Next comes a universal digital ledger. You will no longer collect or spend in a meaningful sense. "intelligent algorithms" will determine how to allocate resources at scale.
This is already happening to some extent given most people live paycheck to paycheck and "intelligent algorithms" can be replaced with "investor class".
Services like YouTube premium and Spotify already exist. They pay out based off who you watch / listen to you the most. The algorithms don't need to be that complicated.
That's what we currently have, the title asks "what's next?"
Today's economy uses supply and demand and free markets to determine prices and allocate resources "efficiently". You trade labor for capital, then choose how to spend it. The premise is that individual choice is fair and efficient and maximizes wealth creation the best compared to other models.
YT and Spotify however challenge the free choice model. They claim they can know you better than you know yourself, and do it at scale. They know what music you want. They know what content you want. If their algorithm fails, you will leave their platform for one that does it better. But once you subscribe, free choice exits the equation. Content is the resource and it is being allocated by algorithms. You choose to give up choice.
So, music and videos and other elastic supply is one thing. But what if algorithms can generally solve supply and demand? Can a central algorithm organize society more efficiently than humans can imagine or achieve through market forces?
If so, then it is also inevitable, because either through authoritarian edict, corporate capitalism, or national Darwinism it will out-compete everything else.
At which point, money is no longer a useful thing. Money is a vehicle for human choice. The algorithm has no use for such a device. It will simply mail you a voucher for your house, car, groceries, etc. you'll be getting this year.
A maximally efficient algorithm would determine what job you have, where you live, who you associate with, what your daily routine is, etc.
If there is a "next", it's one where a master algorithm organizes our lives in totality.
"In recent years, the volume of creators has skyrocketed. In just 2020 and 2021, the number leapt by 48% and growth isn’t slowing down. With a glut of incoming talent, incumbent creatives are feeling the squeeze."
That number seemed... odd to me, but I think he's citing this from Stripe, which I guess make sense?
"In aggregating monetization across these 50 platforms, we’ve found that creators will soon pass more than $10 billion in aggregate earnings. While 2020 saw a jump in new creators, it wasn’t a one-time spike. A year later, creators are still coming online at a record clip: the number of creators is up a whopping 48% year-over-year. In total, these platforms have onboarded 668,000 creators."
I wonder what proportion of these "creators" will ever make a living through it. I bet the distribution of that $10 billion is hugely skewed towards a few.
I unexpectedly found myself in the "successful creator" bucket since a few months ago so I might be able to speak to this. I write the top paid technology newsletter on Substack, bringing in enough to pursue this writing - or, as many call it "creating" - full-time.
Despite being considered a successful creator, I don’t think that “creator” is a real thing - at least not a category anyone can, or should aim for.
Being a creator means the content that you create gets significant enough attention. What you do with this attention is what really matters. To be a successful creator and not burn out, you need to build a one-person business that is both profitable, and sustainable. Doing this is much harder to do than most people realize. It's something that is hard to just "wing it". At the same time, winging it is exactly the strategy that most creators are following.
The reality is that most creators don't think of what they do from a business, or sustainability side. No one is telling people who accidentally became successful creators to think of this as a business, or side business. I'm not surprised so many creators end up burnt out, or surprised that on a crowded market with no real differentiation or long-term strategy, they start losing attention they once had.
What helped me is how I had been planning to start a company for some time. I did the studying and research on what it takes to run a business. I'm still doing what I was preparing to do so: but instead of running a venture-funded startup, I'm doing a bootstrapped, one-person business. One that many people refer to as being a creator.
>you need to build a one-person business that is both profitable, and sustainable.
Most successful creators are not a one person business. Things like editing, thumbnail making, writing, can be done by other people for you. Doing everything yourself can just eat up all of your time.
When I say one-person business, I mean a business that has one full-time employee which is the case for me. Of course you need to invest in contractors, tools and other things that give your leverage, given your time is limited and you want to use it as efficiently as possible.
I work with a copyeditor for my writing. I contract on an hourly basis, doing a few hours per week. My editor is far more efficient at what they do than if I did it.
If my business grew large enough, this contract role - and perhaps other ones - might become full-time roles. But that size or workload is far enough away in my case.
Recently, I've started getting into Youtube again, but following a couple of different hobbies much more closely; woodworking/making, and photography. What you describe is echoed by a few of them, namely, they do not really attempt to make a sole living purely off of Youtube. Instead, Youtube is kind of a marketing channel for them with auxiliary advertising revenue.
Basically, they sound a lot like you, in that they're all running a small business, typically as opposed to pure client work. But I don't think any of them see Youtube as a basis of their revenue; it's more of just another marketing channel.
