creativity/machine

I’ve been waiting for this for a while: “The ProAm Revolution: How enthusiasts are changing our economy and society”, Charlie Leadbeater’s full-length report for Demos (with Paul Miller), is now available for purchase or free download.

From astronomy to activism, from surfing to saving lives, Pro-Ams - people pursuing amateur activities to professional standards - are an increasingly important part of our society and economy.

For Pro-Ams, leisure is not passive consumerism but active and participatory, it involves the deployment of publicly accredited knowledge and skills, often built up over a long career, which has involved sacrifices and frustrations.

The 20th century witnessed the rise of professionals in medicine, science, education, and politics. In one field after another, amateurs and their ramshackle organisations were driven out by people who knew what they were doing and had certificates to prove it.

The Pro-Am Revolution argues this historic shift is reversing. We’re witnessing the flowering of Pro-Am, bottom-up self-organisation and the crude, all or nothing, categories of professional or amateur will need to be rethought.

Based on in-depth interviews with a diverse range of Pro-Ams and containing new data about the extent of Pro-Am activity in the UK, this report proposes new policies to support and encourage valuable Pro-Am activity.

Link now, discuss properly later. But in short - this goes in the “context” category for me - it’s next door to vernacular creativity, but it isn’t the same thing, primarily because while it asks us to question the zero-sum game that is the professional-amateur divide, it is mainly concerned with the phenomenon of the “serious amateur” who may (and in some cases already does) actually usurp the stranglehold of the professions over a range of relatively stable and visible cultural fields. While this is part of the cultural shift that gives my work a sense of timeliness, I’m also interested in the value of less visible, more ephemeral and “everyday” fields of creativity than, say, amateur photography or astronomy.