Jason Goodman co-founder of 3rd Ward on the Maker economy, neo-education and how people are equiping themselves:
More hereLet’s talk about freelance life and the changing landscape of the creative market. Have you seen big changes in recent years?
Massive massive change getting bigger every year, and we’re right in the middle of it. The idea that a kid getting out of college today – 22-years-old – will get a job at IBM, work their for four decades and retire is laughable. That’s a huge change. That’s industrial society up until the last decade.
People now have the technology and resources to get so much more done with so much less. You’re seeing freelancers and small-scale groups leveraging technologies that would have acted as gatekeeper to success before. For example, you can go on Etsy and sell your product (that you made in your apartment or at a place like 3rd Ward) to a global marketplace for basically free. Makers may have been passionate about a product or a craft, but had no way to reach an audience outside their local community until fairly recently. That’s a huge change. It’s a huge economy.
We’re getting to the point now where it’s natural and obvious, but I think that over the last few years it was turbulent. But we see this – we live it everyday. We see how our members are able to learn something they wanted to do, put it into practice, and actually reach an audience immediately. It’s a very different world.
