October 2020); and see: https://​ www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​rgvadprJFRc​&​feature​=​emb​_titl pdf (accessed 5 October 2020). 15. For Cicero’s words, see: https://​www​.nationalgeographic​.com/​history/​ magazine/​2019/​01​-02/​death​-of​-cicero​-and​-the​-roman​-republic/​ pdf (accessed 5 October 2020). 16. Cicero features in Raleigh’s frontispiece: https://​www​.canterbury​-cathedral​ .org/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2018/​06/​Elham​-70​-frontispiece​.jpg pdf (accessed 5 October 2020). An accompanying text by Lily Hawker-Yates (Canterbury Christ Church University) contextualises and explains the image: https://​ www​.canterbury​-cathedral​.org/​heritage/​archives/​picture​-this/​sir​-walter​ -raleighs​-history​-of​-the​-world/​pdf (accessed 5 October 2020). See also N. Popper (2012). 17. English Wikipedia has helpful entries on stratification and timeline diagrams. See, for instance, Geologic time scale; Chronological dating; Stratigraphy; Biosphere; Harris matrix (and links within these). 18. For a discussion on the general usefulness of the concept of a possibility space, see: https://​www​.edge​.org/​response​-detail/​10071 pdf (accessed 5 October 2020).

3.

Art to smart – creative content and digital connection

Highbrow to high tech ‘Creative industries’ was a smart idea, but it was spawned in the crucible of national politics, emerging neither from economic theory nor from the academic disciplines devoted to creativity. The problem that this new formulation was meant to solve was chiefly political (both party-political and public administration). This meant straight away that the term would face bemusement and hostility among social and cultural theorists, which duly ensued. Among established disciplines, ‘creative industries’ has been regarded as a bastard concept ever since. What was the political problem it was meant to solve? In 1997, a lengthy period of Thatcherite-Conservative government in the UK came to an end when ‘New Labour’, led by Tony Blair, won a general election with an unexpectedly whopping majority of 179 seats. As the party of ordinary working people, with a mandate to reform and modernise, Labour had to steer a path between its support for the arts and its support for democratisation. The arts were understood as a public good, of value as a national asset, but they were actually patronised by a small minority, easily perceived as elites (a ‘wedge’ issue readily exploited by the tabloid press), especially in those branches that attracted highest subsidy and fewest paying customers, like opera and the orchestras. ‘Democratisation’ of culture was largely catered for commercially, via popular culture (although jaundiced critics called this ‘demotic’ rather than ‘democratic’ culture). Even so, public subsidy in the UK for elite 32

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and community arts, broadcasting and performance had been supported since World War II. The popularity of the BBC survived the hostility of Thatcherite ‘deregulation’, to be followed by some deft (but internally disliked) manoeuvring under Director General John Birt (1992–2000), with a pivot from ‘highbrow’ to ‘high tech’, as Reithian ‘education by stealth’ gave way to digital innovation, well ahead of other UK media, both fictional (entertainment) and factual (journalism).1 Historically, Labour had resolved the elite/democratic paradox by promoting the idea of ‘public culture’, which put the arts on the same footing as the public sector (the National Health Service) and public services (the BBC), both of which had enjoyed long-standing electoral popularity in the UK. The concept of the public enlarged in this period, including a large direct labour force employed by government agencies, including arts and culture workers. It was easy for the Labour Party to contrast itself with the opposing Conservatives by supporting public culture, while the Tories favoured private enterprise, with increasing adherence to neoliberal policies of free-market economics (personified by Milton Friedman). That ideological binarism in turn forced progressives to defend the public sector as a source of employment rather than creative innovation. But the incoming Blair government was banking on reform, and wanted to find a ‘third way’ (Giddens, 2000) to bring habitual opposites together. In this case they wanted to separate public culture from public spending, and to rethink ‘the arts’ as ‘enterprise’, as part of their larger project to increase social mobility and to modernise the economy. In a ‘mixed economy’, they wanted to use political action to complement and improve the ‘essential function of markets’, not simply to oppose them. In third-way thinking, in the words of Massimo D’Alema, Prime Minister of Italy, culture was seen as ‘the most important form of social inclusion’ (Giddens, 2000: chapter 1). Therefore, it was worthy of public investment, even while public spending, no longer seen as the measure of commitment to social justice, was curtailed. Anyone who follows politics can see that this is going to end badly (O’Farrell, 2018: chapter 1). But first, the New Labour administration got on with it, aided by a satellite constellation of journalists, think-tanks and publishers (e.g. Charlie Leadbeater, Kate Oakley, John Howkins, Demos, Nesta, Polity Press). The government commissioned a task force to identify the creative sector of the economy, and converted the existing

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ministry for national heritage into the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), with Chris Smith as Culture Secretary at cabinet rank. It was here that politics (oratory) turned into policy (public administration), and ‘creative industries’ was born. As Chris Smith himself wrote: In 1998 – as Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in the newly-elected Labour government – I published a book, Creative Britain. In it, I argued that the arts were for everyone, not just the privileged few; and that the creative industries – dependent for their success on individual artistic creativity – had moved from the fringes to the centre of the UK economy. (Chris Smith)2

The idea was to reconfigure the arts as wealth-creating (not welfare spending) and to support creativity as enterprise (like industry policy) rather than as a public good. The ‘public good’ approach had brought with it, they thought, a sense of funding-entitlement among grand arts institutions, without accountability to ‘ordinary citizens’ or commitment to economic growth and innovation. A shake of Schumpeterian disruption was overdue. The official definition was approved by DCMS in 2001. It has since been much copied around the world. It covers: those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property. (DCMS, 2015: 4)

This formula is far from inclusive, because that is not its purpose. Its primary purpose is to make creativity parse with the economy, by converting public creativity into private property, which can be owned by a natural person (‘origin in individual creativity’) and traded by companies (‘through exploitation of intellectual property’). No room here for social creativity (e.g. creative arts in Indigenous or traditional societies), or for creativity that is freely shared (as in language, culture and custom, which can’t be copyrighted). From the start there were difficulties about what should be included in the ‘definition’ of the creative industries. Some versions included aspects of digital culture, including software (John Howkins) and the manufacture of CDs (UNESCO), both of which expanded (or inflated) the value of the sector in national accounts. The commercial art market and antiques (and thus furniture) were in because this was the UK, but tourism was out because it belonged to another ministry. Because this was a national

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jurisdiction, creative activities at regional level, in first-languages like Welsh among the home nations, and in multicultural communities (post-imperial and EU-migrant), were forgotten too. Games (especially computer games) were out, as was cuisine. Sport was included in the department’s portfolio but not integrated into creative industries categories. With media, sport lent the popular element to culture.3 Media were included because the UK was a major international producer of broadcasting and the press, although it had already failed to compete successfully with IBM in the ‘global tech-giant’ race for computational dominance, even as part of the EU. The British player in that field had been ICL, formed in the 1960s when Tony Benn was the relevant minister, but finally absorbed by Fujitsu in 2002; leaving the digital field untended while analogue arts were rebranded as wealth-creating. By 2015, DCMS policy documents refined the list to include: –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– ––

Advertising and marketing Architecture Crafts Design: product, graphic and fashion design Film, TV, video, radio and photography IT, software and computer services Publishing Museums, galleries and libraries Music, performing and visual arts (DCMS, 2015).

By 2019, DCMS had revised its name so that the D stands for Digital (replacing Department), and simplifying its message to: ‘We champion innovation and creativity.’4

The methodology is the artwork Uncertainty remained about whether a particular industry or enterprise was creative, and how you could tell. In 2015 a new concept based on occupations was introduced into official statistics: ‘creative intensity.’ This describes those industries employing a sufficient ‘proportion of the work-

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force in creative occupations’ compared with the economy as a whole. How to determine ‘creative intensity’? The methodology comprises three steps. First, a set of occupations are identified as creative. Second, creative intensity is calculated for all industries in the economy. Third, all industries with a creative intensity above a certain ‘threshold’ are classified as Creative Industries. (DCMS, 2015)

To arrive at this method, DCMS moved beyond the usual warrant for administrative action (ministerial will), leaving room for advice from lobbyists, consultants and academic centres of excellence: Uncertainties in the data mean that it is particularly important to review industries with creative intensities around the threshold level, so the final classification has also drawn on feedback gathered from stakeholders through consultation. (DCMS, 2015: 4)

In a rapidly changing environment, uncertainty of definition was acceptable, so long as the primary aim was achieved: to demonstrate that the creative industries are a significant component of Britain’s economic activity. Here, there was good news to report: employment, gross added value, and exports attributable to the creative industries were all up (DCMS, 2015). Hasan Bakhshi (2014), a former Treasury economist working at Nesta, argued that the process of measuring was itself a contribution to innovation policy, because the methodology was able to accommodate both uncertainty (which occupations are creative?) and accuracy (statistical methods for allocating them). This methodology was called ‘Dynamic Mapping’ (Bakhshi, Freeman and Higgs, 2013). First, a definition of creative occupations was required: ‘Creative roles were defined as those which deploy cognitive skills to bring about novelty whose final form cannot be fully specified in advance’ (Bakhshi, 2014). Note that the determinant of a creative occupation does not depend on the artistry of the maker or on the creation of intellectual property, but on ‘the development of novel ideas and artefacts’ (Bakhshi, Frey and Osborne, 2015: 14). This definition changes the purpose of creative endeavour: it’s not identified with artistic expression but future-facing national competitiveness; not part of national heritage or ‘common meanings’ but culture as innovation.

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The Dynamic Mapping methodology itself was algorithmic, probabilistic, not ‘sensitive to the subjective priors of experts’: Nesta used detailed data on job task descriptions and machine learning techniques to identify a wider range of occupations as creative. Nesta then calculated the percentage of the workforce in a creative occupation in every industry in the UK economy (in other words, its creative intensity) and analysed how this creative intensity was distributed across different sectors. (Bakhshi, Frey and Osborne, 2015: 8)

It threw up some surprises when contrasted with the DCMS categories of creative occupations (Figure 3.1). For example, ‘Actuaries, economists and statisticians’ and ‘Social and humanities scientists’ were assessed by Nesta as having a higher ‘creative probability’ than more than half of DCMS’s own ‘creative occupations’ (Bakhshi, Frey and Osborne, 2015: 14). Bakhshi draws an important conclusion from this about the creative (innovative) role of methodologies and mapping as creative occupations: The brief history of the creative industries and the creative economy shows that robust and transparent ways of defining, classifying and measuring new and rapidly evolving sectors of the economy contributes to their being recognised and legitimised, not just by policymakers but also suppliers, educators and investors. In fact, it may turn out that the development of a rigorous mapping framework is one of the primary ways in which governments can support new industries, mapping as innovation policy. (Bakhshi, 2014)

The take-out lesson of this is that thinking is a maker; analysis is creative; knowledge is the causal force of innovation. Thus, the formal disciplines of economics, humanities and social sciences perform what they analyse. The sign-systems by which cultural-economic actions are known are endogenous to the system they describe (in complexity jargon they are autopoietic or self-creating; and reflexive or knowledge-about-knowledge), such that those actions ‘perform’ how they are known (Herrmann-Pillath, 2013). At some level of abstraction economic ‘models’ are fictions: that is, imagined worlds realised in codes derived from human thought not physical phenomena. At a certain scale of uptake these play a creative role in imagining the economies they describe into real existence. Hence, scholarship (e.g. the present book) is part of the creative economy. It produces future-facing novel ideas, some of which are taken up (by readers)

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as innovations in socioeconomic practice, causing unpredictable changes downstream.

Figure 3.1

Creative intensity by occupation

Source: Nesta (Bakhshi, Frey and Osborne, 2015: 13–14).

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Creative global The Brits are well connected around the world, not only because there is an abiding people-to-people skiamorph (shadow-shape) of empire in Commonwealth cultural and educational exchange programmes, but also because the UK government maintains active international agencies, including the British Council. This body pursues a global ‘education + arts + trade’ agenda, an inspired combination that now includes a dedicated Creative Economy team. This outfit initiates and supports worldwide programmes to promote creative enterprise, communities (‘hubs’), cities and tech. British Council initiatives use ‘traditional research and peer learning’ – naturally, mostly British, which is why the work of Bakhshi and others remains internationally significant – as the basis for ‘our ongoing dialogues with policy makers in the countries where we work’. In other words, the British Council targets leadership cadres and change-makers, aiming to exchange know-how and education in arts and culture for trade (e.g. Bahkshi, 2014). They claim that ‘this has led to long-term change at government level, for example cultural industries and enterprise hubs being included in national strategies’.5 Like any other public body they are subject to austerity cuts, but still they have made their presence felt in jurisdictions as varied as Greater China, Russia, the former Yugoslavia, Vietnam, South Asia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, often directly advising government ministers on creative industries policy for developing and emergent economies. At the same time, many other transnational agencies have developed creative economy policies and programmes, including the United Nations (UN) (via their cultural agency UNESCO and the development agency UNDP), the EU, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Others such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) commissioned reports on ‘national innovation systems’ that dovetail with the creative economy agenda at multiple points. Some of these agencies and treaty organisations were focused on economic development (e.g. the UN), but others, like WIPO and the World Trade Organization (through TRIPS, the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights), were used to enforce US-led efforts

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to globalise their own markets, and only incidentally to stimulate the economy of trading partners. Enter the dragoon. Here at last is where the USA enters the narrative; not as a leader or competitor in creative research, policy or enterprise as such, but as the hegemonic global enforcer, policing intellectual property on behalf of its own ‘copyright industries’, seeking untrammelled entry for its own (but not China’s) global tech corporations, and writing into treaties these firms’ power to sue governments for their own electively decided social welfare policies (aka ‘protection’). ‘Openness’ here means opening markets to US firms, not opening the USA to global creative ideas (Johns, 2010). The creative industries concept never caught on at federal level in the USA, although it was widely influential in American cities and states (Harris, Collins and Cheek, 2013), filtered through the ‘creative class’ formula developed by Richard Florida (2012). Federally, it was dismissed as suspiciously European, governmentalist and analogue, ill-suited to the global corporate ambitions of the digital tech titans that were already worth more than many of the governments whose taxes they failed to pay, and growing. The US historical-cultural apparatus differed from what some of their public officials called ‘Old Europe’ (meaning a France-led EU). No ancient chateaux and castles here, filled with once-aristocratic but now public artworks, where ‘creative’ obviously invokes associations like ‘heritage’, ‘art’, ‘elite’ and ‘public’.6 Instead, in America, the influential arts are in the Tocquevillian ‘democratic’ tradition: movies, music, entertainment, TV, consumer culture. During the Clinton Presidency, libertarian tech entrepreneurs added a new element to this tradition in a competitive race to develop what were then called information and communication technologies (ICTs), including computational hardware, software, media and applications, as a fully US-centric ‘mass medium’, wholly within the private sphere, including the nascent internet. Perhaps the most important early component of the ‘creative economy’ in the USA was NASDAQ, the composite index of US-based ICT-heavy stocks. Although launched in 1970, the Nasdaq Index was not widely followed until the ‘dot-com boom’ of the 1990s, when it rapidly rose to a peak of over 5000 points in the year 2000. In the ‘dot-com bust’ it

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crashed to about 1300 points. It took another 15 years before it reached 5000 again, after which recovery seemed to be based on more than ‘irrational exuberance’. Even so, it reached another exorbitant high of 10,000+ points in February 2020, before falling back in the coronavirus crisis (Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2

Nasdaq 45-year Historical Chart: Composite Index (logarithmic scale), 1970–2020

Source: Macrotrends (https://​www​.macrotrends​.net/​1320/​nasdaq​-historical​ -chart), used with permission. See also: https://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​wiki/​Closing​ _milestones​_of​_the​_NASDAQ​_Composite (accessed 5 October 2020).

Art to smart Creativity as a business proposition was following two different trajectories during the crucial two decades of the 1990s and 2000s. The UK/ EU pathway followed individual talent (‘the arts were for everyone’) and national cultures, building innovation on the infrastructure of heritage. This version sought to monetise creativity as copyright and to globalise it by expanding creative practice via peer-to-peer networks of co-creative agents across otherwise distinct jurisdictions.

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The US/tech-giant pathway pursued a technological logic, based on seeking to expand individual enterprise from initial invention to global scale (in the footsteps of Edison) regardless of ‘legacy’ barriers, including national borders, and to convert every human individual from citizen or co-creator into consumer in an ‘internet of shopping’ that was All-American and all-aspiring, ambitious to enfold everyone on Earth. This model – corporate monopoly bestriding the planet – was already a well-entrenched habit-of-thought of capitalism (Philippon, 2019; Stoller, 2019), where for instance the global computation scene since the 1970s had been characterised as ‘IBM and the Seven Dwarves’ until IBM was itself toppled, not by competitors but by its own spawn: Microsoft. Now there’s Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple: not just behemoths in their home jurisdiction (like telecoms companies) but globally (except in China). There was a system-level anti-competitive problem, not just with big tech but with corporate capitalism. As Vox reported: Competition is lacking across countless industries, including airlines, telecommunications, lightbulbs, funeral caskets, hospitals, mattresses, baby formula, agriculture, candy, chocolate, beer, porn, and even cheerleading … When you look, monopolies and oligopolies … are everywhere. They’re a systemic feature of the economy.7

Here there is the fork in the road. ‘Creative industries’ marked out a pathway for copyright-protected productivity and city/national industry policy within a public/private mixed economy. Along this way, official stimulation policies were directed at helping incumbents to transform and startups to proliferate. The focus of attention was on creative inventiveness (not corporate structures). Here, the importance of co-creation, cooperation, crowdsourcing and networked processes was quickly recognised, not least because this was already the way that ‘Hollywood’ worked – as a creative cluster, where talent, know-how and risk capital were co-present (Caldwell, 2008; Florida, 2012; Gong and Hassink, 2017): a model that was already globalised (De Propris and Hypponen, 2007) and evolutionary (Fornahl, Hassink and Menzel, 2015), from Seoul (Berg, 2015) to Lagos (Lobato, 2010). The ‘digital technology’ pathway, on the other prong of the fork, sought to create new corporate structures, to disrupt and capture global markets, treating incumbents as ‘legacy’ leftovers (at best an archive) and populations as consumers. Digital attention was concentrated on the founding

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CEO, whose success could be measured on the Forbes World’s Billionaires List, which quickly became a totem for Silicon Valley tycoons (Table 3.1). Table 3.1

Top ten tech tycoons (2019)

10

Michael Dell ($34.3 billion)

Dell Computers

9

Jack Ma ($37.3 billion)

Alibaba

8

Ma Huateng ($38.8 billion)

Tencent Holdings

7

Steve Ballmer ($41.2 billion)

Microsoft

6

Sergey Brin ($49.8 billion)

Google

5

Larry Page ($50.8 billion)

Google

4

Mark Zuckerberg ($62.3 billion)

Facebook

3

Larry Ellison ($62.5 billion)

Oracle

2

Bill Gates ($96.5 billion)

Microsoft

1

Jeff Bezos ($131 billion)

Amazon

Note: Figures from Forbes, ranking from Investopedia, November 2019: https://​ www​.investopedia​.com/​articles/​personal​-finance/​072715/​10​-richest​-most​ -successful​-tech​-geniuses​.asp. See also: https://​www​.forbes​.com/​billionaires/​ #4e9ae1d6251c (accessed 5 October 2020): ‘The U.S. remains the country with the most billionaires, with 614, followed by greater China (including Hong Kong and Macao), with 456’ (April 2020).

For these favoured Schumpeterian individuals, the idea was to scale up from Silicon Valley garage (following the Dell model) or college dorm (Facebook) to global megacorporation in one move, aided not only by fiercely guarded algorithms but also by predatory business methods and ruthless ‘creative destruction’ of competitors, if necessary by buying and closing them. Along this pathway it was OK to plan for ‘tomorrow, the world’ – to make ‘the internet’ what Facebook or Google said it was, e-commerce to equate with Amazon, or smart computation to mean only a device with an ‘i’ in front, and in front of every corporation an individualist ‘I’. That road was very much a one-way street: the iPlanet was American, and so was this vision of the internet. ‘Competition’ did not include openness to ambitious outsiders like Jack Ma’s Alibaba, Huawei’s telecoms,

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Tencent’s games and social media apps (WeChat and QQ). For these guys (and their apologists in economics and in office), –– Outward expansion from America = ‘free market’ economics (government: back off). –– Inward expansion into America = ‘strategic threat’ (government: send a gunboat). It is difficult not to conclude that, in purely business terms, technology trumps culture. The first question facing CEOs of analogue copyright industries was: ‘how do we survive?’ (Viswanathan, 2019). You’ll make more money from platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017) than you will from creative content, as long as you own the company and maintain a winner-takes-all instinct. Even so, despite the ‘I can have whatever I want’ mentality of the billionaires, who are actively preparing for life off Earth on the probability that it will become unsustainable on it (Davenport, 2018),8 things don’t always go according to plan. The most notorious example of this was the failed merger of content-led Time Warner with tech-led America Online (AOL). When the deal was clinched in 2000 – just before the dot-com bust – it was the biggest corporate merger of all time. By 2005 AOL’s founding CEO Steve Case (number 1513 on Forbes Billionaire List) had quit and in 2009 the two firms demerged, leaving behind the lesson of ‘one of the worst mergers in history’.9 The AOL/Time Warner debacle was a clash of cultures (Swisher, 2003). Another clash that the frat-boy billionaire trope forgets is that of class. ‘Success’ for the CEO may look very different for the outworkers, assuming these companies even need your labour any more, as they retreat to the desert in one of their ‘fulfilment centres’ or ‘Gigafactories’: The Tahoe Reno Industrial Center (TRIC) [is] the largest industrial park in the world, a 107,000-acre swath of the Nevada desert that … is now home to gargantuan hangars for Google and Apple, along with distribution warehouses for businesses such as Walmart and Amazon, and the new Tesla battery ‘Gigafactory’ – set to be, at 1m sq metres, the world’s biggest building when finally complete.10

Elon Musk’s latest Gigafactory (in China)11 may seem a long way removed from Chris Smith’s insight that ‘the arts are for everyone’. But it is the collision of these two insights – population-wide co-creativity (at micro-textual level) and planet-wide digital co-productivity (at

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macro-systems level) – that, together, drive the creative economy. Here’s where ‘convergence culture’ (Jenkins, 2006) links individual ‘creativity’ with planetary ‘connectivity’. But, ‘together’ means oil-and-water mutually repellent conflict as much as cooperative harmony. The ascendant tech-driven capitalist economic system achieves planetary scale and organisational efficiency while reducing the majority of the species to helpless uselessness amid environmental destruction. Can the clash between ‘creative culture’ and ‘connective scale’ produce something new, or is this just another handcart to hell?

Notes 1. For a glimpse of the era, see Wired, ‘Can the BBC be saved?’: https://​www​ .wired​.com/​1994/​03/​bbc/​(accessed 5 October 2020); for a taste of BBC culture, not so much captured by as capturing the musician-anthropologist, see Born (2004); for Birt as persistent bogeyman, see: https://​www​ .independent​.co​.uk/​news/​media/​john​-birt​-the​-dg​-who​-refused​-to​-fade​ -away​-307256​.html (accessed 5 October 2020) 2. Source: Chris Smith, ‘Creative Britain: where have we got to?’ Guardian, 18 November 2013: https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​culture​-professionals​ -network/​culture​-professionals​-blog/​2013/​nov/​18/​creative​-britain​-chris​ -smith​-2013 (accessed 5 October 2020). He cites Smith (1998). 3. The Sports Minister was Tony Banks, outspoken survivor of the ‘loony left’ Greater London Council, where he had promoted football as being on a cultural par with opera, and defunded opera: https://​www​.telegraph​.co​.uk/​ news/​obituaries/​1507307/​Tony​-Banks​.html (accessed 5 October 2020). 4. DCMS Single Departmental Plan, 2019: https://​www​.gov​.uk/​government/​ publications/​ d epartment​ - for​ - digital​ - culture​ - media​ - and​ - sport​ - single​ -departmental​-plan/​dcms​-single​-departmental​-plan​-2019 (accessed 5 October 2020). 5. Source: https://​creativeconomy​.britishcouncil​.org/​about/​ (accessed 5 October 2020). 6. The self-made nouveaux riches (à la Gatsby) self-consciously modelled their mansions on the European template, for instance, Hearst Castle, built by a press baron and critiqued in the film Citizen Kane. 7. Emily Stewart, ‘America’s monopoly problem’, Vox, 18 February 2020: https://​www​.vox​.com/​the​-goods/​2020/​2/​18/​21126347/​antitrust​-monopolies​ -internet​-telecommunications​-cheerleading (accessed 5 October 2020). 8. The main players are Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson. ‘Do we want,’ Elon Musk asks, ‘a future where we are forever confined to one planet until some eventual extinction event – however far in the future that might occur? Or do we want to become a multi-planet species, ultimately out there among the stars?’ (Davenport, 2018). Meanwhile they buy bolt-hole real

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estate in New Zealand and earth-boring companies to make their bunkers (https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​world/​2017/​feb/​17/​billionaires​-bolthole​ -new​-zealand​-preppers​-paradise; https://​bgr​.com/​2017/​02/​16/​elon​-musk​ -boring​-company​-fallout​-shelter/​, accessed 5 October 2020). 9. Source: https://​www​.forbes​.com/​profile/​steve​-case/​#54ff130218f3 (accessed 5 October 2020). 10. Source: Guardian, 12 February 2020: https://​ www​ .theguardian​ .com/​ artanddesign/ ​ 2 020/ ​ f eb/ ​ 1 1/ ​ r em ​ - koolhaas ​ - rural ​ - countryside​ - the​ - future​ -guggenheim (accessed 5 October 2020). See also: http://​tahoereno​.com/​. For ‘fulfilment centres’, see: https://​www​.aboutamazon​.co​.uk/​amazon​-fulfilment/​ our​- fulfilment​- centres/​ w hy​- amazon​- warehouses​- are​- called​- fulfilment​ -centers (accessed 5 October 2020). 11. For contrasting perspectives on the Tesla Gigafactory, see: https://​www​.tesla​ .com/​gigafactory; https://​insideevs​.com/​news/​409906/​tesla​-giga​-shanghai​ -construction​-april​-15​-2020/​(accessed 5 October 2020); and USA Today, 12 November 2019: https://​www​.usatoday​.com/​in​-depth/​news/​investigations/​ 2019/​ 1 1/​ 1 2/​ t esla​ - gigafactory​ - brings​ - nevada​ - jobs​ - and​ - housing​ - woes​ -worker​-injuries​-strained​-ems/​2452396001/​ (accessed 5 October 2020).

4.

Copyright (lock it up!) – what does it mean, ‘to be’? Original, copy or piracy?

Deeds to be hid which were not hid, Which all confused I could not know Whether I suffered, or I did: … The horror of their deeds to view, To know and loathe, yet wish and do! (Coleridge, 1803/1816)1

Social network markets To understand copyright, we must understand the concept of originality. What is an original and how do we know? Who is its author and why do they care? Why is an original so valuable and a copy so worthless, especially if you can’t tell them apart? The answers to all of these questions are pecuniary (as Veblen, 1899, would have put it), within the logic of what is known as a ‘social network market’ (Potts et al., 2008). In a social network market: –– The choice of a good (for example, a painting) is determined not by its price but by the choices of others in the system (fashion, trend); –– Its price is determined not by the cost of production but by the status of others who have chosen it (prestige, repute); and –– Consumers are also producers, in the sense that what they choose is also a signal, which drives the system that Veblen called ‘conspicuous consumption’. A social network market results in an agent that classical economics would not recognise, the ‘entrepreneurial consumer’ (Hartley and Montgomery, 2009), now more readily identified as the ‘influencer’ (Abidin, 2018), whose currency goes well beyond the pecuniary, belonging as much to culture as to economics (Abidin and Brown, 2019). 47

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In the case of fine art, the overriding determinant of value is authenticity or originality.2 An original Old Master by a recognised artist of high international repute and fashionable status – say Leonardo da Vinci – may sell for hundreds of millions of dollars. A copy, however, may adorn anything from a fridge magnet to a shower curtain. Such trinkets exist in their billions as souvenirs, but each and every one of them, once purchased, is effectively worthless. The only way to possess the original Mona Lisa is to steal it, as happened in 1913.3

Original copy It transpires, however, that there is another way to own a genuine original Mona Lisa. It uses the method of mass production first described by Adam Smith in his celebrated analysis on the first page of The Wealth of Nations (1776) of ‘a very trifling manufacture’ – a pin factory. The manufacturing process is broken down into steps (division of labour) and each step is created separately (specialisation), requiring a less skilled and multitasking workforce, in part replaced by machinery (repetition), thereby lowering labour costs while increasing production speeds. The full realisation of Smith’s model was the Model T – Henry Ford’s automobile assembly line (1913). This same model was applied by ‘art entrepreneur’ Huang Jiang to oil painting. In 1989 he set up a factory system for producing copies of famous artworks in a poor fishing and farming village called Dafen, near Shenzhen, China. Instead of copying the Mona Lisa, he trained up an assembly-line model of semiskilled labour to do the job for him. Huang employed 1000 rural labourers. ‘For those without any art background, three to six months intensive training is good enough for imitations.’ Inspired by the assembly lines in clothing and car factories, Huang invented a new model of painting by adopting the mass production painting method to accelerate production. He asked every painter to take charge of only one part of a painting ... Using this method helped Huang achieve the same qualities in all his paintings.4

Huang marketed his reproductions mostly to overseas department stores and hotels. Then Walmart ‘wanted him to imitate 55,000 paintings in just 45 days’, making him his first million-dollar profit. The business prospered, both overseas and by creating a new domestic market. You can

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of course order your own original Mona Lisa online now, customised by size, framing and price. Here is the ‘product description’: 100% hand-painted oil painting reproduction on canvas of Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting, Mona Lisa II. It has been perfectly recreated brushstroke by brushstroke by our talented artist. We not only reproduce every detail of the original painting, but capture its soul.5

All contributing artists, whether they painted the nondescript sky or the famous smile, remain anonymous, like any assembly-line labour force, no matter how skilled. The model requires that no trace of ‘originality’ contaminates their ‘brushstroke by brushstroke’ rendition of this ‘Northern Renaissance Woman’. The outcome may be modestly labelled ‘Mona Lisa II’ but it is Leonardo’s originality that’s for sale. Despite the focus on Leonardo as the authentic original, there are two other sources of value in this tale. The first is generated by entrepreneurship: if you can organise production at scale and find a market, you can make millions from copies, by the classic capitalist mechanism of marginal profit. The second is generated by the community that is created on the site of manufacture, in this case the village of Dafen. Huang Jiang was eventually joined by other ‘art entrepreneurs’, some of them his own students, such as Zhou Xiaohong. Between them, they turned Dafen Art Village into an international painting powerhouse and tourist attraction, uplifting the place and its population, increased manyfold by migrant workers, to a share in the astonishing economic boom experienced in nearby Shenzhen during the years of opening up: In the mid-2000s, Dafen’s copy industry was booming. It was at this point that auxiliary commercial avenues began to take root in the village. Quaint cafes, as well as more accessible ‘gallery shops’ (predominantly fronts for anonymous art workers and addresses from which to tout for business both wholesale and retail) lent the village lucrative tourist appeal. (Arnold, 2017)

DIY digital deepfake The path from original art to copy art is in fact a two-way street. The copy can be made into an original artwork. This was imaginatively demonstrated at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai by Meng Yan, Chief Designer of the Shenzhen Pavilion. Meng commissioned the ‘Dafen Lisa’, a mosaic of 999 panels, each one painted by one of the Dafen Village painters.

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Meng said: ‘It is neither an individual artist’s experiment, nor a mere copy of a classic, it is a collaborative creation – a conceptual art piece involving a great number of Dafen painters.’ In other words, it was produced by the village. ‘The original style, individuality and mindset of each painting has been retained, and the painters wrote their names, ages, hometowns and dreams on the back of each painting’.6 A collaborative creation, retaining individual artists’ style, mindset and dreams, creating new conceptual art, takes us a long way beyond the notion of the worthless copy: after World Expo it was taken to Shenzhen Airport, where Dafen Lisa continues her enigmatic watch (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1

‘Dafen Lisa’ by Meng Yan and 999 Dafen artists, for World Expo 2010 Shanghai, now displayed at Airport North Station in Fuyong, Shenzhen

Source: Wikimedia Commons. Photo by Prosperity Horizons, formerly Exploringlife. CC license.

