Retweet This: Participation, Collective Production, and New Paradigms of Cultural Production (original) (raw)

Creativity has never been an individual or isolated activity, despite the fact that some policymakers and regulators would suggest so. In the last thirty years, we have seen a tremendous growth in policy frameworks, economic models, schemes, programmes, and discourses that have been designed in order to transform cultural practices into economic activities. The promotion of the figure of the cultural entrepreneur, the widespread promotion of intellectual property, and the valuation of culture as a resource are in this chapter going to be understood as part of the neoliberalisation of the wider economy. This process first occurred under the guise of the cultural industries, rebranded later as the creative industries, as the main discursive and political framework promoted by institutions and policymakers. This has also triggered the growth of theories and debates aimed at conceptualising the underlying notions of wealth and value that have taken place during these transformations and the changes in the nature of labour after the so-called immaterialisation of the economy. In the introduction of this book, economic normativity is defined as the operative indistinction of the economic and the moral. If we look at the period and the cases that will be explored in this chapter, we see how ideas, discourses, and practices of, for example, free software, intellectual property, creative industries, or creative labour share this double facet of being simultaneously economic and moral.