Why I think Creative Scenes are a key to our future

Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, the summer of 1986.  This is the BMX/skate scene where I really started notice how important the actual scene it self was.  Led by visionary BMXer/skater/promoter Dave Vanderspek, he and the other pro riders, like Maurice Meyer, featured here, spent a lot of time helping us up-and-coming riders build our skills.  Thanks to their leadership, we had a place to try new things, invent tricks, and be a part of a group of similar weirdos.  This little clip includes a future BMX Plus magazine editor, Karl Rothe at 4:23, the future graphic artist who changed the entire skateboard industry, Mark McKee at 4:43, and me, a future magazine/newsletter writer and video producer, at 5:07.  Legendary street skating pioneer and Bones Brigade member Tommy Guerrero was also part of this scene. 

What is a Creative Scene?
It's any group of two or more people who get together, throw ideas around, and actually do something creative.  Art scenes.  Music scenes.  BMX scenes.  Skate scenes.  Entrepreneurial scenes.  Tech scenes.  Gaming/coding scenes.  Web design scenes.  Blog/zine scenes.  Craft scenes.  Food truck and local restaurant scenes.  You get the idea.

Why do we need Creative Scenes?
Here's why:
Most of small town/rural America is dying economically.  Here's a great Wall Street Journal article on this issue.  Even in the larger cities that do have high paying tech jobs,the majority of jobs are low paying service industry jobs.  People across the country need tens of MILLIONS of good paying jobs.  There are no large numbers of major companies to create all these jobs today.  The days of the huge factories in every town are gone.  Many of you will have to create your own jobs in many cases.  Creative scenes can turn into small, and sometimes big, businesses.  They can even become entire new industries.

We are in a decades-long transition between the Industrial Age and the Information Age.  The late futurist Alvin Toffler and his wife Heidi called this Information-based Age The Third Wave.  That was the title of their 1980 book on the subject.  As we go through this transition, Industrial Age institutions and systems of all kinds are fading, or often just collapsing, and being replaced by entirely new institutions, systems, and infrastructure.  Websites, blogs, and ebooks have largely replaced books, magazines, and newspapers.  Shopping centers and malls are closing down, and being replaced by Amazon, online shops, and UPS trucks delivering goods.  Records and CD's have been replaced by Mp3's and now streaming.  TV is all but dead, and Netflix, You Tube, Roku and live streaming are taking its place.  But schools and colleges are still largely the same.  Our legal system is still largely the same.  Our health care system is still largely the same.  These and other aspects of the Industrial Age will flounder at some point, and be replaced by a new model.

Today's technology and connectivity mean that individuals, almost anywhere, can create all kinds of small businesses and ways to earn a living in this new and ever-changing world.  But tens of millions of people have been left behind, and local Creative Scenes can help bring new skills and ideas and money into areas that are struggling now.   They can also help teach new skills to older workers.

There are 7 million or more "prime working age men" out of work, and not looking for work.  Here's Nicolas Eberstadt, the main researcher into this issue.  This huge group is in addition to the officially unemployed people.  This group rivals the percentage of unemployed people in the Great Depression of the 1930's.  Because our population is much larger now, the actual number is much greater than in the Great Depression.

There are also over 20 million people, not currently incarcerated, who have a felony on their record, which makes finding a high paying, traditional job much harder.  Straight up, if we get most of these people in these two groups doing some kind of legit work, our country becomes much, MUCH stronger in nearly every way.  To do this, we need new ideas, people, and Creative Scenes, to implement these new ideas.  This can and should happen in arts, business, and through new non-profit groups.

The Federal Reserve, and other Central Banks, have complete screwed our financial system worldwide.  Here's former Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs "quant" (super math geek) Nomi Prins explaining this mess.  We're in for another big ass financial collapse like 2008, but probably worse.  So all of the things above will soon have the added pressure of a serious recession weighing them down, as well.

Wahsington D.C. is not going to fix this.  They're somewhere between impotent and just plain retarded at this point.  It's up to us.  Welcome to the DIY economy.  I think small groups of creative people are one of the best ways we can start working on these, and all the other big issues, we have to deal with.  I think Creative Scenes is a big part of the solution to these problems.

But can a handful of artsy fartsy people in some random town REALLY make a difference?
Yes.
I've seen it happen, over and over.  Here are a few examples.

In 1984, a group of Montreal street performers decided to buy a tent and create their own circus.  Things were dicey for several years.  But now, Cirque du Soleil has over 20 permanent and touring shows, a huge facility in Montreal, employs over 4,000 creative people, and brings in around $800 million a year.  Oh, and they put the Ringling Bros. and Barnum Bailey circus out of business.

This is Jason Lee's video part from the 1991 skate video, Blind's Video Days.  The part was directed by a young guy named Spike Jonze, his directorial debut.  The first song in the video ("The Knife Song" by Milk) was sung by Jeff Tremaine.  Spike and Jeff are film directors now, and Jason's an actor.  The gross income of the movies they've all worked on since this video part comes to $3.693 billion.

In 2005, three creative people got together and built a website to give artists and crafters a place to sell their works online.  They gave is a nonsense word as a name, "Etsy."  It was quite literally a small Creative Scene bent on helping people everywhere legitimize and monetize their creative works.  As of the end of 2014, Etsy had 685 employees, 54 million registered users, nearly 20 million of those active, and gross sales on the platform was $1.93 billion.

My point?  Little groups of creative people, morphing into small Creative Scenes, can have big impacts.  In some cases, that includes big businesses and incomes.  These three examples of small Creative Scenes spawning people doing big things and making big bucks, don't even include all the tech company successes we all know that started from a handful of creative people.

This Creative Scenes idea is my main focus these days.  I've been a part of many different Creative Scenes in my life, and I have a lot of experience, thoughts, and ideas on how to enable, nurture, improve, and build Creative Scenes.  Stay tuned here on this blog for a lot more on this subject.