Recommended: "On the Creative Question –- Nine Theses," by Geert Lovink, Sebastian Olma and Ned Rossiter, which tackles Uber-era concepts of sharing, "social," and what it means to be a radical innovator when creativity is institutionally neutralized:
Degraded to a commercial and political marketing tool, the semantic content of creativity has been reduced to an insipid spread of happy homogeneity – including the right amount of TED-styled fringe misfits and subcultures – that can be bureaucratically regulated and 'valorized.' To this rhetoric corresponds a catalogue of 'sectors' and 'clusters' labelled as creative industries: a radically disciplined and ordered subdomain of the economy, a domesticated creative commons where innovators and creatives harmoniously co-mingle and develop their auto-predictive disruptions of self-quantification, sharing and gamification. Conflict is anathema to the delicate sensibilities of personas trading in creative consultancy.
The authors question how much innovation can actually occur within the tight time frames of "template capitalism":
Maturation, which is creative growth, requires time. Don’t be afraid of the cycle. Who’s afraid of the longue durée? The time of creativity is that of idleness and procrastination, indeed otium [wikipedia link --ed]. This turns out to be the opposite of frantic entrepreneurship and instant valorization. This is why creative industries policy can only propose fixed formats and known concepts: template capitalism. Maker labs, with their standard 3D printers and software, can only produce more of the same. Open source is not the solution to this problem. Neither is it sufficient to place the wild, weird bohème at the helm.
What are some examples of this bureaucratically regulated art that emphasizes "frantic entrepeneurship and instant valorization"? The authors are light on specifics but let's throw out some NYC precedents: NEW INC's art/business incubator program, Rhizome's 7 on 7 artist-technologist partnerships where innovation happens in a single day, and Eyebeam fellowships calling for entries that are "provocative" and yet, "have positive real-world impact."
Slower time frames probably mean self-funding, i.e. "day job", although Lovink, et al, don't say that. Another alternative to incubation systems feeding creatives into the capitalist maw is the principled opt-out, or what the authors call "radical practice outside the stack." As a "key strategy for practices of anonymity and a commons beyond expropriation" they suggest "storage without a trace" including "USB libraries, blue-tooth networks, off-the-grid computing."
All well and good but the authors should be more explicit about what they mean by "high risk politics":
Taking ‘social innovation’ seriously means to think about the design of non-scalable communities, creative save-havens and post-digital makers. These are emphatically political challenges. Circumventing politics by way of social design is a dead-end. It repeats the technocratic mistakes that have lead to the incapacitation of politics in the first place. To regain efficacy requires a shift into high risk politics, a politics that has the guts to take decisions about our injured future.
Not sure what the prison system is like in the Netherlands (where this essay originates) but in America that's where real political risk lands you. Entering a nightmare beyond the imaginings of Burroughs and de Sade is a lot to ask of a "creative."
[edited after posting]