Creative Economy vs the Cruelty Economy
2022-03-21 08:55:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
Some thoughts on these two concepts, don’t take these as fact, just some observations, might lead to something interesting, or maybe not.
In the cruelty economy you are rewarded for receiving and disposing of cruelty. People optimise for not being hurt, not getting angry, for catching the purpotraiters of cruelty. Things tend towards a imprisonment.
In the creator economy you are rewarded for receiving creativity and releasing it. People optimise for maximising the creativity, even bad stuff can be good. Things tend towards anarchy.
Things go bad when your capacity to process is exceeded. Creativity turns to cruelty, but perhaps also cruelty turns to creativity.
Real true anger is a capacity problem, it’s the group mis-managing capacity.
It’s a sort of symbiosis, perhaps similar in concept and behaviour to other natural phenomena like the El niño - La niña weather system. In the case of the creator-cruelty economy, ultimately it’s all based on chemical fluctuations in our brains.
It’s a really tough problem to think about, because we are all in the map so to speak, whatever actions we take, including thinking about the dynamic, affects the dynamic, and the balance.
A potential danger is that you get caught in one extreme or the other, without enough capacity to switch. And then you are probably in for a bad time. Smashed against the rocks, over and over again, in plain site.