Caregiving made me Creative?
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Blog Beta (Test mode): There is some great content already here, but we
are developing the 'infrastructure' before launching the main content.

Both these antitheses contain truth: “The more we consume, the less we live.” “The more we consume, the more we live.”

If anti-consumption becomes an ideology, such that we spend 1000 hours on do-it-yourself projects when we could have spent one hour and $100 to find an industrial equivalent, our morality is immoral. If we refuse to watch TV, or read magazines, arguing that anything we can consume, we can create, we may become great innovators, but we may also stay parochial, isolated from important experience.

I try to ride both horses – reigned under one Master. ‘Creative consumption’ can exist – not frivolous spending, but consumption that contributes to growth.

A High Tech Christmas / Caregiving by Consuming:

Audio/Video

Planning to buy a CD or DVD? See if it’s already online.¹ It would be spurious to claim that this overcomes consumption, but it does reduce stuff, and thus embodied energy. Perhaps more importantly, it’s easier to access, edit, and include in playlists.

As a caregiver, I developed what I dare say almost everyone would agree is the world’s greatest collection of music and video: It is not massive, but refined, and diverse – to grow mind, body and soul – and easy to operate.² It’s not yet ideal – you can’t yet do a search that returns results in different media formats (audio, video, image, text), and we’re still working on enabling full-screen playlists, but … for our audio playlists, youtube group, Jonathon’s youtube playlists, and more, see www.CaregivingChannel.com.³

Software

Alas, this must wait til next year. Our Works in Progress will be revised – and reviewed at our public meeting: Imagiscape Budget 2008.

Socks and such

See Socks? Brilliant!

Higher Tech (a.k.a. Low Tech) / Caregiving by Creating:

Imagiscape Workshops –

Advancing Your Play – Improv Theatre The Creative Workout / Becoming Light – Health, Strength & Wit through Dance and Movement Intelligence The Home Factory Farm – An Engineer’s Dream, A Dance Know Your Neighbours – Save on transportation, find friends next door.

Others’ Goods and Events –

[suggest yours in the comments below] See Imagiscape Recommends or engage: Volunteer at Street Missions / Develop Ecological Audit Programs. This list will expand next year.

But what about the people whose livelihoods depend on sales?

I have that compassion, but imagination and ecological design are technologies – notice that the same people who raise a cry for shopkeepers tend to be the same people who argue against compassion for labourers and manufacturers displaced by technological progress.

Only by a gross stretch can we make the following analogy, but: If a drug addict found freedom from the addiction, would you be sad for the drug dealer? So why do we complain when someone graduates from needing shopkeepers’ products?

I acknowledge ‘graduating’ is a loaded term, which could work in the opposite way – graduating from self-imposed isolation due to an ideological conviction that precludes people from experiencing how the market can facilitate collaboration.

Still, if there was a cure for diabetes, should diabetics keep getting dialysis to keep the dialysis industry going?

An ecological economy does not require sacrifice

• it requires getting what we really want – not stuff, but the flow of benefits that is promised by that commodity, and is often fulfilled better by non-material means. Sacrifice may be good, but caregiving does not require sacrifice.

Render consumption obsolete

Re-imagine this standard economic model:

Natural Resources => Production => Consumption => Utility [~Happiness] as

Natural Resources => Production => Utility [~Happiness]. We cannot avoid consuming, but we can make all we consume be inputs for participating in Creation. We can consume only to create – not so our egos can consider ourselves ‘artists’, but so we can contribute to human history.

Inspired Economies

While most economic systems attempt to organize behaviour by incentives (material, social or spiritual; rewards or punishments), Imagiscape tests and develops the conditions for Inspired Economies.

What do you think?

Has truth slipped into heresy? Am I a Scrooge? Perhaps I should have kept this lighter until after the holidays.

———-

For Sale: Nothing™

Get what you really want – not a product, but the ability to create; not an egg, but the goose that lays the golden eggs. Get what you really want – not a CD, but the ability to create music, the ability to live in music.

What to get for the person who has everything? Nothing! You don’t have everything until you have nothing – then you can experience the richness of everything inside you and of everyone and everything around you.

———

We have bought the previously unused domain name www.SaveSanta.org for this campaign.

Similar Campaigns by Others: - Buy Nothing Christmas - Hundred Dollar Holiday

———

Footnotes:

1. CDs and DVDs are clunky, obsolete – I copy the clips I want to hard drive (it’s much easier to extract video clips from files that are not in DVD format), where I can access them easily or build them into playlists, and then I have to dispose of the useless discs.

2. It seems to me therefore better than Rhapsody, Last.fm, and other online music services.

3. According to [reference forthcoming], files stored in online storage accounts like box.net are legal for streaming. Still, since the artist and production company incurred expenses, I’m willing to pay for [non-profit distribution] rights, even though I offer it for free. I volunteered hundreds of hours and I will pay to be able to make it available, because I think the world should have it.

Do you know of a licensing service that can send me an invoice for all the content? From my research it seems I would have to search for the copyright owner for each song individually, then find how to contact each copyright owner (each have different methods), and then communicate with each one until I get the appropriate price, and then pay by whatever method that company uses. These search and transaction costs make the market an impediment to economic growth. A licensing service should rectify that, but it seems there are barriers to such a business, because I can’t find one that works anything like that.

keywords: “Gift Guide”, “Holiday Guide”, “You have not lived until …”, “Must-See”, “Must-Have”

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