Of Coins, Bit and Culture

Update: @ddower and @Pollyckarl have made themselves available on Twitter recently, to answer questions about Culture Coin that have cleared up a few things. The first is that the Business Unusual contest specifically requested "half-baked" ideas, ideas that are unfinished, undoubtedly to prevent organizations from editing themselves out of a good idea. The second is that they are two incredibly smart, engaged, and approachable people who truly want the community to develop ideas together. This post has been edited to reflect all of that. 

Fair warning: I am not an economics blogger. But I read a bunch of them on the regular (Matt Yglesias, Joe Weisenthal, better known as @TheStalwart, Ezra Klein and Wonkblong in general, Ryan Avent and The Economist in general, and Free Exchange in particular - you get the picture). Caveat emptor.

If you are a theatrical bent and you are at all engaged with social media, then you may have noticed HowlRound on Twitter, talking up voting for Culture Coin, their Business Unusual contest entry (side note to ArtsFwd: this is 2013 - frames are dead, dead, dead, please stop using them). I encourage you to read the proposal, a heartfelt plea for new thinking on connecting resources with users and rewarding sweat with "sweat equity." I am wholly on board with the premise that there are underutilized resources in the arts sector, that there are dark resources, latent abilities, spaces, or resources that have not been tapped into, and that nearly everyone in the arts sector is underpaid. It's an open question what direction exactly Culture Coin is going to take on tackling these issues. However, all of this talk about creating a digital distributed transnational currency reminds me of that other digital transnational invented currency, Bitcoin, which can lead to some productive thinking about what Culture Coin should not be.

You may have heard of Bitcoin. It's been in the news recently because its value went nuts, which led to all kinds of snarky econoblogger fun. If you haven't heard, Bitcoin is a digital, anonymous, cryptographically secure, peer-to-peer currency based on hard money theories of value (which is influenced by a school of thought called monetarism), namely that scarcity and durability create value. If you have libertarian friends, ask them about gold. You will get a wonky earful about intrinsic value and you will understand what Bitcoin wants to be (it's all wrong, of course - theatre makers, of all people, should understand that value is a shared collective phenomenon that is not always stable). Bitcoin is, essentially, digital gold. Gold has desirable qualities in a physical currency: it doesn't rust; there's a limited supply of it; historically, everybody wants it. Bitcoin, like gold, is limited in its supply. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins in the world. Bitcoins must be mined in order to go into circulation (being "mined" involves your computer doing a complex set of number crunching, kind of like SETI@home or Folding@home, but with less societal value). And finally, Bitcoin can be converted to other currencies at a floating market value, in addition to being useful (that's a strong word, but let's be generous) for purchasing goods and services directly (for the record, despite all the techo-utopian enthusiasm behind Bitcoin, the bulk of the goods purchased with it at this point are drugs and guns - turns out libertarians aren't the only ones interested in a cryptographically secure anonymous transnational digital currency).

It's easy to see the similarities between Bitcoin and Culture Coin, which aims to be a peer-to-peer digital currency as well. However, those similarities end pretty quickly. For example, the value basis of the Culture Coin is the exact inversion of Bitcoin. The basis for "mining" Culture Coins is sweat, i.e. labor, which is essentially infinite, and the money supply is unconstrained. This begs the question: how does labor create capital? When you perform labor in the real economy,  you receive wages out of an existing stock of available money, you don't create that money out of thin air in that moment. Libertarians and Bitcoin enthusiasts don't like fiat money because governments can increase the money supply (i.e. print money) to change the value of that money, pretty much at will. Fiat money means that it is always possible for a sovereign to make more money with their magic "Because I said so!" (this is also why no sovereign nation with its own currency can go bankrupt - tell your Republican friends). But that doesn't mean the money created would be worth anything, just ask Zimbabwe (231,000,000% per day!). Culture Coin, if it were truly to be implemented as a currency, is the most extreme version of fiat money ever, where labor itself creates new money, rather than getting rewarded with existing money. There is no precedent for that whatsoever, it's essentially alchemy. If the user base grows and Culture Coin catches on in this scenario, value will disappear the instant it is "created" because the more successful Culture Coin is at convincing people to put in sweat and be paid in coin, the less each individual coin will be worth, undercutting the very purpose of the project: fair compensation.

