Old wisdom: Corporate support leads to financial stability, which allows artists perform their art with confidence, knowing that they are protected from the whims of the market.
New wisdom: Corporate backing creates vulnerability for an artist by making them susceptible to large scale political pressure, which is an impediment to them performing their art.
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If we are going to have art in the new world that Trump created for us (which is going to stay with us for a generation at least, I believe) we will need a better distribution channel. The internet is obviously the first choice in the infrastructure, but the answer is NOT Youtube, which is another corporate entity. What we need is an alternative to corporate harbors.
The alternative needs to be NOT motivated by profit. It needs to be a co-op and not a corporation. It needs to be creator owned. It also needs to have a distributed architecture so that a handful of masked ICE agents can't take it down. So Mastodon or Bluesky like in its basic design, and a co-op in its conception.
The missing piece, I think is the economic structure around it. Perhaps a Patreon like individual support for individual artists, but that eventually turns art stale because new voices need support until they find their footing enough to pull their own weight. Which, to me, says a combination of patronage vs revenue sharing among the creators participating in the platform.
We need this.
This means we no longer get millionaires who make a killing off of making art in this ecosystem, but if making a killing's your thing, you can always be a part of the corporate structure and make the art *they* want to see.
We also need this when it comes to news. What's happening to entertainment and art will come down as a bigger force on news. We are already seeing news organizations turning into collaborators one by one. So we need a similar structure for news: distributed co-ooperatives.
We will need to then expand this to repositories of knowledge. Education and sciences need a lot of money, which is something that I am not sure models like this can handle. So I don't think we can get scientific progress in this manner, but perhaps more importantly, we need a memory bank for the science that has already been established, because they are coming after that too, eventually. Keep in mind that their primary motivation is to re-make every aspect of this society, seven mountains and such. And they are continuing to accumulate the power to achieve this every single capitulation large or small.
Yeah we can protest, push back, resist as individuals, but that means *absolutely nothing*. What is being lost is something on a much larger scale, which means we need to go against our cultural indoctrination and embrace a shared solution, a communal action. We need to begin to create the society we want to live in. Be a part of the solution. Be the hope, if you will.
I am not sure how. I am not sure where we start. But we need to build our parallel cultural ecosystem. And we need to set that up soon before we get too fragmented by outside pressure and lack of means to connect to one another in meaningful ways.