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As for the artwork, so for the workshop. Dafen Village itself has set off along the return path from copy to originality over the ensuing decade. Reporting for Artsy in 2017, Frances Arnold noted this ambition: By far the loftiest ambition of the various players currently invested in Dafen is for the village to become an authentic creative hub, and above all a place for original art and culture. Today, this branching of paths – from copy art, to original art, to shining national example – feels tangled. (Arnold, 2017)

Tangled and contradictory, like any competitive market, but pursuing new sources of value-creation, and so valuing originality as well as the copy. Along the way, Dafen evolved into a ‘creative cluster’ for this new-old creative industry, complete with a statue of Leonardo in the town square.7 The ‘factory’ model of wholesale production was dispersed and customised to include retail galleries: There are also more conventional galleries, generally showcasing the work of – and often owned by – a single artist. One such space is Ease Gallery, established in 2006 by Ethan Lau … An exponent of Dafen’s more recent turn to artists creating original paintings, Lau says designers, homeowners, hotels, and clubs are the most frequent buyers of his large-scale ink works, inspired by traditional Chinese calligraphy. (Arnold, 2017)

Here, we move on to another dimension of the copy, namely, digital reproduction. Dafen artists rely on internet e-commerce for both overseas business sales and domestic lifestyle consumers. Both markets include those who want cheap copies of classics and those who want authentic originals. The copy has emerged into maturity by following a pathway that in hindsight looks remarkably similar to the development of high-end Western art itself, which emerged from artisanal workshops (ateliers) where individual brushstrokes were not individually authored, into the strong light of artistic celebrity for some and repetitive drudgery for others as one of the earliest commercial sectors of modern capitalism. Artists will try their hand at both copies and originals.8 But, as Ethan Lau remarked: ‘plagiarism is rife’ (aka ‘collective learning’). What does the future hold? Uncertainty and precarity: welcome to the creative industries (Tsing, 2015). But there’s no recourse to copyright crackdown. China acceded to the World Trade Organization in 2001 and set up various agencies and schemes for registering and protecting copyright, as required to satisfy Western pressures (especially from US music industry enforcers). This was not exactly window-dressing, but it was

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alien to the development process across the creative and electronic sectors in China more generally. As the Dafen case illustrates, wealth-creation by divisions of labour, specialisation, competition and a judicious mix of copying and originality is the path of innovation. With the shift from analogue painting to digital copying, we haven’t quite finished with the digital Mona Lisa. The next step takes us to Russia, where a group of researchers at the Samsung AI Centre in Moscow and the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (a private joint venture with MIT), created the first deepfake animated version of the Mona Lisa (Zakharov et al., 2019).9 Deepfakes came to critical media attention around the world when they were used to produce pornographic images of celebrities, or where personal photos were ‘weaponised’ by deepfake techniques for the purposes of ‘revenge porn’.10 Here the emphasis is technical: how to make convincing animations out of still photographs. As a technical achievement, a movie of Mona Lisa smiling is something quite ‘original’. The trick is prefigured in the Dafen Lisa, whose image is effectively reduced to 999 pixels. But the Russian version uses pixels from digital archives, with machine learning, to reanimate a person who’s been dead for half a millennium quite convincingly. How long before the negative possibilities of this are explored and exploited, for fake news, pornographic harassment and state surveillance? Once again, popular drama proved to be the ideal vehicle for thinking through these troubling issues, for example, Ben Chanan’s 2019 surveillance thriller The Capture (BBC).11 You can see that the question of originality is not trivial. Not only does it arbitrate commercial art values, it is also a foundational aspect of personhood, including whether a person has a right to their own image – a right that has clearly not been recognised or enforced with anything like the vigour shown by intellectual property lawyers in pursuit of copyright ‘pirates’. The reasons for that are historical as well as pecuniary. So before we get to the pirates, we must take a detour to visit another modern miscreant, Dr. Faustus, to explain the struggle between being and knowledge, authentic originality and deepfake reanimation, via the equally fraught relations between a self and their own image. In short, we need to understand not originality or authenticity, but modernity, where the ‘fake’ versus ‘real’ binary is not as helpful as you might think. In fact, it can hinder the dissemination of knowledge. This has proven to be

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more situated, experiential, hybrid, diverse and reflexive than the binary presupposes, requiring us to ‘understand the world by interacting with it’. In other words, we must use the navigational approach, guiding our practices with: doubt, making (and staying with the) trouble, staying present, and being open: ‘open to the data, open to being wrong, to redoing one’s own work, actively to seek out new views and mistakes’. (Witschge et al., 2018: 657)

To be: is that the question? What does it mean, ‘to be’? This is a problem that modernity has resolved – not by definition but by conflict: ‘to be’ is not a condition but a struggle; just as modern evolutionary science is ‘not about Truth, but Doubt; not Knowledge, but Ignorance; not Certainty, but Uncertainty’ (Gee, 2013: xiii). Modernity as the outworking of the Enlightenment is a familiar trope. Rational, truth-seeking and secular, characterised by science, journalism and realism (Richards, 1993), it inaugurated the era of individualism, self-consciousness and self-knowledge. Economically, it led to industrialisation, mass society, unprecedented expansion and exchange. And yet, throughout, it was dogged by its own opposites: abroad, exploitation, racism and enslavement (aka imperialism); at home, doubt, despair and danger (aka Romanticism). Modernity’s three great knowledge systems – journalism, science and the novel – all put struggle at the centre of being: political and class struggle (journalism; Marx), the struggle for existence (evolution; Darwin) and the struggle for self-realisation (the novel – take your pick). At the time, ‘to be’ seemed most secure in self-realisation, but therein lay struggle too, for exogenous knowledge could destroy the endogenous self. Despite the scepticism of science (for whom the self is ‘illusory’: Gee, 2013: 164), Romantic artists were confident enough about the self’s importance, celebrating it in philosophy (the Cartesian ego), poetry (Goethe, Coleridge), painting (Blake, Turner) and music (Beethoven, Wagner). But they were much less certain about knowledge. Knowledge entered modernity accompanied by Sturm und Drang (‘storm and stress’), Faustian bargains (Goethe, Gounod) and Gothic horror (Schiller, Mary Shelley). As the Dafen painters know, the trick is not simply to reproduce the self, but to ‘capture its soul’.

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Goethe’s short ballad of 1782, ‘Der Erlkönig’ (the ‘alder-king’ or ‘elf-king’), can set the scene. It brings together the fatal opposites of ‘storm and drive’: love and death, desire and horror, beauty and violence (‘I want; I kill’), in a setting where the only two witnesses see completely different realities. Reason and realism are impotent in a helter-skelter race against a supernatural and unseen seducer, whose fatal attraction to a boy-child slides straight from love and persuasion to rape and possession: I love you, your beautiful figure excites me; And if you are not willing, then I need violence. (Goethe, ‘Erlkönig’, 1782)12

The rational and protective but unseeing father reaches his destination, the boy cradled in his arms, but ‘In his arms the child was dead’. Goethe critic Ellis Dye poses the question: ‘Erlkönig’ does not rationalize, or soften, except formally, in its matchless, cruel beauty. The message is plain and stark. The child is dead. The last line … says so: ‘In seinen Armen das Kind war tot.’ But ‘dead’ is not among the things that one can be, as we admit when we refer to a person’s ‘remains’ or to ‘the body’. How can anyone be dead? (Dye, 2004: 141)

‘How can anyone be dead?’ is not a foolish question. For most of humanity, over much of recorded time, this species has projected consciousness, knowledge and causation well beyond the realm of physics. Dead beings have been our constant companions since the Stone Ages. Recent protests about whether to remove or revere statues of slavers, racists and imperialists demonstrate all too clearly that ‘being dead’ is still very much a site of intense civic struggle about demic identity. Across a span of several millennia, Pharaonic pyramids and tombs were elaborate immortality machines, designed not only to project the royal corpse into the afterlife and to turn ancestors into gods, but also to perpetuate the agricultural system on which Egyptian life, wealth and power depended (Romer, 2012). Even earlier, more than 6000 years ago, the Bronze Age was ushered in with ‘The Tale of the Smith and the Devil’ (da Silva and Tehrani, 2016),13 in which the secret of smelting metal is said to have been tricked out of an infernal agent of knowledge, ‘the devil’ being a neat personification of the forces required for smelting rocks into metals using fire and furnace. Getting the Age’s most valuable commodity out of a stone? No wonder Neolithic Smith became Renaissance Subtle, the Alchemist.14

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Faust was published between 1790 and 1832, the year of Goethe’s death. A persistent figure of the European imagination, Faust is the one whose yearning for knowledge tempts him to make a deal with the infernal know-all. Faust bargains his soul for knowledge, but proceeds to squander that power on selfish tricks – worthless trinkets and sexual conquest. Inevitably, the acquisition and deployment of knowledge result in self-destruction, turning Trickster into tragedy. Later Romantic works, culminating with Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (1947) pursued the morality of the Faustian bargain into philosophy (Nietzsche’s nihilism) and history (German fascism), showing how giving the self over to the will for power results in social destruction. In short, whether at the hands of celebrants (Wagner) or critics (Marx), the appropriation of knowledge is represented as imperilling selves and society alike. Here, ‘to be’ does not mean ‘be alive’, as opposed to ‘being dead’ (Crace, 1999); it means ‘don’t mess with Nature’.15 In modernity, while knowledge was secularising with Enlightenment science, doubt and uncertainty about where ‘I’ stop and when ‘we’ stop reached new heights. It was hard to draw the line. A self exists in life, but does it cease ‘to be’ when we die? Do ‘we’ include only people who are alive right now, or does it encompass ancestors and heroes of the past, spirits and saints in the here-and-now, and future prospects for disembodied or immortal souls? The nineteenth century was so alive with ‘ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties, and things that go bump in the night’ that seances and spiritualism, paranormality and religiosity became part of popular culture.16 Uncertainty about the limits to consciousness extended to scientific discovery. Was electricity ‘alive’ as well as ‘live’? Could a medium communicate with the dead as well as the masses (Sconce, 2000)? Were there fairies at the bottom of the garden?17 Modernity is the era of self-consciousness. Not only are individuals self-conscious but they know they are conscious, which means that ‘to be’ entails both being (subject) and knowing (object): All such formulations as ‘self-esteem,’ ‘self-projection,’ ‘self-representation,’ ‘self-criticism,’ ‘self-blame’ and ‘self-deception’ derive from a reflexive model of ‘self-consciousness’ in which a knowing subject is presumed to be able to observe itself as an object and, as an author, free to represent or misrepresent a more or less accurately discerned self. (Dye, 2004: 109)

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Conjoining self and knowledge, self and language, self and authorship is, however, another mode of modern struggle. It turns out that self-possession is a form of duplicity: The idea of self-representation, or, for that matter, self-deception, is a trap set for us by language, since the self portrayed or deceived cannot coincide with the self doing the portraying or the deceiving. Every self-portrait … is a counterfeit self in place of the original … Even the most truthful art must be partly a fiction. (Dye, 2004: 109)

Here (at last, after long struggle) we have the knowing subject as author of the self, where property rights can be anchored to an entity that knows itself ‘to be’, one who both originates a representation and is the same one who knows that they are doing so. Authors as self-conscious originators of themselves and possessors of their own actions proved to be politically productive (Macpherson, 1962) and economically pivotal. The discovery that authorship was a function of the self meant that it could be alienated, marketised, monetised, and that there was a philosophical warrant – a ‘natural law’ – for that, despite the fact that that modern consciousness was haunted, already knowing that selfhood and self-deception are conjoined in struggle. The modern author was born a duplicitous Faustian bargain.

Pirates of possessive individualism Both copyright and patents were emergent concepts in law in Europe prior to this period (Hartley, 2020: 143–51; May and Sell, 2006), but the idea that originality is the mark of ownership did not prevail until Romanticism gave it a philosophical foundation in the concept of a natural law of the inalienable self. This was not a straightforward achievement. It took time to establish, and was unevenly accepted over different disciplines and jurisdictions. The concept of property was extended from ‘real’ (estates) to ‘immaterial’ (knowledge), with ownership vested in the originator, even though most of the investment, productivity and marketing of an idea might come from intermediaries like publishers (copyright) or manufacturers (patents), who acted as agents for authors, equating ‘legal persons’ (firms) with ‘natural persons’ (‘to be’). Ideas or languages cannot be copyrighted (they’re the ultimate instance of Elinor Ostrom’s ‘common pool resource’), but strings of words can be, to serve

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as the basis for a property-relation in ‘immaterial’ goods. ‘Knowledge’ is reduced from what a community knows in common, via its shared language, culture, customs and pedagogies, to what an individual (‘natural’ or ‘legal’) can sell for gain. Nonetheless, uncertainty about the reality of intellectual property remained: first, because of Romantic doubts about self-consciousness and originality as reliable sources of being; and second, because of scientific concerns about knowledge as a social production, where ‘knowledge shared is knowledge gained’, so that ‘the full benefit of knowledge is only reaped when its circulation is free’, which requires a socially responsible science that is both open (accountable) and for the public good (Johns, 2010: 416–22). In Piracy (2010), Adrian Johns makes the point: The range of phenomena that fall under the term ‘piracy’ as it is nowadays used … reach, in fact, to the defining elements of modern culture itself: to science and technology; to authorship, authenticity, and credibility; to policing and politics; to the premises on which economic activity and social order rest. (Johns, 2010: 3)

So much is this the case that Johns sees modernity itself as defined by piracy. In battles going back to early modern Europe, piracy comes first, where contending groups disputed the line between public discourse and private life, mechanical and intellectual labour, printers and booksellers, free-trader industrialists and inventors, broadcasters (who must disclose content) and mail or telephone systems (who must not), radio transmitters and radio listeners (both can be pirates), pharmaceutical multinationals and public health advocates, computer/software corporations and their customers (users). Battles continue to rage, from suburban bedrooms, between uptight parents and their downloading teens, to international policing, between uptight governments and WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange.18 It’s not just that piracy has a long history: this is to argue that ‘intellectual property’ itself is a product of piracy, accumulating piecemeal over centuries of disconnected disputes, until it coalesced relatively recently (post-World War II) into an industry dedicated to maximising intellectual property enforcement, which has resulted in turn in predatory lawyers and enforcement overreach, making everyone a pirate. ‘Pirates are us’, concludes Johns (2010: 4).

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One of the battlegrounds Johns surveys is that between two opposing views of science, that is, knowledge in society. This invoked and extended positions already familiar to many, for instance, Hayek versus Keynes in economics,19 and Karl Popper versus ‘historicists’ in realism theory, both of which have remained influential in libertarian and liberal politics to this day. In mid-twentieth century Europe, the contest was between the ‘open’ society and ‘planned’ economies, which was itself code for ‘US-led managerial, team-based, free-market capitalism’ versus ‘communism’, aka The Open Society and Its Enemies (Popper, 1945 [2011]) versus The Road to Serfdom (Hayek, 1944 [2007]). Scientist Michael Polanyi (1944, 1945) joined this debate with an attack on patents, the then cutting edge of intellectual property (Johns, 2010: 416–22), as copyright had been post-Enlightenment. The battle was staged between patents (commercial ‘planning’) and science (open-source discovery). It grew out of the ideological opposition between ‘free-market’ R&D versus ‘public good’ science, the latter supported by notable leftist scientists such as J.D. Bernal, J.B.S. Haldane, Lancelot Hogben, Dorothy Hodgkin, Eric Hobsbawm and Rosalind Franklin, who argued that the social function of science precluded ‘scientific property’ (Johns, 2010: 416). Contrary to the usual ideological stand-off, Polanyi produced a hybrid model, where patents were abolished and pioneer scientists supported from the public purse, in order to avoid the concentration of science into cartels, where ‘planning’ was not socialist but monopolist. The argument that ‘free competition’ needs to be controlled is an argument about creativity (Polanyi, 1981), which Polanyi construed as ‘personal knowledge’ and ‘tacit knowing’, both essential to the crucial process of scientific discovery. No scientific discovery can be strictly verified, or even proved to be probable, yet we bet our lives every day on the correctness of scientific generalizations, for example, those underlying medicine and technology. (Polanyi, 1981: 91)

Although ideological divides have continued to demonise ‘planning’ and acquiesce in the reduction of creative, ‘open’ discovery to corporate control, it is worth recalling that it has been possible for those engaged in such matters to think through the issues to a more sophisticated viewpoint, where ‘science with a social purpose’ is not dismissed as the ‘road to serfdom’ but required to protect the future.

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Attack of the creationist reverberators!20 Of course, the future took quite a different turn from the one that Polanyi recommended. Global corporate capitalism ran rampant. Rupert Murdoch bestrode the turbulent and transformational period of the technological break between analogue creative industries and the digital economy. He made his fortune by modernising both the press (in the UK) and screen media (in the USA) – that is, making production routines more efficient, less accommodating to unions, and making content more populist – only to see them overtaken in turn by digital upstarts like Google and Facebook. But he wasn’t having any of that, and commenced a decade-long struggle to preserve the ‘content’ industries against the ‘copy’ cats. He used the Global Financial Crisis of 2008–09 to attack Google, accusing it of theft. For instance, and this was only one of numerous such statements, in October 2009 he addressed media executives in Beijing: ‘The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content,’ Murdoch said. ‘But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators – the people in this hall – who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph.’21

Meanwhile son James was also used as an attack dog, taking aim at government intervention in the market, in the shape of the BBC, Channel 4 UK and UK media regulator Ofcom. James accused them of creationism, no less. He told the 2009 Edinburgh International Television Festival (a familiar forum for BBC-bashing): This year is the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s The Origin of Species. It argued that the most dramatic evolutionary changes can occur through an entirely natural process. Darwin proved that evolution is unmanaged ... The number who reject Darwin and cling to the concept of creationism is substantial. And it crops up in some surprising places. For example, right here in the broadcasting sector in the UK. The consensus appears to be that creationism – the belief in a managed process with an omniscient authority – is the only way to achieve successful outcomes.22

Of course, the gentleman did protest too much, for what he wanted was not a species-wide unmanaged evolutionary process but a ‘managed process with an omniscient authority’ in the shape of Rupert Murdoch

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rather than the BBC and Ofcom. James concluded: ‘The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.’ The terms of the debate are familiar, but now ‘independence’ has replaced ‘originality’ and ‘profit’ has replaced ‘creativity’. Mr Murdoch’s attack dogs would have us believe that it’s all about how our freedom and his profit are the same thing. Here’s Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of Dow Jones, managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, former editor of The Times, former US editor of the Financial Times and former journalist with the Melbourne Herald: It is becoming clear that there are two personality types in the world of content: the creators and the reverberators. The latter group is merely an editorial echo chamber: the noise is sometimes interesting, but they are neither composers nor musicians. If we make a comparison to tennis, in which the sublime Spaniard Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer fight out a final on centre court, the reverberators are like ball boys and ball girls. If one stretches the imagination you can almost imagine Arianna Huffington [Huff Post] and Eric Schmidt [Google] scurrying around the court, part of the event but not why you pay money to attend.23

The Murdoch argument uses the concept of ‘creativity’ to attack another kind of freedom – free content, whether it is provided by public-service media or American tech giants, for both of whom ‘free content’ is the business plan. Here’s Google CEO (aka Murdoch’s ball boy) Eric Schmidt, explaining it to Ken Auletta: ‘The benefit of free is that you get 100 percent of the market,’ Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, explained to Auletta. ‘Free is the right answer.’ For a while, perhaps – but maybe free is unsustainable. For news­papers, Auletta writes, ‘free may be a death certificate.’ Maybe in the end, even on the Internet, you get what you pay for.24

That last bit is certainly what Murdoch (ventriloquised by Thomson) wants you to think: ‘Rupert Murdoch’s intent was to prompt a debate on the value of content and then begin a second debate over how that value can be best captured.’ The purpose of all this ideological manoeuvring was to introduce a charging mechanism that was as understandable to users as it is remunerative to those who create content. It was clear to Murdoch that too many institutions were resigned to seemingly inevitable decline and that there had not been a coherent examination of the motives of those whose business

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models were built on other people’s content. The reverberations continue to echo across the globe. As one commentator put it: The newspaper groups are between a rock and a hard place ... The big publishers are waiting for Murdoch, who’s prone to bold and sometimes industry-transforming moves, to go first. When and how he does that could determine the fate of newspaper groups around the globe, including his own.25

In other words, and not for the first time, Murdoch was risking the company on his hunch about having the right business plan: in this case, a subscription model (for consumers) and fees for re-use (for producers) enforced on Google and others by compliant governments. By 2020, against the odds, it seemed that the Murdoch/Thomson plan was bearing fruit. A compliant Australian government conducted an inquiry.26 It resulted in just what they had been demanding: 27 new rules requiring tech giants to share revenue with media publishers. In this tussle, Australia, latter-day Pirate of the Indo-Pacific, is cast as the attack vessel for international regulators: More worryingly for the tech giants, competition regulators across the world are watching Australia closely. The use (and misuse) of people’s personal data, by Facebook in particular, the rise of fake news and the decline of traditional media outlets have made Big Tech an easy target for regulators outside the US. Indeed, the ACCC [Australian Competition and Consumer Commission] has led the charge globally, with its 18-month inquiry the most comprehensive investigation into these concerns undertaken in the world.28

Do we need copyright any longer? A problem the copyright enforcers have still to face is that for many users they are the pirates, using standover tactics to gain uncompetitive advantage, constraining the semiotic productivity of user-created content and ruthlessly suppressing innovations from the margins. A case in point concerns fan fiction or fanfic, which has burgeoned online in recent years (Hellekson and Busse, 2014), where copyright matters when a fanfic author achieves commercial success. The problem is that fanfic works with existing source material. In order to be recognised by other fans, new authors must use the familiar tropes of a given fictional universe – be that slash Harry Potter, 50 shades of Twilight, or wolfish erotica in the ‘Omegaverse’. Fanfic came of age when Archive Of Our Own or AO3, a popular online platform devoted to fan works, and opposed to legal harassment of authors, won a prestigious 2019 Hugo Award for Best

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Related Work in sci-fi and fantasy fiction.29 At the time it archived over five million such stories. Of these, more than 70,000 concerned ‘a sprawling body of work that came to be known as the Omegaverse, with its own rules, plot elements and terminology’, which had become ‘an established genre of its own’. While the AO3 platform was winning awards for community-creation, two Omegaverse authors were making a commercial success of their own fanfic. The New York Times took up the story, when one of the authors (‘Addison Cain’) sought to stop another (‘Zoey Ellis’), using take-down notices and legal action, claiming plagiarism.30 Of course, both authors used familiar tropes from the genre, which itself had been created in ‘a shared universe’ or ‘crowdsourced collective’, which hundreds create but no one owns. The New York Times pointed out the similarities across the two authors’ works, which: featured an Alpha and Omega couple, and lots of lupine sex ... In both books, Alpha men are overpowered by the scent of Omega heroines and take them hostage. In both books, the women try and fail to suppress their pheromones and give in to the urge to mate. In both books, the couples sniff, purr and growl; nest in den-like enclosures; neck-bite to leave ‘claim’ marks; and experience something called ‘knotting,’” involving a peculiar feature of the wolf phallus.31

The defending author countersued, seeking damages for defamation, false claim of copyright and interference with her career. The New York Times coverage was sympathetic, noting that the case (unresolved at time of writing) ‘reveals how easily intellectual property law can be weaponized by authors seeking to take down their rivals’. A May 2020 US government report on the ‘crushing volume’ of take-down notices received by Google and others proved the point, quoting motives including ‘anti-competitive purposes, to harass a platform or consumer, or to try and chill speech that the rightsholder does not like’.32 In other words, the real problem is not the theft of one writer’s work by another, or even the attempt to enclose and privatise the ‘teeming multiverse of stories’ that are owned in common on AO3, but the capture of legal processes to conduct predatory claims against creative works and other authors. Here is where ‘self-interest’ actively corrodes a creative group or social network (see Chapter 6). Economist Geoffrey Hodgson (2016) proposes a ‘moral’ as well as ‘self-interested’ foundation for

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economics, deriving his argument from both Adam Smith and Charles Darwin, where ‘morality’ is right conduct in relation to others, and is foundational for society. As Hodgson puts it, ‘A moral system refers to shared and interactively reinforced moral values in a society or social group’ (2016). If it is not already clear, it must be said that despite the defining role of intellectual property in the creative industries, this is no longer a story about creativity or even morality: it’s about corporate revenue. Media giants like News Corp are hostile to government intervention in content creation, but they insist upon it to ‘regulate’ their own competitors, the digital platforms. Copyright and intellectual property have been emptied of their previous meanings, the concepts of ‘original work’ and ‘individual authorship’. Intellectual property ‘rights’ have expanded to a government/media conspiracy against competition, directly counter to their claimed role in innovation systems. The official name for that conspiracy is ‘futureproofing’. Launching the ACCC Report on Digital Platforms in 2019, the Chair of the ACCC Rod Sims issued a press release saying as much: ‘Our goal is to assist the community in staying up to date with these issues and futureproofing our enforcement, regulatory and legal frameworks’: There has been global interest in this timely Australian inquiry and the many significant international reports and external developments in the past 18 months. These reports demonstrate the shared concerns and momentum for reform. The world has now recognised the impact of the digital platforms’ market power and the impact this has on consumers, news, businesses and society more broadly. Continuing national and world action will now follow.33

The question, then, is not ‘to be’, or ‘not to be’. The question is, at just what scale of appropriation does piracy become law? As Adrian Johns concludes: The nexus of creativity and commerce that has prevailed in modern times is nowadays in a predicament. Its implications … may well foment a crisis of democratic culture itself. It is hard to see how the situation can be resolved satisfactorily without changing the very terms in which society understands intellectual property and its policing. (Johns, 2010: 15)

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The scene is set, not only the reform of policy towards creative innovation, but also for democratic reform. Henry Jenkins (2019: 84) makes the connection: Around the world, young activists are developing new political vernaculars, new modes of protest, new ways of imagining the future, as young people who grew up as participants in fandom and other participatory culture communities find their civic voices. Here, fans have always rallied to save an endangered series or to defend themselves against attack from copyright holders which has allowed them to rehearse skills they now are deploying to challenge right wing governments around the world.

Notes 1.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Pains of Sleep’, written 1803; first published in Christabel (1816): https://​www​.poetryfoundation​.org/​poems/​43995/​the​ -pains​-of​-sleep (accessed 5 October 2020). See also Fulford (2013). 2. The value of provenance has its own reality TV series: Fake or Fortune (BBC), eight seasons, 2011–19, gaining ‘unprecedented’ popularity for an arts show. See: https://​www​.bbc​.co​.uk/​programmes/​b01mxxz6; and: https://​ www​.bbcstudios​.com/​case​-studies/​fake​-or​-fortune (accessed 5 October 2020). 3. See: ‘The stolen Mona Lisa on display in the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence (Italy), 1913’: https://​upload​.wikimedia​.org/​wikipedia/​commons/​9/​93/​ Monalisa​_uffizi​_1913​.jpg (accessed 5 October 2020). 4. Source: ‘Master of the arts’, by Lui Lu, China Daily European Edition, 4 November 2011: http://​europe​.chinadaily​.com​.cn/​epaper/​2011​-11/​04/​ content​_14038009​.htm (accessed 5 October 2020). 5. Source: DafenVillageOnline.com: https://​www​.dafenvillageonline​.com/​ mona​-lisa​-ii​-oil​-painting​-reproduction​-on​-canvas​-p​-5151​.html (accessed 5 October 2020). 6. Source: Shanghai Daily, 7 September 2010: https://​archive​.shine​.cn/​metro/​ Creating​-a​-Dafen​-Lisa/​shdaily​.shtml (accessed 5 October 2020). See also: http://​www​.urbanus​.com​.cn/​partner/​meng​-yan/​?lang​=​en (accessed 5 October 2020). 7. ‘“Copycat kingdom” to cultural icon’, China Daily, 28 July 2018: ‘The iconic Leonardo da Vinci statue in Shenzhen’s Dafen village. A world-renowned painting center famous for making replicas, Dafen is shaking off its “copycat” stigma and evolving into an international arts hub that nurtures original artists’: https://​www​.chinadaily​.com​.cn/​a/​201807/​28/​ WS5b5b5a13a31031a351e90ab5​.html (accessed 5 October 2020). 8. See, for instance, https://​www​.globaltimes​.cn/​content/​1055900​.shtml (accessed 5 October 2020). 9. Source: Zakharov et al. (2019). An illustration can be seen in Fig. 7 of the paper (p. 13). For the animated video version, see: https://​news​.artnet​.com/​ art​-world/​mona​-lisa​-deepfake​-video​-1561600 (accessed 5 October 2020).

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10. See, for instance, https://​mashable​.com/​article/​deepfakes​-revenge​-porn​ -domestic​-violence/​(accessed 5 October 2020); and see Jane (2017). 11. See: https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​tv​-and​-radio/​2019/​oct/​03/​trust​-nothing​ -why​-the​-capture​-bbc​-is​-perfect​-tv​-for​-our​-paranoid​-times/​ (accessed 5 October 2020). 12. J.W. von Goethe, from Die Fischerin (The Fisherwoman), 1782 (translation by Google Translate). 13. And see: https://​www​.bbc​.com/​news/​uk​-35358487 (accessed 5 October 2020). 14. The Alchemist, by Ben Jonson: https://​www​.gutenberg​.org/​files/​4081/​4081​ -h/​4081​-h​.htm (accessed 5 October 2020). 15. This is the period when ‘natural law’ (with ‘inalienable rights’) was invented in order to justify rebellion, most notably in the American and French Revolutions. More recently, ‘natural rights’ have been extended to nature itself: https://​www​.earthlaws​.org​.au/​what​-is​-earth​-jurisprudence/​rights​-of​ -nature/​(accessed 5 October 2020). 16. This is not just a Western phenomenon. See Xueting Christine Ni (31 October 2017), ‘The long list of Chinese ghosts and ghouls, deadly demons, friendly fiends, mythical monsters and saucy spooks from Chinese lore to round out your Halloween bestiary’: https://​radiichina​.com/​long​-list​-chinese​ -ghosts​-ghouls/​(accessed 5 October 2020). Ni concludes: ‘Halloween has become increasingly popular in China, alongside the revival of traditional festivities such as Ghost Month … So you might see girls dressed up as sexy spider demons dancing with Dracula at the school horror disco.’ See also: Zhong Yuan, or Ghost Month: http://​snowpavilion​.co​.uk/​zhong​-yuan​-ghost​ -month/​(accessed 5 October 2020). 17. The most famous fictional representation of the modern, scientifically astute ‘knowing subject’ was Sherlock Holmes, whose powers of observation were uncanny but empirical. His creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, however, was a spiritualist, who believed in the occult or ‘invisible world’. He thought it had been made manifest in the ‘Cottingley Fairies’ photographs, which were in fact faked by two young girls (https://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​wiki/​Cottingley​ _Fairies, accessed 5 October 2020). 18. See Adrian Johns’s 2013 analysis of ‘information policing’: http://​ www​ .law​.nyu​.edu/​sites/​default/​files/​ECM​_PRO​_074584​.pdf (accessed 5 October 2020). 19. A contest perhaps best conducted as a rap battle – Emergent Order, ‘Fear the boom and bust’ (2010): https://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​d0nERTFo​-Sk (accessed 5 October 2020); and ‘Fight of the century’ (2011): https://​www​ .youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​GTQnarzmTOc (accessed 5 October 2020). 20. This section draws on work from Hartley (2010). 21. W. Kosova (9 October 2009), Newsweek, ‘Techtonic Shifts’: https://​ goldsteinreport​.com/​rupert​-murdoch​-says​-google​-is​-stealing​-his​-content​ -so​-why​-doesnt​-he​-stop​-them/​ (accessed 5 October 2020). 22. J. Murdoch (August 2009), ‘The absence of trust’. MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival: http://​www​.broadcastnow​ .co ​ . uk/ ​ c omment/ ​ j ames ​ - murdochs ​ - mactaggart ​ - speech/​ 5 004990​ . article (accessed 5 October 2020).

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23. Robert Thomson (23 January 2010) ‘End of the world as we know it’. The Australian. 24. Quoted in a review of Auletta (2009) by N. Baker, New York Times, 27 November 2009: http://​www​.nytimes​.com/​2009/​11/​29/​books/​review/​Baker​ -t​.html (accessed 5 October 2020). 25. S. Bartholomeusz (3 February 2010) ‘News Corp’s healthier pallor’. Business Spectator. 26. See: https://​www​.accc​.gov​.au/​focus​-areas/​inquiries​-ongoing/​digital​ -platforms​-inquiry/​final​-report​-executive​-summary (accessed 5 October 2020). 27. See: https://​www​.smh​.com​.au/​business/​companies/​murdoch​-s​-news​-corp​ -to​-take​-aim​-at​-google​-and​-facebook​-20180502​-p4zcxd​.html (accessed 5 October 2020). 28. Source: Sydney Morning Herald, 20 April 2020: https://​www​.smh​.com​.au/​ politics/​federal/​making​-facebook​-and​-google​-pay​-for​-australian​-news​-is​-a​ -wake​-up​-call​-20200419​-p54l7s​.html. 29. Source: https://​www​.vox​.com/​2019/​4/​11/​18292419/​archive​-of​-our​-own​ -wins​-hugo​-award​-best​-related​-work (accessed 5 October 2020). 30. The legal dimension is discussed here: https://​legalinspiration​.com/​?p​=7​ 09 (accessed 5 October 2020). 31. A. Alter, ‘A feud in wolf-kink erotica raises a deep legal question: what do copyright and authorship mean in the crowdsourced realm known as www​ .nytimes​ the Omegaverse?’ New York Times, 23 May 2020: https://​ .com/​2020/​05/​23/​business/​omegaverse​-erotica​-copyright​.html (accessed 5 October 2020). www​ .copyright​ .gov/​ policy/​ 32. US Copyright Office Report at: https://​ section512/​. 33. See: https://​www​.accc​.gov​.au/​media​-release/​holistic​-dynamic​-reforms​ -needed​-to​-address​-dominance​-of​-digital​-platforms (accessed 5 October 2020).

5.

Creative cities – our complex system, or theirs?

What is a city? Along with language, cities are the most distinctive, complex and enduring of human-made structures. What are they for? Some say that, like a spider’s web, they are set to catch food. The rationale is economic. Others point to the fortress; they are a signal of the power of their ruler (the ‘order’ of their rule or algorithm). The rationale is political. Other cities, like Xanadu (Shangdu, China) or Pasargadae (Persia/Iran),1 are decreed as ‘pleasure domes’ or gardens, by rulers seeking enlightenment or civilisation through spatial-physical representation. Some of these cities were enriched, and others destroyed, by competitive networking: trade, conquest, imperialism and colonialism (aka plunder). The rationale was what Veblen (1899) called ‘conspicuous waste’. Modern cities were measured by population rather than power. The scale and industry of their workforce determined their competitive edge. Now, the knowledge economy is witness to new cities being founded as private developments or master-planned ventures, to stimulate some aspect of technological innovation. These range from Bitcoin/blockchain in Ya’an, China,2 to ‘the world’s first neighbourhood built from the internet up’ – the ‘smart city’ planned for a derelict district of Toronto by a Google company called Sidewalk Labs. (More on this now-abandoned venture below.) Writing in 2018, after the scheme was launched, Nancy Scola noted: Modern cities thrive on information, but none has built itself around data infrastructure in a similar way; connecting a bevy of smaller-scale innovations through a common networked digital platform could be a hugely powerful innovation in itself. Sidewalk … calls it a chance to ‘reimagine the full stack.’3

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In the context of the knowledge economy and information society, according to Benjamin Bratton (2016), global computation has evolved from ‘different genres of computation – smart grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, smart cities, the Internet of Things, automation’ to an ‘accidental megastructure called The Stack that is both a computational apparatus and a new governing architecture’. The ‘smart city’ is both a ruse to power (part of a ‘new governing architecture’) and a strongly contested zone, where the ‘ruling’ purposes of corporate/state investment may be opposed or ignored, thwarted or tweaked, by different groups of users and uses. The ‘full stack’ of economic, political, industrial, technological and information rationales all play a part in the history of cities. So much so that it can seem impossible to identify what it is that makes them distinctive. That is because what defines a city is not any one attribute but rather the principle of organised settlement at scale. The existence and ‘career’ of a city is based on systemic probabilities; on evolutionary uncertainty, not on precision planning or the will of any one ruler. Thus, the question of what constitutes a city is not economic, political, industrial, technological or informational, but sociocultural. The first major theorist to develop a systematic view of what characterises cities was the Australian Marxist archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe (see also Bairoch, 1988). Childe was responsible for some of the twentieth century’s most influential ideas about human development. He invented the concept of the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ in the 1920s (Hartley, 2020: 48–54; Hartley and Potts, 2014: 59–62), and followed it up with the ‘Urban Revolution’ (1950). Here, he identified ten ‘rather abstract criteria’ that distinguish cities from prior settlements: 1. Large size 2. Specialist classes 3. Taxation (surplus value) 4. Public buildings (concentrated surplus) 5. Ruling class (priesthoods; civil/military leaders) 6. Practical sciences 7. Writing 8. Arts (‘conceptualised and sophisticated’ modes of representation) 9. Imports and trade 10. State obligations to citizens (security for craft specialists) (Childe, 1950: 9–16).