Bitcoin is also meant to mimic gold in that it intends to be a resource that is left to the collective use of those who adopt it. In other words, there is no central bank of Bitcoin. As a form of specie, it simply is what it is and it doesn't need anyone standing behind it to have value (we've seen that this is not true, of course, but that's the theory). The Culture Coin project has an altruistic motive at heart, fair compensation for market participants, that requires active management of the currency to meet its philosophical goals. Some of these ideas can't be found in the contest entry, but they do show up on Twitter. One in particular catches the eye:

Culture Coin gets co-created & democratically run by—ALL—artists & culture makers. Read/Vote it up @artsfwd goo.gl/PGRCF #newplay
— HowlRound.com (@HowlRound) May 22, 2013

Culture Coin would again be the exact opposite of Bitcoin: instead of having no central bank, its central bank will be every user of the currency. Culture Coin plans to have all users collectively act together and democratically decide on conversion rates and fair compensation for your sweat. You can search for days on whatever search engine suits you and you will not find anyone who has ever attempted anything like that. Digital direct democracy, in and of itself, has yet to succeed or be effectively implemented by its own biggest proponents. No one has ever attempted direct democractic control of a central bank. Ever.We have seen what happens when amateurs help run major financial institutions, though and it looks a lot like the Great Depression. Setting aside major questions about standards of fairness and the workability of the currency, this is a giant governance headache. Huge amounts of resources and time will be needed to work out the theory on this, produce actionable ideas, run the experiments necessary to implement those ideas, learn from those experiments, and then finally convince someone to actually accept a Culture Coin as a form of payment from someone they don't know. Creating a currency is hard work.

This is all pretty theoretical, so let me put it into more concrete terms. Let's say I volunteer with several local theatres in DC, doing lighting or whatever they had to hand, and let's say I did that for long enough, that I could use some of the Culture Coins I'd built up to rent a space in Germany (transnational!) for a week for a cross-cultural project I'd been kicking around (something like these examples came up in the Twitter conversation, which I should storify, but haven't yet). That's great! But . . . the people who own that space in Germany have to pay rent. In euro. How does giving them some Culture Coins help them make rent? It doesn't . . . unless you can turn a Culture Coin into euro. But there is already a way for me to labor for a certain amount of time, receive currency in return for that labor (from an already accepted store of value), and then use that wage to pay for goods and services to realize my dream idea; all without creating a parallel economy or a new currency.

What this all boils down to is that Culture Coin is actually still an inchoate nascent idea and it will take some time to develop. To me, it is pretty clear though that it shouldn't develop into a true currency and that even one second spent thinking of it that way is time better spent doing something. To me, there is something far more interesting lurking at the heart of the project than a digital currency. Remember that the impetus for Culture Coin, beyond the fair compensation thing, is the desire to uncover and connect resources, including latent resources, with those who are interested in using them. Fair compensation doesn't actually have anything to do with connecting users with resources. It would be nice to be fairly compensated, but that's a problem with not having enough capital, something that inventing a new currency won't solve. But this resource problem? That can be solved. Indeed, Fractured Atlas has already made a run at part of this problem with their Spaces project. In keeping with the commons ethos, I think the best thing HowlRound can do, would be to leverage that contest reward into a partnership with someone who is already working on part of their problem and extend the work of both.

I moved to Washington, DC in order to get plugged into a vibrant theatre community that was large enough to be doing interesting work and taking serious risks, but small enough to welcome in a complete stranger. I have a couple of projects that I would love to self-produce, but I'm still new to the community (and disconnected from it by my production gig - I think sometimes that I will get deeper into the theatre, only when I step away from running shows). I don't hang around with a coterie of actors. I don't know anyone with a blackbox theatre. I don't know where to go to get the kind of booth you might find in a diner for my set. If HowlRound can put together a web platform that helps me find all of these disparate parts and pieces and use them to put on a show, they will have done me and the entire theatre community a huge service, even if I have to spend my own money to do it. Culture Coin is worth supporting for that reason. I hope they just leave that currency thing to anonymous genius libertarians. And sovereign nations. Because even they can't figure it out.

Of Mechanics and Ferraris

This post is dedicated to the mechanics of theatre (as is this little ditty, in a way).

What you think of your mechanic depends almost entirely on what you think of your car. If you are a regular commuter, you probably think of your car as an instrument, essentially, a commodity, something completely fungible and interchangeable. You also probably don't know your mechanic. In all likelihood, you don't have a regular guy or gal at all. Jiffy Lube, or Mr. Tire, or whoever suits you fine for the regular stuff and for the other stuff? Whatever AAA or the insurance company (yours or theirs) recommends is fine. The fact that your car has to be repaired at times is annoying. The machine is just a machine, you are reluctant to spend any real money at all, and when you do spend any serious amount of money, it is with much grumbling and great regret.

