I’ve been part of a terrific listserv for a couple years now. For those of you too young to remember listservs, they are an old-fashioned email-based form of community forum, many of which still thrive in the e-hinterlands, including the this one, run by the Institute for Distributed Creativity. And it rocks.

A lot of very very smart people contribute to it and the conversations tend to very sophisticated, very informed and often very provocative. Ok, I will admit that I do my part to make sure the provocation quotient remains comfortably in the red.
Which brings us to a most excellent thread that has been running on the list for the past couple of weeks. It’s titled “Immaterial Labor and Life Beyond Utility” and I’ve contributed several posts to the thread. We’re hashing out some fascinating ideas relating to the character of the socially networked ‘experience economy’, its relationship to wealth and to the environment, to Marxism, to “sovereign media’, the Italian mercato, the French philosopher George Bataille, the mechanics of YouTube and beyond. Very interesting stuff. For me it has been an excellent forum to articulate some of the theoretical issues underlying our new secret project, which is definitely plugged into the ‘experience economy’.

To tell you the truth, I’m kind of proud of some of my posts, but rather than simply pasting them in here, where they would be out of context, here’s a link to the iDC thread archive, where you can find the entire discussion. If you’re interested in the topics mentioned above, check it out here.