My artist’s manifesto
All artists, sooner or later, must make a manifesto, or in my case, a counter-manifesto. Chalk it up to youth! 
Here it is:
The Value of Things
Value is a complex thing. Either in a currency system, or in a system of barter, value is something that must be discussed, negotiated, settled. It depends essentially on the ratio between offer and demand, and offer depends on the scarcity of each of the components that make up each good or service. Demand is even more complex, depending on what is needed, but increasingly, on what is wanted.
The evolution of scarcity
In great part, the history of Humanity is the history of technology. Fire is technology. The wheel is technology. Writing, mathematics, farming, bureaucracy – they’re all technologies. And technology upsets the status quo of what scarcity is. The wheel made distance a less expensive commodity. Gutenberg made information so simple to disseminate to the point that it transformed something easy to safeguard to something easy to copy. The loom made textiles worthy of a King available to the poorest. And technology keeps its relentless pace.
The evolution of demand
Producers of goods and services, to safeguard their livelihoods in the face of dwindling scarcity, created fashion. It’s just the simple act of creating “wants” where before there were “needs”. It’s fashionable to have the latest clothing. To live in the best places. To have a finer car. You don’t need any of those things, it’s all a question of what is fashionable.
Meta Evolution
Digital is the meta invention. Digital + The Internet are the Gutenberg press squared. Cubed. What once was made easy is now completely effortless. If you can describe it or scan it, you can make it available to the world, and thanks to the search engines, if you tag it well, it will be found by those who need it (or merely want it). Even if you’re just copying what someone else created, even without their consent.
The Problem
If an artisan spends a considerable percentage of his/her time creating something physical, if you just go and grab what they created, it’s theft. In part because it’s easily enforceable (you can lock physical things up) and also because it’s our culture, of property of physical goods. If an artisan spends a considerable time creating something that can be scanned or is natively digital, and wants to sell it, the buyer can easily duplicate it. Physical goods vs. Informational goods. They’re very different (and even the design of physical goods is usually easily replicated).
Trying to stop the ocean
The intellectual property industry’s reaction was to try to lock content up with DRM (Digital Rights Management). Millions were spent trying to lock what can’t possibly be contained. What they didn’t understand is that it takes only a single copy to get freed to be replicated endlessly to everyone who wants it. Basically it was a big and shortsighted waste of money.
An opportunity
Instead of fighting what can’t possibly be fought, some intelligent people created the Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org) – basically, the expanse between “All Rights Reserved” (full copyright) and “No Rights Reserved” (placing something in the public domain). Instead of only having only the extreme options, they created several types of machine/people/lawyer readable legal licenses under which you can license what you create. Want your work to be available for free, but only for non-commercial uses? But not used in derivative works? But you insist on having it attributed to your name? No problem, Creative Commons licenses have it covered.
For free? Why?
Because the money to be earned is not on things that can be copied. That’s a lost battle. If you’re a musician, you can make more money on concerts and events. If you’re a photographer, more money can be made by shooting specific assignments for customers, or on photography workshops. If you’re a writer, you can make more money by participating as a speaker at conferences. The era of making something and making your livelihood from just selling copies of it is nearing its end. And getting your creations known to the widest possible audience is the key for getting work that can’t be replicated.
Summing up
This is the reason why I don’t create single copies of my photographs or limited editions. I want people to enjoy my photography not because it’s scarce, but because they like it. I do sell signed and numbered copies (limitless editions only), but only for the people who voluntarily want to financially support my art. Don’t buy it as an investment – buy it because you enjoy it and want to see more of it! Everyone else is welcome to just download and use (non-commercially) my photographs any way they like it – on your computer desktop, on your blog, by printing and hanging it on your walls!
You can visit my portfolio at pedromourapinheiro.com
In the flesh
My online life started about 18 years ago with the BBSs, Fidonet, Relaynet, etc. In 1994 I got my first “true” connection to the Internet. Contrary to non-geek belief, this “staring at the monitor for hours on end” has not alienated me from the world, quite the opposite. I’ve met a whole lot of interesting people, some of which have become my friends, some even In Real Life. People I wouldn’t have met if it wasn’t for the Internet and all the interesting services that run over it, like Twitter for instance. I’ve written about Twitter before, and now I’m organizing a monthly Twitter meeting in Lisbon, so you can meet your fellow Twitterers in the so called Big R!!
Mountains of knowledge
Within the mindset of our parents’ generation, being a well informed and cultured person meant reading a lot of newspapers and magazines, going to exhibitions, listening and watching news and opinion programs on the radio and on television, and discussing the current events and tastes within the immediate circle of family, friends, and even acquaintances. The selection of which sources of information to absorb was helped by the overall bias each person had in political, ideological, and aesthetic terms, and how well it aligned with the image they had of each source.
We’re living through a transition, made possible by the development of the internet in the past fifteen years. Some people still use the new medium as a digital replacement of the old system – they read online newspapers, chat with people they know personally, basically do online what they did “in real life”. But others, and you’re one of this group if you’re reading this, have adopted a completely new posture of being “well informed people”, taking the advantage of the p2p (person to person in this case ) system made possible by *everyone* being able of becoming a source of information and creativity if they wish to do so, basically “for free”, in a whole range of different mediums.
This has created a wealth of available information, some of it excellent, some of it original, and some of it intelligible to non-experts outside each field, and we can discuss about what we learn with people we’ve never met before. This makes the selection of what we read or watch, and who we interact with, much more important decisions than they were under the old system, due to the sheer scale vs. the available time that we have. How do you personally handle climbing these mountains of knowledge?
Time is money
Today I realized one more way in which bureaucracy, especially like the one we live with here in Portugal, makes our lives more expensive in a less direct way (compared with taxes and such). You might not have noticed, but the official approval to build or rebuild a building around these parts takes forever. Which means, between the time someone or some company buys a piece of land to build on, or an old building to rebuild, and the time they can use or sell it, the initial capital spent on the acquisition, projects, and running costs has been tied down.
Who pays this increase in immobilization costs? The final customer, meaning housing and offices are much more expensive than they should be if the necessary official legal steps took a reasonable time. And who profits from it? The lenders – and the bureaucracy, who reaps even more taxes on the interest charged over the loans.
The (ignored) long reach of Humanity
I still find amazing how unimportant some things are to the media and people in general. The furthest man-made objects are the Voyager 1 probe, now 15.5 billion kilometers from Sun – that’s 103.6 times the distance the Earth is from the Sun, and it’s sister probe, the Voyager 2, which is 12.3 billion kilometers from the Sun (82.2 AU).
After 30 years from their launch from Earth, despite still being operational and doing active and useful science, they are mostly unknown to everyone. These are the pinnacles of human genius – pieces of ourselves out there, studying the universe. We should be celebrating our long reach as humans – instead, we focus on the worst and most banal aspects of humanity, everyday.
They’re not the only probes still working – many others are active, a lot of them lasting well beyond their expected lifespan.