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The simplest requirements for such a system are: scale; specialism; various mechanisms for collecting and socially redistributing the surplus produced by agriculture; various technological systems (arts, sciences, writing) to record and archive the knowledge gained in that process; various forms of mutual obligation among inhabitants; and further specialists to conduct relations beyond the city, both positive (trade) and negative (warfare). The city, then, is irreducibly a complex system, requiring organisational complexity in order to function. Having said that, some critics worry that the city is nevertheless being reduced catastrophically, beyond its capacity to continue as a complex system. In a book written just before she died, urban visionary Jane Jacobs predicted a ‘dark age ahead’. She argued that fully half of Childe’s criteria for the Neolithic city are failing the twenty-first century American city: –– –– –– ––

community and family (#2 above) higher education (#7 and #8 above) the effective practice of science (#6 above) ‘dumbed-down’ taxation, and government responsiveness to citizens’ needs (#3 and #10 above) –– the self-regulation of the learned professions (#6, #7 and #8 above) (Jacobs, 2004). For Jacobs, these essential characteristics of cities are being undermined by a new cluster of threats: from/to the environment (waste, pollution and climate change), racism (class antagonism, systemic family failure and the subversion of community self-policing), and inequality (gap between rich and poor). These threats persist (Wang, 2018; see also Chapter 10). Whether they are thriving or threatened, these are all internal or positive characteristics of a given city, but each individual city is also caught up in larger systems and determined by wider networks. In turn, these develop macro-patterns of order and governance, some emergent and others imposed. In the context of ‘smart cities’, ‘the full stack’ requires the same sort of integrative and synthesising theory that Childe applied to early cities. Instead of treating each city or each computational innovation as a ‘species’, it is necessary also to understand the ‘ecosystem’ of which they are a part.

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‘Capital is restless’ (Metcalfe, 1998; see also Harvey and McMeekin, 2013; Holmén and McKelvey, 2013), so it comes and goes, often leaving ruins within cities – like the industrial wasteland upon which Google sought to build Quayside. Indeed, Google’s master plan, along with developments such as Tesla’s Gigafactory and Amazon’s ‘fulfilment centers’, open the question of whether it is possible for a single corporation to own a city. The state of play differs in different cities. There is no one originating agent, but a complex interplay among public (state), private (corporate) and user (citizen) interests and agencies, such that forms of organisation – economic, political, industrial, technological and mediated – vie for advantage. Outcomes may be probabilistic, accidental or purposeless, rather than planned or controlled. Here is where the city itself is a creative agent.

How big is a city, and how many are there? Cities have turned out to be quite an innovation. The UN (2018) estimates that over 55 per cent of the world’s population now live in cities. As with other institutions – kingship, for example – individual cities come and go, but ‘the city’ endures (Jacobs, 1961 [1992]). Some cities have been continuously inhabited for 10,000 years and more (e.g. Damascus, Aleppo, Jericho). But others are ‘lost’: abandoned, as stone cities were abandoned when the Roman Empire withdrew from Britain, in favour of wooden villages and towns; or destroyed, often in what R.J. Rummel has called ‘democide’ or ‘death by government’ (2017).4 Some regions have experienced ‘Dead Cities’ in both ancient and modern times, for example, Idlib in Syria. Recent examples of abandonment, from a cluster of causes, include: –– Civil war: Belchite (Spain), Varosha/Famagusta (Cyprus), Phnom Penh (Cambodia) –– Nuclear accidents: Pripyat (Ukraine), Fukushima (Japan) –– Mining: Wittenoom in Australia (asbestos), Hashima Is., Japan, once noted for the world’s highest population density (coal)5 –– Under construction but declared abandoned, for example, Ashgabat (Turkmenistan), Ordos Kangbashi (China) (Shepard, 2015).6 Cities themselves are nevertheless a boom industry, growing in number and size, especially across Asia and Africa. As the globalisation of trade has outpaced nation-state jurisdictions, the greatest cities are not necessarily in the same place as the seat of political power.

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International firms organise their operations and marketing to benefit from infrastructure, transport, workforce and customer-concentrations, typically in urban clusters. They deal with national jurisdictions in order to influence legislation, gain tax benefits or government procurement, but these are matters for lobbies, ‘cabinets’, corridors, restaurants and bars. In short, commercial trade and democratic deliberation have parted company. The deliberation that matters is privatised within corporate boardrooms, while public decisions are reached behind closed doors (often by privatised public authorities), impermeable to freedom-of-information requests, while public places become mere sensor points for the collection of data about cities and citizens by tech giants like Google. This constitutes a major ‘democratic vulnerability’. As commentator Martyn Warwick put it when Google announced the withdrawal of their Toronto ‘smart city’ proposal, it was never about democracy or civics: No, this is about making yet more money from data that once harvested cannot be called back or controlled by those who provided it. It is about the imposition, by stealth … of a self-serving money-machine based on a dystopian surveillance system disguised as civic service and benevolence. It was nothing of the sort – and it will be tried again. (Warwick, 2020)

Similarly, digital-public advocate Bianca Wylie drew attention to the problem of closed-door governance in public procurement processes: Through public technology procurements, governments continually conflate growing the tech sector (economic development) with being consumed by it (outsourcing and automating public governance). Technology procurement is thus one of the largest democratic vulnerabilities that exists today.7

Wylie makes a telling point about the agency of cities themselves in contesting the corporate privatisation of government: ‘From its inception, the project failed to appreciate the extent to which cities remain strongholds of democracy and democratic process.’ Cities can develop an uncontrollable life of their own, as Paris did on 14 July 1789, with modernity’s signature act: the ‘creative destruction’ of the Bastille stronghold-prison by a largely anonymous collective citizenry, precipitating the collapse of the entire ancien regime. That’s a model of civic action still widely in use, from Beirut and Baghdad to Hong Kong and Quito, now coordinated at global scale by digital activism (Tufekci, 2017).8 Perhaps it’s no surprise that national and federal capital cities are becoming largely theatrical, purpose-built to showcase a particular gov-

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ernment’s self-image, a long way from the productive populace (e.g. Canberra, Brasilia, Ajuba, Putrajaya, Naypyidaw and Washington DC). This is a growing trend, with Egypt, Indonesia, South Korea and South Sudan, among other countries, planning to relocate their administrative capital over the next few decades.9 At the same time, tech giants are choosing sites far from existing centres of power to build their own mini-cities, which are at the same time experiments (thus far, with mixed results) in new modes of urban association. Thus, Amazon locates its giant robotic ‘fulfilment center’ (warehouse/distribution centres) in the desert outside Las Vegas; Tesla develops ‘Gigafactories’ in Nevada and Shanghai (bankrolled by a Chinese state bank);10 and Virgin Galactic persuaded a local authority in New Mexico to bankroll the ‘world’s first commercial spaceport’, years before they had a working spacecraft to put in it. But Google’s experimental ‘smart city’ was scuppered by public opposition to ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Warwick, 2020). Meanwhile, some existing cities have evolved into megacities, usually defined as those exceeding 10 million inhabitants. By one commercial estimation, the top ten of these in 2019 were: (1) Tokyo, (2) Delhi, (3) Shanghai, (4) Sao Paulo, (5) Mexico City, (6) Cairo, (7) Mumbai, (8) Beijing, (9) Dhaka and (10) Osaka.11 Not one of these is in the traditional centres of Western power in Europe and North America. Perhaps that is why Richard Florida came up with something he calls mega-regions (Florida, Gulden and Mellander, 2007). Florida criticises the ‘obsession with nation-states’ among ‘world leaders, economists, and pundits’, because it ‘does not fit the reality of today’s highly-clustered knowledge economy’. Instead, he argues that ‘the real driving force is larger combinations of cities and metro areas called mega-regions’ – urban clusters and corridors, rather than discrete cities. Working with Fabio Dias, Florida has developed a definition that combines: –– –– –– ––

energy use (measured by satellite imaging of light output) organisational complexity (two or more metro areas) scale of population (over five million) economic productivity (over US$300 billion), thus: We define mega-regions as areas of continuous light that contain at least two existing metro areas, have populations of five million or more, and generate economic output of more than $300 billion. (Florida, 2019)

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This definition results in some counter-intuitive juxtapositions, for example, ‘NorCal’, which includes Silicon Valley, outpaces greater Shanghai, with more than twice its population, because Florida calculates rankings by ‘economic output’. His list (Table 5.1) restores the hegemonic view of global economic supremacy, with five in the USA, two in Europe and just five in Asia. Table 5.1

Richard Florida’s mega-regions

Mega-Region

Cities

Population (millions)

Economic Output (billions, $)

1. Bos-Wash

New York, Washington DC, Boston

47.6

3650

2. Par-Am-Mun

Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Munich

43.5

2505

3. Chi-Pitts

Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh

32.9

2130

4. Greater Tokyo

Tokyo

39.1

1800

5. SoCal

Los Angeles, San Diego

22.0

1424

6. Seoul-San

Seoul, Busan

35.5

1325

7. Texas Triangle

Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Austin

18.4

1227

8. Beijing

Beijing, Tianjin

37.4

1226

9. Lon-Leed-Chester

London, Leeds, Manchester

22.6

1177

10. Hong-Shen

Hong Kong, Shenzhen

19.5

1043

11. NorCal

San Francisco, San Jose

10.8

925

12 Shanghai

Shanghai, Hangzhou

24.2

892

Note: Amounts from Florida (2019).

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If cities are the locus of demographic and economic growth, how many of them are there? It’s impossible to know, because ‘a city’ is still subject to national definition, varying around the world. One recent estimate, using a new definition of the city developed by the OECD and the EU, put the global urban population at 48 per cent (rather than the UN’s 55 per cent). A city is: a contiguous geographic area with at least 50,000 inhabitants at an average population density of 1,500 people per square kilometre.12

By this definition, ‘there are 10,000 cities on planet Earth. Half didn’t exist 40 years ago’.13

Creative cities The distinction between global-economic and national-political cities remains influential, because it affects the way that data are collected. Official statistics tend to be organised at national level, while commercial data are often decomposed to individual-consumer level. Either way, cities are not always counted in their own terms, which is why ‘what is a city?’ is so hard to answer with statistics. Here, then, we may have to content ourselves with a subsidiary question: ‘What is a creative city?’ Even this may be too varied a category: the problem is not to identify a ‘creative city’ in general, for all times and places, but for now, in what’s been called the ‘digital creative economy’ (Towse and Handke, 2013). The most important aspect of this problem is not to define ‘creative’ any more closely than it is possible to define a ‘city’. Nor is it necessary to run through the structure, operations and performance of industries in cities – such data measure their past not their potential. Most important is to grasp what makes a city creative in the first place – how does clustering lots of people together ignite a place as a crucible for new ideas, for their adoption and retention? There are two different ways of answering that question. First, culturally, what makes ‘new’ people migrate to cities, and persuades them to stay there despite the risk of poverty and its attendant privations? What is the attractant? And second, economically, how can this process be understood? What is the knowledge

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system by means of which we can understand ‘the creative city’ as an abstract unit? 1. Culture This attractant may be realised individually: people migrate to cities for work, food and housing, but also for connections, change, chances, entertainment and to expose the self to new stimuli and risks. You can observe and analyse this process through the creative and performing arts themselves, of course: music and movies constantly think through what it means, how it feels and what may be the personal costs involved in being a child, boy, girl or stranger, responding to the challenge of uncertainty in an environment (both built and thought) that presents itself as a ‘character’, pursuing its own impersonal and often impenetrable purposes. The creative city is one that enables self-realisation within a connected network of relationships and constraints. 2. Economics This attractant may be realised institutionally: how can a purposeful organisation benefit from change; from the origination of new ideas, the adoption of new technologies and their retention among a population of users? This is an evolutionary process (Hartley, Potts and MacDonald, 2012; Potts, 2013). With such a template, you can observe and analyse the social uptake of experimentation, innovation, making, and the far-from-costless business of stimulating and coordinating the social uptake of newness, including new technologies, new things, new meanings and new business models, among a large and heterogeneous population. The creative city is one that enables a dynamic system to adapt and change, creating new opportunities for the re-coordination of the economic order. 3. Technology This attractant is realised in data. Google’s spin-off company Sidewalk Labs summarised the attractions of data in their ‘founding vision’, whereby: A combination of digital technologies – ubiquitous internet connectivity, social networks, sensing, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and new design and fabrication technologies –  would help bring about a revolution in urban life. (Doctoroff, 2016)

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Silvio Carta has summarised the attractions for Google: ‘The new area is imagined as a living laboratory for data harvesting, urban analytics and future software development, whereby people are at the centre’ (Carta, 2020: ‘Introduction’). ‘People are at the centre’ of this ‘living laboratory’ in the same way that lab-rats are at the centre of their maze. Sidewalk Labs envisioned: a vastly expanded array of fixed-sensor inputs and control outputs will generate an enormous amount of data on the built environment that developers, students, and residents will be able to use to reimagine and reinvent how the city works.14

The data these people ‘at the centre’ generate belong not to them but to Google, which will use them for its own profitability, including licensing some data back to users like ‘developers, students, and residents’. This is the business model of all the tech giants (see van Dijck (2013) for a critical history of social media; McNamee (2019) and Levy (2020) for Facebook; Hoffmann, Proferes and Zimmer (2018) for Zuckerberg; Burgess and Baym (2020) for Twitter; Leaver, Highfield and Abidin (2020) for Instagram). Although the Quayside initiative was abandoned, Google’s investment in Sidewalk Labs still showed a return, in the form of further spin-off companies: We’ve already started innovative companies addressing urban mobility, next-generation infrastructure, and community-based healthcare, and invested in startups working on everything from robotic furniture to digital electricity. We continue to work internally on factory-made mass timber construction that can improve housing affordability and sustainability, a digital master-planning tool that can improve quality of life outcomes and project economics, and a new approach to all-electric neighborhoods.15

Creative industries – four phases Economic analysis too often leaves out of account the important work that goes on after the moment of origination or invention (which determines property rights; see Chapter 4). A ‘new idea’ – say, steam power, the internal combustion engine, electrification or computation – is made valuable over time and across difference: it is adopted, adapted, retained, coordinated and generalised across a population, which in turn has to monitor, analyse, learn and use the invention in spaces and organisational forms that are able to accommodate it, before its economic potential is yielded (Mokyr, 2009). In that sense, it’s the user (as a population)

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that ‘originates’ value but, in classical economic calculation, neither the cultural processes of creating and pursuing a lifestyle, making new meanings or ways of being, nor the Schumpeterian processes associated with ‘creative destruction’ and building new enterprises are regarded as ‘economic’ inputs (Caves, 2000). However, creative cities are where all this takes place, where people can live and learn to identify themselves with (or against!) the symptoms of a dynamic system transforming itself from within (Potts, 2013: 31). Given that the ‘creative city’ (like ‘creative industries’) is another of those concepts that doesn’t arise directly from social or economic theory, it is not surprising to find that a worthwhile definition of it took time to accumulate and adapt (see Landry, 2019: chapter 4). In previous work, I have proposed four phases that are required in order to identify the creative industries (Table 5.2). It is only at the fourth phase that cities take centre stage, because only by this stage is it clear that merely using industry or economic definitions doesn’t explain how the creative economy actually works. You need both citizens and cities to complete the model of a culture-made system in which industrial and economic activities achieve social uptake (or not). Table 5.2

Four phases of the creative industries, from industry clusters and services to creative citizens and cities

CI-1: Creative clusters: industry definition –– Closed expert pipeline of innovation (internal to the firm) –– Clusters of different industry sectors – advertising, architecture, publishing, software, performing arts, media production, art, design, fashion, etc. – that together produce creative works or outputs –– Provider-led or supply-based definition: institutional (meso-level) creativity; elaborate production by specialist organisations –– Indicators: ‘Creative outputs’, consumer goods priced on creative values (i.e. adding value to information or material), including music, writing, design, performance –– The CI-1 sector is reckoned to be anywhere between 3% and 8% of advanced economies (UK, USA, Australia), of growing importance to emergent economies (e.g. China, Indonesia, Brazil), high-growth, with an economic multiplier effect.

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Table 5.2 (continued)

Four phases of the creative industries, from industry clusters and services to creative citizens and cities

CI-2: Creative services: economic services definition –– Closed innovation system –– ‘Creative services’ – creative inputs by creative occupations and companies (professional designers, producers, performers and writers) –– Value-added to ‘non-creative’ sectors (e.g. health, government) by creative services: institutional (meso-level) creativity –– Indicators: employment of specialist creative people (professional designers, producers, performers and writers) –– Creative services expand the creative industries by at least a third, using the concept of ‘creative intensities’ (DCMS, 2015). Creative input is high value-added; stimulating the economy as a whole and boosting innovation in otherwise static sectors (e.g. manufacturing). CI-3: Creative citizens: cultural definition –– Open innovation network (innovation from beyond firms and professionals) –– Number of ‘creative citizens’ – population, workforce, consumers, users and entrepreneurs, artists –– Personal (micro-level) creativity/micro-productivity/market-based and non-market –– Focus now on user productivity (crowdsourcing, etc.) –– Social media/user-created content –– Indicators: emergent production from social networks; scaled-up via micro-productive institutions (e.g. YouTube, Google) –– This is a user-led or demand-side definition, where in principle everyone’s energies can be harnessed. It adds the value of social networks and the individual agency of whole populations to the growth of knowledge. It is the domain of experimentation and adaptation, where individual agency may have network-wide effects: thus it is the dynamic ‘edge’ of systemic emergence. CI-4: Creative cities: system definition –– ‘Melting pot’ mixture; clash and friction among systems: (e.g. incommensurable attitude towards intellectual property) –– Sites for social meeting and mixture as well as friction: connecting culture and economy, diversity, tolerance, civility –– Creative cities are those that co-locate all four types – industry, economy, culture and technology for urban semiosis –– Population-wide (macro-level) creativity –– This is a ‘non-linear’ definition, where creativity is emergent from intensity of mixture (demographic/multicultural or industrial/occupational), and from the clash of competitive systems, where new ideas are produced out of difference. Source: Adapted from Hartley, Wen and Li (2015: 70).

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It becomes obvious that industrial and economic behaviourism (with its division between producers and consumers) needs to give way to an understanding of how culture-made groups – which we call ‘demes’ (see Chapter 6) – make knowledge, rendering whole populations of users into coeval status with producers, makers, inventors, artists and the rest. The city itself is an agent in a larger system of creative enterprise and meaningfulness, where relationships among units of difference are just as important as any ‘intrinsic’ values or properties of a given unit. Paris means what it does because it’s not New York. Emergent cities must develop such relational distinctions if they are to compete as ‘world cities’. This is why many emergent countries invest in opera houses as well as high-rises; but also why people from here (let’s say Shanghai) ‘scorn’ people from there – let’s say ‘ambitious’ Beijing or ‘vulgar’ Guangzhou (Li, 1996). It’s not just a matter of top-down city-branding; there has also to be a bottom-up cultural infrastructure that is made by those who live and work in a multi-layered environment of connection and clash. Further, books, movies and social media are all parties to the creation of a complex story, look and feel for particular cities; without it, they seem sterile. A ‘creative city’, then, is made of media, relationships, users, narratives, ‘scenes’, festivals, competitions and venues that enable cultural and economic approaches to creativity to mix, in a rich interaction between productive ‘entrepreneurial consumers’ (Hartley and Montgomery, 2009) and creative enterprise (Table 5.3).

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The creative city as medium Table 5.3

Cities as media for mixing culture and economy

Culture

Medium (city)

Economy

Consumption Demand Novelty bundling Language/translation Identity Play Scene/Festival ‘social …

Mediation Platform Urban semiosis Community institutions Knowledge Mix/Move City quarter network …

Production Supply Institutions and firms Intellectual property Growth Work Industry cluster markets’

Note: For ‘novelty bundling’, see Potts (2011); ‘urban semiosis’, Hartley (2020); ‘language/translation’, Lotman (1990); ‘city quarter’, Roodhouse (2010); ‘social network markets’, Potts et al. (2008). Source: Adapted from Hartley, Wen and Li (2015: 78).

Constructing a creative city requires nurturing all three columns of attributes in Table 5.3: culture for ‘emergence’; a place for ‘mixing’; and economy for coordination and scaling. The table also shows how the middle column, the city, acts as the medium between culture and the economy, bringing the different values, actors and knowledge of cultural and economic systems into productive ‘marriageability’.

Competitive cites In 2012, as Research Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI), which was interested in identifying the dimensions of and measures for a creative economy, I led a research project, part-funded by the Beijing Municipal Government, which was interested in Beijing’s status as a ‘world city’. Working with Centre Fellow Jason Potts and others, we produced a ‘Creative City Index’ (Hartley, Potts and MacDonald, 2012). We started from the observation that the function of the greatest global cities has changed. Once they were imperial capitals, centres of power and politics (Rome); then trading hubs, noted for commerce and market efficiencies (London); now they act as ‘attractors’, crucibles of creativity

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and the knowledge economy (Silicon Valley). If cities change, there can be no single criterion or measure of their comparative creativity, especially as cities rise and fall, competing among themselves for the most valuable mobile human capital (Florida, 2019). In fact, cities compete across many dimensions, so an index that can capture these dimensions will prove useful. Naturally, consultants and specialists have stepped up to provide such an index. We analysed as many as we could find, reviewing a total of 23. These fell into two classes: ‘stock’ indexes, which focus on cultural and creative assets; and ‘flows’ indexes, which focus on broader city services, innovation, computational and digital infrastructure, and global integration. We identified 16 dimensions by means of which a city has been reckoned creative: –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– ––

cultural tourism creative industries cultural capital venues liveability transportation globalisation openness human capital social capital government business & economy entrepreneurship innovation & research technology & ICT environment.

A collateral problem arises here about the emergent ‘index industry’. In a competitive market, which index is most compelling, which is most likely to survive long term, and which one will emerge as the dominant force among urban planners, policy consultants and city governments globally? We sought to create an index that drew on the others, while advancing a new agenda in which a creative city is seen as a future-facing organism, not a real-estate venture. We deployed a theory of the ‘value chain of meaning’, in which all three components (producer-content-consumer) are creative agents, evolving over the long term, from premodern, to modern and to global cities. We pursued the shift from ‘creative clusters’ (CI-1) to ‘creative services’ (CI-2), to ‘creative citizens’ (CI-3), to ‘creative

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cities’ (CI-4). We distinguished between a world city (control, power, past) and creative city (difference, change, future). Creative cities focus on the dynamic sources of change. Their centre of gravity incorporates the youth/migrant/multicultural/diverse/intersectional population. Creative cities nurture ‘scenes’ and a popular culture shaped by the digitally literate and ‘entrepreneurial consumer’ (directional ‘street fashion’), as well as by specialist crafts (on the LA/Hollywood model). Creative cities are characterised by complexity, friction and buzz, layered difference and overlapping specialisms (Currid-Hackett, 2009). On this model of the creative city, we erected a Creative City Index, comprising eight main dimensions, with 72 components and over 250 individual data points. The eight dimensions are: –– Creative industries scale & scope (proportion of the overall economy); –– Microproductivity (sole traders, startups, community organisations, non-business enterprises, e.g. museums); –– Attractions & economy of attention (arts, entertainment, work); –– Participation & expenditure (consumption of creative outputs); –– Public support (government expenditure); –– Human capital (creative occupations and workforce); –– Global integration (digital and physical connectivity); –– Openness, tolerance & diversity (ability to accept innovation from the margins). We outline the methods and data used to estimate each index dimension. Three of our indicator suites – CI scope, microproductivity and economy of attention are entirely novel inclusions in creative city index construction. We tested the Index on six cities in three pairs (one metropolitan and one provincial city): London/Cardiff in the UK; Melbourne/ Brisbane in Australia; Berlin/Bremen in Germany. We found the Index to be efficient and robust. However, there remain some issues in identifying equivalent measures (particularly of social media) in China, and potentially in other jurisdictions. The Index can improve in efficiency with the benefit of (a) longitudinal trends among the cities analysed; (b) a wider comparative array and diversity of cities indexed. We completed the Index during the year in which the CCI completed its funding cycle, and Beijing Municipal Government did not take it up, so the Creative City Index awaits a sponsor.

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Do we need cities any longer? In this chapter I’ve focused on cities as populations, crowds, congregations, out of which renewal energies can emerge. With language, cities are one of humanity’s most enduring inventions; but also one that has left permanent ‘sediment’ of ruins, waste, pollution and continuing transformation in the geosphere, to say nothing of their impact on the biosphere as they suck in food and material resources from surrounding areas and across the world. Cities may not suit the ‘circular economy’ of a sustainable Earth-system that we discuss in Chapter 10. Alternatively, if you follow the techno-entrepreneurs, it’s not cities but mega-sheds that they’re building out in the desert (see Chapter 3). Which way will cities go in the future? Some pointers suggest that their day may already be over, at least in affluent countries, where the flight to the suburbs began in the 1950s, and the more recent collapse of retail outlets on the street where the artisans used to live as well as trade (Westbury, 2015), in favour of the suburban mall and then online shopping, intensified during the COVID-9 lockdown period. Modernists had a great liking for cities that went up, not out (preferring art-deco New York to po-mo Los Angeles), so they invested great talent in the city as a built environment, following Le Corbusier in France and the International Movement everywhere. Indeed, architect and historian Charles Jencks famously dates the end of modernity to the moment when this approach to cities proved to be a failure. The occasion was the demolition of a giant ‘block and slab’ residential development in the USA: Happily, it is possible to date the death of Modern Architecture to a precise moment in time. Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32 pm (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grâce by dynamite. (Jencks, 2002: 9)

In fact, although no one admitted it at the time, it was not postmodernism (Lucy, 2016) but institutional racism, ‘white flight’ to the suburbs and poor decisions by government that doomed Pruitt-Igoe. The very name gave the game away. The architects’ brief was for segregated residences: the Captain Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and the William L. Igoe Apartments. The Pruitt Homes were named after local wartime air-ace

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Wendell Pruitt, one of very few Black fighter pilots to see active service, because the US military was segregated in World War II. These were for African-American tenants. The Igoe Apartments were named for white US Congressman William Igoe (Democrat). His claim to fame was that he had voted against the US declaration of war against Germany in 1917. These were for white families. When the 1954 Supreme Court decision on desegregation of public housing was enforced, many whites moved out to the suburbs. The desegregated complex struggled to fill its tenancies, and deterioration of the external environment (stairwells, galleries, elevators, open space) led to vandalism, violence, garbage and ‘rampant vacancy’. Drug dealing and prostitution filled the empty spaces; ‘occupancy rates continued to decline, crime rates climbed, and the most basic building management and maintenance were neglected’ (Allen and Wendl, 2011). Eventually, they blew it all up and it’s empty to this day, while St. Louis continues to depopulate.16 The modernist vision continued long afterwards, to confine poor, migrant and marginal populations in tower blocks, resulting in Attack the Block in horror fiction and Grenfell Tower in horrific fact (Danewid, 2020).17 It persists to this day, when a reimposed coronavirus lockdown was applied in the Australian city of Melbourne to nine ‘public housing’ towers – but not immediately to the city as a whole. These towers housed 3000 people of the multicultural and ‘socially vulnerable’ classes. The move was an attempt to stop COVID-19 spreading to broader (aka affluent) communities where lockdown had already been eased. Critics called out the way that public health decisions reinforced the contours of racism and classism. Nevertheless, it soon became clear that – as in the fictional Attack the Block – what looked like an ‘explosive’ risk to policymakers looked like a vibrant community to insiders. The media’s ‘discovery’ that neglected slums are also resilient communities with sustainable economies and social enterprise echoes a previous occasion, when Kevin McCloud (Grand Designs) made a TV documentary on Dharavi in Mumbai (Slumming It, 2010). It was dubbed ‘poverty porn’ by the Indian government, but McCloud saw it as ‘the worldwide city of tomorrow’.18 Marcus Westbury’s solution to the problem of declining cities is to renew declining high streets. Westbury came out of the alternative festival and arts scene, and made several ‘irreverent, but thought-provoking’ documentary series for ABC TV in Australia, one on digital art, another on the ‘maker’ economy.19 He crowdfunded his book Creating Cities (2015) to

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promote the ‘Renew Newcastle’ project and its application to other cities, which involved gaining short-term leases for abandoned department stores, office blocks and shopfronts – often opulent buildings gone to seed – and letting them at low rents to artists and startups, in order to repopulate city centres and attract foot traffic back into central business districts. For him, repurposing (being clever with leases and licences) was preferable to dynamite (grandiose statements). Many city mayors agreed. The question of whether, where and how cities will survive still preoccupies architects, planners, educators and media. A report from the science news website Science Alert (2019) poses the question in relation to environmental politics and the regenerative turn (see Chapter 10): how might cities migrate to the circular economy? Among those interviewed is environmental architect-educator Steffen Lehmann: When you think of futuristic cities, you might think of flying cars or a Wall-E-like trash city, but Steffen Lehmann … is picturing microclimates and sustainable buildings. Urban Nexus … is trying to achieve an exciting goal – using the waste of one system to power another … ‘It’s very important to understand the inter-connectedness and nexus of the various currently separated sectors,’ he explains. ‘Cities have a governance that is based on the separation of these sectors – for example, the water management people do not talk to the waste management folks in the administration. A first step is to bring these different but inter-connected sectors closer together.’

Admitting that ‘changing our cities and industrial systems to interconnectedly use each other’s waste’ is a big ask, Science Alert recommends doing it: But at this point, business as usual is a much worse option. Building and sustaining large-scale circular economies would at least give us a fighting chance – after all, Earth is just one big generational ship, complete with finite resources and a limited capacity to contain our waste. Right now, it’s the only one we have. And we’re going to have to start reusing stuff much more efficiently, if we want our ship to last.

Lehmann (2018) seeks to head off unsustainability by experimenting with solutions in his Urban Nexus project. If he and others don’t succeed, then at some point the only ‘creative’ solution may become binary: cities or the planet, not both.

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Notes 1.

Both are UNESCO World Heritage sites, partly on account of their gardens. See: https://​whc​.unesco​.org/​en/​list/​1389/​ (Xanadu) and https://​whc​.unesco​ .org/​en/​list/​1106/​(Pasargadae) (accessed 5 October 2020). 2. The idea was to utilise spare hydro-power generated in the rainy summer www​ months for blockchain mining. See Coindesk, April 2020: https://​ .coindesk​.com/​chinese​-city​-known​-for​-bitcoin​-mining​-seeks​-blockchain​ -firms​-to​-burn​-excess​-hydropower, accessed 5 October 2020). 3. N. Scola, ‘Google is building a city of the future in Toronto. Would anyone want to live there?’ Politico Magazine, July/August 2018: https://​ www​ .politico​.com/​magazine/​story/​2018/​06/​29/​google​-city​-technology​-toronto​ -canada​-218841 (accessed 5 October 2020). 4. And see Rummel’s ‘power kills’ website: https://​ hawaii​ .edu/​ powerkills/​ welcome​.html (accessed 5 October 2020). 5. See: http://​www​.uwosh​.edu/​home​_pages/​faculty​_staff/​earns/​hashima​.html (accessed 5 October 2020). 6. See, for instance: https://​www​.insider​.com/​abandoned​-cities​-2018​ -8 (accessed 5 October 2020); and Wade Shepard’s ‘update’ for Forbes (April 2016): https://​www​.forbes​.com/​sites/​wadeshepard/​2016/​04/​19/​an​ -update​-on​-chinas​-largest​-ghost​-city​-what​-ordos​-kangbashi​-is​-like​-today/​ #547f9ace2327 (accessed 5 October 2020). 7. B. Wylie, ‘In Toronto, Google’s attempt to privatize government fails – for now’. Boston Review, 13 May 2020: http://​bostonreview​.net/​politics/​bianca​ -wylie​-no​-google​-yes​-democracy​-toronto (accessed 5 October 2020). 8. And see: https://​www​.bbc​.com/​news/​world​-50123743 (accessed 5 October 2020). 9. See: https://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​wiki/​List​_of​_purpose​-built​_national​_capitals (accessed 5 October 2020). 10. To the tune of half a billion US dollars (May 2020): https://​supchina​.com/​ 2020/​05/​11/​tesla​-borrows​-more​-than​-half​-a​-billion​-dollars​-from​-chinese​ -state​-bank/​(accessed 5 October 2020). https://​www​.msn​.com/​en​-us/​money/​realestate/​the​-worlds​-33​ 11. See: -megacities/​ar​-BBUaR3v (accessed 5 October 2020). World Data has a different ranking, with most in East and South Asia: (1) Shanghai, (2) Beijing, (3) Delhi, (4) Istanbul, (5) Dhaka, (6) Lagos, (7) Moscow, (8) Karachi, (9) Tianjin, (10) Mumbai: https://​www​.worlddata​.info/​megacities​.php (accessed 5 October 2020). 12. Next City (February 2020). Report at: https://​nextcity​.org/​daily/​entry/​there​ -are​-10000​-cities​-on​-planet​-earth​-half​-didnt​-exist​-40​-years​-ago. (accessed 21 October 2020). The full OECD report on Cities in the World was released in June 2020: https://​www​.oecd​.org/​publications/​cities​-in​-the​-world​ -d0efcbda​-en​.htm. (accessed 21 October 2020). 13. Ibid. 14. Sidewalk Labs, Project Vision (2017: 17): http://​www​.passivehousecanada​ .com/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2017/​12/​TO​-Sidewalk​-Labs​-Vision​-Sections​-of​ -RFP​-Submission​-sm​.pdf (accessed 5 October 2020).