I suspect the best generalization is the "1000 true fans" approach, where they're just trying to use different media to just contact those true fans. And build a business around that interaction, and just monetize everything else they can
I don't want to see what comes next. It's been a continuous negative slide for as long as I've been alive. Goodbye union jobs with benefits and pensions (that didn't require college either!). Goodbye full time jobs with benefits. Hello gig economy, creator economy, social media influencers, etc. Based on that trajectory, I expect our kids will be living in a Blade Runner-esque post apocalyptic grungy world hustling NFTs to pay for a bowl of ramen.
It is poorly-written, derivative, and juvenile. The protagonist wins ownership of the Internet (and gets the girl) by playing video games well and knowing the most 80s "geek" trivia. I think the comparisons to GamemasterAnthony's birthday ("every character from every game, comic, cartoon, TV show, movie, and book reality come in with everything for a HUGE party") are rather apt... lots of the book is just the protagonist going to a virtual environment and noting that an R2D2 model has been instantiated there or whatever.
Basically, if you've read Snow Crash you'll be disappointed, and if you haven't read Snow Crash, you should just read it instead.
Basically, if you've read Snow Crash you'll be disappointed, and if you haven't read Snow Crash, you should just read it instead.
I tend to agree. Although, in Snow Crash, not much happens in the metaverse. Most of the action is in the real world.
I was hoping for a Snow Crash movie. That project has been in and out of development hell for years. (It would have to be heavily censored. "Mr Lee's Hong Kong" would annoy China, "White Columns" would annoy the woke people, and evangelical Christians being a front for a cult created to support a scam would annoy the Trump voters.)
As a 30s something person, the movie had me rolling my eyes. It was designed for the now in vogue Gen Z crowd. A group that apparently don't remember the 80s and 90s when computing was more unstable, there was a lot less software and that you had to internalize that the lower layers were more fragile and built on a bed of sand.
These people live their lives entirely in the application layer and come up with all these fantasies of Virtual Reality and all the magical stuff it entails. I hate it and everything that comes with this new world and I want to re-live the simpler times of the 90s and the 00s.
I fear that time is long gone though. Just that feeling of millennials now beginning to be brushed aside in favor of the next generation's worldview is jarring because now I have to live in it or disconnect and try to retain the memories of the past. I guess every generation goes through it.
I miss the world of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. That took place during the beginnings of Obama's "Hope and Change". Things were on the upswing. Climate change was not in your face as much as it is now. No coming world war and economic collapse. Just a bunch of hipsters and a guy trying to overcome the baggage of his dream girl the old fashioned way: by battling her seven evil exes via old style 2d video game fighting.
I had to quit reading Ready Player One at the point the protagonist got into an 80s pop culture trivia competition in a VR chat room and he won, and everyone started cheering and clapping. Even though this was fictional I cringed so hard I just couldn’t keep reading.
If you're ok with the a typical male protagonist nerding out over a Flux Capacitor you'll get through just fine. If a story that's 50% nostalgic references isn't cool it'll be a very slow read...
There's some interesting ideas around the dystopian state of the world and whether it is a result of the virtual universe or not, but only a few chapters dig into that.
I agree. I don't think the current trajectory even can continue -- for the reasons you bring up.
I'm hoping what comes next is a significant step not forward, and not back, but to the side: an increase in cooperatives and other forms of small-scale communism -- people who get together and do things for each other based on what they can and what they need.
People working for people. Not for layers of middle managers and subcontractors fulfilling meaningless specifications until only 5 % of the effort actually makes it to the person who needs it, with every layer along the way scraping off a bit of their cut.
Creator economy and gig economy are not related. Creator economy refers to things like YouTubers being able to create content and reach viewers directly. It replaces the need pitch a show to a TV network or find a gallery to hang your art. The evolution in this article is the shift from ad-based revenue model to subscriber-based.
That's sort of what they have become. A couple generations ago, it was for working conditions.
For my coal mining grandfather, it meant safety equipment like respirators so you didn't get black lung, and that the company had to send down a meal for you if you were working a double (before that you had to rely on the next shift to give you items from their lunches, if they were willing to share).
Crediting unions solely for pursuing the creation of federal workplace safety regulations is a bit of a revision. It was a issue of significant public interest in the late 60s, and the specific reason that OSHA ended up being created was that Nixon had made a campaign promise to address workplace safety.
But regardless of the history, it’s not longer especially relevant to the roles of unions today, and certainly adds nothing to the value unions supposedly provide to their members.
I didn't credit them solely. Yes workers and workers right organizations supported it. Unions were the main ones lobbying it. We all know that without lobbying things don't get done in the US (unfortunately).
