Tron: The creative spirit in other areas

I'm so not a sci-fi, person. The people that know me refer to me teasingly as a technical wizard.
I didn't have as much trouble following Tron as I did TXH-1138 and I'm almost reluctant to admit that I really enjoyed the lecture on Wednesday. I think the guest speaker had a lot to do with it because he was someone I could relate to. I have several friends who survived the dot com boom and I work closely with a couple of them on the volunteer organization I'm involved with here in DC and in Chicago. Check it out at www.onebrick.org The idea of the creative vs. the corporate really resonated with me because I see it at work in our organization and it's something that comes up all the time. At heart, we are a grassroots organization but in the last couple years we generated enough interest to attain the sponsorship of a corporation in upstate New York. They have brought a decidedly corporate attitude to our little garage shop organization. Then again, we weren't so little when they came to us. By the time we got their attention we were in three cities and had about 20,000 volunteers in the combined databases. So it's never a quick fix when someone proposes to spend $1,000 of our budget even though we have the money to spend. My friend and one of the co-founders is always telling us it's just easier to keep the budget skinny than it is to try and trim it at some later date.

As we've recruited and looked for people to take on administrative duties I notice most of the people who are interested in taking on these responsibilities come work in a corporate environment and/or hold MBA degrees. So even from our own people there is the pressure to spend money, institute structural changes, etc. that more closely resemble a corporation v. a nonprofit organization. What has also always interested me about the structure of our organization is that it runs, essentially, like a business and it lacks the undesireable attributes (disorganization, lack of funding, poor staffing, etc.) of the typical nonprofit. One of the things I thought of when Michael was talking about Google and Craigslist is that while these two organizations have managed to retain the creative spirit, the creative spirit essentially is the spirit of its top leaders and if so many organizations change over time, it is often due to change in leadership. Right now we still have the original founders at the helm but I wonder if our organization will be able to sustain its momentum if those three people are no longer able to be involved. My boyfriend worked for MBNA when it was one of the most profitable companies in the country. But despite its size, the energy and the direction came all from one man: Charlie Cauley the CEO and founder. When MBNA was bought out by Bank of America, Charlie retired and the company is no longer the same.

I know I've gone on a tangent, but I did want to get to Tron. During our talk on Wednesday I also wondered about how suitable the creative personality would have been in distributing this technology to the masses. Artists are creative, but not necessarily practical. Would we be able to buy a personal computer for $300 if it had been left up to just the artist?