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15. Source: Daniel Doctoroff (7 May 2020): https://​medium​.com/​sidewalk​-talk/​ why​-were​-no​-longer​-pursuing​-the​-quayside​-project​-and​-what​-s​-next​-for​ -sidewalk​-labs​-9a61de3fee3a (accessed 5 October 2020). 16. This paragraph draws on my entry on Charles Jencks in Lucy (2016: 105–9). 17. Attack the Block (2011) shows tower-block life from the point of view of the teens-of-colour who live in it: https://​www​.imdb​.com/​title/​tt1478964/​ (accessed 5 October 2020). 18. For ‘explosive’ risk, see: https://​www​.abc​.net​.au/​news/​2020​-07​-06/​why​ -melbourne​ - locked ​ - down ​ - public ​ - towers ​ - are ​ - a ​ - coronavirus ​ - worry/​ 12423934 (accessed 5 October 2020). For ‘classism and racism’, see: https://​ www​.huffingtonpost​.com​.au/​entry/​melbourne​-towers​-lockdown​-how​-to​ -help​_au​_5f026aafc5b6ca9709203a58 (accessed 5 October 2020). For ‘resilient community’ see: https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​australia​-news/​2020/​ jul/​09/​a​-completely​-different​-world​-the​-rich​-and​-resilient​-communities​ -inside​-melbournes​-towers (accessed 5 October 2020). For Slumming It, see: https://​architexturez​.net/​pst/​az​-cf​-166657​-1264399192 (accessed 5 October 2020). For the ‘worldwide city of tomorrow’, see: https://​www​.telegraph​.co​ .uk/​culture/​tvandradio/​6952436/​Kevin​-McCloud​-on​-his​-trip​-to​-India​.html (accessed 5 October 2020). 19. Not Quite Art: https://​www​.abc​.net​.au/​tv/​notquiteart; Bespoke: https://​iview​ .abc​.net​.au/​show/​bespoke (accessed 5 October 2020).

6.

Clubs to cosmos – groups, scale, knowledge

Group genius? Complex organisations? Interacting teams? We are used to associating creativity with the ‘lone genius’ – the artist or inventor who is the inalienable owner of their own talent. But ownership is substitutable: both the ‘inputs’ (talent) and the ‘outputs’ (work) of creativity can be traded, so the identity of the owner is neither here nor there. Creative talents and works, intellectual property copyrights and patents, creative companies and platforms, catalogues and galleries (e.g. an artist’s oeuvre – Taylor Swift’s first six albums; The Dali Museum in Florida, etc.): they’re all for sale. A work of art is valued by the price mechanism of the creative market, not the say-so of the artist or even its value to a buyer, although that can help if they are ‘entrepreneurial consumers’ (Hartley and Montgomery, 2009). In such a market – like the creative industries generally, this is a ‘social network market’ (Potts et al., 2008) – creative products are valued not for intrinsic worth but for their provenance (their ‘life in society’, you might say). If a work can be associated with celebrity or prestige, then it is worth more than an anonymous item, no matter how creative; and provenance is ‘proven’ by the market and specialist agencies, not by the owner. The same goes for scientific inventions. A new resource, material, gadget, process or operating system is valued by its uptake, not by the intrinsic content of the invention, no matter how well imagined, well made or elaborate. In both arts and technologies, it is a larger system – the market, mediation and social uptake – that counts, not individual inventive input as such. To ask what makes creativity and creative work is to shift atten88

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tion from individual (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996) to group. Social theorist Keith Sawyer makes the point: I argue that most of what we’ve heard about famous inventions is wrong because it’s based on the myth of the lone genius … Forget the myths about historical inventors; the truth is always a story of group genius. Today’s innovations emerge from ever more complex organizations and many interacting teams. (Sawyer, 2017)

If creativity is a function of groups, then it is time to think about what type of group is creative, and how such groups are formed and transformed. But in order to see what’s going on, we must take a step back from the economy, to see how groups are made in the first place. It is not sufficient to confine the concept to already-known business organisations like ‘teams’ and firms, or economic institutions like markets. Instead, we need some less familiar terms, derived from the study of culture, language, discourse, text and signs. The sphere of semiosis (the process of signification in any medium) is the semiosphere (Lotman, 1984 [2005], 1990), which is the possibility space of any one culture/knowledge system, from the creative dyad (Shenk, 2014) up to the global space for culture as a whole. The ‘cultural science’ that studies signification is semiotics (Chandler, 2017). It is impossible to recover for analysis the full empirical ‘text’ of human culture over time and space, so semiotic sciences seek to model signification processes. Some theorists have focused on an abstract objectivist approach, for example, Ferdinand de Saussure and his followers, who were very influential in anthropology, philosophy and literary theory in the twentieth century (e.g. Barthes, Derrida, Lévi-Strauss), seeking to build that model ‘up’ from the ‘smallest signifying unit’ of language.1 Others, less well known in the West, have pursued a social materialist approach, for example, Yuri Lotman and his predecessors (e.g. Bakhtin, Propp, Vernadsky, Vološinov, Vygotsky), seeking a systems explanation, ‘down’ to social interaction and relationship. Saussurean linguistic semiotics is terrific for investigating the relational relativity of signs. Lotmanian cultural semiotics is the go-to framework for understanding the links among culture, knowledge and the sociality of groups.

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The question that follows is twofold: –– what kind of groups are formed through the operations of the semiosphere system? –– how does knowledge accrue and grow across such groups? Groups made by culture may be of any scale (micro, meso or macro), but they share homologous features. Because signification requires ‘at least two’ systems to interact, any one group is both bounded internally and connected externally by the language/culture it uses and the texts, archives, genres, stories, games and other semiotic modes of organisation that accrue (and collapse) over time. Group-identity is produced by both autocommunication (reflexive, about itself), whereby the group knows itself as different compared with others, and in dialogue with external groups. Interaction within and between groups requires translation not transmission of knowledge. Comparative dialogue is competitive: ‘our group’s understandings are more adequate than theirs’, or even supremacist: ‘our truth wins’; assertions that have no intrinsic merit but can only be tested in contact with an uncertain environment and in conflict with other (often ‘othered’) groups. None of these uncertainties can be decided by individuals. Indeed, the pursuit of self-interest in a group setting (which was the ancient Greek definition of ‘tragedy’) leads historically not to social success but to social dissolution: You cannot have a well-functioning society in which everybody, or even a majority, are pursuing solely self-interest. This applies to the whole society, and to its parts, including the economy. Good institutions are not going to work in the absence of internalized prosocial values held by a sufficient number of people. Telling anybody to pursue their naked self-interest is not a recipe for greater social good. It’s a recipe for social dissolution. (Turchin, 2016)

Groups: clubs, commons, demes My own recent work with numerous colleagues has developed a way of thinking about the function of culture – not ‘what is it?’ but ‘what is it for?’ (e.g. Hartley, 2020; Hartley and Potts, 2014; Hartley et al., 2019; Hartley, Ibrus and Ojamaa, 2020). Indeed, the basic proposition of what we call ‘cultural science’ is that the evolutionary/historical function of culture among humans is to make groups. Internally bonded and externally

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competitive social groups explain the survival value of culture, which is to transmit knowledge (including tacit know-how) through time and across different/overlapping demographics. Culture is the mechanism that enables accrued knowledge to be continued, environmental uncertainties to be faced, and codes and processes to be tested and shared (but at the same time kept secret from enemies). The semiosphere makes culture; culture makes groups; groups make knowledge; knowledge increases the chances of group-survival (despite individual mortality) under uncertainty. Culture-made groups use signs, codes, languages and internal ‘institutions of language’ – forms, functions, genres, games, registers, dialects, subcultures – to generate, organise and store knowledge and know-how, which they share and secrete, perform and play, to reproduce the group, despite the inevitable death of individual ‘knowing subjects’. Human groups are historically scattered and competitive, so the knowledge of each is only shared across group boundaries by means of certain conventions: cooperation (e.g. translation, marriage, trade) or conflict (copying, theft, conquest). Humans cannot inherit and transmit knowledge as they can inherit and transmit genes. Culture can. That is its evolutionary function. Because evolution is blind, there is no certainty as times change that the semiosphere as a whole, or any one culture, is adequate to its circumstances. Mass extinctions of cultures and all their knowledge have occurred, whether for environmental reasons or by conquest and imperialism. Nevertheless, over the last 10,000 years or so, culture has continuously grown in content, complexity and scale – from small close-knit bands of singing, dancing and storytelling kinfolk up to a global/digital patchwork/ network of planetary extent (and beyond). The species still makes groups as vigorously as ever – carelessly, you might say. But nothing is certain. Culture is a ‘product’ of populations over time and therefore a collective, group responsibility, requiring more than self-interest. Currently, extreme individualism holds sway in economics, politics, entertainment and the accumulation of wealth. If self-interest accelerates to exorbitant scale, it threatens the mechanics of the whole system, knowledge included (Goerner, 2016; Jacobs, 2015; Turchin, 2013). Culture needs a governance or regulator system, like any other engine. Creativity, like thoughts, ideas, words – and individuals – is an abundant resource,

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indiscriminately shared among the whole population. Creativity doesn’t matter until it is organised in and among groups. As mentioned above, culture-made groups vary in scale. –– micro-scale agents, from the dyad to family to ‘small world’ networks –– meso-scale institutions, from specialist crafts or elites to firms and organisations –– macro-scale networks, from speech-communities (e.g. the Anglosphere), ‘virtual’ groups like fans, gamers, ‘the TV audience’, to nations and empires (coordinated groups-of-groups). Three corresponding types of culture-made group can be identified: clubs, commons and demes. At one extreme is the you/me dipole, origin of the dialogic dyad. Think of this in dramatised form, for example, the romcom.2 Although it concerns a couple, ‘it takes a village’ to get them together (after the usual vicissitudes), such that very modern urbanites can achieve the plane of maturity or Mündigkeit (O’Sullivan, 2014) that anthropologists used to call ‘marriageability’ – typically to set the stage for ‘childrearing’ – which together symbolically secure the continuation of the village.3 Despite the very personal and intimate desires of the yearning youngsters, ‘it takes a village’ to get them together, so that (what used to be called) ‘courting’ is a collective action, observed, approved, interrupted and policed by a social network that reproduces itself in the act. One of the best contemporary versions of this process is the Korean romcom Crash Landing on You (Netflix, 2019–20).4 Setting it across the North/ South Korea border takes very seriously – and also adventurously – both the boundary between the I/you couple and the work of the village that is needed to get them together. New knowledge (innovation) is generated along the edges of such groups, where difference meets and interacts – competitively, cooperatively or in conflict (the typical love/hate scenario of the romcom). Through such groups and their interactions, without central direction or the conscious will of individuals, culture ensures both the stability/continuation of knowledge at the core (rules) and the emergence of newness at the periphery (creativity). Both of these are necessary for the survival of a group. Culture is necessary for the survival of knowledge systems; and understanding how these processes work and how they are regulated is necessary for the survival of the species – and the planet.

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Knowledge clubs Knowledge is made in autopoietic (self-selecting, self-organising and self-governing) groups. At micro-scale, such groups are ‘clubs’. This is a club in the economic sense, coined by James Buchanan (1965) to identify goods that are neither public nor private but somewhere in between. Club goods are not ‘rivalrous’ like food (if I consume it, you can’t), and not fully public like roads (everyone can use it). In a club, access is ‘excludable’ (by fees or rules) but use is free to members. Club theory has proven useful in the context of creative industries that produce ‘immaterial’ goods (like media broadcasting), which may be produced commercially (private) but consumed freely (public) – and in ‘clubs’ of the traditional kind. As the knowledge-based economy has burgeoned, the economic concept can be applied to knowledge-making clusters across the board. The economic model applies equally to political clubs, from the Jacobin Club of the French Revolution, to clubs organised around periodicals (e.g. the British political weeklies), to online chatrooms (as exploited by the contemporary alt-right). ‘Clubs’ are the basic unit of organisation for making and disseminating any specialist knowledge, and for recruiting new members, from World of Warcraft meetup groups to the Royal Society. Academic disciplines are also markedly ‘clubby’, where specialist languages, processes and rituals – and often aggressive boundary-policing – set insiders apart, despite a commitment to ‘open’ knowledge. Open Access (OA) has become a leading trend in digital scholarly publishing. However, OA is problematised around the private-goods → public-goods axis: how to make rivalrous, excludable information (private goods) into non-rivalrous, non-excludable knowledge (public goods). The problem of open ‘access’ is seen as how to make private goods (information) public. The alternative offered by Buchanan’s (1965) concept of club goods, and Ostrom’s (1990) of the commons, fits knowledge systems much better than the private/public dichotomy does. Club goods are non-rivalrous but excludable; and commons are non-excludable but rivalrous. In this alternative model, the problem is not about private property and the public sphere, but about how to make club goods (group-held excludable knowledge) into common goods (group-made rivalrous knowledge) – and vice versa, since this is a non-linear problem, best seen as dialogue, not ‘transfer’ or ‘access’.

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Following this logic, my own research ‘club’ has proposed that scholarly journals are not ‘goods’ in the usual sense, despite their commodification by commercial publishers. Instead, they can be reconceptualised as ‘knowledge clubs’ (Hartley, 2015; Hartley et al., 2019; Neylon, 2017; Potts et al., 2017), where a cluster of like-minded scholars get together to produce, test, share and apply a new approach, addition or other advance to knowledge. Participants include readers, authors and editors, who cooperatively determine and follow agreed platforms, protocols and methods. Acceptance is restricted not by price but by ‘review’ (i.e. using discourse to assess value). Such a knowledge club needs to find its optimum scale: too small and it becomes a cult; too large and it becomes mass media. Among other consequences, the ‘knowledge club’ evolves, changes and continues, even though individuals come and go and some design elements are fixed. Knowledge is the outcome and the resource of the club’s activities. Therefore, publishing in this context is not an industry making goods for sale to consumers, but a creative industry for making innovation (Potts, 2019), where uncertainty, experiment and newness are not only tolerated but are indeed the point of the whole exercise. Each journal is a place where uncertain knowledge is protected. Publishing is a coordination mechanism for making new clubs and for nurturing the efforts of existing ones, competitively with other clubs. A club is formed whose participants must contribute (reading, reviewing, editing, authoring, citing) rather than simply appropriating information they find there (which is universally reviled and policed as cheating or plagiarism). Active participation allows members to accrue more knowledge than is disclosed in any one article or journal. Knowledge extends to the social dimension of the field, including its personnel and conditions: who can be trusted (or not); what’s new (or not); which direction will find the ‘cutting edge’ as opposed to the ‘old hat’. In practice, ‘knowledge clubs’ are devalued by academic conditions-of-work, which incentivise authorship but do not reward scholars for active work in editing, reviewing and so on. The ‘open science’ movement has reacted with numerous apps and platforms, both public and proprietary, to encourage sharing of productive tasks in online journal production (OJS), editing (Grammarly), reviewing (Publons), dissemination metrics (Kudos) and publishing (Ubiquity). But again, most of these cluster around automating the competitive-individualist part of

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scholarly productivity, especially at the commercial end of the spectrum. Collective action apps to nurture community-knowledge organisations and through them to grow ‘globalisation from below’ are a wilder terrain (Schoonmaker, 2018). The production and organisation of knowledge, for personal or community advancement, is by now a fully-fledged digital-creative industry. New models for publishing, and thence for a creative-innovative culture-economy, require a fundamental shift of understanding towards knowledge-making in clubs; a shift of analytical attention away from behaviour (consumption) to culture (community). This entails recasting communication from ‘the transmission of accurate information’ (theorist: Claude Shannon, model: electrons/wire) to ‘the interaction of self-creating semiotic systems’ (theorist: Yuri Lotman, model: translation/ semiosphere). At this point, it is feasible to propose a new model of creativity, based on: culture-made groups; group-made knowledge; intergroup dynamics; and the production of newness (innovation) as an evolutionary process under competitive uncertainty.

Knowledge commons The economics of commons is associated with the work of Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom (1990), who solved the problem of the so-called ‘tragedy’ of the commons – called ‘defection’ in economics – which occurs when self-interest impels participants not to cooperate. Ostrom (who was a political scientist, not an economist) made a distinction between (common) stocks and (ownable) flows of any ‘common pool resource’ (although there was much talk of fish). She showed how cooperation in sustaining stocks was necessary to enable individual profitability in exploiting flows. Jason Potts (2019: 146–8) has followed up her work by characterising an ‘innovation commons’ as a ‘cooperative social technology of alertness’ to ‘opportunity discovery’ (pp.  200–201). He suggests that an innovation commons results from the co-presence of self-interested parties (e.g. entrepreneurs) in a self-governing cooperative arrangement that is tolerant of innovation and can pool knowledge, in order to solve an uncertainty problem (pp. 197–8). For Potts, ‘innovation policy’ is not a matter

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of government support for this or that incumbent (aka pork-barrelling), but a self-governing and socially distributed process of community formation, using institutional governance rules to facilitate ‘lower-order’ competitors to cooperate at a ‘higher-order’ level (p. 197). Such group cooperation and collective action out-compete individualistic self-interest (the ‘unit’ of classical economic analysis), so an ‘open’ market must incorporate cooperation and coordination at system level in order to achieve open competition at scale, even though participating in an innovation commons is not in the immediate self-interest of any one participant individual. Potts locates innovation commons in universities, regions/cities and ‘demes’ (culture-made groups; see p. 100), not in incumbent nations, firms or markets. Indeed, he characterises incumbents as the ‘enemy’ of innovation (it imposes costs on a few). Instead, the ‘friends’ of innovation come from ‘civil society’ (it brings benefits to many) (p. 205). Civil society is the place of cooperation, collective action, common pool resources (Ostrom, 1990) and culture (identity, meaning, relationship). Innovation commons draw on cooperative institutions in civil society, and in addition from ‘knowledge clubs’ and places like universities, urban scenes and creative-cluster districts, to develop over time a knowledge commons that combines economic, political and civic values, along with the mechanisms, platforms and devices to share them, including various forms of open mediation, from premodern song and story, to modern newspapers and universities, to postmodern social media (influencers) and crowdsourced knowledge-brokers (e.g. Wikipedia). Potts’s model assumes that such arrangements are temporary, a prior condition for what will eventually become a new market, in which entrepreneurs and their firms compete (presumably uncooperatively). Writing with Darcey Allen, and citing ‘amateur sports clubs’, ‘hackerspaces’ and ‘bitcoin co-working spaces’, he argues that in order to discover valuable opportunities, entrepreneurs and enthusiasts ‘pool together contextual information about the uses of technology’ (Allen and Potts, 2016). Indeed, Potts restricts the ‘innovation commons’ to those who temporarily crowd around a new technology, on the assumption that once they have shared knowledge about ‘the uses, costs and possibilities of a technology’, they ‘instigate their own decline’ as the participants disperse to continue individualistic competition without seeking to establish any kind of ongoing

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community, without a mechanism for coordinating knowledge-sharing or training up new knowledge makers. However, Potts has been taken to task on this by Erwin Dekker (2020b), who argues persuasively that there is more to an innovation commons than tech: it also requires processes, practices and places. He is disappointed that Potts ignores the creative industries in favour of tech, because that weakens the model. As Dekker points out, ‘scenes, salons and creative communities … are part and parcel of the economic history of the cultural sector’; so the idea that innovation commons are temporary is wrong. Innovation commons are embedded in enduring institutional and cultural processes: most artistic scenes don’t collapse … The same is true for many, if not all, cultural genres. There is typically a top-layer of commercially successful artists, but underneath that elevated layer exists an amateur scene that remains an important source of knowledge and innovation for the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’.

Further, Potts misses out the ways that ‘experimentation with new technologies merges with new practices in artistic scenes’: More generally, he fails to bring out the fact that … clubs typically revolve around certain practices that give the ‘scenes’ a unique coherence and identity … Perhaps a combination of practices and experimentation within strong social norms regarding originality would do a better job at capturing what happens in communities.

Finally, Potts is working with an abstract model, but overlooks the importance of places: Potts has lots of interesting things to say about a culture of innovation in which ‘the new’ is tolerated, but he pays virtually no attention to the importance of meeting places and their characteristics, although innovation policy for the creative industries has long recognized the importance of place.

Potts has plenty to say elsewhere about the innovation-brokering and ‘novelty-bundling’ capacities of the creative economy (Potts, 2011), so we need to bring that work together with his model of an innovation commons, which is skewed towards his own growing interest in distributed governance via blockchain technologies.

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I prefer the term ‘knowledge commons’ to Potts’s ‘innovation commons’, because it includes the cultural-creative processes, practices and places that enable a new technology to achieve uptake among myriad anonymous groups and users, and for these applications to become part of a more or less public knowledge archive. A knowledge commons gathers together: –– Ostrom’s original conceptualisation in relation to natural resource allocation and its further elaboration (Frischmann, Madison and Strandburg, 2014); –– Potts’s combination of technology, entrepreneurship and civil society in knowledge cooperation for innovation; –– Dekker’s hunch that that the situated scenes and habits of creative groups are essential to the formation of commons. A ‘knowledge commons’ is a dynamic system. It may originate in curiosity about a new technology, but soon new services and mechanisms emerge to professionalise, coordinate and automate collective action. Some of these stabilise as formal organisations, such as think-tanks, consultancies and workspace startups that continue to operate as ‘knowledge clubs’, and to cooperate as ‘knowledge commons’ for the growth of knowledge for creative innovation. These include both national and international agencies, among them some foundational organisations: for instance, in the UK alone: –– Demos (a New Labour think-tank); –– Nesta (now morphed into an ‘innovation foundation’) with its Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre (PEC) directed by Hasan Bakhshi; –– government agencies like DCMS and the British Council; –– research centres at universities; –– private consultancies like BOP Consulting; and –– specialist apps like Wishu (for booking creative freelancers) etc.5 All of these – and this book – are ‘branded’ knowledge clubs, in dialogue with each other as ‘citizens’ of a larger knowledge commons for the creative economy.

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Groups make knowledge Erwin Dekker (2020a) has made a distinction between two knowledge-making groups. He differentiates them into contrasting disciplines: scientists and humanists. Individuals choose a group according to their ‘attitude’: the ‘detached’ expert (science) or the ‘engaged’ citizen (humanities). The scientist ‘describes’ the world for ‘instrumental’ purposes. The humanist ‘is facing the same problems as anybody else’. One abstracts knowledge for individual use; the other immerses knowledge in a group. There is certainly a distinction between them. But it is determined by something more complex than the psychological disposition (‘attitude’) of an individual towards one side or the other. After all, the detached scientist may be an engaged humanist at home; the humanist may be a detached expert in the lecture-theatre, when they’re not out in the street throwing bricks at the security forces – as Foucault famously did (Smith, 2001: 93). Each discipline takes its identity by contrast with the other, and both of them improve their own processes and practices at least partly through critique by the other, and in competition with it. They are characterised by their differences within the overall knowledge system, and both scientists and humanists belong to a larger group – that of scholarship. Further, each embodies something necessary but not sufficient about how we ‘engage’ with the world: we can’t just exploit it; and we can’t just merge with ‘anybody else’. In other words, knowledge-making systems and groups are in dialogue – one that also produces and shapes them – within an even larger signifying and signalling system: culture. Looked at from inside universities, it may seem that right across the world ‘the sciences’ receive more favoured institutional treatment (public funding and corporate sponsorship) than ‘the humanities’ and especially ‘the arts’ (although these remain popular choices for students). But looked at from the outside, it may seem now that both sciences and humanities – indeed expert or formal knowledge systems in general – are under attack from populist partisans, authoritarian regimes and powerful media. From climate change to coronavirus, the call to ‘unite behind the science’ has become a radical and rebellious act.6 Is it possible to recognise knowledge systems at cultural scale, within which subsystems like science, humani-

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ties and creative arts may thrive? Usually, such large-scale cultural units have been understood in relation to something other than culture: –– Political (territorial) entity: a nation-state, monarchy or empire. –– Language or speech-community: the Anglosphere, Francophone countries, Mandarin speakers. –– Nation: the populace. Some countries recognise their diasporas as citizens. Many countries are internally riven by racism. –– Medium: newspaper readerships (Anderson’s ‘imagined community’), TV audiences, fans. –– Demographics: individual characteristics that yield identity and group solidarity: ethnicity/race, gender, class, sexual orientation, age group (e.g. teens, tweens, etc.), ableness. Cultural differences also play their part in connecting and distancing contiguous populations via differentiating and divergent knowledge systems: in faith, occupation, costume, cuisine, sporting preferences, customs and tastes in performance arts, literary and audio-visual traditions, as well as a mass of ‘how-to’ commonsensical knowledge, distributed by copying, in family, workplace and street. In practice, these categories are mixed up in any one community and everyone belongs to more than one subpopulation or subculture. A culture or semiosphere comprises multiple such groups. Mobility across them has increased with modernity (mobility of labour) and with media (digital globalisation).

Demes In the biosciences, an ‘interbreeding subpopulation’ of any species is called a ‘deme’. It is possible to identify a human deme by its partnering practices (a deme boundary is where marrying across demographic, geographical or political boundaries begins to be frowned upon). Jason Potts and I have borrowed the term to describe ‘inter-knowing’ cultural groups, on the model of ‘democratic’ groups (Hartley, 2020; Hartley and Potts, 2014; Potts, 2019). For us, demes are the largest scale of culture-made groups within the semiosphere. In that context, I have characterised two kinds of knowledge that can be distinguished by demic difference. They map onto Dekker’s sciences/ humanities distinction, but in a cultural and historical rather than behav-

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ioural frame. One is what I call productive or ‘armed’ knowledge; the other is connective or ‘tribal’ knowledge (Hartley, 2018). –– Productive knowledge is expert, organised (into sciences) and institutionalised (in universities) for a purpose (defence of the state). –– Connective knowledge enables recognition (of friend from foe) in the wild, and on knowing one’s own ‘tribe’, through the way they talk, dress and conduct themselves. Connective knowledge is ‘tribal’, based on vernacular, oral-aural media (song, story, sight, screen), whereas the learned sciences are ‘clerical’, marked as Latinate and print-literate (paper, journal, book). There was a time – as the Roman Empire collapsed towards the ‘Dark Ages’ – when productive knowledge was indeed found inside the walls of the imperial fortress, while the connective or wild variety was kept out in the field. But since the ‘barbarians’ took over the imperial mantle (in 476 CE), productive and connective knowledge systems have contended within the bounds of ‘our’ culture. Productive or ‘armed’ knowledge is expert, scientific and instrumental; connective knowledge is vernacular, humanistic and adversarial, concerned with how each group faces ‘the same problems as anybody else’. Together, these two knowledge systems amount to a larger deme (scholars), which itself is in dialogue with the everyday world and with popular media and culture. Scientists and humanists are thrown together with each other and with other demes in digital and entertainment media, where they may have to contend with foes as well as friends. To do so they have to stop scholarly and disciplinary in-fighting in order to face the bigger challenge of increasing social distrust. Fuelled by political and media partisanship with its own agenda, formal knowledge systems of both kinds – descriptive and engaged – are under attack from latter-day Vikings who are bent on general disruption, in order to prise polities away from learnèd ‘elites’. Here you can glimpse ways in which knowledge systems interact, aggregate and grow. Are they linked by the ‘attitude’ of the individual knowledge agent (scientist or humanist)? Clearly there’s more to it than that. Knowledge systems serve groups. A group is not an aggregate of individuals, nor is it a technology, made of components; it’s a cultural system, made of rules, relationships, interactions and meaningfulness, as outlined in Yuri Lotman’s model of the semiosphere (introduced in Chapters 1–2).

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Semiosphere The semiosphere is a global unit, enveloping the planet as the biosphere does. At the same time, each human uses it as a common resource to operate psychologically (micro-agent scale), economically (meso-institution scale), politically (macro-system scale). The semiosphere is a term for the space of signification in any culture, large or small. There are therefore many semiospheres, overlapping and interacting (as is the case with languages) while remaining distinct. The term was coined by Yuri Lotman (1984 [2005], 1990), who used it interchangeably with ‘culture’, allowing the context to decide whether he referred to ‘culture in general’, ‘Russian culture’, ‘literary culture’ (etc.). The French (Francophone) semiosphere differs from the Russian, even if each overlaps with and influences the other (e.g. with respect to the meaning of Revolution). Indeed, Lotman (1990) argued that cultures are in long-term, turn-taking dialogue, alternately receiving and sending semiosis over the course of centuries. This means that all languages are world languages, since each language is in dialogue with the language system as a whole, sometimes to its own peril, like some Indigenous languages. Other semiospheric subsystems might include the specialist codes of religions, arts and crafts, sciences and professions. Some of these too are small, secretive and restrictive (e.g. craft mysteries that survive in the organisational shell of Freemasonry). Others are global – fans of music, games, TV and other contemporary entertainments, for instance. Combine them all, and you have ‘the’ semiosphere: human culture in toto. Based on language, we can regard the semiosphere as both the operating system and the space of possibility without which humans – individually and as a whole – can’t create or mean anything. But this operating system is not stored in a device; it’s stored in culture. The semiosphere is the most suitable model on which to conceptualise groups, because it explains how culture makes groups (Hartley and Potts, 2014). The semiosphere is global, but not an undifferentiated unit. Like planetary tectonic plates, it’s an interacting matrix of systems, large and small, connected and separated by seething fissures and forces along each border zone. Within the semiosphere there are subsystems at all scales. Each deme generates their own semiosphere, whether small (e.g. isolated communities, arcane specialisms or total institutions) or large (e.g. populous nations, popular culture or discursive institutions like feminism). Each develops

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its unique formal language, informal argots and idioms, which enable participants to recognise each other, promoting trust for ‘we’ and distrust of ‘they’ identities in that space. Humans are very skilled at identifying friend from foe by the way people speak and conduct themselves. Simply by speaking in shared culture-made codes they can distribute knowledge while keeping it secret from adversaries or outfoxing competitors. Within each group, codes, rules and rituals emerge about who can gain entry and what can be said: –– myths, stories, assumed knowledge, vocabulary, forms of expression and play, which mark group-identity while processing internal rules and external anomalies; –– expected codes of behaviour for participants; –– arbitrary but widely tolerated punishments for transgressors; –– what counts as true is relational: ‘our’ knowledge can be trusted; ‘theirs’ may pose a threat; –– groups encounter other groups as risks: they may be neighbours or enemies, and must be treated accordingly. The signals may be subtle: if you are looking for feminism, encountering a mention of ‘the feminist movement’ is likely to signal a neighbour, whereas a mention of ‘the femosphere’ means you’re in enemy territory. All of these are cultural rather than directly political or economic phenomena. As a result, even though ‘the semiosphere’ is of planetary extent and includes all sense-making activities by humans, there is no united, species-level semiosphere. Attempts to build one, through formal institutions (international law, the UN, etc.) or by informal group activism (Fridays For Future, Extinction Rebellion) have not so far yielded a coherent group that recognises ‘one planet; one species’ as its own boundary. Nevertheless, whether building a business or a community, culture is primary and directive. Economics and politics are enabled and regulated by the semiosphere. Culture-made codes and content of a semiosphere unite and bond any group, but there are many kinds of group operating in many different situated contexts, using different languages, both formal and informal. All these come under the rules and processes of cultural semiosis. For its part, cultural semiosis is not best sought in individual signs or utterances, but in the way in which incommensurable difference meets in dialogue, such that each encounter is both bounded – ‘I’ am irreducibly not ‘you’; ‘we are not ‘they’ – and at the same time translated – creative of new meanings across those boundaries, as each participant

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sends and receives signals that change even as they reproduce the codes available in the place and context of the ‘play’.

Stars This is why drama has long held a special place in society. In the classical world, Greek tragedy was of legislative, constitutional status for the city-states whose citizens gathered to see it (Sennett, 2016). In the modern world, actors are among the most prominent and highly rewarded of all cultural workers, able to gather heterogeneous populations around an identity and a purpose, not only among fans but also politically. Actors may seek to convert their fame into votes in the formal political system, whether they are movie stars (Ronald Reagan, USA), comedians (Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine), Bollywood performers (J. Jayalalithaa, Tamil Nadu, India), reality-TV celebrities (Donald Trump, USA), or the once-most-famous child-actress in the world (Shirley Temple). Alternatively, this cultural function may be exercised informally, as when a non-governmental organisation (NGO) or political party secures the voluntary support of a popular star. Thus, the UN recruits Goodwill Ambassadors and Messengers of Peace, ‘prominent personalities’, like Angelina Jolie, who ‘volunteer their time, talent and passion to raise awareness of United Nations efforts to improve the lives of billions of people everywhere’.7 Actors have long lent their fame and beauty to the cause of propaganda, sometimes finding that the powers-that-be prefer this to their genius, as was famously the case for Hedy Lamarr, Austrian-American movie star cum mathematician, who patented a weapons guidance system during World War II. According to Wikipedia: White Cargo contains arguably her most memorable film quote, delivered with provocative invitation: ‘I am Tondelayo. I make tiffin for you?’ This line typifies many of Lamarr’s roles, which emphasized her beauty and sensuality while giving her relatively few lines. The lack of acting challenges bored Lamarr. She reportedly took up inventing to relieve her boredom.8

Recast as ‘beauty by day; inventor by night’, Lamarr’s ‘secret communication system’ patent was classified and then shelved by the US Navy, but

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taken up commercially in the 1950s, and is now hailed as paving the way for Wi-Fi.9 Actors ‘represent’ populations in a way that politicians don’t – through the ‘price mechanism’ (we pay to see them, even if we only ‘pay attention’) rather than through the elective system (we vote for them). It is clear that these systems overlap, so much so that the commercial audience and consumer is not always distinguishable from the political public and citizen, so that ‘we’ are one and the same population, even though there are two quite separate demes involved here (shoppers and voters), each of them characterised by ‘actors’ and ‘audiences’, who can cross from one type to the other, just as ‘producers’ can emerge from among ‘consumers’ and ‘influencers’ emerge from social media ‘users’. The lesson of this is that human groupishness is profoundly performative. Seeing and saying, thinking and doing are fully integrated in and by the semiosphere. Without the resources of language, culture and semiosis, politics and economics cannot be expressed, let alone enacted.

Cosmos Lotman’s model of the semiosphere is not only suitable for thinking about the seething cauldron of demic identity, it is also important for thinking at global scale, about human culture overall. It is possible to consider all utterances by all humans over all time as one text. Here is where cultural science returns to scientific universalism, linking culture to evolution at planetary and species scale (and beyond). Humans are not very good at thinking globally and as a single species. The demic structure of cultural difference means that it takes a pandemic contagion, a threat to human life in general, to make ‘us’ act in concert at higher than national levels of organisation, and even then only temporarily and with suspicion, uncertainty and defections. The coronavirus-made COVID-19 pandemic, like HIV/AIDS and Spanish flu before it, brought humans together in fear, as had the two World Wars of the twentieth century, which had resulted in the League of Nations (World War I) and the UN (World War II), neither of which has fulfilled its promise to self-regulate a world of nations.