The question wasn't about what unions do today. The question specifically asked what unions were for. I stand by my statement that they were formed not only for pay increases, but also for working conditions improvements.
I don’t think these things are as linked in that way exactly.
The benefits of employers to employees has certainly gone down and that’s disgusting but the creator economy that’s been propped up by the internet in a way that was not possible beforehand I think is plenty good, and not a viable career/job for most people.
I don’t think people are going to eschew traditional employment en made to try to make it as creators. It’s not going to happen for most and the pressing needs of survival aren’t going to allow many to pursue it.
Social media influencers are gross for a lot of reasons but people making content for an audience that is willing to pay is a good thing. Structuring a company so that 90% of its workforce aren’t employees to deny having to pay them reasonable wages/benefits is a bad thing. I just don’t think they’re directly connected.
Creative jobs, whether journalism, acting, writing, music, etc. have always been a difficult business.
Creator economy is no different than the poor musicians 30 years ago.
The fall of unions and rise of gig economy is more concerning. But unrelated to entertainment industry, which has always been insecure/underpaid/risky..
Side note: when I heard how taxies used to be rented on per-day basis by the driver, I'll admit I became less sure the gig economy was a step down.
> I don't want to see what comes next. It's been a continuous negative slide for as long as I've been alive.
Opera, orchestras, chamber music, the “big band” period, and the 1950s-1990s “music industry” were all products of their respective times’ technological and economic structure, which some people learned to exploit and others did not. Those exploitation models were just passing artifacts.
You just see a particular point in time, a business model, and the life of the then winners and draw a conclusion from that.
I don’t know what the future may be but it is most certainly not a return to any status quo ante. But I do know that apart from a minuscule fraction of people, nobody in “music” (however it was described at a given time) ever made much, if any living from it.
Unless you happened to get hired on by some organization like the Catholic church that was willing to pay for art and music, there hasn't been job security for creative professions pretty much throughout history.
It was musicians who seem to have coined the word "gig" back in the 1920s. The usage of the term is a reference to what they have always been dealing with.
Right? I assume tech support lines will soon force customers through "turkstations"; you'll need to solve a few captchas or maybe resolve a few support tickets for others before someone does the same for you. In-browser coin mining while you hold and you don't come off hold until hitting the minimum is a "great" way to let people with better computers (and therefore are more likely better paying or better able to pay) jump the queue. Microtransaction to outsource jobs or offset cost of support is somewhere on the chain of next logical steps.
I think you've been reading too much online negativity. In the past even math and science was performed by either aristocrats or precocious folks at the behest of their patron. If anything, humanity has become better at guaranteeing employment for folks who don't directly and immediately move somebody's bottom line. Moreover the Western art scene until the '90s was also quite conservative with what it depicted and who it allowed to participate. Other art scenes (North and South Indian film, Yose entertainment in Japan, etc.) around the world had their own interesting niches, funding models, and lifestyles.
It seems harder to get a job today due to in-depth background checks. Until the pandemic employers were extremely picky. We're also sitting near record low labor participation rates. If it's so easy to get a job now, why were participation rates higher?
This thread is scoped to the "creator economy" (see the title, the article, and the other toplevel threads.) I'm not talking about the economy as a whole, and even then we would need to scope that down to a place, a time period, etc etc.
But if we're on the topic of creatives, just look at the pushback that the Jackson 5 received in America or that NWA had in the '90s. Yes it probably was easier to be a white, male artist in the '50s-'90s (like the Beatles), but the case was much murkier for anyone else. And it's not like the establishment went unscathed by technology change either. There's a song titled "Video Killed the Radio Star" after all...
With the collapse of live music, I highly doubt this is true. You could get gigs at bars and stuff. Few places today have live music.
Yes, minority artists might not have made it big in the past, but there was demand in the establishments that were run/supported/patronized by their respective group.
If anything, technology has made success/wealth inequity worse by making music cheap and accessible, thus allowing people to have unlimited music (replays) for little money. This killed a lot of live music and funneled that money to the upper echelon on musicians.
Without numbers both you and I are just grasping at our feelings. That said, the technology to make music "cheap and accessible" enough to displace live music "thus allowing people to have unlimited music" has been around since at least the early 1900s with the creation and maturation of the record player/phonograph. I don't think this is a new phenomenon. This "killing of live music" would have happened long before the Beatles were even born.
Further improvements in portable audio like the cassette tape, the CD, and eventually digital music only improved the portability of music for individuals but commercial settings have had the ability to replace live music at venues for a century. I don't think the root cause for the decline of live music was technical. I think cultural attitudes toward music changed, that's all.
