Bear with me, I'm going to make a big list of links to a lot of people, including family, friends, acquaintances, and even a few people who probably don't remember me. There is a point to this discussion, which will come later and which I will mark for your convenience if you want to skip the inane listing. Also, do not click the links unless you are really curious. Some of these MySpace pages have so much junk on them your computer will absolutely choke.

Inane listing begins.

So it turns out that everyone uses MySpace.

My little sister. My little brother. My other little sister. My next brother actually just uses livejournal so far as I am aware, but, sure enough, another little sister on MySpace. That's four of my eight siblings on MySpace. Not to mention my wife's page, though to my knowledge she doesn't use it much--she has a blogspot as well as the TLD I maintain for her. I can't even begin to tell you how many cousins I have on MySpace.

At this point I started thinking of names and typing them into the MySpace search, people I know or have known, past or present. My old friend Richard uses MySpace (his little sister too, apparently). Another old friend, Jeff, maintains a remarkably low web profile so far as I can discern, but he has at least two siblings on MySpace, maybe three. Maybe more. Another old friend there.

This guy was in my high school choir. I'm pretty sure this girl dated one of my high school buddies, and I dated this guy's sister. That was around the same time this girl graciously provided me with a place to sleep while I was on a long road trip. Here is the manager of the Radio Shack where I worked for a few months when I first got married. More obscure? How about the Academic Decathalon class I had as a freshman in the tiny town of Eagar, Arizona? Found three classmates without even digging. If I opened up my yearbook for some names I've forgotten, there would doubtless be many more.

In all, as I pulled names out of my head, MySpace People Search handed me pages for more than half of them.

Inane listing ends. Inane rant begins.

So yeah, MySpace is popular. That's not really news to anyone. I won't touch it, but I have no need; my technical knowledge is sufficient to the task of maintaining my own TLD. And people like to have their own space, which MySpace brings to the masses; again, I am adding nothing original to the discussion. The recent YouTube purchase adds to the ongoing "Web 2.0" debate, which I mostly find ironic because mass participation was the whole point of "Web 1.0." (Anyone remember GeoCities? AngelFire? They're ad-ridden shadows of their former selves, but once upon a time, GeoCities was MySpace.) We've added and innovated--social networking transforms MySpace from "personal page hosting" to something more. Blogging becomes interactive with comments. Additional bandwidth means more complex content including music and videos. But on the whole, "Web 2.0" is just the original vision of the internet escaping from under the mercantile interest that subjugated it in the 90s.

Now the question. I listed the people above for anecdotal support; every single one of these individuals has, to some extent or another, expressed a creative drive in putting together a MySpace page. They come from many varied circumstances. Some are family, some left my Monkey Sphere years ago. Some are intimates, some are strangers to me in all but name. Their motivations are doubtless manifold. But they all created content. The all produced. Some have computer experience, artistic experience, creative experience... some do not. Is 90% of everything trash? Probably. But if an infinite number of monkeys can produce quality art, surely a sizeable population of humans can do moderately better.

And most importantly, no one paid them a dime.

Hah! The trap is sprung. d^_^b This is my roundabout way of asking, what is it that motivates us to create? We have built a culture--and, perhaps more significantly, we have built an economy--around the idea that no one will do anything worth doing, no one will craft anything worth crafting, unless they are fiscally compensated. The enormous popularity of MySpace and YouTube and Wikipedia tell me that this is a lie. The operating system currently running on my computer tells me that this is a lie. My own human nature tells me that this is a lie.

Now the talking point. Presently, media is, for the most part, mass. "Web 2.0" is changing that, albeit slowly. Big media is dreadfully concerned about piracy diluting the value of their IP, but it turns out that what is really diluting the value of their IP is the enormous amount of quality (and not-so-quality) media that is springing up all around us. There is much debate about how to manage this--words like "micropayments" spring to mind--but this misses the point. It is an effort to "adapt" old ways of doing business to new models, but "free" is not a new model. It is a human realization, that often the finest art is that art unfettered by the need to earn a living. The engineer who writes poetry does not seek to write something "marketable."

This is not to say that all artists are sellouts, though many fit that description. And to be sure, I would not turn down a check for something I'd written. But there is a qualitative difference in the work of the sellout and the work of the storyteller. One writes words for money, the other receives money for his words. And even if the storyteller receives no compensation whatever, the story still is told.

There is something special in that, in the human drive to define oneself independent of the demands of the world. MySpace is definitely not my thing, and most people's garish tastes combine disastrously with their poor grasp of technology to produce an absolute trainwreck of a personal page. But it's comforting to see that even in a world and culture largely sterile and pre-fabricated by the rich and powerful, that spark of human creativity cannot be extinguished. Life finds a way again.