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More recently, climate change activists have warned about impending catastrophe caused by global warming, rising sea-levels, food and fresh water scarcity, mass displacement of populations, natural disasters and mass extinction of species (Rose, van Dooren and Chrulew, 2017), and consequent socio-political reaction (crackdown, war).10 As usual, science fiction is a leading forum for thinking through the issues at stake, without needing to confine itself to the here-and-now. For a truly cosmic vision of what happens to human culture when it is observed as a whole from the outside, making human semiosis the cause of its own downfall, we could not do better than to see it from the point of view of a Trisolarian alien, as in ‘hard’ sci-fi author Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy (The Three Body Problem; The Dark Forest; Death’s End). The problem is that, for the Trisolarians, who face some pretty tricky challenges of their own, communication itself is a fatal risk, since, for them, to be known is to be destroyed. Writer Bogna Konior has explained Liu’s logic in her Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (2020): Communication can potentially draw the attention of another civilization. When the two notice each other, one irrevocably must die at the hand of the other. The smarter one stays silent or attacks first … Interdependent behaviours become complex quickly but the result is mercilessly constant: one of us will die. (Konior, 2020)

Starting from Facebook’s banal ‘riddle’ – What’s on your mind? – that invites us all to communicate, Konior uses Liu’s idea of communication as a fatal flaw to motivate her own theory of the internet as a global medium: Each new medium both expands and shatters the human ego, showing us more of the universe and then promptly reducing it all to us. Bound to discover that it cannot insert itself into an active social network and hope for a straightforward exercise of choice and ethics, ‘each generation is obliged to verify this horror anew for itself, and to discover that it is impotent.’ (Konior, 2020)

She returns us, as a species, to the problem raised in Chapter 4, where we explored the question of ‘to be’ in relation to Romantic modernity and the

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idea of self-originality. But, it transpires, ‘to be’ is a ‘prison of interiority’ that shuts out the universe, rather than letting the light in: The more the world can be described through complexity theory and emergent extra-human behaviour, the more science tells us that notions such as free will and causality might be shaky, the more dogmatically humans reassert detailed textual descriptions of individual thoughts and morals as a panicked solution. In the prison of interiority that is the internet, everything hinges on us and yet no one among us can bring about the change that she desires. (Konior, 2020)

In this impasse, we are confined in the ‘dark forest’ of the internet, awaiting the inevitable apocalypse: ‘everything is internalized, even the weather and the fate of the planet are down to us, and yet we can do only what the medium affords us – externalize, communicate.’ Elsewhere, Konior asks the inevitable further question: What comes after humanism? Identity, agency, epistemology and causality are dislocated across global technological networks and environmental crises. Digital culture registers this process. Human thought is but an emergent aspect of the complex technical network of the internet.11

It’s time to confront our own meaninglessness, as the global technosphere takes over the tasks of agency.

Do we need countries any longer? A stand-out insight from this work is that ‘incumbents’ are not ‘the economy’ but ‘the economic problem’ for a creative economy, especially when government and corporate interests are combined and entangled with political party ideologies, lobby groups and official industry policy, all of which fuel growing generational distrust of ‘incumbent’ government as well as firms. In fact, the lesson of this chapter is that nations are no more than a conspiracy of incumbents. The main apparatus for nation-state collective action has been captured by tribal legislatures, authoritarian-populist governments and over-politicised bureaucracies. The major coordinating mechanism for national populations is rigid, unfit for purpose, ignorant of or antagonistic to creativity, newness, innovation or knowledge.

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Restoring the nation-state to demic credibility and effective action in relation to global challenges of climate change and pandemics is itself a major challenge. Some commentators are up for that. Anatol Lieven, for instance, argues: ‘The drastic action required both to change our habits and protect ourselves can be carried out not through some vague globalism but through maintaining social cohesion and through our current governmental, fiscal and military structures’ (Lieven, 2020, blurb). But globalism is only ‘vague’ because it is rejected by incumbent governmental agencies, as would be expected. Here, we need to pursue a different path, to identify how governance might work in planetary-scale systems, such that ‘globalism’ in relation to governance and the coordination of collective action is seen not as ‘vague’ but as full of creative potential, and distributed among populations and systems at global scale.

Notes 1. The full text of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916; translated 1959) can be found here: https://​archive​.org/​stream/​courseingenerall00saus/​ courseingenerall00saus​_djvu​.txt (accessed 5 October 2020). 2. See ‘In defence of the modern romcom’ by Guy Lodge (2015): https://​www​ .bfi​.org​.uk/​features/​romcom/​ (accessed 5 October 2020). 3. ‘It takes a village’ to travel from Africa to US politics: https://​www​.npr​ .org/​sections/​goatsandsoda/​2016/​07/​30/​487925796/​it​-takes​-a​-village​-to​ -determine​-the​-origins​-of​-an​-african​-proverb (accessed 5 October 2020). 4. See: http://​www​.netflix​.com/​title/​81159258 (accessed 5 October 2020). 5. See, for Demos: https://​demos​.co​.uk/​about/​; for Nesta: https://​www​.nesta​ .org​.uk/​team/​hasan​-bakhshi/​(with links to Nesta and PEC reports, accessed 5 October 2020); for DCMS: https://​www​.gov​.uk/​government/​publications/​ department ​ - for ​ - digital​ - culture​ - media​ - and​ - sport​ - single​ - departmental​ -plan/​dcms​-single​-departmental​-plan​-2019 (accessed 5 October 2020); for the British Council: https://​creativeconomy​.britishcouncil​.org (accessed 5 October 2020)/; for university centres: https://​ ahrc​ .ukri​ .org/​ innovation/​ creative​-economy​-research/​(accessed 5 October 2020); for BOP: http://​bop​ .co​.uk/​about​-us (accessed 5 October 2020); for Wishu: https://​www​.uktech​ .news/​featured/​wishu​-the​-social​-marketplace​-for​-creatives​-launches​-in​-the ​ -uk​-20191210 (accessed 5 October 2020). 6. See: ‘Climate activists Luisa Neubauer of Fridays For Future and Greta Thunberg at COP25, 2019’: https://​www​.sei​.org/​events/​sei​-scientist​-joins​ -event​-with​-greta​-thunberg​-at​-cop25/​ (accessed 5 October 2020).

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7. Source: UN. See: http://​ask​.un​.org/​faq/​14597 (accessed 5 October 2020). Angelina Jolie was honoured in the UK with an Honorary Dame Grand Cross of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George, for her work with the UN Refugee Commission on preventing sexual violence in conflict zones. See: https://​www​.bbc​.com/​news/​entertainment​-arts​ -29565253 (accessed 5 October 2020). 8. For the patent, see: https://​patentimages​.storage​.googleapis​.com/​e0/​dd/​4e/​ 0e04d56d1d7604/​US2292387​.pdf (accessed 5 October 2020); for the star, see: https://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​wiki/​Hedy​_Lamarr​#/​media/​File:​Hedy​_Lamarr​ _Publicity​_Photo​_for​_The​_Heavenly​_Body​_1944​.jpg (accessed 5 October 2020). 9. See, for instance: https://​www​.cnet​.com/​news/​happy​-100th​-birthday​-hedy​ -lamarr​-movie​-star​-and​-wi​-fi​-inventor/​ (accessed 5 October 2020). 10. See Wikipedia on this topic: https://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​wiki/​Climate​ _apocalypse (accessed 5 October 2020). 11. Source: Konior’s website: https://​www​.bognamk​.com/​(accessed 5 October 2020).

7.

All change! – time, duration, extinction

What seest thou else In the dark backward and abysm of time? If thou remember’st aught ere thou camest here, How thou camest here thou mayst. (William Shakespeare, The Tempest I. ii. 48–52)

Old time One of the problems with the concept of creative culture as generally understood is that it lives in the past. It is used to describe the customs, norms and practices of ‘traditional’ cultures. And it attaches to a highly selective tradition of creative works of the past (Oman, 2020), via various exclusive qualities – ‘high’ culture, ‘fine’ arts, ‘literary’ fiction and ‘serious’ music, drama or games. While ‘pop culture’ is lived and is about now, ‘classical’ orchestral music, ballet and opera are often said to have been captured by the past. Compositions from the nineteenth century or earlier are preferred over contemporary music; instruments, costumes and venues are often antiquely ‘authentic’; concert-going audiences over-represent older people. To find serious orchestral music as an emergent culture of the present, you must turn to film, TV and video game soundtracks rather than to concert halls, where ‘culture’ is signalled as a static and stand-alone value. In order to reach new (multicultural, multi-ethnic, multigender, multi-age) audiences on new technological platforms – to compete with the Apple Store or Spotify – classical music has sought to extend itself in space rather than time, by going global. This goes for both states and markets. No aspirational emergent economy waits too long before an iconic new opera house takes pride of place on the capital city skyline. Even in a country like China, with a quite separate opera tradition, the 110

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state is willing to fund a National Centre for the Performing Arts, including concert hall, opera house and drama theatre, in a striking building designed by French architect Paul Andreu next to Tiananmen Square. It is popularly known as the Giant Egg. This is part of the global language of competitive statecraft, denoting a ‘world city’. According to the World City Cultural Forum, hosted by the Mayor of London working with BOP Consulting, there are currently 43 of these: 1. Abu Dhabi 2. Amsterdam 3. Austin 4. Barcelona 5. Bogotá 6. Brasília 7. Brussels 8. Buenos Aires 9. Cape Town 10. Chengdu 11. Dublin 12. Edinburgh 13. Guangzhou 14. Helsinki 15. Hong Kong 16. Istanbul 17. Lagos 18. Lisbon 19. London 20. Los Angeles 21. Melbourne 22. Milan 23. Montréal 24. Moscow 25. Nanjing 26. New York 27. Oslo 28. Paris 29. Rome 30. San Francisco 31. Seoul 32. Shanghai

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33. Shenzhen 34. Singapore 35. Stockholm 36. Sydney 37. Taipei 38. Tokyo 39. Toronto 40. Vancouver 41. Vienna 42. Warsaw 43. Zurich.1 Amazingly, Beijing is not listed among them. But then neither are Bangkok, Berlin, Cairo, Kolkata, Mumbai, Nairobi, New Delhi, St. Petersburg (and others). Global culture is clearly an artefact of marketing, subject to commercial pressures rather than exact criteria (but see Chapter 5). Perhaps a more accurate measure of the globalisation of classical music is the marketing of the product itself, not simply seeking to trade in its prestige. Here, the ‘live’ platform may be less significant than the digital one. The founder of classical-only streaming service IDAGIO, Till Janczukowicz, has said that classical can be called ‘humanity’s most global genre’. The claim is anthropological, not historical, seeking to explain classical music by reference to the way humans perceive sound, harmony and rhythm: ‘Classical music can connect us with ourselves,’ Janczukowicz said. ‘It comforts us, calms us down and it makes us feel we are part of something bigger than ourselves.’2

In other words, extending classical music to new markets, especially among young people and global non-Western audiences, presents a business opportunity for a digital tech platform, but the rationale for listening becomes abstract and universal. What was once a revolutionary political and moral force, bringing classes together for a cause, is now promoted as nostalgic ‘background’ mood setting for listeners who are doing something else. As a ‘creative industry’, it seems that this ‘genre’ must find its niche by channelling the past into the present as comfort food for the ear. Instead

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of calling a population together for a common purpose, the marketing approach does the opposite, individualising the audience. It targets people’s personal motivation, likes, dislikes and preferences, not their place in history. Such an approach pays scant attention either to the purpose of music or to listeners’ sociocultural affiliations. It seeks to maximise audiences by clustering them into comfort clumps. For instance, a recent national survey of classical audiences in the UK came up with ten audience ‘segments’: –– Highly engaged: Metroculturals; Commuterland culturebuffs; Experience seekers; –– Medium engaged: Dormitory dependables; Trips & treats; Home & heritage; –– Lower engaged: Up our street; Facebook families; Kaleidoscope creativity; Heydays.3 There aren’t many people who would self-identify as a ‘commuterland culturebuff’, ‘dormitory dependable’ or ‘lower engaged’. These are not internally organised social groups but externally targeted market segments. The promotional approach takes classical music to be an already-formed (unchanging) commodity looking for a ‘consumer’. Such an approach cannot recognise the group-forming function of culture, even though this is the purpose of some of the most illustrious examples of classical music, which played its part in rousing aspirational consciousness over several centuries. Ambitious and elaborate music is certainly not timeless but it does link past, present and future, beating out a slower temporal rhythm than that of daily life in the here-and-now. That can be inspiring and emotional as well as offering cautionary lessons. ‘Literacy’ in it mediates between present and past, opening a wormhole to the cultural pathways upon which ‘we’ (as a culture-formed group) still depend: Religious → Renaissance → Enlightenment → Romantic → National → Democratic → Modernist … even as a particular composition thrills and surprises with its own internal inventiveness and virtuosic performance fireworks. Following declining public support for national institutions, however, it must compete with contemporary genres, tastes and listening habits to survive in the commercial environment. That may have the effect of making a particular composition mean the exact opposite of what it once said to its own culture. Classical music can and does call out across

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temporal and demographic boundaries. To do so it must also attend to its own cultural exclusions, learning from past mistakes. Although it is now more common for ‘the great orchestras’ to admit women and musicians of colour, there is still a systematic neglect of women composers, non-Western and ethnically diverse music. But if the entire genre is reduced to commodified white nostalgia for individualistic consumption, then its dynamism as a cultural form is lost, and it ceases to be in active dialogue with the present.

Innovation as a temporal phenomenon The moral of this story is that change is built in to any cultural-creative form, expressing its history while inevitably existing in the present. But creativity is now valued less for continuing traditions and more as the generative and adaptive aspect of culture, valued for its role in innovation and the production of ‘newness’ (Hutter, 2015; Hutter and Farías, 2017). Newness is of course a temporal concept. The spark-of-creation model is not enough, however, because ‘newness’ is a process of change, whereby new ideas are taken up socially and used. A widening population tweaks, amends and applies a given invention to suit their own horizons and purposes (Hutter, 2015; Mokyr, 2009). To make its mark on history, an innovation (like steam power) needs societal transformation (Industrial Revolution), without which nothing much happens to an invention (Mokyr, 2009). That transformation is accomplished culturally, taking shape as much from conversation (mediation), distribution and use as from originality and invention. ‘Newness’ is not a property of things but an institutionalised process, rippling through fashions and crazes; stories and celebrities; marketing and mediation; controversy and debate; copying and repurposing. In such a context, innovations cannot be technological alone, nor can they be accomplished without uptake at group scale. There is no overall ‘power to command’ particular uses and users (although political and corporate incumbents will certainly try), and no ‘inheritance’ of innovative capability (despite business dynasties). Newness can come from anywhere in a cultural system, especially its margins and zones of external conflict, while marble-clad edifices built on past success may – must – fail and fall, like imperial and racist statuary.

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Despite the habit of tagging inventions or businesses with the name of one beneficiary owner, the ‘career’ of an innovation shows the opposite tendency. The more an invention is taken up and used as a cultural and not just as a proprietary artefact, the more anonymous it becomes. Business dynasties follow a similar pattern, exemplified (for me) by the Marquesses of Bute: the first ‘takes’ (politician); the second ‘makes’ (industrialist), the third ‘spends’ (patron), the fourth ‘loses’ (‘the man who sold a city’). From the protoplasm they come, and to the protoplasm they return. But what they make remains, as a component of everyday life in the present, not the past.4 Thus, the man who invented corrugated flue-pipes for steam-engine boilers and made a fortune out of railway rolling stock wanted to be remembered as a philanthropist, so he signed a cheque that built the Royal College of Music in London. Few now remember Samson Fox (1838–1903), except his descendants in the acting family (James, Edward, Emilia Fox, etc.).5 But his innovations – both metal and musical – continued in use long after they had stopped making money or memories in his name. We need to understand better how big, long-lasting complex systems self-regulate, and how they regulate their environment, in order to answer a fundamental question posed by Yuri Lotman (2009: 1): ‘How can a system develop and yet remain true to itself?’ To tackle this question is to explain why and how culture is the source of creativity. We need to theorise change as well as rules, structures and traditions, not simply by invoking the Schumpeterian notion of ‘creative destruction’, which applies to meso-level institutions. How do chance, challenge and change also operate at micro (textual-personal) and macro (system-cultural) scale? How does change operate at different ‘wavelengths’ – from the aspirations of the single lifetime to the barely perceptible rhythms of business and historical cycles, all the way out to the blind processes of evolution? What is the governance mechanism of the cultural engine? Complex systems at any scale require renewal and adaptation in order to survive uncertainties. They learn resilience via disruption (one system adapts) or ‘creative destruction’ (one system supplants another). Here, change can be understood as the engine of economic, political, cultural and technological innovation, through which changes can also be driven towards environmental regeneration beyond the human sphere.

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Rhythms of change Creative innovation is not simply technological or even economic; it is driven by changes in meaning, thought and culture. ‘Solutions’ to technological challenges are rarely implemented without fierce semiotic struggle (Morozov, 2013), a staged conflict between dominant monopolies and emergent expertise, where incumbents fight off upstart rivals, using proxies and allies in politics, law and media (not just or not even ‘competition’ in the market) to resist change, until some crisis forces it. At that point, those same firms flip their strategic mode from defensive (resist innovation) to offensive (join innovation arms race). A familiar pattern is established, where transformational change is first ‘impossible’; then ‘inevitable’. A current example is the prolonged and painful transformation from fossil fuels to renewables. Other examples abound, from sanitation (transforming public health) to computation (transforming public affairs). Change introduces elements of chance and chaos into a system, so it is not surprising that it is resisted, by those with something to lose, as an agent of dissolution, predation and extinction. On the other hand, some people, impatient for social or epistemic change, seek to ‘accelerate’ it by introducing random chaos in order to catalyse system-level change. Instead of opposing capitalism, why not hurry it to its own collapse? Accelerationism of this kind is associated with alt-right theory (Breitbart) and white-supremacist terrorism (Christchurch).6 The point is that representative politics is a mode of collective action by coordinated decision-making, a macro-system required to handle change. Political parties and movements are often sorted accordingly: –– –– –– ––

Conservatives = the conspiracy of the incumbents; Progressives = gradual change can be managed; Radicals = sudden change is possible; Extremists = do it now!

System-level change occurs across a gradient from no-change (rigid control) to all-change (random chaos). Any ‘poised’ system (Kauffman, 1991) needs to find and to sustain a sweet spot between these two extremes; politics needs to coordinate change across many systems.

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Just as there are many competing, conflicting and cooperating subsystems in the semiosphere, so there are many different rhythms of time, from moments to eons. It is impossible to control all such relations and frequencies. The relations among systems are too complex and random to permit precise planning: past actions are no guide; the future can’t be predicted. This view of dynamics is widely accepted in economics, where it is said that ‘the market’ cannot be centrally planned, but must be left to individual agents to find its own ‘equilibrium’, motivated by the price mechanism (Hayek, 1945). It is less well understood in politics and culture, where strenuous efforts are expended to achieve ‘unity’ among national populations by encouraging conformity to a narrow set of stories and values. The idea is that ‘we’ are ‘one’ (e pluribus unum – US motto), despite internal demographic differences (ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, age, affiliations, etc.). In other words, although coordination across difference is not the same as sameness across difference, nation-state politics has long been subject to putsch by groups-with-a-cause who want others to conform to one system, and who exploit the elective process and bureaucratic apparatus to achieve control, from bedroom to boardroom. Such thinking does spill over to science, as for instance when evolutionary biologists speculate that ‘our destiny is to be one world with one language’.7 What can or should be meant by ‘we’ is kept under centralised command-and-control, from allowable babies’ names (e.g. Denmark) to prescribed (and therefore also proscribed) languages, religions and cultural values. Sometimes opposition to established ‘we’ identities erupts into the open, as with ‘fallism’, #MeToo or #BlackLivesMatter, where a single incident can precipitate system-wide disruption, offering a chance for transformational change. More routinely, ‘we’ are patrolled by unity-machines that maintain ‘social order’ (permitted and prohibited change), including semiotic apparatuses like education, entertainment, media and the arts, backed up by repressive apparatuses, enforcing a country’s identity via legislation, policing/incarceration practices, migration policies and provision for minorities, for example. None of this can be planned in advance, because social change occurs unpredictably, across multiple temporal ‘wavelengths’, from general, imperceptible evolution to immediate, instantaneous revolution (or ‘explosion’, Lotman, 2009). Both result in irreversible, transformational

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changes, some of which are perceptible in the here-and-now, while other types take much longer to unfold (Table 7.1). Table 7.1

Change itself changes over time

Type of change

Type of knowledge

Type of experience

History/anthropology (Braudel; Lévi-Strauss) Events

Political disturbance

In your face

Conjunctures

Economic cycle (Marx, Schumpeter)

Over a lifetime (Kondratieff)

Structures

Social life (‘longue durée’)

Almost imperceptible

Human-made planetary systems (Lotman; Hermann-Pillath) Technosphere

Posthumanism, artificial intelligence

Inhuman, waste, pollution

Culture/semiosphere

Species being (contextual, comparative)

Population-wide; cannot be experienced individually

Bioscience/physics (Vernadsky; Darwin; 2nd law of thermodynamics) Biosphere/geosphere

Ecological/ environmental

Earth-system interactions

Evolution

Life, the universe and everything

Random meaninglessness

Note: Different disciplinary domains focus on different temporal ‘strata’, with different accounts of change, where ‘deeper’ strata indicate lengthening temporal rhythms.

Knowledge frequencies The same applies to knowledge. To break up the continuum of lived experience, different disciplines ‘think with’ various cycles, waves and periods, which construe change at lengthening rhythm and frequency, from personal to planetary. Epistemologically, it can be said that the ‘higher’ frequencies of change cluster in the humanities (politics, history, meaning), while the sciences cluster at ‘lower’ frequencies (evolutionary processes, universal laws, matter-energy). The ‘social sciences’ are a mid-range hybrid that explore the tension between ‘agency’ (high

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temporal frequency) and ‘structure’ (low temporal frequency). All of these periodicities are co-present in the present, even though their ‘wavelengths’ may differ.8 Indeed, as Bogna Konior has aptly phrased it: Studying this historical context should not, however, lock us in the past … The Anthropocene is the suffocating recognition that all time is human time and no temporality is separable from human industrial history. (Konior, 2019: 54–5)

Once you look at change this way, you can’t help but notice that ‘creative innovation’, the claimed economic value-add of the creative industries (Potts, 2011), follows the same pattern. The supposed ‘lightbulb moment’ of discovery and invention is a semiotic artefact, a way of breaking up the continuum of time into meaningful periods. Implausible though it be, the lightbulb myth is preferred because it projects inventive work back to a single point of origin, the self-owning individual. But, as everyone knows, it takes years to become an overnight success. Precursor conditions and the consequent outworking of their economic, social and environmental ‘impact’ mean that what is valued about any creative invention, innovation, product or process may not be realised within a single lifetime. Outcomes may be understood as positive (e.g. Bessemer converters to make bulk steel, electrolysis to make bulk aluminium, or lithium-ion to make batteries).9 Equally, they may reveal negative consequences. It takes time to realise that this year’s wonder-technology (e.g. plastics and hydrocarbons; or nuclear fuel) may remain as long-term pollution of the Earth-system (fatbergs and The Great Pacific Garbage Patch; or Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima). As the UN has put it: ‘Plastic – both a wonderful invention and a scourge on our planet.’10 Artists too have picked up on the theme.11 The process of disciplinary discovery – and thus of changes to knowledge – also occurs at different rates, sometimes taking centuries to clarify (as with the gradual discovery of the electromagnetic spectrum), sometimes causing upheaval straight away. The ‘exact’ sciences may reform ‘what we know’ so quickly that the current research agenda flatly contradicts what is taught in schools. The ‘interpretive’ sciences, on the other hand, maintain many alternative possibilities in play at once, but a ‘paradigm shift’ may take much longer to permeate such a field. Thus, in the social sciences, the ‘individualist-behavioural’ paradigm is giving way – painfully, over a couple of generations – to the ‘evolutionary-complex-systems’ para-

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digm, but it remains dominant or ‘mainstream’ in many subdisciplines, including economics. However, ‘all time is human time’, which means that the concept of change is human too, and we should explain it in human terms.

Semiosphere to biosphere Konior places ‘the inability to scale the local to the global’ at ‘the heart of our post-global era’ (2019: 50). The arts and humanities have been slow to adopt a systems paradigm, although it opens up the possibility of fixing that inability. Among the earliest and most consistent attempts to scale ­– from local sign to global semiosphere – is the ‘cultural semiotics’ of Yuri Lotman (1990, 2009). His approach, which informs this book, is itself not widely adopted among Lotman’s home disciplines, including those that use textual-discursive, linguistic-cultural or social-economic analysis. It would seem that turning to evolutionary time spans and longue durée histories is not welcome here. As Vladimir Alexandrov has argued: Lotman’s long-term, megascopic, biogeochemically inspired perspective tends to lose sight of the shorter-lived and smaller-scaled phenomena on which cultural psychologists focus, even if these are still numerous and important, especially to those who live them. (Alexandrov, 2000)

As an example of what he means, Alexandrov turns to language itself. Over cumulative time, knowledge systems have specialised and proliferated, not only contributing to the growth of knowledge but also increasing the number and scope of specific ‘languages’. But, he reminds us, that’s no comfort to the speakers of the many natural languages – Indigenous, migrant or minority tongues, and languages from colonised countries – that have become extinct in the process: If we judge the current state of the semiosphere in terms of the quantity and novelty of information it contains, then it seems reasonable to argue that there has been a global increase over time due to such areas of intense activity as the sciences and technology, all of which can be seen as generating ‘languages’ specific to themselves. But is it possible to ascertain if, in an abstract sense, this growth ‘compensates’ for the decrease in linguistic and cultural diversity? (Alexandrov, 2000)

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Perhaps this explains why evolutionary-complex-systems approaches have not proven popular among those who practise cultural criticism, critique and contestation, both scholarly and activist. Those who interrogate the synchronic here-and-now of identity, difference and power remain sceptical of a ‘scientism’ that deploys an abstract universal model of evolution, expressed in the endless present tense of social science and computational mathematics. Attempts to apply global and digital methods to cultural and political difference can all too predictably, if unwittingly, reproduce the very same imperial power structures that humanities approaches have been criticising from the get-go. For an example, applied to ‘global language networks’, see Ronen et al. (2014). Such uses of science seem to ascribe natural causes to social-power antagonism, which in turn serves not only to depoliticise cultural struggles but to support reactionary politics. In cultural and creative circles, ‘science’ is routinely seen as a suspect witness. However, systems approaches like Lotman’s, based on bioscience not reductive science, do supply a warrant for cultural critique and activism, to engage with global systems and ‘post-global’ politics, beyond the immediate identity struggles of dispossessed groups and unemancipated classes (see Felski, 2015, on the ‘limits’ of critique founded on suspicion), while at the same time reconnecting these with long-term, inhuman and posthuman processes. Lotman derived the concept of the semiosphere directly from prior conceptualisations of the biosphere and geosphere (Hartley, Ibrus and Ojamaa, 2020), thereby proposing a causal relation between culture (all human linguistic, textual and discursive utterance), existence (all life, over evolutionary time), and matter-energy (the Earth-system). As soon as this is done, however, it turns out that causation is a two-way street. Just as ‘we’ are sustained by the natural and material environment, so we are changing it. Conversely, even as we alter that environment, so we are sustained by it. This is not simply because the biosphere supplies food-energy while the geosphere supplies energy resources. It is also because (for instance) the oxygen we breathe is made by living organisms, and the structure of the Earth-system is regulated by the biosphere (see e.g. Schwartzman, 1999, 2017), giving us a ‘self-interest’ in understanding how these relationships work. Knowingly or unknowingly, ‘they’ can make or unmake us; ‘we’ can make or unmake them. The biosphere includes us; the semiosphere includes them. Hence, the human habit of restricting a group’s ‘we’-community

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to some partisan fraction of humanity, and to the time frame of a single life, seems increasingly reckless and short-sighted from an Earth-system perspective. Better to bring to mind the ‘dark backward and abysm of time’ in order to understand our dependence on evolutionary processes, which are blind and purposeless – but may be changed or extinguished by our own blind purposefulness. Lotman derived his notion of the semiosphere directly from Vladimir Vernadsky’s early model of the biosphere. Together, these two concepts provide a compelling account of how human sense-making and accumulated knowledge are a continuum of the biosphere. Here is where ‘creativity’ needs a radical rethink. For if we confine our creativity to human-scale horizons and time frames, then ‘the environment’ and ‘the planet’ remain as external phenomena, all too readily commodified as a resource, not a coexistent collaborator. But if we extend creativity to include the means of existence, not just the means of production, then ‘they’ become ‘we’. The environment and the planet become ‘our problem’ at the very moment when we realise that the human is itself of impermanent duration. Climate change is anthropogenic. Extinction is inevitable. What then?

Notes 1.

Source: http://​www​.worldcitiescultureforum​.com/​ (accessed 6 October 2020). 2. Source, Forbes, 22 July 2019, referring to a survey commissioned by IDAGIO: https://​www​.forbes​.com/​sites/​melissamdaniels/​2019/​07/​22/​how​-classical​ -music​-is​-becoming​-the​-next​-emerging​-streaming​-market/​#7cb0b9ff2894 (accessed 6 October 2020). Report: https://​www​.midiaresearch​.com/​blog/​the​ -classical​-music​-market​-streamings​-next​-genre (accessed 6 October 2020). 3. Source: The Audience Agency (2017), National Classical Music Audiences, p.  7: https://​www​.theaudienceagency​.org/​asset/​1303 (accessed 6 October 2020). 4. For the Bute family timeline, see: http://​www​.butefamily​.com/​our​-story/​ bute​-family​-timeline/​(accessed 6 October 2020). The second and third Marquesses were bigshots in Cardiff. The fourth ‘sold’ it. 5. See Who Do You Think You Are, Series 8 Episode 5, Emilia Fox: https://​www​ .bbc​.co​.uk/​programmes/​b014hrn6 (accessed 6 October 2020). 6. See: https://​www​.vox​.com/​the​-highlight/​2019/​11/​11/​20882005/​accelerationism​ -white​-supremacy​-christchurch (accessed 6 October 2020).

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7. Mark Pagel (2011), ‘How language transformed humanity’. TED Talk: https://​ w ww​ . ted ​ . com/ ​ t alks/ ​ m ark ​ _ pagel ​ _ how ​ _ language​ _ transformed​ _humanity/​transcript (accessed 6 October 2020). Pagel’s later work does not pursue this thought bubble (e.g. Pagel, 2017), but the TED talk is widely viewed (and translated), with over 1.7 million views (6 October 2020). 8. See Hartley (2008: 36–60) for further analysis of frequencies in public mediation (accessed 6 October 2020). 9. Batteries: https://​thedriven​.io/​2020/​06/​05/​tesla​-battery​-day​-looms​-as​ -rumours​-of​-new​-lithium​-ion​-partnership​-emerges/​ (accessed 6 October 2020). 10. The UN’s sustainable development goals include marine environments. Source: https://​www​.un​.org/​sustainabledevelopment/​blog/​2019/​02/​plastic​ -ocean/​(accessed 6 October 2020). 11. For instance, John Dahlsen: https://​johndahlsen​.com/​(accessed 6 October 2020).

8.

Constitution and consequences – the mediation of classes

The means of mediation It used to be a truism that social classes were organised around the ‘means of production’ – capital and labour – and that these classes were fundamentally antagonistic (Engels, 1845). The conflict between these interests was said to provide the energy to drive social transformation, and this explains epochal historical change, all the way back to the Neolithic Revolution. The most important exponents of these ideas were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who burst onto the European scene in 1848 with The Communist Manifesto. This document and its doctrine of class struggle went on to shape world history over the ensuing century. While no one doubts the impact of Marxist thinking on the unfolding history of modernity, the importance of thinking itself as a creative agent of change is routinely downplayed. Thought is dismissed as immaterial media rather than empirical matter, and likely illusory or deluded at that. Instead, trust is sought in the ‘realities’ of lived experience, not in the ‘means of looking’. The first witness to take this path was in fact Engels himself, who prefaced his own 1845 book on the Condition of the Working Class in England with this address to the subject of his study: I have studied the various official and non-official documents as far as I was able to get hold of them – I have not been satisfied with this, I wanted more than a mere abstract knowledge of my subject, I wanted to see you in your own homes, to observe you in your everyday life, to chat with you on your condition and grievances, to witness your struggles against the social and political power of your oppressors. I have done so: I … devoted my leisure-hours almost 124

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exclusively to the intercourse with plain Working-Men; … thus I was induced to spend many a happy hour in obtaining a knowledge of the realities of life. (Engels, 1845: 29)

Here is the now-familiar gesture of separating ‘reality’ from ‘studies’ and ‘documents’, downgrading ‘abstract knowledge’ as ‘mere’, while ‘knowledge of the realities of life’ is valued as unmediated experience. This passage also takes the further crucial step of addressing a group or deme directly – ‘you’, the ‘Working Classes of Great-Britain’. Thereby it constitutes that class in media, that is, using journalistic methods to produce a media text that went on to gain a long and productive life of its own. Engels was among those who were calling this ‘objectively’ identified working class into ‘subjective’ being, in order for that class, acting collectively, to exercise consciousness and agency ‘for itself’. The very act of describing their ‘condition’ was simultaneously to endow that anonymous population of millions with selfhood and identity, which in turn (in Althusserian terminology) can be ‘hailed’ or ‘interpellated’ for collective political action: ‘Workers of all countries, unite!’ (Marx and Engels, 1848)

By this rhetorical stroke (and its subsequent discursive career), the working class ceased to be what anyone said they were in ‘mere theory’ and became ‘lived realities’ for ‘the masses’ who were now called upon to organise and act for their own emancipation – and did so, in that very ‘year of revolutions’, 1848, right across Europe. As historian Christopher Clark has put it: In 1848 … parallel political tumults broke out across the entire continent, from Switzerland and Portugal to Wallachia and Moldavia, from Norway, Denmark and Sweden to Palermo and the Ionian Islands. This was the only truly European revolution that there has ever been … For politically sentient Europeans, 1848 was an all-encompassing moment of shared experience. It turned everyone into contemporaries, branding them with memories that would last as long as life itself. (Clark, 2019)

Of course, Marx and Engels were reporting on something real (‘condition’) and their call to action (‘manifesto’) was designed to change that reality, by reordering the forces and relations of production (‘unite!’). But no such change could take effect without the ‘abstract knowledge’ of social theory (Marx’s own great talent) engaging in creative dialogue with everyday life, as later imagined in Robert Tressell’s novel The Ragged Trousered

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Philanthropists (1914 [1955]). Class consciousness – a class ‘for itself’ in Marx’s own term – arose from activists’ success (or otherwise) in describing objective reality in a systematic way and, at the same time, calling the working class into subjective being, to achieve self-realisation and collective action, the process that ‘turned everyone into contemporaries’. With many others, and over a lengthy period, they created an identity for their agent of history.1 It can be argued, therefore, that classes are formed around the means of their own mediation. Instead of classifying a class by its economic activity (productive labour), this model recognises a class by its formation as a cultural deme (communicative identity). Here, ‘mediation’ includes both abstract knowledge (system) and knowledge of experience (story). Mediation includes internal dialogue with in-class interlocutors; and external dialogue with ‘society’ – media, state and disciplinary observers and opponents. Further, certain organisational units and institutional forms emerge that can legitimate a claim to represent the demic class at large. This is in fact the narrative arc of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and of Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society (1958a: 319–28). Both of these founding figures of cultural studies use the periodical media of the day as documentary evidence of Thompson’s fundamental theoretical claim, which is that the working class ‘was present at its own making’. Among the artefacts, sociofacts and mentifacts (Huxley, 1955) that it made – collectively and over much longer than one lifetime – was consciousness, made real in collective and coordinating institutions, including trades unions, political parties, partisan publishers and community organisations; as well as the everyday life of communities themselves.