But if you own a Ferrari (you're welcome), things are quite different. For one thing, you can't take it to just anybody anymore. There aren't millions of Ferraris in the world. Very few third party manufacturers make parts for such a high end automobile. The number of mechanics qualified to maintain a high performance vehicle in peak condition is way smaller than the number who can replace any old fifteen dollar oil filter (it sinks from thousands to tens). You also understand that a Ferrari is a fine piece of kit, expensive to purchase and to operate. You don't begrudge the running cost, because it is simply part of being a member of an exclusive club, the kind of club where you don't bother listing the prices of accessories. That means you know your mechanic, you probably know them by name, you visit them regularly, and you pay them extremely well for their specialized knowledge and ability. You acknowledge the importance of their work in making it possible for you to do ridiculous things (again, you're welcome) with your car.

But that is not the top end of what mechanics can do. For that, you have to look at pit crews, or well, you know, real pit crews. Drivers routinely thank their pit crews. They also routinely throw them under the bus, but that comes with the high stakes territory. The constructors and engineers involved with Formula 1, in particular, are extremely important. But they work with the best mechanics and crew members in the world. You could be the best engineer in the world, but if there isn't a machine shop in the world capable of doing what you want, it will not matter at all. Those crews are paid well, they are part of a world famous team. They didn't design the car. They don't race the car. But they sure do make it run.

"Yes, but when are you going to talk about theatre?" asks the impatient reader (but not too impatient, thanks for making it this far). I would love to be able to drop the mic right here. "I've been talking about theatre all along: technicians are mechanics!" Unfortunately, I can't and to see why, we have to take step back for a moment.

Theatre is experiencing the same wrenching transition from a hard-fought past into an unknown future that all creative content companies are right now. The business model of regional theatre is collapsing because there are fewer theatregoers and because of generational shift away from the culture of subscription toward a single-ticket world. As an added bonus, the rising cohort has now been scarred by years of economic hardship. All of this difficulty spawns a lot of discussion, some of it more practical than others. I read quite a lot of it. Almost none of it mentions technicians at all. The discourse of theatre and the arts is dominated by people who work in the artistic department, a group that is very often housed in a building entirely separate from the theatre. Whenever anyone talks about the future of theatre, it is always cast in terms of enabling the artists or changing our relationship with the artist. That is a problem.

Take HowlRound's CULTURE Coin proposal. It is a radical proposal to change the way that sweat equity is rewarded and recognized. They start with the presumption that theatre artists are underpaid and are therefore trying to create a community where the sweat equity of the artists is valued and becomes a medium of exchange (which is only slightly harder than re-inventing the wheel; it's just democratically inventing a currency from nothing, with no central bank - that should sound alarms). At certain levels of theatre, particularly small professional theatres, this makes sense. The lighting designer will, in fact, turn a wrench, the sound designer will install the speaker cluster, the scenic designer will take up a screw gun and get to work. The reason that happens is that the theatre company cannot afford to pay the designer a living wage (or a wage at all), let alone hire a crew to do the work the designer lays out. There must be a way to reward them for that sweat, right?

I invite you to think about what that proposal presumes about technicians. Thought about it? The answer is that it presumes those people don't exist. Nowhere in that proposal will you see mention of anything other than artists: no technicians, no administrators, just artists. In order for CULTURE Coin to work, you have to assume that the people who are doing the work want to be paid in a way that lets them transform sweat into cultural participation. There is no place in that model for somehow who paints sets, gets paid, and then goes home. In this model, it is presumed that the people putting in the sweat equity want to be regarded as artists. Some designers have to do that sweat work, but not all of the people doing that sweat work are designers, directors, actors, or any other type of artist. The worldview of so much of the thinkers of theatre is hermetically sealed - it contains only art and artists. Despite the generous assumption that the people putting in the sweat equity are artists, it doesn't quite cut both ways. It is nigh on impossible to cross the boundary between technician and artist. It is possible to conceive of an artist who has to do mechanic things, but a mechanic who wants to do artistic things? That's literally unthinkable within the current discourse.