This has some information in it. It seems like cost is a major factor in the reduction of live music, allowing cheaper recorded music to take its place in some cases.
I do see cultural attitudes playing a role too. My guess is they both play a part.
There's tons of live gigs at every scale. If you don't see it, you're not looking. It wasn't that long ago I joined everyone else in a coffee shop singing covers with the band.
>If it's so easy to get a job now, why were participation rates higher
An abundance of wealth and entertainment. A record number of people are able to eek out a minimal living without having to work in traditional markets. It is not a great life, but not desperate enough to enter the job market.
I just want to read about/see things created by people who like what they are doing and who aren't chasing fans/subscribers/patrons. The most interesting stuff on the Internet, to me, is when a person puts up a crappy HTML page with 5 years worth of notes about using a particular hiking backpack. The presence of a single affiliate marketing link makes anyone's opinion instantly suspect. A link to a Patreon page invalidates the very "authentic" feeling they were striving for.
Do you feel the same way about the music, shows and movies you watch or listen to? I certainly like the occasional homemade passion project and community theater but I’d really hate it if that was the totality of the entertainment offerings available.
Well there is entertainment that exists in order to get you spend money on the product itself. Don't mind that, as presumably the goal is to produce great entertainment. But there is entertainment designed to get your spend money on something else (product placement, kids movies that are actually toy advertisements, talk shows that are actually advertisements for whatever the guest is promoting, etc). Those I find quite annoying. The only exception I can think of is the TV show Shark Tank, which has interesting investment dicussions surrounded by countless advertisements for products within the entertainment itself.
So a blog post where the guy teases his next entry -> don't mind. A blog post where the guy constantly intersperses affiliate links with ad copy -> irritating.
Feels like everyone nowadays plays video games to try and become rich/famous rather than just for fun too. Try play Apex Legends or Warzone and everyone has 'TTV' in their gamertag trying to push people towards their streams. Even my mum asks me if I'm going to monetise my hobbies of hydroponics. "Hustle culture" has taken over and I hate it so much.
"You're so creative, you should sell this stuff on Etsy!"
"Wow, this pie is incredible, you should open a bakery!"
I think Californians might be worse about it than most, too. Maybe it's all the pressure of keeping up with insane cost of living, plus the feeling that there's just so much stupid money sloshing around that surely you should be able to scoop some of it up...
Yep - I live in Palo Alto and mentioned I was training for a half Ironman. Someone asked if I was blogging my journey and what my ad strategy was to bring in revenue.
That's really harsh and will prevent anyone from ever committing to what they're doing. There's loads of independent creators who are doing sincere, authentic work but they can't do it for free. And if you're consuming creator content on a platform like YouTube, they're getting ad dollars just by dint of being on the platform without saying a word. I don't think there's anything wrong with asking for support to do something that others are deriving value from. It's like people will gladly pay $15/mo for Netflix with the expectation that it's commercial content, but get mad when someone who makes great content with no upfront price suggests their work is worth something.
But that's kind of the whole point - just as the parent poster implies, I very much like content from people who are not "creators", for whom that project is a side hobby and their primary identity is not as the creator of these things, where they're doing it for themselves and not for an audience or me. If some or most of them can't commit to that as a profession, that's fine, there's far too much content anyway, and if most of the content-makers quit and only the "hardcore hobbyists" remain, those who would do that even if they had to pay for it, that's an okay outcome which still leaves more than enough content, and the good stuff does not get drowned out by fake garbage manufactured by those who want "random content creation" to be a profession. We have far too many independent creators who are motivated by money as that money pushes the "market" towards bullshit, so we need fewer of them and need to push some of them out. Less money flowing for views of that content is a way to achieve that.
I agree, the "problem" is on the consumption side not the production side. I don't expect my bricklayer or cabinet maker for coder to enjoy their job. I buy what they are making.
The fact is that there is and always will be a market for consumerization Hobbies. People who would rather watch someone play a game then play a game, watch a band than play in one.
Yes, more people try to be creators than will be successful at it. So what? Unless they try to socialize the costs of their experiment, good for them. Life is an adventure and you are free to make mistakes.
Pretty much what happened to 95% of rock'n'roll bands, I'd guess. Either the big guys smell an opportunity and 'let' you have enough to keep working ... or you become a one-hit wonder.
Honestly, there aren't that many truly creative people. One giant is followed by a thousand wannabes. The gifted need to find new, uninfected ways to nourish and protect themselves ... with a minimum loss of creative time ... or else. One dedicated server, a couple of maintainers and an accountant would keep them away from all the sharks. Then it's up to word-of-mouth.
