Building the creative sector’s collective capacity simultaneously presents its greatest opportunity and the greatest obstacle. As the digital era trends toward vast increases in intellectual property consumption while also making it more reductive to commodify, economics of cultural engagement will depend on institutions who can interface with the emerging narrative of a “Regenerative Culture.” Regenerative culture sees people as stewards of their perceptions and environment with a mission to create a flourishing planet.
collage by Pilar Moreno
Both Buckminster Fuller and Albert Einstein famously commented on the necessity of “new thinking” when confronting fundamental social crises. Today, “productivity” and “growth” are relatively meaningless axioms, unless contextualized by “mindful” (interestingly, author Sharon Salzburg equates Eastern linguistic understandings of the term “mindfulness” with the Western concept of “creativity”) methodology. Similarly, the opportunity to create a “regenerative” cultural narrative supplants the architectures of “sustainability” by suggesting a thriving existence rather than “just getting by.” As Emerson wrote in his essay The Poet, “A new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not in castles or by the sword blade any longer.”
In short: story is what evolves.
The creative sector alone holds the key to promoting a cultural operating system that redirects the nihilistic, self-destructive expressions of materialistic-driven consumption into experiential markets, which can favor healthier practices towards planetary biotic systems, as well as more “open” personal-interpersonal-social dynamics in human cohabitation.
One tiny example is the steady increase of hiking popularity in the U.S. since 2006, which both Albert Camus (“The Physics of Happiness”) and the Japanese (Shinrin-yoku or “forest bathing”) have long recognized as a practice correlative to regenerating personal wellbeing. Therefore, “hiking trails” provide a rife node of cultural engagement for institutions as diverse as inner city youth organizations, hospitals, meditation communities, national parks, NGOs, mobile apps, augmented reality, journalism, and reality television. One could even build a currency backed by the number of miles an individual walks.
The success of any cultural shift involves its ability to integrate sectors (i.e., health care, manufacturing, agriculture, etc.) into a cooperative platform that flourishes irrelative to scale. Good leadership is crucial in building trust through visionary principles, clear communication, and healthy relationships. The greatest diversity of voices should be represented, and prosperity reflected by the wealth of access and participation to innovative expressions via vehicles of art, entrepreneurship, technology, information, and sustenance.
An operating system based on a regenerative platform places creativity at the core of these cultural trends.
One trend is that the public-private format is becoming ever more prevalent within the creative sector in order to weave together organizational characteristics of stewardship, prosperity, efficiency, transparency, innovation, and social impact. While infantile as a movement, platform cooperatives, as an emergent organizational form, may be at the forefront of this trend for their ability to combine worker owned and governed business structures with online peer-to-peer sharing services. As an organizing premise, this distributes ownership and governance to those who create the most value for the platform. As ownership becomes more distributed in future markets, cooperative sharing platforms can adapt users’ concurrent demands for access, community, dependability, livelihood, and ethics into lifestyles that are more balanced, just, and creative.
Whether it’s a major media network, a startup, an educational organization, or nonprofit; more and more institutions must authentically aim to inspire their communities.
Inspiration, however, is not an infinite resource — it requires curiosity, patience, and above all the kind of creativity that reveals truth in all its forms. Hard as what scholar Saskia Sassen has deemed “predatory formations” may try, institutions cannot generate inspiration from doctrines of expulsion which attempt to deny the interdependence of reality for personal gain. Dislocation from this truth engenders institutions that self-decay and self-corrupt by propagating a social role devoid of a cultural narrative that may openly evolve humanity’s aesthetic understanding.
Since we are so deeply connected to our senses to process our existence, their stimulation becomes magnitudes greater when — after deprivation from the fullness of experience’s possibilities — they encounter undeniable inspiration. The form may take Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium or The Beatles’ With or Without You. However, unless an institution can serve its purpose without requiring “faith,” its mission will be filled with insularity and folly. What’s changing in our society is that our interconnectedness is becoming common knowledge. It shows up in advertising campaigns just as regularly now as esoteric traditions. And as information circulates more freely through various cultural membranes that may have once seemed impenetrable, even titans such as ExxonMobile and Coca-Cola become subjected to the true significance of our role as humans, and the responsibility of our institutions to guard all life, everywhere, forever.