Facebook and Twitter's brainchildren in a brawl

- Dipo Doherty

Facebook, a company renowned for its innovation and revolution, brought about a new era to the world: the era of social communication. The company is headed by the far from charismatic founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who in the light of it all was able to convince the general public to ride on the S.S. Facebook. Fast forward a few years later. Twitter, a company with a different approach to social communication, showed the world that if you force people to do things your way (140 character restriction) and get a celebrity to frantically endorse your product, you just might be successful.

There comes a time in any company’s life cycle where the need for innovation is overshadowed by an overpowering need for growth. And as we can clearly see, both companies are approaching this peak. Just like any weary father, who is looking to protect his family’s lineage, they find worthy suitors to join the family.

Facebook made the jaw breaking bargain to acquire the new movie star on the block (Instagram) for over a billion big ones. A bargain which left some confounded as to the logic of spending so much on an app that hasn’t been able to make profits. Now we can keep arguing as to the real impact of Instagram has on Facebook, but we know its a done deal. Twitter seized a good opportunity, to acquire their latest weapon in their arsenal: Vine, a year before they launched. Vine incorporated some of twitter’s core values (restrict people even more and give them an opportunity to be creative), and this philosophy seemed to work.

At around 2pm on June 20th, Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Systrom presented a new feature to the world, in a move to innovate and raise optimism for shareholders. This update featured the new and innovative Facebook video on Instagram. This new feature lets users of Instagram take 15 second video clips and share them with your friends. You could also apply a new palette of filters to these video bites, which seemed quite similar to the photo filters we’ve grown to love but thats fine. But here is the issue, doing this has put them in the boxing ring with Twitter’s Vine which does the same thing minus 8 seconds and the filters. Now I know a lot of critics have called this a cheap shot on Facebook’s part, a less than innovative way to join the video market. Lets cut it and go straight to the point, Instagram just pulled… continue reading 

The Creative Concord

Had Karl Marx been born after Karl Popper, his greatness would be incomparable.
Successfully, Marx identified the bourgeois, the proletariat, and ‘the material dialectic’, but he
failed to identify the artifex, meaning ‘creator class’, which is made up of entrepreneurs,
inventors, and artists. An artifexian, which is a term first introduced in this paper, is anyone who
creates or recreates a means of production and/or a thing to be produced. If anything, Marx
conflated creators with the bourgeois or lost sight of them amongst the general proletariat.
Consequently, his material dialectic only halfway addresses the nature of socioeconomic change
through history. The full dialectic by which society ‘marches’ can be expressed as follows:

                                                     ‘The Creative Concord’

                                           ‘The material dialectic’ | creativity
                                                                  or
                                             (owner(s) | worker(s)) | creator(s)
                                                                 or
                                           (Bourgeois | Proletariat) | Artifex

Marx argued, through the material dialectic, that Capitalism was inherently contradictory,
for it inevitably undergoes, of one kind or another, ‘creative destruction’ (Schumpeter): the
businesses it creates destroys others, the resources it consumes leaves many lacking, etc…In
other words, at the center of Capitalism is self-destructive paradox. Though the material dialectic
properly delineates how socioeconomic orders change within a given creative epoch, it does
not describe how such orders change through them. To allude to Popper, history changes not
in line with any kind of dialectic, but in concordance with unpredictable inventions, ‘eurekas’,
and ‘creative acts’ (see Nikolai Berdyaev). Marx, coming before Popper, missed this, and so
created a theory and system that works in a given epoch, but not through them. Aware of Popper,
so brilliant, surely he would have recognized ‘the creative concord’ and artifex himself. Failing
to identify the creator class, Marx missed that Capitalism expands itself while carrying out
creative destruction within itself. The proper dialectic isn’t just composed of creative destruction,
but creative destruction along with creativity.

Marx claims that ‘alienation’ drives the working class, or proletariat, to revolt against
those who own the means of production, or bourgeois. This is true, making revolution eminent.
The question is how the revolution is to occur. For the proletariat to seize the means of
production and become like the bourgeois they rebelled against is just as alienating and ironic as
being forced to work on something that one doesn’t own. Both kinds of alienation manifest in
apathy, violence, or a desire to be ‘amused to death’ (Postman). A forceful and violent
revolution, as Marx ‘pointed to’ and Lenin advanced, plays into the alienation which stimulated
it, rather than works over it. Marxists and Leninists, through history, have revolted in the wrong
way. They’ve chosen a ‘French Revolution’ rather than a ‘Glorious’ one.
To create is to revolt. The man who starts a business is claiming that he has a competitive
advantage over other businesses. He seizes the means of production by creating new means of
production. Through creativity, he claims that he can be a part of the bourgeois without their

permission. In creating what he owns and what he works, he chooses how he needs others by
choosing which enterprise to create that requires demand, and so escapes both the enslavement
of the bourgeois’ need for the proletariat and the proletariat’s need for the bourgeois. He
becomes both – the artifex – he becomes free. In this regard, the woman who pickets Big Oil
doesn’t launch a revolution as effective as the woman who invents the alternative energy that
Entrepreneurship is peaceful revolution.
Creativity is nonviolent resistance.

For the rest of ‘The Creative Concord’, please visit:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzkJKz21gbfkR09tOHpxM1VuNkE/edit?usp=sharing

O.G. Rose lives in Charlottesville Virginia. Rose graduated from UVa and is working to publish a short story collection called 3 and a novel called Digression(s). For more from O.G. Rose, visit his Flickr and SoundCloud.