We have now come full circle. The technicians who make theatre run are treated like commuter mechanics. We are considered interchangeable, utterly fungible, possibly unnecessary, and only begrudgingly considered part of the theatre landscape. Theatres across the country want to we could let that Check Engine light ride, just for awhile. It's not really important, right? They have no input into how the car is driven. But the reality is that technicians perform a highly specialized task that few people can do well: they are the Ferrari mechanics, not Mr. Tire wrench monkeys. Conceptually, this leaves us with two possible paths. One path leads to a future business model where theatre companies will stay resolutely focused on the artist and not-for-profit theatre companies will not own or operate their own theatre spaces. That money pit be dealt with by companies that are totally focused on that goal alone. There are a number of theatres who would benefit tremendously from divesting themselves of property and all the expensive problems that come with it. The other possible path is that the future of theatre will include the people who actually turn wrenches, mix sound, rig flying scenery, hot glue candlesticks from nothing, whipstitch hems (apologies to the costumes and wardrobe) in a new way. Philosophical decisions will be made in a way that respects them as artisans. Concentrated efforts will be made to cultivate them as a resource to be drawn on, not just in the moment when something needs to be done in tech RIGHT NOW. The barriers between production and artistic will come down making it easier for technicians to become artists and administrators. That would be revolutionary.

Criticism is Not a Four Letter Word

I’ve been eavesdropping on the online conversation about criticism in the arts for awhile now (thank you, HowlRound). Every year, there is a panel at the Humana Festival (like this one) dedicated to assessing the state of theatre criticism. I find the conversation both frustrating and fascinating. I find it fascinating because criticism was my jam as an academic (and all the real philosophers are critical theorists these days - I dare you to find philosophy seminars devoted to anyone born in the twentieth century). It's a frustrating conversation because I also happen to be a huge fan of the work being done at Grantland, a place where sports and popular culture meet. That’s a bad description. I’d say that the insight Bill Simmons had (perhaps unconsciously) is that sports culture is popular culture. And you should have a website devoted to the smartest people covering all of the narratives in popular culture and that this should include everything from NBA shot charts to the most interesting things happening in tabloids today to instigating some excellent gonzo journalism (if the only thing you get out of this blog is reading this Brian Phillips piece on the Iditarod, we are all winners). Everyone should take Derby day to read Hunter S. Thompson’s seminal work on Derby week to be reminded of what great cultural journalism looks like. With all of these Grantland contributors doing such outstanding work, it is bizarre to listen to theatre critics lamenting the death of reviews in print. So, if you want to know the state of criticism in the arts, Grantland is the state of the art and drama critics are the superannuated 18^th century model.

The basic challenge for theatre critics has always been how to get past the popular misconception that the primary work of the critic is to review shows. The problem with that is that the only thing people know of criticism are the reviews because that’s the pretty much all newspapers will print about a theatre show or a movie. This is bundled up with the fact that far too few people understand how awesome live theatre is in general, and not just in New York, or at your local roadhouse. In the modern world, newspapers are no longer sufficient for people who truly love something, even newspapers acknowledge that. The New York Times has ArtsBeat and the Washington Post has WonkBlog and Grantland exists. Conversations are moving more quickly now than ever and criticism is really about fostering and facilitating that conversation.

Only at its most basic level is criticism is about judging the quality of a work. This is much more important in theatre than in film reviewing, because there is so much more theatre being produced than film and with far less money. To truly appreciate cultural artifacts, it is often necessary to understand the components of the form, what its elements are, and how they work together, especially when dealing with challenging work. That’s an educational function and it is to a certain extent necessary, but it isn’t the soul of criticism and, even if it was, it is impossible to do this well in print in the context of a review. This function could and should be moved to a network of content about theatre making, very similar to HowlRound or 2AM Theatre, but with the theatregoing audience in mind, not theatre makers. 

Returning to my academic bread and butter, I am reminded constantly of Friedrich Schlegel. In the 18^th century, Friedrich Schlegel and his cohort attempted to craft a form of criticism that was also itself art and they did it in blurb/blog form, but when that form was printed as a literary journal (called the Athenaeum). This proved to be extremely difficult, but the insight rings more true today than it ever has because cultural criticism is so popular, thanks to the entertainment value of the way it is done. Grantland is all over this, Ain't It Cool is all over this, FilmSpotting is all over this. I think the impetus behind Grantland was the realization that some cultural criticism/observation is better than others and that the writing about the thing can be just as great as the thing (again, see Hunter S. Thompson). Magazines like Rolling Stone and Spin carried this torch for a long time (and still do). All of these great folks have fantastic conversations about cultural products and they do so in a way that is smart, challenging, interesting, and often hilarious. Criticism is doing fine in the 21st Century. The message for theatre criticism is pretty simple: It gets better.