I would hope that it's sustainable and cheap micropayments: I would love to be able to instantly pay anywhere between $0.01 and $1 for a piece of content, directly from within my browser, without either a bank or some cryptocurrency company trying to inject themselves into the process (and, for the latter, burning tires while doing it).
That’s exactly it, IMO. The ability to donate tiny amounts with almost-zero fees, preferably directly through my existing banking system (probably using some middleware like Osko which works flawlessly and I use almost daily, invisibly via my bank).
I don’t have the expendable income to support every single creator I’d like to via Patreon/etc, and I also don’t like their livelihoods being dependent on a single company who can ruin them based on some arbitrary algorithmic magic box of reasons. I’d happily contribute small amounts based on individual content that I liked though, and spread my money wider that way.
I don't think it'll uniformly sustain creators. There will be winners and losers, like every scheme (including advertising). But it's not clear to me that it can't work for some people: tens of millions of Americans make small impulse purchases daily, with no small thanks to how easy it is to do so.
That's the long-tail and how Journalism, and other potential drive-by visits, could be supported. Much more like true corner busking rather than the hole in the wall cover concerts (mostly of videogames, but sometimes literal song covers) streamed / on video archive sites today.
I'd be very interested to hear from people in mainland China about this: my understanding is that digital payments are almost ubiquitous at this point, and have completely displaced cash for almost all small/petty transactions. Assuming that the transaction fees are low/nonexistent (which they might be, if it's all settled via whatever China uses instead of ACH), they might already have something like this.
When I read this article, I had my usual immediate reaction to the phrase "creator economy:" is that actually a thing? If you add up all the net profit made in the so-called creator economy does it amount to anything interesting? I suspect it's just one drop in a bucket that amounts to a long tail of menial low-paying jobs.
you may be correct that the monetary amount is negligible in the greater scheme of things but the "creator economy" is most certainly important in terms of the larger "attention economy" we now find ourselves in today.
I think people have been totally brainwashed by the idea of finding success within the creator economy.
For instance, hobbies are no longer things one does because they bring joy—they're now activities that people haven't figured out how to monetize. Before you’ve purchased a pound of clay and a pottery wheel—before you’ve even made your first mug—you’re buying a domain, designing a logo, and thinking about whether to sell your ceramics on Etsy or Shopify. And maybe you'll start a Patreon to document the learning process. I think for people who have been formed by the creator economy, people who have grown up in this space, the impulse to create and SELL seems almost pathological.
Then, there are the people who are afflicted with what I'm calling curatorial neuroticism. These are people who view curation as creation—they curate and share at a frantic pace. They gather, organize, present, and archive information obsessively. There's no stopping them. They spend more time writing in their seventh iteration of their Zettelkasten than they do interacting with people. If only I could get organized, if I could only "cultivate my second brain", I will unlock my creative potential, I'll figure out how to make money on Substack with a highly curated newsletter, or something.
What I sense in the curatorial creation is not really a "product", but a need to be seen. People share what they share—all of the lists, and links, and archives—so that they are viewed as having a certain literary taste, or wanting to be seen as having read these books, watched these movies, and so on.
Anyway, a quote from: Leisure, The Basis of Culture:
"I have never bothered or asked", Goethe said to Friedrich Sort in 1830, "in what way was I useful to society as a whole; I contended myself with expressing what I recognized as good and true. That has certainly been useful in a wide circle; but that was not the aim; it was the necessary result."
I find this pretty terrifying because it’s undermining the very basis of leisure time and changing many ideas about hobbies into a bland performative regurgitation of the parts that sell. It also feels like things are getting weirdly homogenised.
Among other things I've done I've been an artist/printmaker for a few decades. Can't say how many prints I've made. Always great when work sells, but it's not a predictable event at least in my experience. Very few artists sell enough to earn a living let alone become rich or famous. Most need to have "day jobs", teaching is a common occupation. Of course that's been true for a long time.
Despite these realities more people regard themselves as "artists" than ever before. Amazes me how many people enroll in art schools at $40K/yr. Student loans have to be paid off later on, from a hard financial viewpoint it doesn't pencil out. Yet year after year no shortage of people sign up, level of talent notwithstanding.
You're probably right. What you observe is an expression of form over substance. Maybe it's a "cargo cult" sort of thing where people think wrapping themselves in the trappings of "creatives" is the same as being genuinely creative.
The demise of hobbies probably speaks to denigrated value of "work", that is, expending effort to reach goals. I can tell you that printmaking is 5% design, color, etc., and 95% painstaking physical and cognitive labor, in short, it's work. OTOH looking for shortcuts eventually fails, and failure is followed by yet another round of seeking shortcuts.
Here's my prediction, sooner or later the "shortcut culture" burns itself out, though I won't place any bets on when that will happen.
