This is an idea I just had listening to Angela Nagle. Angela Nagle is this Irish writer who studies how the internet went wrong. I have not read her books, but her ideas are so great. This is a category I should get into. I will put a short reading list at the end. I heard her on Majority Report.
It’s a bit like Bandcamp, she was talking about how these great economic movements always actually came out of economic influences more than anything. Like all of the stuff that you go around the world to see or these amazing flowerings of culture you can identify who paid for it and so on, this is not new news or anything….
But then how depressing it is now how the mass culture has kind of died out with the mass social models, and we have this very philistine billionaire model, with art being a great example where hedge funds and billionaires are buying up new and classic art and unlike the aristocratic patrons, they are not showing it off as largesse, they are stashing it away as investments.
Apparently there is an app where you can invest in shares in expensive pieces of art like it was stocks and make money on how much it goes up in price, so if you buy 0.001% of a Basquiat for $1000 and someone sells it at a profit you get you % of that profit.
This got me thinking, first it just occurred to me that those stupid NFT things where a super depressing example of that, deliberately crap pictures that you pay what you’d pay for a small car for, and then apparently it can go up in price.
But I also thought that you could make a non philistine model of that, where you invest in great new art and get a fine print to hang up as well as an investment in it. I have no idea how it would work, I guess it would have to have a non money based incentive system, I mean you get to hang your painting up, tie it in to mass culture in some way, like a top of the pops or something? I don’t know, I didn’t get that far with it.
This is actually just in keeping with the theme of this page, I miss the internet in 2005 when it was kind of new and they had worked out how to get it to work. Now they worked it out it doesn’t work. I have this long essay in me about how football and the internet completely conform to classical Marxist theory, like Marx was describing economic processes across society that would take 200 years, but with this hyperculture stuff it only takes about 15 years, they turn into oligarchies with an isolated and irrelevant elite who replace the old order and imitate them and it leads to destruction and renewal until someone breaks the cycle
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