save the creative class

Listen to the optimists and the great recession sounds like a great opportunity. This is the time for the creative class to brand itself! A day job, they say, is so 20th century as quaint and outdated as tail fins and manual sewing machines.

Thanks to laptops, cheap Internet connections and structural changes in the world economy, we're living in a world of "free agents" "soloists" who are "self branding" and empowered to live flexible and self determining lives full of meaning. We are all citizens of Freelance Nation heirs not to the old school stodgy, gray flannel suit Organization Man but to the coonskin capped pioneers and rugged, self made types who built this country.

Some are losing their houses. Others are copy van cleef bracelet green watching marriages go up in smoke or falling into heavy drinking. Still others are couch jumping for months or years at a time. Or they're veering close to bankruptcy because of the risk of living without medical insurance. Call it the new creative destruction.

Daniel Pink, a former Clinton White House hand, wrote the witty and engaging Bible of the freelance life, Agent Nation. "Today," he wrote in 2002, in a book still cited approvingly by followers, "in good times and bad, at the peak of the boom or the trough of the bust the dice are loaded in favor of the individual. That's why I feel good about the future a future in which more people can assert their independence and guide their economic and personal destiny."

It might be rough at times, Pink concedes. But a wide range of people "will be able to throw off conformity, escape subservience, and live out their true potential." (Much of the rhetoric of this movement resembles the books from the '70s that told Americans that marriage or monogamy was for squares and that they should enter the free spirited world of swinging.)

But life on the ground shows that the free agent life isn't always so exhilarating especially as incomes have fallen by roughly 10 percent since the recession began.

I know who a graphic designer has had to take a pay cut of at least 40 percent over the last 10 years, saysSuzanneRush, a former print designer for Warner Bros. who now freelances for movie studios and magazines around Los Angeles. true across the board motion graphics people as well as print people, staffers as well as freelancers.

In fact, many free agents see themselves not as freewheeling soloists but as permatemps and content serfs.

The free agent reality

Matthew Wake had paid his dues. Post college, he'd worked as short order cook, waited tables, worked construction and clerked in record stores. While he was living in New Orleans, playing guitar in bands, a girlfriend suggested he might try something less financially risky than piling into a van to play small clubs across the South: music journalism.

Wake didn't walk right into a staff job he wrote copy for a bank, freelanced for papers for free, sold ads and sat through three hour town planning meetings, all ways to break in. The paper was owned by Gannett a famously profit driven company. "Every quarter was like a the 13th horror film," he recalls. "'Am I gonna be the guy that Freddie gets?'"

One day in June, he and his colleagues were called into a room and told the paper was eliminating its arts and entertainment staff: The weekly would recycle copy from other papers in the chain. It was one of about 20,000 layoffs at Gannett under former CEO Craig Dubow, who retired last month due to medical issues and left the company with a $37.1 million golden parachute.

"First," Wake says of his life post job, went through my savings the way Jane's Addiction goes through bass players. I hit up tons and tons of publications local, regional, national. What I've observed is that as times get tough, freelance is the first thing they cut." And publications are shrinking. "Spin just went bimonthly. The Rolling Stone I get copy van cleef turquoise bracelet in the mail is about as thin as a brochure. There will be more rats fighting for that same piece of cheese."

Unpleasant as working for Gannett could be, Wake lived in a three bedroom house, buying CDs or heading to bars when he wanted to. Now, he's moved back to his hometown Huntsville, Ala. and has taken a room in the house he grew up in, now owned by his attorney brother. He writes for pay when he can, and lives off what he makes taking care of his 91 year old grandmother. "It gives me something to do so I don't have to go back to waiting tables," he says. "I just turned 40."

It hard not to feel like he's going backward. When Wake had a job, he was able to make some forays into collecting art. "Now I have the same Stones poster I had in college Do I go into PR? Marketing? I go from interviewing Slash to writing copy for a Denny's menu? It's gonna be a weird world for a while."

collapse of culture the Internet cheerleader books as well as the websites of motivational branding coaches who urge creative types to stop working for the Man and seize their destiny turn on rousing tales of the new economy. "There are a few success stories," he says, "that create a false sense of hope." Because Radiohead can offer its record for free, he points out, doesn't mean that bands below the superstar level can. (Similarly, the death of Apple visionary Steve Jobs uncorked various rants about the value of mavericks and how you can get it if you try hard enough. Which makes everyone who struggles in a post boom, post bubble economy a loser. Or, as Herman Cain says, people who aren't trying hard enough.)

Today's gig economy is tough even for people accustomed to success. Dana Gioia is one of the leading and for a while, most controversial critics of American literature. He served as a vice president at General Foods, and later as director of the National Endowment for the Arts. "When I quit my job in 1991, I had some tough years," he says. "I reviewed books, I did gigs for the BBC, I gave lectures. When a big piece appeared, people would to invite me to give a speech. If you were willing to take a risk and float between gigs, you could make a living."

Like Gioia or not his criticism has made him enemies in academia and elsewhere no one can say he's lacking in drive or entrepreneurial energy. But in between the '90s and now, a lot has changed. "Electronic entertainment has taken over people's lives," he says. "You see it with lower rates of reading, with people not going to performances it's all down. People not going means it's harder for the artists to make a living; it's very difficult for a jazz musician, for instance, to become well known enough to get gigs. And political support for the arts is down."

For Gioia himself, it's made being a freelance man of letters like his heroes from mid century much tougher. "I don't think that's possible anymore," he says, as writing becomes unpaid volunteer work. "There are fewer gigs." The number of papers with real book or ideas sections is down substantially; serious magazines are half the size they used to be. I quit my job this year, I don think I could have made it as a literary freelancer. The problem isn the decline of the economy, though that doesn help. The problem is the collapse of culture. Stone sculpture of busty women and music, made originally on animal bones, are likely even older; the late scholar Denis Dutton argued in his book Art Instinct van cleef and arpels fake bracelets that creativity was hard wired into the human race during the process of evolution.

So, some of us will always do this. Modern life has allowed specialization that Stone Age man did not enjoy, but it's never been easy to survive as an artist. A few especially those with copious subsidies from parents will strike gold and inspire the next generation to take a chance.

What's changing is the ability for people to make a middle class living in creative fields. Many are forced to go freelance because they are losing their jobs: A new report shows that even well after the official end of the recession, slashed state budgets are making things tougher in the performing arts, with a 16 percent drop in performing arts jobs since last year. That's easily the difference between a viable project and something you just can't afford to do without an inheritance.

And as the New York Times recently observed, the freelance musician has gone the way of the Southern Democrat.

was a good living. But the New York freelance musician a bright thread in the fabric of the city is dying out, wrote Daniel J. Wakin. an age of sampling, digitization and outsourcing, New York's soundtrack and advertising jingle recording industry has essentially collapsed. Broadway jobs are in decline. Dance companies rely increasingly on recorded music. And many freelance orchestras, among the last steady deals, are cutting back on their seasons, sometimes to nothingness. is all coming very soon after a surging discussion about how casual, "no collar" creative class, laptop toting "knowledge workers," self determining "free agents," and so on, would be redefining and reviving American life. Richard Florida vaunted creative class was supposed to be pumping its mojo into American cities. "Rent," he says, "is the basis of everything. For any artist or creator who wants to live with that dynamism of dense urban spaces, he can be saddled with rents so high that they take up 50 percent or more of his income. It's impossible to do things outside the marketplace because you're constantly working to pay rent."

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