Demic mediation Contemporary cultural theory was founded upon the study of demic mediation, not directly on the experience of demic inter-knowing culture within a subpopulation. Disagreement has persisted about whether ‘culture’ in this context refers to production and control, studied via history and political economy, or consumption and critique, studied via

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textual-discursive and media studies (Jones, 1994). Should the ‘class subject’ be tutored in government (take over the levers of power) or in literacy (understand the mechanisms of ideology)? That question remains (answer: both!), made more diffuse and more urgent as its range extended from class to other demographics, especially women, people of colour, youth and aged people, people living with disabilities, LGBTIQ+ communities, people of diverse ethnoterritorial descent (migrant communities, both voluntary and forced) and Indigenous people. It soon became clear that each of these demic groups shared some issues with intersectional allies, but also that many differences need to be recognised, and that who is speaking makes a difference to what is said. Since the end of the Cold War it has been difficult to identify a coherent progressive ‘class’, as ‘the broad Left’ could once be named despite internal differences. Marxist idealism for ‘workers of the world’ to unite has faded as identity politics demonstrated just how deeply modern capitalist culture is riven by difference along an indefinite string of identities (see the discussion of demes in Chapter 6). Further, the internal communication of activist groups has been critiqued for its own exclusionary and prejudicial treatment of other identities: class theory was no sooner promulgated than it was critiqued as too unthinkingly masculine, ethnocentric and intolerant of mobile social identities. Feminist theory was critical to radical thought, and also critical of it (Skeggs, 2008), but it too experienced internal tensions and temporal adaptations or ‘waves’: first-wave suffragette agitation for political emancipation; second-wave ‘women’s liberation’ for the social movements of the 1960s; third-wave personal empowerment, the enterprising self and ‘girl – or grrrl – culture’; fourth-wave intersectional and digital connectivity (but see Nicholson, 2010). In another register, internationalism, global markets, media and social media have drawn increasing attention to the ethnocentric ‘America-first’ presumptions underlying the means of mediation, not only because platforms are US-owned and used but also because American cultural discourse can be insular and ignorant of external realities. Champions of one cause have turned out to be blind to another, and too often the ‘universal’ human subject is extrapolated from a mid-Western sophomore. Meanwhile, and partly in response, international social media connectivity can indeed open up the eyes of a community to the struggles of others,

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often following a triggering event that turns the news spotlight on a different part of town, from #MeToo to #BlackLivesMatter. Alicia Garza, co-founder of #BlackLivesMatter in 2013, emphasised its intersectional and international inclusivity thus: Black Lives Matter is a unique contribution that goes beyond extrajudicial killings of Black people by police and vigilantes. It goes beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within some Black communities … Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. It centers those that have been marginalized within Black liberation movements. It is a tactic to (re)build the Black liberation movement. (Garza, 2014)

It ‘goes beyond narrow nationalism’ because Black lives matter both in and beyond the Black community: When we are able to end hyper-criminalization and sexualization of Black people and end the poverty, control, and surveillance of Black people, every single person in this world has a better shot at getting and staying free. When Black people get free, everybody gets free … We remain in active solidarity with all oppressed people who are fighting for their liberation and we know that our destinies are intertwined. (Garza, 2014)

The Black Lives Matter Global Network (BLM) took its radical inclusivity worldwide, not least through the good offices of sympathetic celebrities, including Selena Gomez, whose Instagram account boasted 180 million followers at this time (Table 9.2). In June 2020, she hosted BLM co-founder Alicia Garza, who wrote: ‘From politics to protests, from housing to healthcare, we all deserve better. When we’re organized and have a plan, we can actually change the things we don’t like in this country.’2 The message cut through. In 2017 BLM’s global network was awarded the international Sydney Peace Prize: Since creating the social media hashtag #BlackLivesMatter in 2013, BLM’s Co-Founders, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi steadily and strategically built the scaffolding of a nationwide on-the-ground political network that now has more than 40 chapters worldwide. Encouraging a broader and deeper conversation about what justice for Black people looks like – and how people can join forces to achieve it – the Black Lives Matter Network nurtures an inclusive, decentralised and leaderful movement from the bottom-up. The Founders want the faces of this movement to reflect the change they strive

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towards in their own communities, which is that all Black lives matter, regardless of their gender, class, sexual orientation, or age.3

The Sydney Peace Prize citation praised BLM for ‘courageously reigniting a global conversation around state violence and racism’, using ‘new platforms’ and the ‘power of people’ to reach across ‘inequality and injustice’ to build a global network for change. One of the places where change is sorely needed is Australia, where the Sydney Peace Prize is hosted. Like the USA, Australia is a settler-colonial society, sharing not only the experience of racial profiling, criminalisation, sexualisation, surveillance and poverty among people of colour, especially migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, but also the genocidal suppression of entire Indigenous nations at continental scale. So when #BlackLivesMatter burst back into prominence as part of global community reaction to the killing of African-American George Floyd by Minneapolis police, there was an equal insistence that Indigenous Lives Matter. In Melbourne, Tarneen Onus-Williams, Crystal McKinnon and Meriki Onus, for the Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance, organised one of the BLM rallies that took place around Australia, attracting tens of thousands of protesters from all sections of the community, despite COVID-19 lockdown regulations. Commenting on the event, including official attempts to stop it, they wrote: This is a local, national and international movement, and the way we have been treated is punitive and petty. But this happens whether we are in a pandemic or not. The irony does not escape us that the police on the east coast have responded to a rally against police violence and brutality with more violence and intimidation. This is an example of why reform just does not, and will not, work to end police violence. It is built this way, it is systemic, and they are operating the way that they were designed. It is not that the system can be fixed, the system is the problem – and this is why these colonial systems must be destroyed. New ways of living must be created that centre Indigenous people and sovereignties. This is the only way forward. Anything less continues to be built on the theft of Indigenous land and the genocide of our people. (Onus-Williams, McKinnon and Onus, 2020)

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The Australian Prime Minister at the time told protesters to stay at home: ‘There’s no need to import things happening in other countries here to Australia,’4 he said: As upsetting and terrible that the murder that took place – and it is shocking, that also just made me cringe – I just think to myself how wonderful a country is Australia.5

Among other things, these are all ‘deme wars’, where the boundaries among and between social-class groups are criticised, opened or policed, such that sectional experience can be mobilised for intersectional action. Such society-scale forms of mediation and representation are the current cutting edge of the ‘creative industries’, although as social movements the status of agencies is not necessarily or even primarily commercial.

New populations Class-formation for those present at their own Industrial Revolution was conducted using the means available at the time: by publication and by face-to-face agitation and propaganda at meetings and in workplaces, that is, not just ‘the media’ as a technological form but via mediation as a political practice, intermediating new knowledge systems (e.g. Hegelian and democratic/socialist philosophy), technologies (e.g. the press and pamphlets) and new groups (e.g. public and mass meetings). But what to call ‘the masses’? This was and has remained a strongly contested matter. Class-based masses emerged with the popular press of the nineteenth century, commencing with radical popular (the pauper press) which paved the way for the commercial popular (mass media), although they were made of the same people, how they were addressed began to fragment. For some legacy institutions they were ‘the poor’, ‘souls’ and ‘sinners’; for others they were ‘the multitude’ or ‘mob’; while others again were busy converting them into ‘consumers’. As far as political activism went, a distinction was made between the industrial ‘proletariat’ and the rural ‘peasant’ – the Communist Manifesto (chapter 1) notoriously claims that great industrial cities have ‘rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life’. Marx and Engels saw urban factory workers as the advance guard of the working class, and sought to address, recruit and direct them by inspiring them to identify as revolutionary

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militants, able to act using new knowledge, technology and collective cooperation. Mediation is therefore not just a transparent window through which to glimpse as-yet unrealised possibilities, but a creative industry. What it creates includes the identities, subject positions and communally organised ways of seeing through which ‘the realities of life’ can be understood in a new way by a ‘mass’ audience of readers and spectators who don’t necessarily see themselves that way, made possible by the social media equivalent of the ‘pauper press’ that burgeoned since the 1800s. Radicalism is built in. Following the methodology of quantum physicist Chris Fuchs (2011, 2019), story and evidence both play a creative role in organising uncertainty. And modernity itself is a consequence of the act of bringing newness into knowledge. The progressive and knowledge-brokering sections of society are not a goon-squad of regimented unity, modelled on military discipline or Red Square fantasies, but a heterogeneous and quarrelsome alliance of difference. Getting stories in order is a prime objective. Change has been imagined, introduced, negotiated and enacted through media. Current change-making energy is concentrated around action for human and animal rights, and for renewable energy resources to combat climate change, environmental degradation and the destruction of ocean habitats. In the process, as heavy industries of the past are superseded (or offshored) by new sources of wealth, electrical energy, information technologies and digital or computational media, ‘class consciousness’ itself has had to adopt a global perspective and a serious reappraisal of its own identity. For instance, many of the most visible activists for climate change action are school students, girls and young women. Current policy settings make those same children and young people invisible to decision-making forums. Climate catastrophe is projected into a future when today’s children will be the only ones still around to pick up the bill: they’re the ones who ‘have nothing to lose but their future’ as climate activist Luisa Neubauer put it. Many of those most directly affected by inequality and consequent environmental risk are people of colour, migrants, asylum seekers and people displaced by war. These groups have little in the way of economic clout or political leverage, but they do have access to language, culture, sociality, global media networks and a future. These are what is needed to build a class: the means of mediation, organi-

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sational talent, collaborative solidarity and hope in the face of impossible odds. In short, girls and their allies are well-placed intermediaries who are adept at cross-demographic communication to cut through and build new demes. For their part, scientists are currently experiencing a declining influence on public administration and the public sphere, but a teenage schoolgirl from Sweden can bring their message to global millions. This is because ‘girls’ are an emergent global-digital class, the first of that name, in process of self-formation and self-realisation as a class (Hartley, 2020, chapter 12). ‘Influence’ across knowledge systems, platforms and demes is not an easy ‘industry’ to manage, since its various parts are autonomous from each other (Abidin, 2018; Leaver, Highfield and Abidin, 2020). Those who do the data-gathering and mathematics are not the same people as those who do the consciousness-raising, and both are kept at arm’s length from the inner workings of political policy and corporate platforms. But here, a new class is organising itself, on the street and in social media, to unite otherwise incommensurate groups under one hashtag, and so to call a previously unknown class agency into collective global being. That’s ‘creative innovation’ at scale. Certain performer-celebrities voluntarily take on a coordinating mechanism for overlapping demes, using their demographic reach to promote a cause. If you follow on Instagram – say – Dylan Alcott, Gemma Chan, Cara Delevingne, Tavi Gevinson, Selena Gomez, Gigi Hadid, Laetitia Ky, Demi Lovato, Brit Marling, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Lilly Singh, Taylor Swift, Emma Watson (for instance), you may be surprised at how much topical but tailored information calls for your attention or points you in the right direction on a daily basis, especially when cultural, political and technological crises crop up; and how much straightforward education in theory, practice and mediation these public figures provide their followers, young and old. Thus, for instance, Brit Marling, producer/writer/star of The OA and so on, shared ‘10 rules to fight for Black people’s freedom’, a manifesto by BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors (18 June 2020). Marling had 351,000 followers at this date. Cullors had 272,000. Cullors’s post attracted many more likes on her own screen (42,000) than on Marling’s (4000). In this case, star Marling was not so much amplifying activist Cullors as targeting the message to her own demographic ‘knowledge club’. By contrast, during the same BLM campaign, Cara Delevingne, actor/model/star of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Carnival Row and so on, had 44.3 million followers. She posted a photo of herself holding aloft a ‘Black Lives Matter’ placard, standing next to a poster of

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murdered George Floyd, in front of a public building with military armed guards. This post garnered 2.2 million likes in two weeks.6 Delevingne was reaching out to a ‘deme’. And this is to say nothing of specialist deme-building sites like ExtinctionRebellion, HeForShe, Malala Yousafzai (Assembly.Malala. org), OpenSocietyFoundations, ReconciliationAus, Greta Thunberg or MckenzieWark3000; or digital news, analysis and opinion outlets like Autostraddle, BuzzFeed, The Conversation, Daily Kos, Dazed, The Feminist Wire, FiveThirtyEight, global-e,7 Jacobin, Medium, Radii, Salon, Slate, SupChina, Teen Vogue, Vox and so on (just to list some mostly US-centric sources). Between them, these outlets, together with podcasts, YouTube and TV shows, gather sizeable demographics, for which they perform the role of Gramscian ‘organic intellectual’, teaching and promoting demic ‘common knowledge’, including recommended books, venues, organisations and events for those who want to dig deeper. This is an open/ digital/global knowledge system (aka ‘university’) in formation, largely women-led and intersectional, fully decentralised and self-organised, but nevertheless institutionalising new sets of ‘rules’ about what can and should be said and done, by whom, among emergent inter-knowing populations.

New methods? Many new technologies through which groups and causes organise themselves have proven to be no friend to progressive ideas. This applies to the use of internet and social media affordances by alt-right and extremist ‘groupuscules’, but also to the platform giants who provide the affordance. These tech giants are among the most powerful, secretive and selfish corporations on the planet, prospering even as the world economy tanks while tens of thousands of people succumb to COVID-19.8 But here also, amid the turbulence of mediated contestation on the ‘factory floor’ of data and surveillance capitalism, there are opportunities for truly new creative industries to emerge. The question of ‘industrial scale’ has modulated into one of ‘group-identity’. Here too, story precedes measurement: the act of observation changes reality, as physicist Chris Fuchs (2011) argues on the basis of quantum

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uncertainty; the means of mediation come first; measurability of the scale of productivity follows. Fuchs writes: What has been lost sight of is that physics as a subject of thought is a dynamic interplay between storytelling and equation writing. Neither one stands alone, not even at the end of the day … The ‘interpretation’ should come first; the mathematics (i.e., the pre-existing, universally recognized thing everyone thought they were talking about before an interpretation) should be secondary. (Fuchs, 2011: 5)

Fuchs construes the distinction between story (interpretation) and mathematics (measurement) in just the way that I distinguish between ‘constitution’ and ‘administration’, which itself is a structural transformation of Lotman’s distinction between ‘the moment of explosion’ and the ‘new foundational stage of gradual development’ that follows (2009: 11). Lotman writes: The moment of explosion is also the place where a sharp increase in the informativity of the entire system takes place. The developmental curve jumps, here, to a completely new, unpredictable and much more complex path. The dominant element, which appears as a result of the explosion and which determines future movement, can come from any element of the system or may even be an element of another system, randomly pulled by the explosion into the web of possibilities of future movement. However, in the following stage, this element will already have created a predictable chain of events. (Juri Lotman, 2009: 14)

Paradigm-changing thought (revolution; explosion) comes first; change management (bureaucracy; predictability) comes after. Chris Fuchs puts it this way: Bryce DeWitt once said, ‘We use mathematics in physics so that we won’t have to think.’ In those cases when we need to think, we have to go back to the plot of the story and ask whether each proposed twist and turn really fits into it. An interpretation is powerful if it gives guidance, and I would say the very best interpretation is the one whose story is so powerful it gives rise to the mathematical formalism itself (the part where nonthinking can take over). (Fuchs, 2011)

It’s no use measuring the ‘creative industries’ of a previous mode of mediation to predict how things will go in the future. That’s ‘nonthinking’. Instead, ‘we have to go back to the plot of the story’, alongside Marx, Engels and their legions of active-citizen successors in the process of bringing a new identity and deme into existence, and with them, imagine

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the possibilities for a new culture, politics or industry. The consequences extend all the way back to measurement itself, which in the quantum age is not what it used to be, even in its most rigorous homeland of physics: Before quantum mechanics, the word ‘measurement’ was subliminally understood as being about looking and finding – both of them passive processes … In contrast, [my approach] understands ‘measurement’ as an action an agent takes on her external world with the concern being what are the consequences of the action for the agent. Viewed this way, of course measurements have a creative component in an indeterministic universe. Measurement is … an action I can take that has consequences for me. (Fuchs, 2019)

The methods of the exact sciences – mathematics, measurement and precision – are good for the administration of a given domain (how many of them?), but can’t explain its constitutional aspect (what ‘consequences for me’?). Statistics are vital to the conduct and administration of sports, for instance, supporting a veritable industry of assessing, testing, archiving and reporting, but the performance numbers don’t explain what draws people to that particular sport in the first place. Interpretation comes first. Only culture can explain why some sports have a hard time being recognised as sports, no matter how athletic, competitive and popular they are (e.g. synchronised swimming; Paralympics).9 Popularity is not a natural phenomenon, awaiting measurement, but a manufactured cultural mentifact, held together by continuous storytelling, as the mediation of male-contact sports clearly shows. Measurement is nevertheless the dominant paradigm for both institutional science and public policy. Cultural economics necessarily measures the past, not the moment of creativity itself but indirect traces of something else. In relation to creative producers it can ask ‘how big is the creative sector’ (Chapter 3); in relation to the creative moment itself it can only measure consumers – ‘how many bums on seats’ (e.g. Hewison, 2014). Either way, it can explain very little about creativity or its functions, because creativity is ‘constitutional’ not ‘administrative’. The investigation of consequences cannot lead directly back to causes. Similarly, attempts within economics to explain innovation through the figure of the entrepreneur – Schumpeterian, Austrian or evolutionary – can be sophisticated and thought-provoking, seeking to specify what systems, operations and mechanisms face the entrepreneur as agent of change, of both ‘creative destruction’ and ‘creative innovation’. Here,

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measurement seeks to confront causes, not consequences. That’s an improvement on the ‘bums on seats’ approach, but the success or otherwise of entrepreneurial action can also only be measured ‘in arrears’ – by its consequences – using existing economic categories. Economic method does not recognise language, culture and semiosis as economic categories; they are assumed out of the equation before any calculation takes place. For example, a transdisciplinary ‘rule-based approach’ is recommended by Georg Blind on the basis of ‘four important advantages’: – The distinction of rules from operations enables a more clear-cut analysis and helps to exclude false positives, – The distinction of sub-groups of agents allows conducting more profound analysis, – The transdisciplinary nature of rule-based economics enables the testing of a more complete set of influencing factors, – The evolutionary perspective secures the inclusion of dynamic phenomena. (Blind, 2017: 175–82)

Here, the ‘rules/operations’ distinction (1) echoes cultural linguistics and anthropology, where codes, customs, norms and knowledge systems are analysed as ‘rules’ of the semiosphere. ‘Sub-groups of agents’ (2) echoes subcultural analysis. The call for a ‘more complete set of influencing factors’ (3) admits the possibility that interdisciplinary analysis can strengthen economic models. And the evolutionary perspective (4) puts this branch of economics firmly into the ‘dynamic complex systems’ camp. Blind’s approach is also culturally sensitive; he’s an expert on the Japanese economy. But his approach is addressed to economics as a discipline and does not integrate imported approaches; nor is this type of work widely read in the humanities. Disciplinary overlap is an unwanted overburden. Similarly, Jason Potts has an impressive track record as a theorist of evolutionary economics, which, with others (including me) he has applied to the creative economy (Potts, 2011). But his interest in intersectional and interdisciplinary dialogue is limited to gains for economics. Underpinning the rule-based approach is a ‘general theory of economic evolution’ (Dopfer and Potts, 2008), where a ‘deep’ level of ‘rules’ is distinguished from a ‘manifest’ mode of ‘operations’. There are three domains of analysis:

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–– Micro (origination): individuals, agents, firms. –– Meso (diffusion): institutions, which Dopfer and Potts dub ‘populations of rules’, being the means by which a new rule is carried to many adopters. –– Macro (coordination): integration of a new ‘rule population’ into the existing institutional systems, which interact and change according to the rules of the game as a whole. ‘Rules’ conceptualised this way echo (may be homomorphous with) the latent/manifest distinctions of functional anthropology (Malinowski, Merton) and the ‘langue’/‘parole’ distinction of Saussurean linguistics. For Saussure, ‘langue’ is the abstract system of language’s enabling codes, while ‘parole’ is empirical utterance (‘speech’). Similarly, Lotmanian semiotics distinguishes between cultural (system) rules and human (agent) performance. Here, ‘rules’ are distinguished from ‘operations’. Economics does not share much common ground with anthropology, linguistics or cultural semiotics, so Dopfer and Potts are not ‘path-dependent’ on these well-worn intellectual pathways; instead they independently invent an abstract model. This is not the place to reconcile or integrate the disciplinary overlaps at work here, but it is important to recognise that they are in play, for all of these disciplines are interested in the growth and destruction of knowledge, including their own. Dopfer and Potts extend ‘rules’ to include domains, classes, orders and operations of rules, expanding the concept well beyond the common sense notion of a rule (‘if this; do that’), or even the concept of the algorithm-as-rule for computational and technological processing (Arthur, 2009). They distinguish four ‘classes’ of rules: –– Cognitive and behavioural, which concern the subjective agency of the entrepreneur; –– Social and technological, which concern the objective circumstances of things. Among these classes, they distribute three ‘orders’ of rules: –– Constitutive – of the system; –– Operational – origination, adoption and retention processes; –– Mechanism – of change. This expanded concept of a ‘population of rules’ (aka institutions) is useful in turn to researchers in the humanities. It allows knowledge theory

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to go beyond purely economic institutions of property, government, politics, law and markets; social institutions of government, economy, education, family, healthcare and religion; organisational institutions such as banks or the UN; cultural institutions such as the GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives, museums). The quip attributed to Mae West applies: ‘Marriage is a wonderful institution, but I’m not ready to live in an institution.’ But the idea that ‘an institution’ = ‘population of rules’ does raise the term to algebraic or algorithmic form, enabling ‘microeconomics’ and ‘macroeconomics’ to admit a ‘meso’ (institutional) level; connecting economic, social, organisational and cultural domains into an evolutionary-systems model, of which the prototype and ideal type is language.

Notes 1.

Engels (1845: 32) was not fussy about what to call them: ‘I have continually used the expressions workingmen (Arbeiter) and proletarians, working-class, propertyless class and proletariat as equivalents.’ As for the status of his evidence, he wrote: ‘whenever I lacked official documents for describing the condition of the industrial workers, I always preferred to present proof from Liberal sources in order to defeat the liberal bourgeoisie by casting their own words in their teeth.’ 2. Story posted to Selena Gomez’s Instagram account (5 June 2020). See also: https://​www​.elle​.com/​culture/​celebrities/​a32787852/​selena​-gomez​ -black​-lives​-matter​-alicia​-garza​-instagram/​ (accessed 6 October 2020); and see: https://​www​.eonline​.com/​news/​1158910/​how​-black​-lives​-matter​ -began​-meet​-the​-women​-whose​-hashtag​-turned​-into​-a​-global​-movement (accessed 6 October 2020). 3. Sydney Peace Prize recipients, 2017: https://​sydneypeacefoundation​.org​.au/​ peace​-prize​-recipients/​black​-lives​-matter/​ (accessed 6 October 2020). In 2019 the Prize went to the Me Too Movement: https://​sydneypeacefoundation​.org​ .au/​peace​-prize​-recipients/​2019​-me​-too/​ (accessed 6 October 2020). 4. Source: https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​australia​-news/​2020/​jun/​06/​ australian​-black​-lives​-matter​-protests​-tens​-of​-thousands​-demand​-end​-to​ -indigenous​-deaths​-in​-custody (accessed 6 October 2020); and see: https://​ www​.sbs​.com​.au/​news/​scott​-morrison​-says​-anyone​-who​-goes​-to​-black​ -lives​-matter​-rallies​-should​-be​-charged​-after​-melbourne​-protester​-tests​ -positive​-to​-coronavirus (accessed 6 October 2020). 5. Source: https://​www​.sbs​.com​.au/​news/​quoting​-a​-meme​-scott​-morrison​ -says​-us​-violence​-will​-not​-bring​-about​-change (accessed 6 October 2020); and see: https://​www​.wsws​.org/​en/​articles/​2020/​06/​02/​aust​-j02​.html (accessed 6 October 2020).

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6. 7. 8.

9.

Source: Marling: https://​www​.instagram​.com/​britmarling/​; Delevingne: https:// ​ w ww ​ . instagram ​ . com/ ​ p / ​ C A ​ _ eWARltgH/​ c /​ 1 7861549410904664/​ (accessed 6 October 2020). See: https://​www​.21global​.ucsb​.edu/​global​-e (accessed 6 October 2020). See, for instance: https://​www​.forbes​.com/​sites/​howardhyu/​2020/​05/​01/​how​ -tech​-giants​-are​-winning​-the​-covid​-19​-fallout​-even​-apple/​#508687006b86 (accessed 6 October 2020); https://​www​.nytimes​.com/​2020/​06/​13/​ technology/ ​ f acebook​ - amazon​ - apple​ - google​ - microsoft​ - tech​ - pandemic​ -opportunity​.html (accessed 6 October 2020); and https://​www​.seattletimes​ .com/​business/​tech​-giants​-are​-profiting​-and​-getting​-more​-powerful​-even​ -as​-the​-global​-economy​-tanks/​ (accessed 6 October 2020). For synchronised swimming see: https://​www​.smithsonianmag​.com/​smart​ -news/​synchronized​-swimming​-is​-really​-hard​-and​-really​-weird​-15524193/​ (accessed 6 October 2020). For a Paralympian comment on wheelchair tennis, see: https://​www​.abc​.net​.au/​news/​2020​-06​-18/​disgusting​-discrimination​ -dylan​-alcott​-us​-open​-wheelchair​-tennis/​12367782 (accessed 6 October 2020).

9.

Creative emergence – provocations and proposals

New rules: groups, change, scale There are several themes running throughout this book that, taken together, point to a new way of thinking about ‘creative industries’. 1. Creativity is a function of groups, not individuals, and of their interrelations in a larger cultural-semiotic system, the semiosphere, which is the ‘unit’ of creative innovation. Thus, culture makes groups; groups make knowledge; cultural knowledge is adversarial even as it aspires to universality. The main implication of this theme is that ‘newness’ is a product of ‘staged conflict’ within and among incommensurate, competing or adversarial culture-made knowledge systems. 2. Creativity is diachronic, dynamic, time-based and emergent, as well as synchronic within the rules and relations of coexisting systems. Like technology (Arthur, 2009), creativity is evolutionary (Berg and Hassink, 2014). 3. Creativity faces ‘scaling problems’ because it is ‘constitutional’ not ‘administrative’; belonging to causes rather than consequences. As new ideas jostle for adoption among complex systems, purposeful creation by culture-made groups here has unforeseen consequences there (Ormerod, 1999): for example, fossil-fuel extraction and use in the economy is at the cutting edge of industrial innovation and creative marketplace practices, but can result in instability and degradation in the hydrosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and ultimately in the Earth-system as a whole. Positive-sum games in subsystems turn

140

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into large-scale catastrophe for the Earth-system. Hence, scaling is a regulation problem. Taking up these themes, it is possible to identify how the creative industries themselves may form, evolve, change and generalise under uncertain conditions, and where the ‘poised’ point between chaos (innovation) and control (regulation) can be set. 1.

Groups, systems, conflict (anthropology)

Human groups are self-made and regulated without individuals necessarily becoming aware of their limits. The well-known ‘Dunbar numbers’ are thought to have operated since the Pleistocene, but they were only identified and made explicit in the 1990s (Dunbar, 1996). They specify human group-size limits by gradient of intimacy: Type of group

Number

–– Most intimate, including kin

5

–– Circle of confidants

15

–– Friends

50

–– Socially knowable group

150 – The original Dunbar number.

–– Casual acquaintances

500

–– Limit of recognisable community

1500

Dunbar sees language (especially ‘gossip’) as an evolutionarily efficient means for maintaining socially functioning groups. Insiders are constantly groomed and stroked; ‘free-riders’ are informed on and regulated; outsiders are recognised and excluded (Dunbar, 2004: 109). The application of this anthropological-psychological principle to contemporary mediated life has been discussed by Maria Konnikova for the New Yorker. She interviews Robin Dunbar, and concludes: If you spend most of your time online, you may not get enough in-person group experience to learn how to properly interact on a large scale – a fear that, some early evidence suggests, may be materializing. ‘It’s quite conceivable that we might end up less social in the future, which would be a disaster because we need to be more social – our world has become so large’ Dunbar said.1

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This problem is exacerbated by an additional inconvenient anthropological truth, which is that humans select their enemies and competitors as well as their friends and partners from such groups (Leach, 2000: 322–43). Indeed, we tend to choose both marriage partners and enemies at the same social distance from self – from among our neighbours (Table 9.1). Beyond these are found strangers, unknowable (their language is regarded as untranslatable) and beyond social relationship (marriage), who might nevertheless pose a hostile threat, rather as do multisyllabic rhinoceroses, crocodiles and elephants. Here be devils, dragons and giants. Brave heroes can gain knowledge from them (e.g. metallurgy for better weapons), but may be eaten or damned in the process. Table 9.1

Distance from Self: Edmund Leach’s (2000) model of how language ‘moulds our environment’

Self ♂ (social)

Sister

Cousin

Neighbour

Stranger

Self (space)

House

Farm

Field

Far (forest)

Self (animal)

Pet

Livestock

Game (in season)

Wild

Self (sex)

Incest

Illicit (experimental)

Marriage/ enemy

Unrelated/ hostile

Self (food)

Inedible

Edible if castrated/ sacrificed

Edible

Inedible

Note: Profanity/taboo separates the continuum of perception into meaningful categories. Relations with society, places, creatures, sexual relations and food are structural transformations of each other.

In the era of social media, the scale of those who can be known without fear is exorbitantly distended, but it still doesn’t encompass the species. Instead, the continuum between neighbour and stranger, friend and foe, marriageable and murderer is rendered ambiguous again, making it hard to establish distinctions using customary cultural categories. Nowadays, you can be ‘friends’ with thousands (some of whom may not be ‘natural persons’), and if you are a celebrity, influencer or star, you might number friends and followers in the millions. At time of writing, the most-followed Instagram accounts (after Instagram itself) belonged exclusively to ‘entertainers’ – footballers, actors and musicians (no politicians or economists) – and three of the top five were women (Table 9.2).

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Table 9.2

Instagram’s top accounts (June 2020)

Username

Owner

Followers

Profession (country)

@cristiano

Cristiano Ronaldo

224 million

Footballer (Portugal)

@arianagrande Ariana Grande

191 million

Musician and actress (US)

@therock

Dwayne Johnson

187 million

Actor and professional wrestler (US)

@kyliejenner

Kylie Jenner

181 million

Television personality and businesswoman (US)

@selenagomez

Selena Gomez

180 million

Musician and actress (US)

Note: For comparison, the top-ranked entries for the UK were David Beckham, #38, with 63 million followers, and Emma Watson, #42, with 57 million followers. Source: https://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​wiki/​List​_of​_most​-followed​_Instagram​ _accounts. For demic comparison, see: https://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​wiki/​List​_of​ _most​-followed​_TikTok​_accounts and https://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​wiki/​List​_of​ _most​-followed​_Twitter​_accounts (accessed June 2020).

Adding the top five sets of followers together gives an impressive total – nearly a billion people – but even assuming they are all unique individuals that’s still a piffling percentage of the total number of humans, and includes only Anglophone users. We’ve a long way to go before any platform, organisation or person reaches ‘we’ the species; this is still an index of US cultural hegemony, not human inclusiveness. Meanwhile, although humans evolved among small, mobile groups, from 5 to 1500 in Dunbar numbers, their activities and impact now extend to planetary scale, which means that ‘we’ live in an unimaginable community, even when it is extended beyond face-to-face sociality through social media. How to know and act collectively at planetary scale is not encoded in our received cultural systems. 2.

Change, evolution, meaning (bioscience and culture)

Evolution is random, blind and wasteful and evolutionary change is indifferent to intentions, meanings and purposes, individual or collective. These are all mentifacts of culture. Thus, intellectual property is a fiction, authenticity is a delusion, and original agency is a myth. But here also is culture’s ‘unique selling point’, beyond any other system: it creates

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meaningfulness in the evolving present, even while knowing that the past is death and decomposition, and the future is murder, extinction and the meaninglessness of entropy (Konior, 2019). Culture is, however, slow to adapt, which results in a lag, and conflict, among ‘residual’, ‘dominant’ and ‘emergent’ meanings (Williams, 1977: 121–7). It is – and is going to remain – hard to imagine, never mind to implement, the changes to our dominant systems (knowledge, politics, economics) that are needed for planetary sustainability and regeneration. 3.

Scale, planet, regulation

Scaling up from invention to system-transformation is an uncertain and wasteful process in itself. And the very process of scaling means that an innovation that is useful and generative for a particular group or context can become a toxic or oppressive danger, or a destructive invasion, for the one next door, or the system in general. The main such problem is that of ‘one species, one planet’: the dawning realisation among the general population, over the last century or so, that humanity is a global species, and that the Earth-system is changed and damaged by collective human action.