The article concludes that building complementary businesses comes next. As a part-time creator that is interested in turning it into a business, I view any ad generated revenue as cash that can be invested into building a complimentary business. These massive platforms, YouTube, TikTok, etc. should be viewed as customer interaction tools rather than primary revenue drivers.
I don't understand all the hand-wringing in the comments that creative people being paid somehow makes them a sell-out or will otherwise ruin the hobby/field/employment landscape/whatever else.
Are there people churning out crap hoping to make a quick buck? Yes. Are there corporations trying to exploit creators and fans? Yes. Are there other problems I'm not even aware of? In all probability, yes.
But I also see a lot of good things happening. Examples from my own interests:
Table-top RPGs: before, you only got to play whatever was available at your local store (if you even had one) which was probably whatever the big companies put out (D&D) or your own crappy homebrew system. Maybe you hear about something amazing someone else has done and if you're lucky you get a photocopy/scan of their notes and try to figure things out from that. Today, you can discover heaps of amazing games and support their creators through Kickstarter, YouTube, Patreon, etc.
Muay Thai: I support someone on Patreon and YouTube who puts out tons of content. Hours and hours of her own training footage (with fighters past and present, many of them legends) with commentary. Full videos of all her fights (270 and counting), again with commentary. Commentary on legendary fights. Interviews with MT legends. A long-form podcast. Long-form articles. These cover not just technique but also culture and history. All done for love of the art but also costing money. I don't know how else all this can be made available to a wide audience and be preserved for future generations.
The need to make money modifies the artistic process. Some expressions will be modified or straight up suppressed if they are perceived as unprofitable or offensive.
Advertising is the simplest example. All it takes for a website to censor itself is for someone to complain to Google that some page is offensive, causing them to suspend their revenue stream.
> The need to make money modifies the artistic process. Some expressions will be modified or straight up suppressed if they are perceived as unprofitable or offensive.
But that's always been true, the creator economy didn't create that dynamic. But now, people across the world can support art that wouldn't otherwise exist.
In my Muay Thai example, there are no government or large organisations that I know of doing or funding the work to document, preserve, and spread the art in the way it's being done on YouTube and Patreon. There should be, but there isn't. I'm happy I found and am able to support the two people doing the work.
My friend and I have been working rigorously in our free time building a platform related to this space. We really feel that the community that forms around a creator is a creators biggest value capture. Our platform is intended to help centralize that community of core fans and give them ways to engage in deeper ways with one another. Looking to move out of our alpha stage in the near future.
That's a lot of PR-speak that doesn't tell me anything about your platform. More importantly, it doesn't tell me what's different from the hundred other platforms or even the handful that rose to the top. I checked the website and still can't tell what it's supposed to be.
What's next is successful writers on substack grouping together, to reduce pressure on publishing too frequently, and to be able to keep quality up. That becomes a publication. After that, they will let writers with no or smaller followings contribute their work in exchange for compensation. This is how the next generation or magazines and newspapers will be created.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadThis is already happening to some extent given most people live paycheck to paycheck and "intelligent algorithms" can be replaced with "investor class".
Today's economy uses supply and demand and free markets to determine prices and allocate resources "efficiently". You trade labor for capital, then choose how to spend it. The premise is that individual choice is fair and efficient and maximizes wealth creation the best compared to other models.
YT and Spotify however challenge the free choice model. They claim they can know you better than you know yourself, and do it at scale. They know what music you want. They know what content you want. If their algorithm fails, you will leave their platform for one that does it better. But once you subscribe, free choice exits the equation. Content is the resource and it is being allocated by algorithms. You choose to give up choice.
So, music and videos and other elastic supply is one thing. But what if algorithms can generally solve supply and demand? Can a central algorithm organize society more efficiently than humans can imagine or achieve through market forces?
If so, then it is also inevitable, because either through authoritarian edict, corporate capitalism, or national Darwinism it will out-compete everything else.
At which point, money is no longer a useful thing. Money is a vehicle for human choice. The algorithm has no use for such a device. It will simply mail you a voucher for your house, car, groceries, etc. you'll be getting this year.
A maximally efficient algorithm would determine what job you have, where you live, who you associate with, what your daily routine is, etc.
If there is a "next", it's one where a master algorithm organizes our lives in totality.
That number seemed... odd to me, but I think he's citing this from Stripe, which I guess make sense?
https://stripe.com/blog/creator-economy
"In aggregating monetization across these 50 platforms, we’ve found that creators will soon pass more than $10 billion in aggregate earnings. While 2020 saw a jump in new creators, it wasn’t a one-time spike. A year later, creators are still coming online at a record clip: the number of creators is up a whopping 48% year-over-year. In total, these platforms have onboarded 668,000 creators."
