The ideas of being independent and signed are inherently contradictory, and this contradiction is what makes indie hard to define. Its ephemerality gives it both a mystique and a resistance to criticism ― after all, you can’t critique what you can’t define. And thus, using the term indie is often a great marketing move. But it’s a problematic critical move.
Tag: Digital culture
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Indie, Open, Free: The Fraught Ideologies of Ed-Tech | Hybrid Pedagogy
But the ability to work on indie projects is not available to all. The time and resources required to work indie are a sign of privilege, as is encouraging (and certainly expecting) all to work indie. As Anne Pasek writes, “all materials and practices … have a cost and thus a tollgate for participation.” (And there are many, often intersecting, forms of privilege that contribute to that “toll” ― race, gender, orientation, cultural background, economic background, able-bodiedness, etc.) So while indie work is great, and I’ve done a lot of it myself, we need to be careful about the ways in which we encourage and characterize indie work, noting in particular what it costs and who may be left behind or left out.
This is all important and certainly true.
However, as someone who knows he’s certainly privileged, I view my definition of indie as something that is also open for others to come behind me and use for free or have the ability to reuse and remix in a way that corporate interests or non-indie work wouldn’t. In a large sense, to me this means that while I may be privileged (whether that be socio-economically or even the time-encumbered), I’m helping to lower the cost and the burden for the less privileged who may come behind me to be able to do more, go further, or go faster.
In some sense too, as described, indie has such a nebulous definition. Often when I see it in a technology related space I really read it as “Open Sourced”.