Trump and the Rise of Amateurism
A lot of people are probably going to disagree with this statement, but I don’t believe that it’s in Donald Trump’s nature to be racist, homophobic, or authoritarian. He may have done “what it took” to win votes, but his past as a New York Democrat shows that there’s probably more to the man than what gets portrayed in the media.
What’s become clear, however, is the fact that Trump obviously has no idea what he’s doing as a politician. Even if you agree with his policies, there’s no denying that the execution of his initiatives have been sloppy, at best. How could he have possibly known better, though? He ran his platform on being an “outsider” and people saw his inexperience in government as a good thing. He made it a point to ignore all the advice of the “experts”, and what we’re seeing now is the aftermath of that approach.
Some have warned the public against “underestimating” Trump — a valid warning during the campaign trail, perhaps — but not so much relevant anymore now that his presidency has already started. Being a life-long improviser myself, I can tell when people are making things up, and winging-it is exactly what the President is doing right now. There is no grand scheme or well-thought out plan to take over or save America…he’s really just making it up as it goes.
Which is scarier, though? A plan of an evil mastermind scheming against you, or a leader who has absolutely no plan at all, as the plane in the air starts to shake and steer off balance? I think that some people are making Trump out to be a villain because it at least implies that someone is still in control. The truth is, though, nobody really knows what’s going on — including Trump himself.
The Normalization of Amateurism
If you were paying attention to the cultural developments of the last decade or so, the situation we’re in right now may not come across as a complete surprise. The media and content industry has been racing to the bottom for a long time now, and it was really only a matter of time before the lines between truth and lies became blurred for commercial gain.
But I don’t quite see this development as a battle of good vs. evil, left vs. right, rich vs. poor. The partisanship we see today is the result of the war between the amateurs vs. the professionals. This is the main reason why the political lines didn’t quite fracture in the usual way this time around, and why people are still having trouble figuring out what exactly happened.
The trend towards amateurism started in the arts, particularly in music tech where mp3s and peer-to-peer sharing changed the worlds of content production forever. The history of music tech starts with the act of piracy — mixed tapes, burned CDs, Napster, Torrents — the treasure troves of the recording industry raided and distributed to the people in the form of remix and mashup tracks.
Shortly thereafter, came the rise of the amateurs. Mp3.com, Last.fm, Soundcloud — during the turn of the millennium, hundreds of sites popped up as “sharing platforms” for anyone to upload songs of their own making. There were, of course, no examples of any emerging artists making a decent living off of any of these platforms, but it was a boon for consumers and companies who were able to make this model work.
SOPA and PIPA were attempts by traditional publishers to re-enforce copyright laws in the more-or-less lawless lands of digital space. The tech industry, claiming that these laws were infringements on free speech and innovation, however, launched a grassroots campaign against the legislation and eventually won. While some agreed that copyright laws still had its place, the tech industry argued that “those particular” manifestations were “not the right way to go about it”. The “right way”, however, never came; while the industry, as a whole, continued to shrink.
Since nobody starts off as a professional, having somewhere to share and develop your early works can be a very important place for beginners to have. What the tech industry failed to provide, however, is the bridge from amateurism to professionalism, for those wanting to take their craft to the “next level”. (i.e. make a living from it) On existing content platforms, amateurs often achieve small successes that gain them temporary attention — but eventually get burnt out as they encounter legal, financial, and political issues that take away time from doing their craft. At that point, they either seek outside help (which is still dominated by traditional artists’ agencies) or simply give up.
The biggest misconception and myth that the tech industry has bought into is the idea that artists are lone individuals, operating independently of society’s infrastructure, laws, and rules. Nothing is further from the truth: copyright, performing rights organizations, royalties and publishing rights all exist for a reason, and they serve not only to protect the rights of the artist but also aligns business interests in a way that’s rational and sane. The “middlemen” had existed for a reason, and the failure to understand their value is largely what has gutted out the concept of “quality” that exists in the media today.
The “amateur-driven platform” is, in essence, a metaphor for what happened to the rest of the country as crowd-sourcing and “gig economics” began to take over as the norm. More so than winning or losing, people working in this economy are frustrated by the fact that no matter how hard they work or invest in themselves, the “path” from being a struggling amateur to an established professional (towards a better life) simply doesn’t exist. In Hollywood, the mentorship, training, and guidance that emerging artists receives after they’re scouted for talent is called “artist development” — something lacking in the content space as of today.
Oddly enough, the tech industry does the right thing in terms of taking care of their own kind. Code camps, junior/senior mentorships, paid training are very common initiatives found in software development, and they work to bring talent into the fold as the industry continues to develop and mature. If, say, Lyft or Uber offered its drivers a path towards full-time employment benefits (even if they can’t afford to offer it to all), the level of scrutiny the public places against them wouldn’t be nearly as bad. But as it stands now, tech platforms are more likely to enforce class-based hierarchies than break them, by design.
Trump’s presidency is basically an “amateur success story” come to life, akin to a reality TV show contestant manipulating the rules of the game in order to “win”. He will start strong, driven by pure inspiration, then eventually get burnt out as the complexity of the system continues to weigh him down. (Ironically enough, this is how the system is supposed to work.) Seeking council from experience and expert opinion is obviously the smarter choice here, but given that he ran his campaign promising the exact opposite, there’s little reason to believe that he will do so. The real danger comes not now, but later on when he gets frustrated with the obstructionism of the political process without anyone to advise him how to work it out through the proper channels. An artist giving up on their career is a tragedy, but a president giving up on their country may very well lead to a catastrophic nightmare.
In the end, Trump will always be a hero to many, mostly because he is the kind of character that we’ve been conditioned to admire in the content that we consume on a daily basis. The arts is where we learn and develop our gut reactions and emotional responses to the “events” of the every day, with logic and rationality coming later at a distant second. If you look at Trump’s presidency through that type of lens, the fact that he was able to rise to power no longer seems like that much of a surprise.
Amateurism has a tendency to lead to authoritarianism — not necessarily because of evil intentions, but because power tends to concentrate into the hands of the few when movements are driven by personality rather than process. The political process now is reflecting how things are usually handled on social media, because it generates those types of outcomes by design. If the tech industry is serious about fixing the country’s political woes, it has to fix its content industry first before any of its political efforts will have any effect.
In the end, America will endure Trump’s presidency because our system is much more powerful than any one man can be. But if we were to avoid making the same mistakes again, we do need to create a cultural atmosphere where people respect the rules of the game more than any one player — the point of elections shouldn’t be about the personality of the individual, but what’s good for the society as a whole. Are we ready to make a fundamental shift in how we think about culture and politics in general? Time will tell.
