Max Keiser Blog #4 Pre-Beta – The self-expression in price discovery

April 11th, 2009 by maxkeiser

Micah M. White has a new blog up on AdBusters; “Support Online Piracy”

He says:

“There is no swifter way to bring about the de-commercialization of art than to undercut the profit motive. Likewise, there is no better way to promote a blackspot culture than to actively copy and distribute the cultural productions that speak to us and the future we’d like to build. If we pirate everything, how will the artists get paid? That is precisely the point: piracy opens up the possibility of imagining new ways of being and new ways of supporting the potential of art to change the world.”

To the extent that I am correctly (or incorrectly) interpreting White’s comments,  I agree that de-commercialization is necessary as a means to reinvigorate our public spaces and our public discourse. I see the current media and commerce market as a zero sum game where every dollar, inch, and minute gobbled up by private interests means a commensurate loss of the public’s interest.  I agree that the artists will create art regardless of any profit motive. The overwhelming majority of art and culture that has been created by humans has been done so for little or no money. I agree that by draining the entire economic system as it currently exists will exert downward economic pressure on everyone, including artists. They are, however, able to keep producing premium, insightful, highly valued artifacts no matter what’s going on in the economy.

What I think PirateMyFilm will bring to the copyright reform party is the idea that films and music can be collectively financed, i.e., crowd financed, with both the artistic creator and the art consumer participating in the revenue streams.

To me, economics, markets and finance are an artistic medium in their own right and, as such, can be modeled, molded, manufactured and modified in artistic ways reflecting self expression as easily as paint, words, clay or plastic.

All of the projects I’ve been involved with for the past 15 years: HSX, KarmaBanque, GulagWealthFund, PirateMyFilm and my yet-to-be-publish novel, “Buy Love, Sell Fear,” all share this common characteristic of seeing price discovery and market making as a form of self expression and artistic freedom.

Tags:   · · · 9 Comments

9 responses so far ↓

  • Mep
    Apr 11, 2009 at 2:38 pm

    I caught Micah’s piece on adbusters and directed him over here to check out PMF. 

    I hope that you will find a lot of support for this project.

  • Mr Supergeek
    Apr 11, 2009 at 2:38 pm

    ‘Funk is it’s own Reward’

  • Thomas
    Apr 11, 2009 at 9:46 pm

    Max: On the one hand you’re talking about  “de-commercialization of art”  and on the other you’re saying there are “revenue streams” for PMF.

    So which is it?

    You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

  • Yuan
    Apr 12, 2009 at 6:13 am

    In the existing systems – price discovery & market making are already a product of self expression. There is NOTHING that is not a product self expression. Real change will only occur when there is collective transpersonal expression. This will only happen when enough people disconnecting from identifying with the ‘ego self’. Until then any new system or revolution will continue to cycle within a ‘limited’ framework reflecting the dysfunction of the ‘collective self’…. etc.

    And i still love your way of shaking people up to the reality behind the financial system dysfunction Max!

  • max keiser
    Apr 12, 2009 at 6:42 am

    Yuan

    I’m talking more about creating whole markets being an expressive medium. HSX was an entirely new market that was my expression and interpretation of Hollywood using price discovery like a painter uses paint.

    Its architecture of price discovery was as much an art piece as functioning market..  As users buy and sell on the exchange, expressing their self and their self-interest the shape and contours of HSX responds, not unlike how a building will change based on the use of the people who use that building. 

    KarmaBanque too is a completely original interpretation of markets and price discovery as a form of political and economic self expression.   Hedge funds loved it, but activists unfortunately only believe that projecting a superior ‘moral authority’ can overcome corporate malfeasance.  I disagree with that position as I’ve discussed many times.

    Those who live by the tenets of neo-liberalism and the works of Milton Friedman take the position that economics and finance are ‘hard sciences’ ruled by math and physics but as we can all now see, markets and finance are part of the natural sciences and their direction and appreciation should be seen in the same light as paintings and sculptures.

    Goldman Sachs might be immoral business men but as financial sculptors and accounting painters and balance sheet stylists they generate some interest art and fashion.

  • Mr Supergeek
    Apr 12, 2009 at 8:42 pm

    ‘Thelonious my old friend’

  • Richard Buchanan
    Apr 13, 2009 at 5:07 am

    If we pirate everything how we get paid? The joke is we are being pirated. not by everyone just by a few really rich media companies!!!

  • bzmoore
    Apr 14, 2009 at 6:57 pm

    Richard Buchanan: That is a nice way to put it, ‘WE are being pirated’ and I might add also plundered.

  • Organismo
    Apr 16, 2009 at 5:44 pm

    Max, you do yourself an injustice – yes you’ve made some great artforms out of martforms – but you’ve also done something else rather wonderful. As you know, Hermes/Mercury is the god of commerce, communication, trickstery and theft; he walks between worlds – those of the seen and the unseen, the living and the dead, the human and non-human worlds, the gods and the mortals. I have been working for some years on ways to persuade capitalism voluntarily, happily, enthusiastically, to dissolve itself and make way for something that is less clunky. I have had a little success in some areas. You have had more. That is Hermetic work and I, for one, want to thank you for it ;)