So What, Who Cares (vol 2, issue 19) Why it's easier than ever to be a starving artist

Hello! One week in February down, only three more to go. As Margaret Atwood once wrote:

February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.

Are there french fries in your future? And where do you fall on the "Steak fries: Do they count or are they fry fraud?" spectrum? Make your fry policies known through Twitter or email.

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2015 may be the year we start talking about the economics of 'content production.' Dianne Wiest provided a fairly stark appraisal of the state of the Oscar-winning character actress when she came out and said she wasn't getting enough work to pay the rent.

Then writer Ann Bauer pointed out that her writing career was possible only because someone else pays her bills (do not miss Flavorwire's incisive analysis of the links between money, time and creativity).

Now The New Republic is running a several thousand word examination of America's creative class, grimly concluding that today's working-stiff writers, commercial graphic artists and video producers, session musicians, etc. are experiencing the dismantling of the institutions that allowed them to live modest, middle class lives. And according to TNR, the Internet is to blame.

So what? Scott Timberg argues in the book Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class that "information technology has destabilized the creative class and deprofessionalized their labor." The IT infrastructure is also responsible for making a whole lot of a great creative culture available to lots and lots of people. Or, as New York magazine reported:

Bob Lefsetz, a music-industry analyst, argues that none of this is anything to moan about. "The middle is getting squeezed," he writes. "Because everybody has access to the best all the time. Want to bring back the middle? Stop shopping at Amazon, stop going to Wal-Mart. Pay a grand for a flat screen. Drive miles for your music."

The creative middle used to create a lot of jobs that provided entry -- directly or otherwise -- into a creative-class career. It goes away and so do the jobs.

Who cares? People who love to create things and want to make a living doing it.

What was notable about a recent interview with comedians Chelsea Peretti and Ike Barinholtz was how they're thriving in the modern comedy industry by taking on several different jobs -- writer, podcaster, actor, stand-up comic -- simultaneously. Jack Conte of the duo Pomplamoose is also taking this approach:

"We, the creative class, are finding ways to make a living making music, drawing webcomics, writing articles, coding games, recording podcasts. Most people don’t know our names or faces. We are not on magazine covers at the grocery store. We are not rich, and we are not famous," Conte wrote. "We have not 'made it.' We’re making it."

So you know who else might be interested in this changing dynamic? Time-management types. Expect a heck of a lot of lifehacking how-tos aimed at would-be creative professionals.

Bonus reading: I have always loved David Rakoff's take on RENT, which is a remarkable, personal evisceration of the basic premise of that musical. And I love Alyssa Roseberg's "Why Benny Is The Closest Thing ‘Rent’ Has To An Actual Hero," which is a very nuanced take on the selfish privilege those artsy kids imposed on their neighbors. Both pieces provide some first-person perspective to a big-picture development like "the creative middle is being squeezed."

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Under Armour just bought MyFitnessPal and Endomondo for $560 million, doubling its portfolio of fitness-related mobile apps and expanding its pool of active app users to 120 million people.

So what? Consider this an investment in the company's future: although Under Armour doubles its global sales once every three years or so, developing a comprehensive suite of fitness apps helps the company extend its revenue streams from clothing and fitness gear into software services and data mining. It is still unclear as to exactly what these companies are doing with the data

. But it is clear that a pool of users who compulsively and voluntarily enter data is a really hot commodity.

Who cares? Privacy advocates, who might be curious as to who's getting access to people's food logs, their metrics, their exercise stats. Academics, who might also want access to a very broad pool of raw data that can be sliced and diced in a lot of different ways.

Another group that would do well to be nervous: fitness wearable makers. Nearly half of all people quit using their fitness trackers within six months, mostly because maintaining and charging Yet Another Gadget is a pain in the neck. It's easier to load an app on the same phone you're charging regularly. And so what if the efficacy of fitness apps has yet to be proven? The customer demand is there. The effective product may follow.


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Your pop culture note of the day: You could spend eight minutes watching Jimmy Fallon and his pals "send up" Saved By the Bell in the kind of sketch that goes loud on nostalgia and quiet on the notable absences of Lark Voorhees and Dustin Diamond.

OR you could look at this fantastic collection of photos documenting the foot traffic at American shopping malls in the 1980s. Truly, it was a golden age for the spiral perm.

The photos are by Michael Galinsky, who's released them in the book Malls Across America. (More mall photos here, just in case you really need to see a mullet-sporting dude in a nipple-flashing, fluorescent tank outside the Casual Corner.)

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Did you miss an issue of So What, Who Cares? The archive is here. Are there typos? I apologize in advance.

As always, I welcome your feedback and suggestions -- you can reach me through Twitter or email. Please do not hesitate to let me know what you think about So What, Who Cares, or suggest links/topics/pop culture that rings your bell.

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