There's something odd about telling people, artists, that they need to work for free to be pure while you're sitting there getting a salary that ultimately is paid by a generation of young people going deeply into debt for their education.

It wasn't that people wanted things for free and asked for advertising to fund it - it's that these companies wanted to amass an audience whose "eyeballs" they could sell, and they gave people things for free to do that. Free services and content has been foisted upon us because there wasn't the will power to explore other options.

Advertisers are happy to see the stuff they've branded out there for free, they don't care about scarcity, they want any message they're invested in to be shared and to be abundant and to be passed along.

There's this divergence out there between the very small and the very large with the middle disappearing. There is something paradoxical going on where there is this access and we can seek out things on the fringes, but that doesn't describe the overall reality, because the big are bigger than ever.

I think that overall, ultimately the impact of advertisers calling the shots is a more cloying, complacent culture. For example, it was just announced that Unilever is branding environmental content at The Guardian. How radical or pointed can that content be?

On the one hand, I'm a kind of crazy anarchist-sympathizer with a hippie background, so this sounds pretty good to me. Make something for the love of it! But the reality is so much more complicated.

Also, after Examined Life was finished I found myself thinking about the way creative opportunities and distribution channels were shifting. Should I be showing my films in theaters or just think about getting them out online? There were other issues, too.