Collaboration & the cultural logic of late capitalism

Went over to Dan's yesterday to discuss the 'codex' text. This is the text at the end--the grand exposition that explains the story. It's an audio collage pieced together word by word from various public domain sources. Some of the text I had written was bugging me--it was too literal. I figured that some of the language needed to be gentler, a bit less bald and broad so I had a list of changes for Dan. He has been working on this thing for about three weeks now and it has taken him a tremendous amount of time to piece together the text from various sources. Plus he's been doing a lot of experimentation with notation and writing C-Sound scripts, etc. But I just breeze in and suggest all these changes.

I remember back in my interface days, I used to design and program interfaces by myself. The engineer in me tended to win out so I would design around what I could program relatively easily. There are some benefits to this approach. But in general, there is a nice tension that is created during collaboration. When you're making suggestions about someone else's contribution, the work involved is invisible, so it's often easier to make suggestions. It's like the idea of being a ruthless editor. Sure that shot may have taken hours to set up, but if it needs to changed it needs to be changed.

I wonder if this suggests, strangely, that a disengagement from cost--economic, emotional, material--may sometimes lead to better artistic decisions?

Another issue this brings up is related to design process. Film is traditionally a waterfall process: highly planned and prespecified. But the only reason I felt I could make a narrative film is because I figured the technology (and people I worked with) would enable me to use a more bricolage-like approach in which the details emerged during production. You always hear about film fx people and others saying "it was great working with him because he knows exactly what he wants." I think they mean something very specific by that--that this person is a good visualizer and good at prespecifying things. On the other hand, while I do know exactly what I want, I don't know what it is until I see it! I think this would earn me a reptutation of never knowing what I want. But it just amounts to a difference in process. I think. Or does it?