What are creative industries for? Provocations and proposals Taking the themes and conceptual insights of this book into account, we can look for emergent creative industries. But this is not yet the place of consequences and measurement; it’s still the place of causes and story. In other words, we’re looking for the constitution of creative industries, not their administration. According to historian Christopher Clark, this follows macro-level shifts in European history – from ‘constitutional’ to ‘administrative’ politics: The Vienna-based political theorist Lorenz von Stein captured the meaning of these changes when he observed that, as a consequence of the [1848] revolutions, Europe had passed from the Zeitalter der Verfassung, the age of constitution, to the Zeitalter der Verwaltung, the age of administration. (Clark, 2019: see also Siclovan, 2014: chapter 3)

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In the context of ‘new rules’ about the constitution of groups, the dynamics of change, and problems of scale within the systemic constraints of culture/language, it is unwise to proceed straight to ‘administration’. While European political history may have taken that path (from von Stein to Foucault, you might say), it took much longer for ‘the project of modernity’ to establish itself in every domain – modernity remains an ‘incomplete project’ if ever there was one (Habermas, 1980 [1983]). The ‘restlessness’ of capital (Metcalfe, 1998) resulted in constant change, from industrial to imperial, manufacturing to services, West to East, things to knowledge, mass efficiency to creativity. Constitutional questions constantly arise: where we might look for new creative industries? what institutional form is taken by various cultural functions? Here, we’re still a long way from the hyper-‘administrative’ DCMS industry sectors of the 1990s (Chapter 3). So, instead of accepting the present administrative arrangements as natural or settled, let’s ask what new realities an emergent creativity may constitute. Here, I’m going to offer a series of provocations rather than a systematic model: what follows is not presented as an integrated or comprehensive list, but a ‘navigational’ tool, which I hope will allow you to glimpse the kinds of thing that culture creates. The present historical moment is the first time when ordinary human populations, acting as ‘one species’ (one deme), are getting together – not without conflict – to imagine what it might mean, and what must change, for humans to live sustainably (with other life forms) on ‘one planet’, the Earth-system. Putting species-scale experience into here-and-now order requires some prior givens. It is axiomatic that ‘we’ (Homo sapiens) survive in space and time by sociality (Darwin), fictions (Harari, 2014), language and culture (Lotman) and exploitation of natural and human resources (economics). These species-rules are the ‘anthropological platform’, by means of which human groups (demes, commons, clubs) can attend to multidimensional dynamic complexity while at the same time maintaining the integrity and identity of the group, and of the self within groups (bearing in mind that each self belongs to multiple groups and drifts from one to another, so ‘membership’ need not be continuous or confined to particular individuals). These anthropological platforms supply ‘open’ rule-making templates for group-interaction and survival through time. On them, ‘protocols’ can be established for constituting specific institutions, knowledge and semiotic practices (for the time being and for each semiopshere,

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great and small). Such protocols serve as rule-systems for ‘closed’ ordering of cultural functions. As circumstances, times and places change, so too must protocols. Here is where you’ll find new ‘creative industries’. Thus, it’s instructive to shift the analytic lens from the past – ‘this sector’ (e.g. entertainment, design, innovation) or ‘this country’ (competitive creativity) – to the emergent (‘this cultural function’).

Higher education For example, while it is obvious that ‘universities’ and other bricks-and-mortar educational institutions are for ‘education’, that only goes so far to explain their anthropological, cultural and constitutional functionality. On the one hand, they are used as repetition-machines, rehearsal spaces and rule-reproduction systems, for transmitting accumulated knowledge to new generations of knowing subjects (aka teaching). On the other hand, they are places for play, sequestered from the main group, protected from consequences, to allow for experimentation and iterative improvement or the pursuit of daft ideas that might prove paradigm-shifting (aka research and scholarship). To recycle anthropologist Marshall Sahlins’s distinction (1976: 179–204), they are both utilitarian training (‘get a job’) and honorific transitional (‘waste time’). They are experienced as both a ‘puberty rite’ (Ong, 1959) and club-forming game for (and sometimes into) various elites (Veblen, 1918). They ‘teach’ students to form knowledge clubs and by so doing to develop collegiate solidarity (attachment to a class, method, discipline, sport or ‘fraternity house’) while increasing the specialist ‘division of labour’ (in Adam Smith’s sense) within knowledge domains. In times of change or social turbulence they can be crucibles for new modes of sociality, new styles of living and new ideas, some of them political, others musical. In short, they function to institutionalise a culture’s need for its ‘active citizens’ to play with and rehearse modes of knowledge and conduct, both personal and in-group, to be able to cooperate and compete in productive work while adapting to new possibilities. The outcomes of such solidarity-building among classroom cohorts can be general and liberating, as in the social movements of the 1960s

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and 1970s on US and Western campuses, or they can be factional and authoritarian, as for example the famous example of Class Five and Class Seven of Thailand’s Chulachomklao Royal Military Academy, who were responsible for military coups of the 1990s, not least because of the solidarity of the Class Five group, whose ‘unity, resolve and comprehensive lines of command were invincible’.2 This is an example of ‘microsolidarity’ (Malešević, 2017), by means of which tight-knit groups can steel themselves to risk life and limb (their own and other people’s) for the sake of the collective, which is understood as an ideological cause. Such bonds of mutual loyalty are not maintained strongly except in ‘total’ institutions like the church and the military, but the looser camaraderie of classmates can sustain lifelong business and social relations, from the ‘old school tie’ to marital choices; and of course social media are very active in the class reunion business. As a ‘creative industry’, universities are part of the ‘experience economy’, competing with media and tourism (in some cases incorporating these into some new kind of hybrid ‘edu-touristainment’). Creative innovation needs to take seriously the tacit (honorific) as well as explicit (utilitarian) purposes and the overall cultural function of universities, and not to reduce them to the status of outsourced corporate standardisation and efficiency, aka an ‘abomination of desolation’ (Veblen, 1918). Once they reach this point, and many think they already have, innovators might be better advised to pursue the cultural function and build new institutional forms around the means of mediation, where educational specialisation is burgeoning as part of influencer and celebrity culture, and on ‘entertainment’ platforms like YouTube and its equivalents. There is already a thriving industry of YouTube tutorials on all subjects, and plenty of competing ‘YouTube University’ ventures, all operating under the motto of ‘caveat emptor’. There might just as well be a ‘BBC University’, since that public broadcaster has such a rich and well-curated online archive. Emma Watson is already an emergent global institution of higher education.3 How long before ‘Watson University’ resolves itself into order, out of all the open advice and recommendations emanating from the star with 57 million followers (on Instagram alone)? Educative influencers like Watson are already operational (under any other name), in a space where community organisations and activists are building and coordinating new institutional forms, suited to

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the times. Incumbent universities, meanwhile, are being driven down another path entirely, pursuing credentialism, prestige, metrics and exclusiveness in a global marketplace, while at national level they have to conform to standardised accountability and the instrumental demands of vested-interest funding agencies. They look more and more like the next analogue industry rushing to follow recorded music, the press and publishing off the digital cliff.

Journalism Not long ago, journalism looked like a global industry of great power and influence (at least for the proprietor), organised into well-established organisations, public and private, popular and profitable. If you wanted to be a journalist and could get your foot in the door, an effective cadetship tradition combined training with practice to introduce you to the rules, topography and major players, to set you up for a long career. Now? The mighty mastheads of the analogue press have collapsed in the face of digital social media, and with them many of the corporate structures that the combination of ‘staged conflict’ stories and classified advertising had served so well. At the same time, the very idea of news came under political attack (‘fake news!’). Journalists themselves were subject to unprecedented partisan violence, state surveillance and police suppression in countries both authoritarian and democratic.4 News ‘audiences’ were melting away, as people brought up on post-broadcast social media, or excluded from mainstream media, found their demic coordination elsewhere. Again, reform of ‘legacy’ institutions will either depend upon or give way to new media, new players and new institutional forms. The cultural function remains the same: gathering populations around attention to demic coordination, intragroup relations and intergroup conflict at any scale.

Nit-picking, gossip and blockchain Moving from trust in media to trust in others more generally, it is instructive to return to the evolutionary horizon set by anthropologist

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Robin Dunbar (1996, 2004). His own empirical work includes the study of primates, including their habits of social grooming – nit-picking, rubbing, stroking, patting, petting, and so on. He estimates that primates spend 20 per cent of their time in mutual grooming; and that humans spend 20 per cent of theirs in ‘social grooming’ – mainly conversation (Dunbar, 2004: 102). What he calls ‘gossip’ is therefore of prime anthropological importance, because it is the linguistic extension of grooming, and its cultural function is to establish group trust. Trust is necessary in order for groups (of primates, including humans) to survive; groups are necessary, to collaborate for resources and for defence against external threats. But groups are expensive to maintain, because building trust takes time and because ‘free riders’ (those who exploit the benefits of a group without incurring the costs) can lead to group extinction. According to Dunbar, language – especially ‘gossip’ – is an efficient mechanism for group-maintenance, being good for: –– keeping track of other individuals in the network; –– advertising one’s own advantages as a friend, ally, or mate (and the disadvantages of potential rivals); –– seeking advice on personal problems; –– policing free riders (Dunbar, 2004: 101). In primates, sociality is maintained by alliances that are ‘deeply rooted in matrilineal relationships (mothers and daughters, sisters). These relationships work because they involve a strong element of trust and commitment’. Building trust by such means is time-consuming and restricted to one-to-one grooming, one-at-a-time. In humans, sociality and group-alliances are extended and automated by language (‘gossip’ – also seen as matrilineal), whose relative efficiency means that humans can sustain and work with much larger and more abstract groups. Of course, primate psychology can only take the question of scaling and automating group trust so far. With language, nit-picking and gossiping were turned into a ‘rule population’ or algorithm. Further extensions require further abstraction, into technologies of communication. Among these, ‘the press’ first became prominent in forging and maintaining alliances among ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1991). More recently, internet technologies have tempted some journalists to seek a ‘truth machine’ that can assure trust within a community while at the same time automating and decentralising its operations so as

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not to rely on intermediaries (like governments, proprietors or banks). This is of course blockchain (Hartley, Ibrus and Ojamaa, 2020, chapters 18–19; Potts, Rennie and Pochesneva, 2019). Michael Casey and Paul Vigna (2018) were early proponents of blockchain’s ledger technology for ensuring truth-by-consensus, ‘eliminating middlemen’ (this is called disintermediation), in order to achieve a peer-to-peer level of group trust, secured by the blockchain. Why is this a big deal? Because ‘record-keeping systems, and specifically ledgers, are at the heart of how societies function. Without them we wouldn’t generate sufficient trust to enter into exchanges, to do business, to build organizations and form alliances’: The broad idea is that by deferring the management of trust to a decentralized network guided by a common protocol instead of relying upon a trusted intermediary, and by introducing new, digital forms of money, tokens, and assets, we can change the very nature of social organization. We can encourage new approaches to collaboration and cooperation that weren’t possible before, transforming a wide array of industries and organizational settings. (Casey and Vigna, 2018: introduction).5

Like any promised techno-utopia, it’s going to be a bumpy ride. Casey and Vigna are the first to caution against techno-hype naivety: Still, there’s nothing to say this will assuredly play out in a way that’s best for the world. We’ve seen how the Internet was co-opted by corporations and how that centralization has caused problems – from creating big siloes of personal data for shady hackers to steal to incentivizing disinformation campaigns that distort our democracy. So, it’s crucial that we not let the people with the greatest capacity to influence this technology shape it to suit only their narrow interests. As with the early days of the Internet, there is much work to be done to make this technology sufficiently safe, scalable, and attendant to everyone’s privacy concerns.

Automation is not necessarily the royal road to scalability. But the question of how to build and maintain trust remains, and technology already plays a major part in assuring the population that their means of mediation are not corrupted. Further creative developments in decentralised nit-picking can be expected.

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Ecclesia – meeting and walking No creative industry or medium is operating alone. They all occupy separate but overlapping domains of life and knowledge; none can satisfy ‘cultural functions’ on their own. Thus, the creative industries will proliferate across functions and also across different cultures, times, places and demes, even as automation and digital mediation enable global scaling. One such function that was hived off to a specialist provider very early in European history, but which is available for digital-global automation, is the institution of ‘popular assembly’ of a Greek city-state, which was known in ancient Athens as the ‘ecclesia’, or ‘gathering of those summoned’. The functions of debate, deliberation, election and judgement were conducted in the Pnyx, where theatre was also performed; while indiscriminate mixing and marketing was conducted in the Agora (‘town square’) (Sennett, 2016). The group that assembled in the Pnyx was the ‘ecclesia’. In later ages, these functions – decision, performance, congregation, commerce – were further segregated, when the ecclesiastic function of congregation or communion was specialised into a religious environment. This occurred during the Roman Empire, when the public building known as the ‘basilica’ – used as a courtroom, a place of administration or assembly, and thus also a marketplace and promenade (the Greek equivalent was the covered colonnade or ‘Stoa’) – was taken over for religious services when Rome converted to Christianity. In ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome (before Constantine) the interior of temples were hidden, intimate, reserved for gods and priests, not used for general congregation. The ecclesiastical architecture of Christian churches and Islamic mosques, by contrast, was all-encompassing, with buildings designed to collect the entire community at once. Such buildings tended to be enormous. The mighty Hagia Sophia, built in 537 CE by the Emperor Justinian in his Eastern capital Byzantium (Constantinople), was the largest building in the world at the time (Figure 9.1).6

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Figure 9.1

Hagia Sophia (1880s)

Source: Wikimedia Commons: https://​commons​.wikimedia​.org/​wiki/​File:​ Architecture​,​_classic​_and​_early​_Christian​_(1888)​_(14772585712)​.jpg (accessed 6 October 2020).

In other words, two of the great world religions did not evolve their mode of worship from sacred temples but from civic colonnades, covered walks and secular basilicas – spaces designed for public rather than religious activities. The later history of religion has tended to confine the cultural function of demic communion to religious purposes, at least until modern stages and halls were big enough to secularise that function once again, notably by means of exhibition halls, which can be huge, designed to accommodate visitors and international expos not just locals; and concert halls, which are however valued for acoustic and aesthetic excellence not carrying capacity. The evolving cultural function of ‘gathering indiscriminate publics’ has also been mediated (audiences) and digitised (social media), by broadcasting (special events and televised concerts) and lately by decentralising meetings for both work and leisure, a process accelerated during COVID-19 social distancing lockdown restrictions.7 That people still pay attention to how they are being looked at, even in home-confined isolation, is attested by the burgeoning new art form of ‘creative screen backgrounds’, proliferating on Zoom – and in attendant media.8

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The ‘cultural function’ of promenading (showing off as you walk through public space) has also evolved, from the Greek Stoa, Roman Basilica and medieval cathedral to the aristocratic promenade of commercialising modernity, for which specific architectural forms also evolved – proprietary gardens, public parks, civic walks and city arcades. It was aestheticised in the tradition of the flâneur, professionalised in the fashion catwalk parade, and more recently ‘athleticised’ via parkour and free running (all of these being Parisian inventions). Meeting and walking are creative industries with multiple modes of mediation, as are eating and travelling, to which the same analysis would apply. (Over to you.) However, the ‘next’ creative industries aren’t going to come from gradual accretion of previously neglected sectors, grafted onto the existing definition, but from a paradigm-changing irruption of new world-views into the global arena. In other words, we must turn from creativity and culture to clash and climate – the ‘return of the repressed’ of ideological critique (Hall, 1982; McCalman, 2018). Our closing themes must be conflict and catastrophe, at planetary scale: pollution in the atmosphere, extinction in the biosphere, waste in the geosphere – this is the ‘platform’ for the creative economy of the Anthropocene.

Notes 1. M. Konnikova, ‘The limits of friendship’, New Yorker, 7 October 2014: https://​www​.newyorker​.com/​science/​maria​-konnikova/​social​-media​-affect​ -math​-dunbar​-number​-friendships (accessed 6 October 2020). Wikipedia also has a helpful entry on Dunbar numbers. 2. Source: Thitinan Pongsudhirak, of Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok Post, 6 June 2014, writing after the 2014 coup: https://​www​.bangkokpost​.com/​ opinion/​opinion/​413829/​learning​-from​-a​-long​-history​-of​-coups (accessed 6 October 2020). See also: https://​www​.aph​.gov​.au/​binaries/​library/​pubs/​bp/​ 1991/​91bp05​.pdf (pp. 13–14) (accessed 6 October 2020). 3. Emma Watson is widely active in diplomatic as well as cultural circles. You can find her at a meeting on gender equality at the Elysée Palace (Paris in 2019), before being appointed to the board of Kering (owners of Gucci): https://​www​.scmp​.com/​lifestyle/​fashion​-beauty/​article/​3089853/​what​-gucci​ -owner​-appointing​-emma​-watson​-its​-board​-says (accessed 6 October 2020). As a role model for gender, children’s and fair-trade rights and causes: https://​www​.borgenmagazine​.com/​10​-reasons​-why​-emma​-watson​-is​-a​-role​ -model/​(accessed 6 October 2020). As a literary educator: https://​www​ .elle​.com/​culture/​books/​news/​g29702/​emma​-watson​-book​-list/​ (accessed

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6 October 2020). As a charity activist: https://​ www​ .looktothestars​ .org/​ celebrity/​emma​-watson (accessed 6 October 2020). 4. See Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans frontières): https://​rsf​.org/​ en/​barometer and the Committee to Protect Journalists: https://​cpj​.org/​ (accessed 6 October 2020). 5. An excerpt is available on the publisher’s website: https://​us​.macmillan​.com/​ excerpt​?isbn​=​9781250304179 (accessed 6 October 2020). 6. Hagia Sophia has proven to be inadvertently ecumenical. Over its long life it has been claimed by successive invaders who used it to stage Orthodox (Roman Empire), Catholic (Crusaders and Venetians), and Islamic (Ottoman Empire) rites. It was made a museum by Kemal Atatürk and later listed as a World Heritage building. However, in a political gesture by the incumbent government (2020), Hagia Sophia was reconverted to a mosque. See: https://​theconversation​.com/​hagia​-sophia​-has​-been​-converted​-back​-into​ -a​-mosque​-but​-the​-veiling​-of​-its​-figural​-icons​-is​-not​-a​-muslim​-tradition​ -144042 (accessed 6 October 2020). 7. See: https://​www​.bbc​.com/​news/​business​-52115434 (accessed 6 October 2020); https://​www​.marketwatch​.com/​story/​zoom​-and​-slack​-are​-worth​ -nearly​-50​-billion​-more​-since​-coronavirus​-hit​-and​-now​-we​-see​-the​-results​ -2020​-06​-02 (accessed 6 October 2020); and https://​www​.bbc​.com/​news/​ business​-52750493 (accessed 6 October 2020). 8. For instance, W. Joel (1 May 2020). The Verge, ‘Zoom in style in a sci-fi ship decimating coronavirus particles’. https://​www​.theverge​.com/​2020/​ 5/ ​1 /​2 1243435/​ zoom​-background​-mike​-winkelmann ​-beeples​-ci ​-fi​-ship​ -decimating​-coronavirus​-particles (accessed 6 October 2020).

10. Circular regeneration, creative reabsorption – futures or fungus?

New stories for creative economics The most creative of the creative industries for the future are the ones that are least associated with that loaded term at present. Indeed, so far are they removed from the idea of creativity as ‘origination’ that they are clustered around the opposite end of the production-consumption pipeline – not the ‘input’ but the ‘outlet’ – and the steaming heap where waste, pollution and excrement have traditionally been dumped/forgotten. Here are the ideas, enterprises and industries that are pioneering a new model of the creative economy. They reject the ‘value chain’ business model (Porter, 1985 [1998]). In that model, what happens within the firm, through every step of the production chain, from invention and design, through production and marketing, to distribution and servicing, is analysed and organised to ‘add value’ for the company’s own ‘competitive advantage’. That’s great for the firm’s profitability, but it forgets to specify what happens to materials, personnel and environment before and after the production process, or to a product once it’s been consumed. The firm’s interests are in reconsumption, not recycling; wealth, not waste. If the ‘product’ is a potato, it might get eaten: consumption here means what it says. The product is used up – unless of course it is wasted … But here we must interrupt the career of the potato for an important Australian government message. The government accepts that food waste is a ‘major problem’: costing billions; wasting food and water; and increasing greenhouse emissions: 155

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– Of food that is produced globally, one-third of it is wasted. – 25 per cent of water used in agriculture is used to grow food that is ultimately wasted – throwing away one burger wastes the same amount of water as a 90-minute shower. – And it produces 8 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions – if food waste was a country it would be the third largest greenhouse gas emitter, behind the USA and China.1

The government has developed a three-pronged response – a ‘strategy’, a ‘roadmap’ and an ‘action plan’ – to deal with it. But ‘if food waste was a country’ it would not be very frightened by these gladiatorial gestures and gradualist targets: to halve food waste by 2030, thereby reducing total waste by 10 per cent.2 Returning to the potato, assuming it is eaten in the form of a packet of potato chips, much more than potatoes is produced. The production, packaging and distribution processes generate all kinds of toxic and unused waste, from processing chemicals to exhaust fumes, and the ‘end user’ of the processed potato is left with a plastic bag, which is designed to be discarded without further ado. Such consumers number in the billions, and the discarded packet enters another chain, that of waste and pollution. At global scale, the numbers add up: ‘Since 1950, the world has created 6.3 trillion kilograms of plastic waste – and 91 per cent has never been recycled even once.’3 This business model – firms ‘value-add’ production while regulations encourage ‘percentage reduction’ – prioritises profitability and efficiency, supporting the sustainability of incumbent companies, not the environment. It incentivises companies to avoid responsibility for reducing waste and recycling or regenerating materials that they produce. The public purse picks up the tab, and the resulting landfill, run-off, effluent and fatbergs are no one’s responsibility. The alternative model favours a ‘circular economy’, ‘regenerative culture’ or ‘regenerative capitalism’, and a ‘sustainable society’. Although these ideas and actions have been around for decades and more, they have received a new impetus from the global climate catastrophe, human and posthuman rights movements, allied to environmental and green politics. Indeed, they are integrated into one connected problem. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis, and in the face of climate change and population growth, the challenges of safeguarding sustainable liveli-

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hoods while protecting natural ecosystems across the globe will be immense. (Antonelli, 2020)

Alexandre Antonelli links the decolonisation of knowledge, Indigenous and Black Lives Matter (aka institutional or systemic racism), the coronavirus pandemic, climate change, and the need for sustainable livelihoods, directly to the sustainability of natural ecosystems across the globe. Scientists have appropriated Indigenous knowledge and downplayed its depth and complexity. The first inhabitants of Brazil and the first users of plants in Australia often remained unnamed, unrecognised, and uncompensated. They are quite literally invisible in history. This needs to change. Black Lives Matter is also showing how today’s inequalities and discrimination are deeply rooted in our societies … Countries with the lowest incomes are likely to suffer the most, as outlined in the work on climate injustice. Plants and fungi can be part of the solution. (Antonelli, 2020)

This is a truly ‘one species, one planet’ approach. Antonelli is well placed to know what he’s talking about: he writes as Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (London) – one of the world’s leading scientific agencies, with an imperial past but priceless collection. Rather than seeing Kew’s plant collection as an exploitable resource, plundered by predecessors and continuing to feed the industrial pipeline, he argues that ‘plants and fungi can be part of the solution’ (2020). Antonelli and his colleagues have worked out ways in which plants and fungi correlate with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These are the next creative industries: –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– ––

eradicating poverty (SDG1) eradicating hunger (SDG2) promoting health and well-being (SDG3) clean water (SDG6) clean energy (SDG7) sustainable cities (SDG11) responsible production/consumption (SDG12) climate action (SDG13) life on land (SDG15). (Antonelli, Smith and Simmonds, 2019: 1101)

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Circular economy What is a circular economy? Two things at least. It’s literally circular, as a globally connected complex system encompassing the Earth – a truth that is perhaps best experienced by sailing around it, non-stop and alone. Dame Ellen MacArthur has done that, more than once (MacArthur, 2010), setting a world record (71 days) for a solo, non-stop circumnavigation in 2004. That experience and a subsequent stay on South Georgia, studying the decimation of the albatross by long-line fishing,4 led her to the concept of the circular economy, and to create a foundation to encourage transition to it.5 Taking its cue from existing ‘schools of thought’,6 the foundation’s objective is not to achieve better recycling, but to eliminate waste altogether, using principles derived from nature, which is the second meaning of the term ‘circular’ – the ecological economy, on the model of the biosphere, where total reabsorption is the aim, not just industrial scrap recycling. In a 2015 TED Talk, MacArthur outlined how she used her experience as a round-the-world sailor to shift her understanding from linear to circular, discovering the compelling model of a no-waste complex system in the biosphere, where ‘everything is metabolised’ and where we can ‘use things rather than use them up’, unlike the ‘linear’ economy based on ‘using up’ finite resources like coal, oil and metals, leaving behind not value and creativity but waste and degradation of the planetary ecosystem. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation adopts this concept, citing numerous ‘schools of thought’. As one of her sources puts it: – Everything is a resource for something else. – Use clean and renewable energy. – Celebrate diversity. (Braungart and McDonough, 2002)7

Finnish scholars Mika Sillanpää and Chaker Ncibi (2019) have published a comprehensive analysis of this concept, on the grounds that it offers a ‘a reliable and viable alternative to the unsustainable linear economic model, based on the “take, make and dispose” paradigm’. They conclude that the circular economy model is: the most comprehensive and mature economic model able to reconcile economic growth with sustainability, thus simultaneously ensuring momentous benefits for stakeholders and welfare to societies and the environment. Accomplishing the paradigm shift from linearity to circularity will have plan-

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etary repercussions, as most of UN’s sustainable development goals could be achieved. (Sillanpää and Ncibi, 2019: vii)

Another, broader term for the ‘circular economy’ is ‘regenerative culture’ (Wahl, 2016), which includes the energies of people willing to learn as well as institutions willing to innovate. In other words, ‘regenerative culture’ not only describes a situation which may be achieved but also the movement dedicated to getting there. Jenny Andersson, who describes herself as a ‘creative strategist helping organisations and leaders to develop strategic narratives’, has issued a glossary of terms for use in such narratives: it’s an eclectic mix that maps the terrain from an insider’s perspective (Andersson, 2019): –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– ––

Active Hope: Joanna Macy, Work That Reconnects Agroecology Agroforestry: silvo-pastoral agroforestry, silvo-arable agroforestry Anthropocene Biomes Biomimicry: Janine Benyus, Biomimicry Institute Bioregion: Bioregional Sue Riddlestone, The Bioregional Learning Centre Capital Institute: Regenerative Communities Network Blended Finance: OECD, UN Sustainable Development Goals Blind Spots: Nora Bateson Buckminster Fuller Institute Circular Economy Climate Emergency: Extinction Rebellion; Greta Thunberg Complexity Co-creative collaboration Commons (avoiding the tragedy of) Convergence Daniel Christian Wahl Divergence Doughnut Economics: Kate Raworth Duality Ecoliteracy Ecosystem Ecosystem Services EcoRestorationCamps Emergence Gaia Theory: James Lovelock, Lynn Margulis

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–– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– ––

–– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– –– ––

Green New Deal: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Holistic agriculture: Savory Institute Indigenous Wisdom Interbeing Liminality Maker Movement: Maker Movement; makerspace Midwifing Natural Capital: World Forum on Natural Capital New Deal for Nature Organic Permaculture: The Permaculture Association Regenerative: regenerative culture Regenerative Series –– Ash Buchanan regenerative wellbeing –– Regenerative design and development –– Regenerative economics –– Regenerative business (Carol Sandford) –– Regenerative agriculture (Commonland) Resilience Sacred reciprocity: Maya Zuckerman Salutogenesis: regenerative health Sovereignty: Joe Rogan, Bret Weinstein, Jordan Peterson, Jordan Greenhall, Rebel Wisdom Stewardship: Kenneth Mikkelsen The Symbiocene: Glenn Albrecht Symbiocene Symmathesy: Nora Bateson Symbiosis: Ask Nature Synthesise Systems Thinking: Fritjof Capra, Donella Meadows, Nora Bateson, Humberto Maturana, Peter Senge Tensegrity: Buckminster Fuller, Kenneth Snelson, Tensegrities Theory U: Presencing Institute, Otto Scharmer8 Thrivability: Michelle Holliday Transition Network (Totnes, Devon) Unintended Consequences Weaving Warm Data Xenophilia

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There are many such sites and activists to introduce regenerative ideas.9 The possible list of supporting evidence is long, and populated as much by independent thinkers, think-tanks and consultants as it is by scholars; propagated as much through Medium or Greenbiz as through peer-reviewed journals. But new ideas circulate in new media as a new paradigm takes hold, especially at international scale. This places increased responsibility on the reader to assess as well as to enthuse as they scroll through the thick undergrowth of online thought. It also means that some references will be ephemeral and local, soon replaced and forgotten, so any recommendations are time-sensitive, and subject to such ‘recycling’. In an attempt to systematise them, Brian Fath et al. (2019) propose ‘10 principles of regenerative economics’: 1. Maintain robust, cross-scale circulation of critical flows including energy, information, resources and money. 2. Regenerative re-investment. 3. Maintain reliable inputs 4. & healthy outputs. 5. Maintain a healthy balance and integration of small, medium and large organizations. 6. Maintain a healthy balance of resilience and efficiency. 7. Maintain sufficient diversity. 8. Promote mutually beneficial relationships and common-cause values. 9. Promote constructive activity and limit overly extractive and speculative processes. 10. Promote effective, adaptive, collective learning. Failing all this, Fath et al. warn: Systemic death does not happen automatically. It requires adhering to beliefs long past their usefulness in addressing the problems for which they were designed, while ignoring widespread evidence that they are not achieving systemically healthy outcomes. Of course, systemic health does not happen automatically either. It requires adhering to the rules of regenerative economics, development, and learning. (Fath et al., 2019)

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Cutting through ‘Systemic death’ is so much a feature of modernity that it’s naturalised and ‘forgotten’. Bogna Konior characterises the result as an ‘undead’ zombie state, characteristic of the Anthropocene era: The Anthropocene is an undead territory of violence, where the present is extended into two interlocking graves: the past and the future, each a specific mode of death. In the future awaits extinction and, in the past, awaits murder. (Konior, 2019: 52)

Thinking about the world’s oceans, Konior recalls the numberless – because disavowed – drownings and murders among transported slaves, migrants, refugees and others upon the high seas, as the precondition for the freedoms and comforts enjoyed by the present denizens of the ‘undead territory’ of modernity. As for the future, she reminds us of the accelerating extinctions of myriad species, caused by actions already taken in the present. It is noteworthy that many versions of the regenerative approach to avoiding ‘systemic death’ stress the importance of learning as part of a regenerative system, partly on the model of cybernetic feedback in complex systems. One of the consequences of that principle is that community-building, and the dialogic-pedagogic process of bringing the community along with the economy, are stressed too. That can smack of ideological persuasion and influence, of course, but where it differs from the individualist-behavioural ‘value chain’ version of marketing is that it builds the users and downstream effects of any process into the decision-making arena as part of the circle of a circular economy. Collective learning is part of practical activism, just as practical knowledge is integrated with theory-building. Furthermore, the global prominence given to the climate emergency by Fridays For Future, School Strike for Climate (SS4C) and others, epitomised by Greta Thunberg and a decentralised network of student organisers (e.g. Jeffrey, 2020; Neubauer and Repenning, 2019), demonstrates just how important self-education and creative mediation can be. In a ‘circular’ system, such learning and mediation are more effective if they emerge from the movement itself and not from an external, self-interested marketing agency, news organisation or political party, or from the interests

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of a firm or leadership. Leaderless multinational movements like Fridays For Future and Extinction Rebellion can call millions of protesters into the streets of cities the world over. Young activists like Thunberg and Luisa Neubauer have gained access to global economic forums like Davos, the UN and the European Parliament (Thunberg, 2019), partly because they are school-aged students. Collectively, they have revitalised and expanded the circular/regenerative economy argument while personifying the climate crisis as the generation who will be its casualties, as opposed to the generations who’ve caused it. As a result, people born in the twenty-first century form a distinct political cohort and marketing segment, and the mainstream retail giants are beginning to take notice: ‘The [plastic] water bottle has, in some way, become the mink coat or the pack of cigarettes,’ a senior sustainability manager for Nestlé Waters confessed at a conference last year. ‘It’s socially not very acceptable to the young folks, and that scares me.’ (Tim Dickenson, Rolling Stone, 2020)

One species, one planet In the moment of coronavirus and climate change, the problem is clearly both a health crisis and an environmental one, but it is also a crisis of communication: how to imagine the whole of humanity as one demic group; and, having done so, how to reach them and to win assent for systemic change? This is the problem being tackled by Greta Thunberg, whose consistent message has not only been about the emergencies themselves but also the failures of leadership and action among existing representative structures. There are plentiful private foundations, not-for-profit organisations and lobby groups dedicated to transnational economic, political and environmental causes, and some of these may wield more influence on leadership action than do representative bodies (parliament, congress, etc.). ‘We’ (the species) have few and systematically weakened multinational forums whose job it is to care for transnational populations – the UN, EU, and various development, health and welfare agencies. Humanity’s ‘peak body’, the UN, is perennially hampered by underfunding, inter-member disputes and internal bureaucratic complications, reducing its effectiveness a long way short of its heroically imagined role of the 1950s and 1960s: both fictional Dan Dare, UN Space Fleet pilot whose Venusian exploits represented collective human action by the UN, on behalf of the entire planet Earth, to uphold interplanetary peace;10 and factual

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Dag Hammarskjöld, UN Secretary General (1953–61), under whose leadership it seemed that the ‘parliament of humanity’ might indeed shape events, nudging nations and power blocs towards world peace, with a leader who was willing and able to make the attempt, and who died attempting it.11 Now, as Greta Thunberg, another Swedish mover and shaker, told a World Summit in Austria (May 2019), leadership is again the problem: We are Homo sapiens sapiens … We are part of nature. We are social animals. We are naturally drawn to our leaders … But we children are not leaders. Nor are the scientists, unfortunately. But many of you here today are ... And therefore you have an enormous responsibility. And let’s be honest. This is a responsibility that most of you have failed to take. (Thunberg, 2019: 69)

Later in 2019, she addressed the UN General Assembly in New York, in her famous ‘How dare you?’ speech. Again, she focused on the gap between what is known and what is done: For more than thirty years the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away, and come here saying that you are doing enough. When the politics and solutions needed are nowhere in sight … Your generation is failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you … The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not. (2019: 97–9)

Speaking at a Climate Strike rally in Montreal later the same week, she said: ‘Through history, the most important changes in society have come from the bottom up, from grassroots … It looks like well over 6.6 million people have joined the Week for Future … That is one of the biggest demonstrations in history … We are the change and change is coming’ (2019: 105–6). That change soon melded with the coronavirus crisis, and here is where the gap that Thunberg repeatedly criticised, between knowledge and action, grassroots and leaderships, representative status and collective will, was rapidly narrowed. At time of writing, transformative, new paradigm thinking was more evident among ‘the young folks’ feared by Nestlé than in action by world leaderships, but the willingness of entire societies to take collective action in the face of a crisis could no longer be doubted, despite the cost to the global economy and to individual livelihoods. Some observers expressed regret that the virus soon got more media attention than the climate emergency. Some noted that following international lockdown the eco-

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nomic downturn was helping the environment more than climate activism had managed to do. However, the coronavirus crisis did convince many people that they are indeed ‘one species’ on ‘one planet’, the virus making no distinction among nations or any other demographic distinction, but treating the entire human population with equal indifference as mere replicators. For climate activists, the two crises were one, as Vijay Kolinjivadi, a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Development Policy, University of Antwerp, wrote in an opinion column for Al Jazeera: Both have their roots in the world’s current economic model – that of the pursuit of infinite growth at the expense of the environment on which our survival depends – and both are deadly and disruptive. In fact, one may argue that the pandemic is part of climate change and therefore, our response to it should not be limited to containing the spread of the virus. What we thought was ‘normal; before the pandemic was already a crisis and so returning to it cannot be an option.12

Kolinjivadi notes that the rapid response to COVID-19 around the world ‘illustrates the remarkable capacity of society to put the emergency brake on “business-as-usual” simply by acting in the moment. It shows that we can take radical action if we want to’. He concludes that ‘the inspiring examples of mutual aid also illustrate that society is more than capable of acting collectively in the face of grave danger to the whole of humanity’. Just as well, because, as Greta Thunberg put it on her Instagram and Twitter accounts: ‘The emperors are naked. Every single one. It turns out our whole society is just one big nudist party.’ She added: ‘The climateand ecological crisis can no longer be solved with today’s political and economic systems.’ In response, Thunberg ‘spent a large part of the coronavirus lockdown writing the script for a podcast called Humanity Has Not Yet Failed’ (although the possibility must be entertained). According to a report on Lifegate (a ‘benefit corporation’): In her programme, Thunberg goes on to say that the only positive thing we can take from the Covid-19 pandemic is the way we faced the emergency; how we were able to change our behaviour to face a global crisis. ‘This shows that during a crisis we act with the necessary force,’ she states, claiming that we should confront the climate crisis with the same urgency with which we addressed the health emergency.13

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The ‘takeout’ lesson here is that mediation is central to the realities everyone faces, and that the creative industries are central to that mediation process. Many sectors of the creative industries, from tourism and hospitality to live and recorded performance arts, were severely affected by the measures taken internationally to slow the pandemic. However, the ‘bottom-up’ creativity of people in lockdown was also strongly in evidence, and the combined efforts of professionals and citizens, using social media and balconies, gave meaning to the collective experience even as the creative professionals lost their jobs and some of them their lives. Media, creativity, culture and communication are not specialist sectors, of limited economic scale and confined to leisure activities, but are revealed as the very medium in which human endeavour lives and moves ‘in the moment’.

