Giving away Ideas..
Originally published at Encaffeinated!. You can comment here or there.
I frequently and with great abandon tell anyone who will listen about any idea that crosses my mind. (Most often, that comes from Twitter. Go ahead, follow me, but make it known that you are human or I’ll bounce ya.)
It’s not that I don’t have any internal censors, or even think the ideas are necessarily all that good.
It’s that they need to go out there.
You see, there is a movement in the incorporated culture of capitalist ideals that seems to insist that ideas be owned by someone, that they need to be controlled and made into money-generating solidity in order to really be valuable.
Maybe they’re right, I dunno.. I have been recently heavily influenced by reading the Charlie Stross book Accelerando. I haven’t finished the book yet, so I really shouldn’t allow the pervasive ideas in their to wash over me and change my thinking so much, but I have..
Actually a lot of the ideas feel very familiar to me. I’ve been reading very odd books for quite a while, although most of the reading I’ve done in the last several years has been widely separated in time and complexity. I’ve collected far more of them over the years of being an information omnivore than I have managed to actually read - much to my chagrin and shame. I want to read all my books, I just read slowly, and have been going through a long period of depression and repression and recession of my cortical processes..
Let’s just say that research hasn’t agreed with me for a few years, and it’s taken me a while to see any sort of way out of the wrong way I created for myself…
And one of the reasons for that: I have too many ideas.
Now, this might not sound like a problem to most people, and it isn’t entirely a bad problem to have. The problem comes in when you look at the combination of ideas in their most wild of forms and research. Research demands vigourous testing and examination - and rightly so! It is intended to find the strongest of truths, to weed out all by the most bulletproof of concepts, to express the culling zeal of Darwin’s evolutionary pressures within the realm of ideas.
Research - or at least the scientific version of it - is intended to make things certain, to eliminate doubt, to create a foundation of pure stone on which things continually climb toward the ultimate understanding of life, the universe and Everything. It is idyllic, purposeful, ruthless, unstoppable, intentional…
… and it tends to crush creativity. The ideal of science allows only ideals to survive. If something is no longer the ideal, it is discarded if possible. Only the best survive, and all other things are not valued.
It’s not science’s fault - it does what it was intended to do, and what it should do. I’m just not sure I’m that rigourous. The one segment of my research which has always eluded me has been “evaluation”. In short: prove it works, or shut-up about it!
But then there are all those ideas… Some of them are whimsical, and don’t really have anything to do with “right” or “wrong”. Some aren’t expressions of what is right, but maybe what should be right. Some are just sub-optimal but more meaningful expressions of existing ideas.
This last is the reason I’m a bit dissatisfied which much of what I try to research. There is something important to be said about the 2nd-best things, about the less-than-perfect, about the creative-but-not-right, about the unproven or unprovable but might just be good.
There are a lot of good ideas out there, and I have my share. I just can’t do anything with them. Some I can’t do because of time; others, because they are beyond any scope of actual knowledge I have.
I think everyone has these thoughts, these ideas. I think we need to share them.
I think that if we don’t share them, someone will take them. Someone will corral these ideas in an artificial fence, maybe profit from them or maybe just keep them tied up so no one can benefit from them.
Or worse yet: the ideas will die out, unused and unregarded.
I’ve thought about writing fiction to express some of these ideas. I might do that yet. Speculative fiction gives you the chance to express your ideas without having to prove your ideas, other than in the reader’s minds. (I recognize that not all speculative fiction necessarily presents new ideas, but some of my most favourite definitely does.)
But I don’t have time to write much fiction at the moment. I’m trying to get into the habit of doing something like that, although Twitter receives most of my ideas these days.
So, what’s the point of this particular idea?
I’m a podcaster - it’s one of the ways I express my ideas. Why not use that medium?
How about a podcast whose sole purpose is to give away ideas? An idea exchange, where people can contribute those crazy ideas they get, organized somehow. The “best” ideas (where “best” is defined loosely as “whatever seems profound, interesting, important, eye-catching or just plain cool”) could be bundled up into a podcast, to share with others.
Why? To give these ideas voice, maybe vision. Give them a stage. Get them out there. Start dialogues. To give a chance for a good idea to travel from someone who thunk it to someone who might be able to make it so, or to someone who can take that idea, spin it a bit and come up with another idea. To inspire creativity, to inspire other ideas, to create a common shared resource.
Yeah, big ideas, there.. I can’t pull it off all alone, but I don’t intend to. Right now, I’m just putting the idea out there. Yes: the first idea to put out on the free ideas podcast is the idea of the free ideas podcast. Very meta, that.
Right now, I’m thinking a bit about implementation. How can this be accomplished? I’ll set up a forum, or maybe a wiki. Or a wiki/forum hybrid. It should be easy to add ideas, but easy to push popular ideas up to consciousness. It shouldn’t be closed, but it should also not be entirely open. It needs some protection from spam, from malicious anti-thinkers, some gardening. It needs some other people with other ideas to grow it.
So, what do you think of this idea? Can this idea exist in the real world? Is someone already doing this? Is there any way to practically organize such a thing - or should it be disorganized, at least from the point of view of the creators, self-organized through link meshes like wikis, semi-intelligently organized through suggested links and connections forged by background bots, externally associated through spiders and human hands? Should it be automatically licenced, to protect the ideas as much as the creators and the website?
Any ideas?
