I have no idea what the future holds, but I have an inkling that technology is going to unleash the creative types.  I know, I know the changes being wrought upon the publishing industry are well documented, but sometimes it's hard to grasp what's going on until you see small examples of those changes.  For instance, yesterday at lunch my Mom handed me a "proof" of a book she's been editing and was written by a fascinating man from the Blacksburg, VA area.  The proof was as professional-looking a book as you're going to find and a publisher wasn't involved; it's being self published via Amazon.  (FYI,when it's ready for sale you'll find it here).

But the sea-change that's occurring in the world of the arts really hit home with me when I saw this short done by an amateur Russian filmmaker that's described thusly by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing:

A Russian amateur filmmaker called Alexander Semenov produced this 2.5 minute bootleg Transformers short with a couple of sub-$1,000 cameras, two hours' of footage and a month in the editing suite. It is insanelybadass: a perfect vision of an alternate universe where shirtless Russian thugs go bot-to-bot on dusty distant roads; more fun that the big-budget Hollywood equivalent.

Transformers from repey815 on Vimeo.

I'm really very excited to see where this explosion in artistic availability will take us.