Do we need humans any longer? Extinction is inevitable; for some, perhaps even desirable. But extinction is unlikely to be the sudden apocalyptic shock to the planet beloved of the zombie genres. It is more likely to be piecemeal, unnoticed even – endogenous not exogenous – like the frog in the kettle. It may already have started. Climate activists warn that some countries and classes are more vulnerable to environmental catastrophe than others. Journalist Michelle Garciá (2020) has warned that climate casualties are not distributed evenly, and that media coverage and journalism are complicit: Like Covid-19, the calamities of climate change will not be experienced equally. The wealthy will escape the brunt of environmental destruction, while much of the world’s poor will be forced to migrate, fall ill, or die. The United Nations warned last year that the world is rushing toward ‘climate apartheid.’

Garciá cites the work of UN Rapporteur on poverty and human rights, Philip Alston (2019), who coined the term ‘climate apartheid’. Among the first casualties of climate change will be human rights and democracy: Climate change carries immense implications for human rights, including to life, food, housing and water. It will also impact democracy, said Mr. Alston … ‘As a full-blown crisis that threatens the human rights of vast numbers of people bears down, the usual piecemeal, issue-by-issue human rights methodology is woefully insufficient’.

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Jackie Wang’s (2018) vision of carceral capitalism analyses how American society as a whole is regulated by a racial capitalism and debt economy, which financialise the prison system and assign people of colour as its unpaid workforce, reinventing slavery. Both Alston and Garciá point to the unequal division of climate consequences, which, like incarceration, follow the contours of poverty, Black lives, climate change and coronavirus. In an interview on Carceral Capitalism with the LA Review of Books, Wang outlines how a non-white person might be obliged to navigate the administrative minutiae of the ‘surveillance state’.14 All these activities generate data, which are collected by enforcement agencies. They can largely be avoided by affluent (white) citizens, because ‘only the rich have maintained their right to opacity’. Data is political, no matter how it is used, because, as Wang puts it: When it comes to policing, I don’t think it makes sense to uncritically make appeals for better data collection (unless it’s on police conduct!), as such appeals will necessarily expand the domain of policing, and create a more totalizing surveillance state.

Thus, ‘black racialization proceeds by way of a logic of disposability and a logic of exploitability’ (Wang, 2018: 88). Here, ‘disposability’ (waste) is by no means the ‘end-product’ of racism but part of its own ‘circular’ economy (Danewid, 2020), in which racialised subjects are rendered valuable as ‘exploitable’ units via datafication, debt, fines, incarceration contracts and prison labour, using the all too ‘creative’ industry of ‘offender-funded policing’ (Wang, 2018: 19) to keep them in their place. However, disposability remains on the agenda, notably in the hands of historian Yuval Noah Harari, whose book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) raised the prospect of a ‘useless class’ of humans, displaced from employment by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and farmed for data by those same machines. For Harari, it’s not so much a zombie apocalypse that will do for humanity, but something more like the ‘fat (and for some reason sockless) blobs’ in Pixar’s dystopian film WALL·E (2008). As tech-writer Amelia Tait wrote in the New Statesman: Often it’s the films that don’t try to predict the future that end up doing so. We don’t have Back to the Future’s self-drying jacket or ‘Jaws 19’, but we do have Airplane II’s full-body scanners and The Simpsons’ presidential-candidate-Donald-Trump. Pixar’s 2008 hit animated film WALL·E … acted as more of a warning than a prediction – reminding us all to pick up our rubbish and go for a jog lest we end up fat (and for some reason,

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sockless) blobs on a colossal spaceship – but already many of its dystopian visions have come true. (Tait, 2016)

She lists some of these: from the deadly serious ‘The Earth is a giant landfill’ to the positively alarming: ‘It’s comforting to know that no matter how far humanity falls, there will always be men called John’ – in this case a hapless (but well-fed) passenger onboard the colossal spaceship.15 Will there ‘always be men called John’? Phew! But perhaps not. Yuval Harari’s dystopia reduces the ‘Johns’ to the status of discontented cattle: Currently, humans risk becoming similar to domesticated animals. We have bred docile cows that produce enormous amounts of milk but are otherwise far inferior to their wild ancestors. They are less agile, less curious, and less resourceful. We are now creating tame humans who produce enormous amounts of data and function as efficient chips in a huge data-processing mechanism, but they hardly maximize their human potential. If we are not careful, we will end up with downgraded humans misusing upgraded computers to wreak havoc on themselves and on the world. (Harari, 2018)

It’s hard to know who ‘we’ are in that concluding remark: ‘if we are not careful’ – despite the reference to cows, havoc-wreaking is a male-gendered trope (Jane, 2017). But if it refers to the species, and not just to the male managerial class, then the message may need further clarification. The ‘digital dictatorship’ will not eventuate because humans are ‘less agile, less curious, less resourceful’, but because the global political-economic system allows it. Cattle are not responsible for the farming practices they endure; and global consumers are not responsible for being farmed – by fictional ‘Buy n Large’ corporation or factual Facebook. Writing in 2018 – after MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) and SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and E. coli but before coronavirus – Harari imagined a scenario designed to convince us that: These potential advantages of connectivity and updatability are so huge that at least in some lines of work, it might make sense to replace all humans with computers, even if individually some humans still do a better job than the machines.

‘Replace all humans’? – Harari fantasises about billions of AI robot-doctors who can replace health professionals. They can be updated simultaneously across the planet, unlike humans. But equally, might they not be ‘updated’ to put the useless classes out of their misery? Harari’s ‘prediction’ hovers between wishful-thinking sci-fi, like Fritz Lang’s 1927 film

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Metropolis, and ‘fascinating fascism’ (Sontag, 1980). It was soon put to the test, because quite soon the World Health Organization did indeed identify a new disease: COVID-19. What happened next was not quite as the techno-dystopia model predicted. Indeed, it was all too human. The virus depended on human sociality for its own survival. The USA defunded its obligation to the World Health Organization and blamed China. Elsewhere, for a while, an unexpected cooperative spirit united governments, health experts and general populations, using social distancing and isolation, general economic lockdown and travel restrictions to ‘flatten the curve’ of infections, first to protect the capacity of health systems to suppress the pandemic, and then (in some jurisdictions) to eradicate it. Soon enough there were defectors – some countries were slow to take action (Brazil, the USA, the UK, India, Russia). In others, previously compliant populations got sick of ‘iso’ and defied the regulations to gather in each other’s homes, in city spaces and – if they could get there – holiday beaches. The relations among government, scientific agencies and economics were at breaking strain. Without a vaccine, secondary and subsequent outbreaks seemed inevitable. People caught COVID-19 in their millions, and while millions recovered, deaths topped a million within nine months.16 The point is that nowhere did this look like an automated techno-system. Everywhere, it looked like culture; and people caught glimpses of humanity’s capacity for creative system-change based on cooperative collective action, even while the ‘business-as-usual’ mob, as you would expect, squabbled and resisted. Harari’s ‘useless class’ doesn’t exist, nor is it likely to, not just because AI technology is not an agent in the same way that demes, corporations, government, class or community can be, but also because we are already well down an alternative path, where ‘uselessness’ in terms of mass employment in legacy economic processes can be converted to even more authoritarian and exploitative ‘uses’ by the surveillance state, debt-financed municipalities, carceral capitalism and climate apartheid. That’s not a future prediction but a present reality. Predicting future trends for the creative industries therefore presents a clear choice, between improving the efficiency of armed-and-dangerous linear production and techno-fix, or working with intersectional allies to

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change the system. According to the experts, the former choice leads to dictatorship and inequality; the latter opens up hopeful possibilities for business and for the Earth-system: Finally, we can confidently say that CE [circular economy] will boost the competitiveness of countries and corporations implementing it … It will create local jobs at all skills levels and opportunities for social integration and cohesion. At the same time, it will save energy and help avoid the irreversible damages to climate, biodiversity, air, soil, and water caused by the unsustainable exploitation of resources. Yes, CE can make all this happen, but we need to promote it, educate it, coordinate it, incentivize it, regulate it, protect it, and above all believe in it. (Sillanpää and Ncibi, 2019: ix)

‘Above all believe in it’ sounds cultish and utopian, but as this book has been arguing throughout, systems need stories, as economics needs culture, especially if they are to cooperate with other systems. A useful check-grid for assessing where we are up to in the transformation of various ‘operating systems’ in this process comes from Otto Scharmer of MIT (2020) (Figure 10.1):

Figure 10.1

Otto Scharmer’s ‘Four Stages of Systems Evolution, Four Operating Systems’

Source: Otto Scharmer (2020), ‘A new superpower in the making: awareness-based collective action’. Medium, 9 April: https://​medium​.com/​presencing​-institute​ -blog/​a​-new​-superpower​-in​-the​-making​-awareness​-based​-collective​-action​ -83861bcb9859 (accessed 6 October 2020). Visual by Kelvy Bird.

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American individualism and modernist progress won’t cut it any longer. Symbiosis is the new story. It’s not ‘us or them’ but ‘all life is connected’ – for good or ill – and not just human to human life. Look to the mushrooms. Here, the biosciences – not to mention the fungi – or China – are well in the lead (Grimm and Wösten, 2018; Hyde et al., 2019): ‘Fungi should make a greater contribution to humanity.’17 And humanity has much to learn in return. Anna Tsing (2015) uses the matsutake mushroom to pursue posthuman possibilities in ‘patterns of unintentional coordination’ within and across species. As Tsing makes clear, this is not a choice between dictatorship and democracy, or jobs and uselessness, employment or environment, or even between capitalist and circular economics: We are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological ruination. Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival. (Tsing, 2015: 19, 22)

But, as she says, ‘Making worlds is not limited to humans’. It turns out that mould and slime, mushrooms and viruses are just as creative and industrious as ‘we’ are. You have been warned.

Notes 1. Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment (in that order): ‘Tackling Australia’s food waste’: https://​www​.environment​.gov​.au/​protection/​ waste​-resource​-recovery/​food​-waste (accessed 6 October 2020). 2. ‘Actions to be undertaken to reduce food waste are laid out in the National Food Waste Strategy, Roadmap and the National Waste Action Plan’, to ‘halve food-waste by 2030’: https://​www​.environment​.gov​.au/​protection/​waste​ -resource​-recovery/​publications/​national​-food​-waste​-strategy (accessed 6 October 2020); ‘All levels of government, industry and key stakeholders, such as the food rescue and relief sector and industry associations, have a role to play’: https://​www​.environment​.gov​.au/​protection/​waste​-resource​-recovery/​ publications/​ roadmap​ -reducing​ -food​ -waste (accessed 6 October 2020); in order to ‘reduce total waste generated in Australia by 10% per person by 2030’: https://​www​.environment​.gov​.au/​protection/​waste​-resource​-recovery/​ publications/​national​-waste​-policy​-action​-plan (accessed 6 October 2020). 3. T. Dickinson (2020), ‘Planet plastic: how big oil and big soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades’. Rolling Stone, March: https://​www​ .rollingstone​.com/​culture/​culture​-features/​plastic​-problem​-recycling​-myth​ -big​-oil​-950957/​(accessed 6 October 2020). 4. See: https://​www​.independent​.co​.uk/​news/​people/​news/​ellen​-macarthur​-says​ -that​-shell​-never​-race​-again​-1797545​.html (accessed 6 October 2020). The threat continues: Australia’s only endemic albatross is now officially ‘endangered’: https://​www​.abc​.net​.au/​news/​2020​-06​-28/​shy​-albatross​-gains​-endangered​ -species​-listing/​12395140 (accessed 6 October 2020). 5. ‘The surprising thing I learned sailing solo around the world.’ Dame Ellen MacArthur, TED Talk: 29 June 2015: https://​ www​ .youtube​ .com/​

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watch​?v​=​ooIxHVXgLbc​&​feature​=​youtu​.be (accessed 6 October 2020). See also: https://​www​.ellenmacarthurfoundation​.org/​ and https://​www​ .ellenmacarthurfoundation​. org/​circular​-economy/​what​-is​-the​-circular​ -economy (accessed 6 October 2020). 6. See: https://​www​.ellenmacarthurfoundation​.org/​circular​-economy/​concept/​ schools​-of​-thought (accessed 6 October 2020). 7. Source: https://​www​.ellenmacarthurfoundation​.org/​circular​-economy/​concept/​ infographic; and see: https://​mcdonough​.com/​writings/​cradle​-cradle​-remaking​ -way​-make​-things/​(accessed 6 October 2020). 8. See, for instance, a regenerative approach to the coronavirus crisis: https://​ medium​ . com/​ p resencing​ - institute​ - blog/​ e ight​ - emerging​ - lessons​ - from​ -coronavirus​-to​-climate​-action​-683c39c10e8b (accessed 6 October 2020). capitalinstitute​ .org/​ 9. John Fullerton (‘regenerative capitalism’): https://​ regenerative​-capitalism/​(accessed 6 October 2020); Nora Bateson (‘warm data’): https://​norabateson​.wordpress​.com/​about/​ (accessed 6 October 2020); Science Alert (city planning for a circular economy): https://​www​.sciencealert​ .com/​can​-we​-build​-a​-circular​-economy​-to​-save​-the​-planet (accessed 6 October 2020); Daria Habicher (a ‘postgrowth’ perspective for globalisation): https://​www​.21global​.ucsb​.edu/​global​-e/​june​-2020/​revise​-globalization​ -postgrowth​-perspective (accessed 6 October 2020). 10. Dan Dare (launched in the Eagle comic, 1950) became ‘one of the most recognised fictional characters on the planet’ (Peter Hampson, 2018). 11. Wikipedia has a helpful entry on Hammarskjöld, and see the posthumous translation of his journal, Hammarskjöld (1964). 12. Vijay Kolinjivadi, 30 March 2020, Al Jazeera (opinion): The coronavirus outbreak is part of the climate change crisis: https://​www​.aljazeera​.com/​ indepth/​opinion/​coronavirus​-outbreak​-part​-climate​-change​-emergency​ -200325135058077​.html (accessed 6 October 2020). See also Natasha Chassagne in The Conversation: https://​theconversation​.com/​heres​-what​-the​-coronavirus​ -pandemic​-can​-teach​-us​-about​-tackling​-climate​-change​-134399; and professorial letters to the Guardian: https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​world/​2020/​may/​10/​ after​-coronavirus​-focus​-on​-the​-climate​-emergency (accessed 6 October 2020). 13. Source: Lifegate, 23 June 2020: ‘Humanity has not yet failed. Greta Thunberg is back with a podcast’: https://​www​.lifegate​.com/​greta​-thunberg​-podcast. For the podcast, see: https://​sverigesradio​.se/​sida/​avsnitt/​1535269​?programid​ =​ 2071 (accessed 6 October 2020); and: https://​ open​ .spotify​ .com/​ episode/​ 7E2Wz3C5XwtEw3Pi96tLQA​?t​=​0 (accessed 6 October 2020). 14. M. Buna, ‘Carceral capitalism: a conversation with Jackie Wang’ (18 May 2018). LARB: https://​lareviewofbooks​.org/​article/​carceral​-capitalism​-conversation​ -jackie​-wang/​(accessed 6 October 2020). 15. For ‘John’: https://​www​.imdb​.com/​title/​tt0910970/​characters/​nm0001652. For the spaceship Axiom: https://​disney​.fandom​.com/​wiki/​Axiom. For Buy n Large (aka corporate capitalism): https://​disney​.fandom​.com/​wiki/​Buy​_n​ _Large (accessed 6 October 2020). Vox too admires WALL·E’s environmentalism: https://​www​.vox​.com/​culture/​2017/​6/​3/​15728220/​wall​-e​-pixar​ -environmentalist​-movie​-of​-week​-paris​-accord (accessed 6 October 2020). 16. The Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University kept score: https://​coronavirus​.jhu​.edu/​data/​new​-cases. But actual deaths rather than those recorded may have reached 1.8 million. See: https://​www​.abc​.net​.au/​ news/​2020​-10​-01/​johns​-hopkins​-coronavirus​-covid​-death​-toll​-probably​ -much​-higher/​12716740 (accessed 6 October 2020). 17. Wang Xuejing (2019), Kunming Institute of Botany: http://​english​.kib​.cas​.cn/​rh/​ rp/​201908/​t20190806​_213933​.html (accessed 6 October 2020). And see: http://​ english​.cas​.cn/​print​_2019/​index​.shtml​?docurl​=​http://​english​.cas​.cn/​newsroom/​ research​_news/​earth/​201908/​t20190806​_213934​.shtml (accessed 6 October 2020).

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Index

21 Lessons for the 21st Century 167 abstract knowledge 99, 124–6 acceleration/ism 17, 116 Alexandrov, Vladimir 120 Alston, Philip 166 Anthropocene 18, 119, 153, 159, 162 AO3 (Archive of Our Own) 61, 62 AOL/Time-Warner 44 Arnold, Frances 51 art to smart 41–5 artwork 35–8 author 12, 21, 47, 55, 56, 61, 62, 106 authorship 56 autocommunication 90 Bakhshi, Hasan 36, 98 BBC 33, 52, 59, 60, 147 Beck, Ulrich 18 biosphere 18, 28, 83, 102, 118, 120–2, 140, 153, 158 Birt, John 33 Black Lives Matter (BLM) 128–9, 132, 157 black racialization 167 Blind, Georg 136 blockchain 17, 67, 97, 148–50 bottom-up analysis 20–5 Bracknell, Kylie and Clint 23 Buchanan, James 93 Bute, Marquesses of 115 capitalism 7, 10, 42, 44, 51, 58, 59, 72, 116, 167, 169 carceral 167, 169 vs. communism 58

corporate 42, 59 platform 10, 44 regenerative 156 restless 7, 70 surveillance 72, 133 Casey, Michael 150 change x, 19, 75, 82, 108, 114–19, 124, 125, 128, 129, 131, 140–6, 164, 166 rhythms of 116–18 Childe, V. Gordon 68, 69 circular economy 83, 85, 156, 158–62, 170 circular regeneration 155–73 civic struggle 54 civil society 96 Clark, Christopher 125 class consciousness 126 classical music 110, 112, 113 class struggle 53, 124 climate activism/activists 165, 166 change x, 19, 26, 99, 106, 108, 131, 156, 157, 163, 165–7 justice 18 clubs 90–2 commons 90–2 competition 2, 29, 42, 43, 52, 58, 61, 63, 96, 99, 116 competitive cities 80–2 complex-adaptive systems 9 complexity 9–11, 37, 69, 72, 82, 91, 107, 157, 159 complex organisations 88–90 complex system 2, 67, 69, 158 conflict, anthropology 141–3 185

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connectivity 45, 75, 82, 127, 168 consequences 124, 125, 127, 129, 131, 133, 135–7, 140, 144, 146, 160, 162 conspicuous waste 67 conspiracy of incumbents 107, 116 constitution vs. administration 134 convergence 16, 22, 45, 159 copy 47–51, 59 copyright 40–2, 47–66 copyright industries 15, 40, 44 coronavirus (COVID-19) viii, ix, x, xi, xiii, 24, 25, 99, 133, 152, 163–5, 167–9 cosmos 88, 89, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101, 103, 105–7 Creating Cities 84 creationist reverberators 59–61 creative city 15, 74, 75, 77, 79–82 class 40 cluster 42, 51 destruction 16, 26, 43, 71, 77, 115, 135 industries viii, ix, x, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, 1, 3, 4, 6, 11, 16–18, 24, 29, 34, 36, 76–9, 144–6 industries policy 18, 39, 98 innovation 19, 33, 64, 98, 116, 119, 132, 135, 140, 147 intensity 35–8 probability 37 creative cities 74–5 culture 75 economics 75 as medium 80 technology 75–6 creative city index 80, 82 creative economics, stories for 155–7 creative emergence 140–54 journalism 140 creative global 39–41 Creative Nation ix, xiii creative reabsorption 155–73 crisis viii, ix, xi, xiii, 5, 6, 59, 63, 156, 163–6 Cullors, Patrisse 128, 132 cultural differences 100 Cultural Economics 135

cultural functions 29, 104, 145–9, 151–3 cultural science 89, 90, 105 culture ix, 5, 26, 32–4, 80, 89–92, 95, 100, 102, 103, 105, 110, 113, 126, 143 Culture and Society 126 Dafen (China) 48, 49, 51 Dafen Artist Village 49 Dan Dare 163 Dark Forest Theory of the Internet 106 DCMS 34–7, 78, 98, 145 deepfake 49, 52 Dekker, Erwin 97, 99 Delevingne, Cara 132, 133 demes 79, 90–2, 96, 100–2, 105, 125–7, 130, 132–4, 145, 151 demic mediation 126–30 democide 70 digital globalisation 100 DIY digital deepfake 49–53 Doktor Faustus 55 Dopfer, K. 136, 137 drama 9 Dunbar, Robin 149 Dunbar numbers 141 Dustyesky 3 ecclesia (meeting and walking) 151–3 endogenous 9, 10, 37, 53, 166 Engels, Friedrich 124, 125, 130, 134 entrepreneurial consumer 47, 82 evolution 2, 7, 9, 53, 59, 115, 117, 118, 121, 136, 143–4 evolutionary uncertainty 68 exogenous 9, 53, 166 explosion (Lotmanian) 117, 134 extinction 103, 106, 110, 116, 122, 144, 149, 153, 159, 162, 163, 166 Extinction Rebellion 18, 103, 159, 163 fallism 117 fanfic 61, 62 Fath, Brian 161 Faust 55 feminism/feminist 102–3, 127, 133 femosphere 103

INDEX

flâneur 153 Florida, Richard 40, 72, 73 Fox, Samson 115 Fridays For Future 18, 103, 162, 163 Fuchs, Chris 131, 133, 134 fulfilment centre (Amazon) 44 fungi/fungus 155, 157, 171 Garciá, Michelle 166 Garza, Alicia 128 Gevinson, Tavi 12 Gigafactory (Tesla) 44, 70 global culture 28–9 globalisation 18, 25–7, 70, 81, 95, 100, 112 Goffman, Erving 10, 11 Gomez, Selena 128, 132 gossip 12, 141, 148–50 group genius 88–90 groups 1, 19, 26, 61, 89–93, 98–103, 113, 127, 130, 136, 140–6, 149 groups make knowledge 99–100 group trust 149 Harari, Y. N. 167 Hayek, F. von 7 higher education 69, 146–8 Hodgson, Geoffrey 62 home truths ix–x Hospers, Gert-Jan 16 human culture 89, 102, 105, 106 humanities 2, 5, 6, 10, 11, 26–8, 37, 99, 100, 120, 121, 136, 137, 171 human rights 13, 166 Hurricane Katrina 19 individualism 13, 53, 56, 91, 171 individualist 2, 43, 94, 119, 162 influencers 96, 105, 147 innovation commons 95–8 as temporal phenomenon 114–15 intellectual property 34, 36, 39, 40, 52, 57, 58, 62, 63, 78, 80 piracy of 57 pirates of 57 interdisciplinary methods 6, 136

187

Jenkins, Henry 64 Johns, Adrian 57 journalism 11, 33, 53, 148, 166 and blockchain 149–50 creative emergence 140 as creative industry 148 Kivisto, Peter 12 knowledge 1–10, 53, 55, 57, 91–6, 98, 99, 101, 125, 146 clubs 8, 93–6, 98, 132 commons 95–8 frequencies 118–20 groups 88, 99–100 productive/connective 101 systems 2, 6, 8, 13, 16, 92, 93, 99, 101, 132, 136, 140 Kocher, M. 26 Konior, Bogna 106, 107, 119, 162 Kushner, Tony 8, 12–13, 14 Lehmann, S. 85 Lotman, Juri 134 Lotman, Yuri 28, 89, 101, 102, 115, 120 MacArthur, Ellen 158 macro 90, 92, 102, 115, 137 macro-scale networks 92 Mann, Thomas 55 Marling, Britt 132 mathematics 2, 121, 132, 134, 135 computational 121 rhetoric of 27–8 and story 134 meaningfulness 3, 29, 79, 101, 144 meaning-work 18 mediation of classes 124–6 demic 126–30 means of 124–7, 131, 134, 147, 150 open 96 meeting 78, 97, 151, 153 meso 90, 92, 102, 115, 137 meso-scale institutions 92 Metcalfe, J.S. 7 Me Too (#MeToo) 117, 128 micro 90, 92, 102, 115, 137

188 ADVANCED INTRODUCTION TO CREATIVE INDUSTRIES

micro-scale agents 92 modernity 52, 53, 55, 57, 100, 106, 124, 131, 145, 153, 162 modernism/modernist 7, 84, 113, 171 modern struggle 56 Mona Lisa 48, 49, 52 Murdoch, James 59, 60 Murdoch, Rupert 59, 60 Musk, Elon 44

possessive individualism 56–8 posthuman/ism 118, 121, 171 Potts, Jason 17, 95, 136, 137 poverty 166 presentation of self 11 private enterprise 33 promenading 153 Pruitt-Igoe 83

navigational approach 1, 53 Ncibi, Chaker 158 Neubauer, Luisa 19, 131, 163 newness 3, 16, 22, 75, 92, 94, 95, 107, 114, 131, 140 new populations 130–3 news archive x New York Times 62 nit-picking 148–50 Noongar Shakespeare Project 23

racial capitalism 167 radical romantic 15–16 The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists 125–6 recycling 155, 156, 158, 161 reflexive knowledge 10, 37 regenerative culture 20, 156, 159, 160 regulation 69, 141, 144 Rennie, Ellie 17 revolution 68, 75, 93, 102, 114, 117, 124, 125, 130, 134 rhetorical effects, well-coded social interaction 11 rhythms of change 116–18 Ribeiro, Celina x romantic originality 56, 57 rule population 137, 149 rules population of 137, 138 Rummel, R.J. 70

old time 110–14 Omegaverse 61, 62 open mediation 96 opera 24, 32, 79, 110, 111 opera house 24, 110, 111 operating systems 88, 102, 170 organic intellectuals 133 original copy 48–9 Ostrom, Elinor 93, 95 piracy 47, 57, 63 Piracy 57 piracy/pirates (of intellectual property) 57 Pittman, Dan 12 planet 144 plays viii, x, 1, 8, 18, 20, 22, 23, 68, 70, 100, 103, 104, 131, 146, 150 plus ça change x–xiii Pochesneva, Ana 17 Polanyi, Michael 58 popularity 135 pop-up globe 15–31 bottom-up analysis 20–5 pop-up philosophy 17

quantum uncertainty 133–4

scale 140–4 scaling problems 140 Scharmer, Otto 170 School Strike for Climate 162 Schumpeterian process 77, 115, 135 Science Alert 85 Scola, Nancy 67 self-consciousness 55 self-possession 56 semiosis 3, 28, 29, 78, 80, 89, 102, 103, 105, 106, 136 semiosphere 25–9, 89, 91, 100–5, 117, 118, 120–2 semiotic struggle 116

INDEX

Shakespeare, William 20, 22, 23, 27, 110 Macbeth/Hecate 23 Midsummer Night’s Dream 20–2 The Tempest 22 Sidewalk Labs 67, 75, 76 Sillanpää, Mika 158 smart cities 17, 67–9, 71–2 Smith, Adam 48 social classes 124 social distancing 5, 152, 169 social network markets 4, 47–8, 88 social reality 12 stack, the 68 staged conflict 17, 116, 140, 148 stars 104–5 struggle and being 52 civic 54 class 53, 124 and competition 2 modern 56 semiotic 116 Sydney Peace Prize 128, 129 symbiosis 160, 171 systemic death 162 systems model 4, 138 systems science 28–9 teams, interacting 88–90 The Making of the English Working Class 126 Thompson, E.P. 126 Thunberg, Greta 19, 133, 159, 162–5 time x, xiii, 5, 27–9, 44, 62, 72, 83, 89, 91, 110, 119–22, 130, 145, 149 ‘tragedy’ of commons 95 Tressell, Robert 125 Trove x, xi, xii Tsing, Anna 171

189

UN (United Nations) 39, 70, 104, 105, 119, 163, 166 Sustainable Development Goals 157, 159 uncertainty evolutionary 68 of identity ix of knowledge 1 quantum 133–4 unity machines 117 universities 96, 98, 99, 101, 146–8 Urban Nexus 85 Urban Revolution 68 urban/urbanization renewal 84 revolution 68 semiosis 78, 80 urbanist 15 useless class 167, 169 Veblen, Thorstein 3, 47, 67 Vernadsky, V. I. 28, 122 Vigna, Paul 150 WALL·E 167 Wang, Jackie 167 Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance 129 waste 18, 19, 67, 69, 83, 85, 146, 153, 155, 156, 158 Watson, Emma 132, 147 Westbury, Marcus 84 Williams, Raymond 126 working class 124–6, 130 World Summit in Austria 164 Ytreberg, Espen 11 zombie apocalypse 167 genres 166

Titles in the Elgar Advanced Introductions series include: International Political Economy Benjamin J. Cohen The Austrian School of Economics Randall G. Holcombe Cultural Economics Ruth Towse Law and Development Michael J. Trebilcock and Mariana Mota Prado

International Conflict and Security Law Nigel D. White Comparative Constitutional Law Mark Tushnet International Human Rights Law Dinah L. Shelton Entrepreneurship Robert D. Hisrich

International Humanitarian Law Robert Kolb

International Tax Law Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

International Trade Law Michael J. Trebilcock

Public Policy B. Guy Peters

Post Keynesian Economics J.E. King

The Law of International Organizations Jan Klabbers

International Intellectual Property Susy Frankel and Daniel J. Gervais Public Management and Administration Christopher Pollitt

International Environmental Law Ellen Hey International Sales Law Clayton P. Gillette

Organised Crime Leslie Holmes

Corporate Venturing Robert D. Hisrich

Nationalism Liah Greenfeld

Public Choice Randall G. Holcombe

Social Policy Daniel Béland and Rianne Mahon

Private Law Jan M. Smits

Globalisation Jonathan Michie

Consumer Behavior Analysis Gordon Foxall

Entrepreneurial Finance Hans Landström

Behavioral Economics John F. Tomer

Cost-Benefit Analysis Robert J. Brent

European Union Law Jacques Ziller

Environmental Impact Assessment Angus Morrison Saunders

Planning Theory Robert A. Beauregard

Comparative Constitutional Law Second Edition Mark Tushnet

Tourism Destination Management Chris Ryan

National Innovation Systems Cristina Chaminade, Bengt-Åke Lundvall and Shagufta Haneef Ecological Economics Matthias Ruth Private International Law and Procedure Peter Hay Freedom of Expression Mark Tushnet Law and Globalisation Jaakko Husa Regional Innovation Systems Bjørn T. Asheim, Arne Isaksen and Michaela Trippl International Political Economy Second Edition Benjamin J. Cohen International Tax Law Second Edition Reuven S. Avi-Yonah Social Innovation Frank Moulaert and Diana MacCallum The Creative City Charles Landry

International Investment Law August Reinisch Sustainable Tourism David Weaver Austrian School of Economics Second Edition Randall G. Holcombe U.S. Criminal Procedure Christopher Slobogin Platform Economics Robin Mansell and W. Edward Steinmueller Public Finance Vito Tanzi Feminist Economics Joyce P. Jacobsen Human Dignity and Law James R. May and Erin Daly Space Law Frans G. von der Dunk Legal Research Methods Ernst Hirsch Ballin National Accounting John M. Hartwick International Human Rights Law Second Edition Dinah L. Shelton

Privacy Law Megan Richardson

Housing Studies William A.V. Clark

Law and Artificial Intelligence Woodrow Barfield and Ugo Pagello

Public Policy B. Guy Peters

Politics of International Human Rights David P. Forsythe Community-based Conservation Fikret Berkes Global Production Networks Neil M. Coe Mental Health Law Michael L. Perlin Law and Literature Peter Goodrich Creative Industries John Hartley Global Administration Law Sabino Cassese

Global Sports Law Stephen F. Ross Empirical Legal Research Herbert M. Kritzer Cities Peter J. Taylor Law and Entrepreneurship Shubha Ghosh Mobilities Mimi Sheller Technology Policy Albert N. Link and James Cunningham Urban Transport Planning Kevin J. Krizek and David A. King