joe blogs

A striking image is generated by the above title – brave soldiers sent to their pointless deaths by idiots who couldn’t care less.

I came across the quote while looking at some background information for a project I am helping my children on about the first world war (I won’t give it capitals – I don’t believe that it deserves them).

And, at first the quote seemed apt.

Not from a point of criticising inept general-ship (although that is where the term is originally aimed) but rather from that of greedy political intrigue and a blind insistence on cementing the status quo. (Indeed, the generals are almost as much part of the politically manipulated crowd as the foot soldiers!)

But there the first problem arose: the term “donkeys” suggests foolishness and stubbornness and incompetence. But, while stubborn does fit as an accurate description of the political mind, foolishness and incompetence don’t. We like to think they do, but only when measuring their results with what we hoped they would achieve. However, most politicians are remarkably clever and subtle in gaining, not what they promise or what we hope they will achieve, but what they want for themselves. The political leaders at the time of the first world war certainly did as much as they could to further their own interests. Continued colonial conquest and domination; maintenance of the status quo at home.

(As an aside, it has been argued that the achievement of women’s votes can be attributed to the first world war, but that does not radically alter the status quo automatically. After all, no politician really cares who actually votes them to power).

So donkey’s doesn’t fit.

Then again, lions raises images of brave, kingly figures – the lion as ruler of the beasts and all that. Where most of the soldiers lions? One would hardly claim they were either extra-ordinarily brave or cowardly. They were simply those who did what they were told. And that is certainly not the image of a lion. I find it hard to reconcile the image conjured by “I did what I was told to do” with “Lion, king of beasts”.

I would argue that we, the mothers and fathers and teachers of our children, should be raising lions. Because, while lions may have fights and battles of their own choosing, and may indeed be roused to anger, they will not be manipulated and led like sheep to the slaughter for some other hyena’s profit.

Let us teach our children to be lions!

In his blog post, The game theory of discovery and the birth of the free-gap, Seth Godin discusses an interesting point regarding the acceleration towards free in the digital media. Software, images, sounds, videos; all are examples where we are getting used to the idea of free.

In some cases that free is still heavily guilted out – piracy, illegal copying, etc. – but the pirated content is becoming more and more fleshed out with legally available content. Sometimes, the cost is one of time – download wait time, listen to this advert time – sometimes it’s a cost of membership (either pay-for or free subscriptions).

Perhaps the time has come to relook at content as socially owned. In times gone past, ideas were freely passed around by scholars, as a result of which they grew, spawned new ideas, and changed the way the world worked. The scholars in question would be paid (how else would they eat), but the ideas and the content was truly public domain – ie belonging to everybody. Occasionally, a rich patron would have a “pet” scholar (or artist) and certain work would be owned by them, but ultimately the content benefited us all (as a species). Music was played by orchestras for people to listen to, paintings and sculptures were created to be seen, and thoughts were bounced around among scholars and philosophers.

The thing I find most important in all this is that we seem in recent times to have given in to a fear that if we let go of our ownership of content that we will never be able to generate more. And that fear leads us to hold onto our rights to that content, because (rather like the professional sportsperson, who reaches a peak and can no longer earn a living with sport) we fear not being able to make a living tomorrow.

If on the other hand, instead of living in fear of “drying up”, we realise that we can continue to generate content, then being paid for the “skin time” involved in the content (either in a concert, or for the original artwork, or whatever the tangible experience of the artist creating this content might mean) might be sufficient payment, and the content itself can be left free to roam and generate new content within society.

In other words, it is the personal interaction between the creator and the recipient that is irreplaceable and thus needs to be secured by the recipient by some form of payment, while the content itself is set free to add value to all of society. An artist who paints a painting, or a sculptor who creates a statue has only one original, has only that single space of time that they dedicate to that work, and it is that one to one correlation between the artists’ time and the work which makes those articles irreplaceable.

The future copies on the other hand involve little or no effort or time from the artist, and their dissemination (even in physical form) contains a value that is more general rather than specific. The value of these copies lies in how much they influence further and future content generation, and how much they impact the generation of new thoughts and ideas.