Since prehistoric times, people have huddled together around
campfires and told stories to each other. These stories have served the purpose
of entertaining (taking our minds off of the brutal realities of survival on
this planet), educational (teaching us how to better navigate and survive some
of the brutal realities of survival on this planet), and remind us of the goal,
which is namely to stay bound together as a tribe, family, nation or similar
social units to hopefully aim for the ideal of collectively overcoming the day
to day drudgeries of simple survival and achieve the status of heroes and gods.
(Well, one can dream!)
The stories that have survived the test of time and become
the most repeated, were the ones that resonated with our collective natures,
taught us the most enduring and valuable lessons or lifted our spirits through
the vehicle of mirth or hope.
Somewhere along the way, there arose a class of people who
saw that as technology evolved and story telling and dissemination more and
more became reliant on these changes that the profitable position was to set
oneself up as a gatekeeper to the means of production and distribution. We
eventually came to know these gatekeepers by names such as; scribes, priests,
printers, publishers, newspapers, magazines, radio stations, television
stations, record companies, movie studios, et al. As you can plainly see, this
model was profitable and even beneficial to the public and to artists for a
period of time, but that time has come to an end. Everywhere you look,
traditional publishing is upside down, the music industry is upside down, the
movie industry is upside down, and mostly due to their own myopic tendencies.
Read the rest on the Hukilau blog