Despite being considered a successful creator, I don’t think that “creator” is a real thing - at least not a category anyone can, or should aim for.
Being a creator means the content that you create gets significant enough attention. What you do with this attention is what really matters. To be a successful creator and not burn out, you need to build a one-person business that is both profitable, and sustainable. Doing this is much harder to do than most people realize. It's something that is hard to just "wing it". At the same time, winging it is exactly the strategy that most creators are following.
The reality is that most creators don't think of what they do from a business, or sustainability side. No one is telling people who accidentally became successful creators to think of this as a business, or side business. I'm not surprised so many creators end up burnt out, or surprised that on a crowded market with no real differentiation or long-term strategy, they start losing attention they once had.
What helped me is how I had been planning to start a company for some time. I did the studying and research on what it takes to run a business. I'm still doing what I was preparing to do so: but instead of running a venture-funded startup, I'm doing a bootstrapped, one-person business. One that many people refer to as being a creator.
Most successful creators are not a one person business. Things like editing, thumbnail making, writing, can be done by other people for you. Doing everything yourself can just eat up all of your time.
I work with a copyeditor for my writing. I contract on an hourly basis, doing a few hours per week. My editor is far more efficient at what they do than if I did it.
If my business grew large enough, this contract role - and perhaps other ones - might become full-time roles. But that size or workload is far enough away in my case.
Keep it up Greg!
Basically, they sound a lot like you, in that they're all running a small business, typically as opposed to pure client work. But I don't think any of them see Youtube as a basis of their revenue; it's more of just another marketing channel.
A couple of different takes on this:
- Sean Tucker, photography: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI02c5DnRUg - Lincoln St Woodworks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDxs5Y13rlk
I suspect the best generalization is the "1000 true fans" approach, where they're just trying to use different media to just contact those true fans. And build a business around that interaction, and just monetize everything else they can
Basically, if you've read Snow Crash you'll be disappointed, and if you haven't read Snow Crash, you should just read it instead.
I tend to agree. Although, in Snow Crash, not much happens in the metaverse. Most of the action is in the real world.
I was hoping for a Snow Crash movie. That project has been in and out of development hell for years. (It would have to be heavily censored. "Mr Lee's Hong Kong" would annoy China, "White Columns" would annoy the woke people, and evangelical Christians being a front for a cult created to support a scam would annoy the Trump voters.)
Which is one of its insightful points.
“White Columns” would not only not offend anyone woke, but satisfy their assumptions.
These people live their lives entirely in the application layer and come up with all these fantasies of Virtual Reality and all the magical stuff it entails. I hate it and everything that comes with this new world and I want to re-live the simpler times of the 90s and the 00s.
I fear that time is long gone though. Just that feeling of millennials now beginning to be brushed aside in favor of the next generation's worldview is jarring because now I have to live in it or disconnect and try to retain the memories of the past. I guess every generation goes through it.
I miss the world of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. That took place during the beginnings of Obama's "Hope and Change". Things were on the upswing. Climate change was not in your face as much as it is now. No coming world war and economic collapse. Just a bunch of hipsters and a guy trying to overcome the baggage of his dream girl the old fashioned way: by battling her seven evil exes via old style 2d video game fighting.
There's some interesting ideas around the dystopian state of the world and whether it is a result of the virtual universe or not, but only a few chapters dig into that.
I'm hoping what comes next is a significant step not forward, and not back, but to the side: an increase in cooperatives and other forms of small-scale communism -- people who get together and do things for each other based on what they can and what they need.
People working for people. Not for layers of middle managers and subcontractors fulfilling meaningless specifications until only 5 % of the effort actually makes it to the person who needs it, with every layer along the way scraping off a bit of their cut.
If they can be more efficient, maybe they could survive.
This comment drastically underestimates the amount of capital spent on suppressing union activity, it's not as if they're operating in a vacuum.
For my coal mining grandfather, it meant safety equipment like respirators so you didn't get black lung, and that the company had to send down a meal for you if you were working a double (before that you had to rely on the next shift to give you items from their lunches, if they were willing to share).
We have OSHA for that today, so I don’t think the primary purpose of a union is to file OSHA complaints…
Who do you think lobbied to start OSHA? It was the unions.
But regardless of the history, it’s not longer especially relevant to the roles of unions today, and certainly adds nothing to the value unions supposedly provide to their members.
The question wasn't about what unions do today. The question specifically asked what unions were for. I stand by my statement that they were formed not only for pay increases, but also for working conditions improvements.
