Financial crisis=more awesome stuff for culture

A few days ago Tim Hwang kindly accepted an invitation to come in and talk at Modernista!  Tim is an incredibly smart thinker about the internet and one of the founders of ROFLCon.

He made a lot of great observations, some of which you can read on Tim's blog.  But he made one observation that struck me as incredibly simple and powerful, one I should of probably have noticed already.  Contrary to intuition, the crashing global economy is likely to lead to more bizarre, interesting awesome stuff popping up on the web.  Here's Tim's rough, and arguably conservative, calculation:

even taking the overly harsh assumption that only one percent of those unemployed since the recession began both have a computer connected to the internet and are want to produce content in some form (33,000), and only spend one extra hour a day for a month on it (~30 hours) — we’re talking about a torrent of close to a million man hours of production (990,000) barfing up content online.

So, we're likely to see more funny cats and the next rickroll.  Or, put more broadly, a more vibrant, fertile web culture.  This in turn is likely to lead to more strange stuff entering pop culture because as Tim rightly pointed out the internet seems to be the beta development lab for pop culture - think about how stuff white people like transformed itself from a niche blog to a bestselling book, or middle America being rickrolled during the Macy Day's Parade.

So, it seems financial volatility is going to trigger some cultural volatility.  I wonder if this happened in past recessions (going to look into that) but even if it did I doubt it will have been with the pace or pervasiveness of what we're about to see.  (Worth noting, that there's evidence of the Argentinean crash triggering the emergence of a strong DIY/maker culture.)

Comments

[Jon Bellinger]

If there are any marketers out there who work online and haven't yet attended ROFLcon / ROFLthing, then you're missing a very big and important boat. It's basically the best of the internet, all in one room together.