The benefits of employers to employees has certainly gone down and that’s disgusting but the creator economy that’s been propped up by the internet in a way that was not possible beforehand I think is plenty good, and not a viable career/job for most people.
I don’t think people are going to eschew traditional employment en made to try to make it as creators. It’s not going to happen for most and the pressing needs of survival aren’t going to allow many to pursue it.
Social media influencers are gross for a lot of reasons but people making content for an audience that is willing to pay is a good thing. Structuring a company so that 90% of its workforce aren’t employees to deny having to pay them reasonable wages/benefits is a bad thing. I just don’t think they’re directly connected.
Creative jobs, whether journalism, acting, writing, music, etc. have always been a difficult business.
Creator economy is no different than the poor musicians 30 years ago.
The fall of unions and rise of gig economy is more concerning. But unrelated to entertainment industry, which has always been insecure/underpaid/risky..
Side note: when I heard how taxies used to be rented on per-day basis by the driver, I'll admit I became less sure the gig economy was a step down.
Maybe. 30 years ago you could work a blue collar day job that paid decent money and play gigs at night. More places had live music back then too.
Opera, orchestras, chamber music, the “big band” period, and the 1950s-1990s “music industry” were all products of their respective times’ technological and economic structure, which some people learned to exploit and others did not. Those exploitation models were just passing artifacts.
You just see a particular point in time, a business model, and the life of the then winners and draw a conclusion from that.
I don’t know what the future may be but it is most certainly not a return to any status quo ante. But I do know that apart from a minuscule fraction of people, nobody in “music” (however it was described at a given time) ever made much, if any living from it.
It was musicians who seem to have coined the word "gig" back in the 1920s. The usage of the term is a reference to what they have always been dealing with.
But if we're on the topic of creatives, just look at the pushback that the Jackson 5 received in America or that NWA had in the '90s. Yes it probably was easier to be a white, male artist in the '50s-'90s (like the Beatles), but the case was much murkier for anyone else. And it's not like the establishment went unscathed by technology change either. There's a song titled "Video Killed the Radio Star" after all...
Yes, minority artists might not have made it big in the past, but there was demand in the establishments that were run/supported/patronized by their respective group.
If anything, technology has made success/wealth inequity worse by making music cheap and accessible, thus allowing people to have unlimited music (replays) for little money. This killed a lot of live music and funneled that money to the upper echelon on musicians.
Further improvements in portable audio like the cassette tape, the CD, and eventually digital music only improved the portability of music for individuals but commercial settings have had the ability to replace live music at venues for a century. I don't think the root cause for the decline of live music was technical. I think cultural attitudes toward music changed, that's all.
I do see cultural attitudes playing a role too. My guess is they both play a part.
An abundance of wealth and entertainment. A record number of people are able to eek out a minimal living without having to work in traditional markets. It is not a great life, but not desperate enough to enter the job market.
So a blog post where the guy teases his next entry -> don't mind. A blog post where the guy constantly intersperses affiliate links with ad copy -> irritating.
"Wow, this pie is incredible, you should open a bakery!"
I think Californians might be worse about it than most, too. Maybe it's all the pressure of keeping up with insane cost of living, plus the feeling that there's just so much stupid money sloshing around that surely you should be able to scoop some of it up...
The fact is that there is and always will be a market for consumerization Hobbies. People who would rather watch someone play a game then play a game, watch a band than play in one.
Yes, more people try to be creators than will be successful at it. So what? Unless they try to socialize the costs of their experiment, good for them. Life is an adventure and you are free to make mistakes.
Pretty much what happened to 95% of rock'n'roll bands, I'd guess. Either the big guys smell an opportunity and 'let' you have enough to keep working ... or you become a one-hit wonder.
Honestly, there aren't that many truly creative people. One giant is followed by a thousand wannabes. The gifted need to find new, uninfected ways to nourish and protect themselves ... with a minimum loss of creative time ... or else. One dedicated server, a couple of maintainers and an accountant would keep them away from all the sharks. Then it's up to word-of-mouth.
I think that's a pipe dream, but I can hope.
I don’t have the expendable income to support every single creator I’d like to via Patreon/etc, and I also don’t like their livelihoods being dependent on a single company who can ruin them based on some arbitrary algorithmic magic box of reasons. I’d happily contribute small amounts based on individual content that I liked though, and spread my money wider that way.
For instance, hobbies are no longer things one does because they bring joy—they're now activities that people haven't figured out how to monetize. Before you’ve purchased a pound of clay and a pottery wheel—before you’ve even made your first mug—you’re buying a domain, designing a logo, and thinking about whether to sell your ceramics on Etsy or Shopify. And maybe you'll start a Patreon to document the learning process. I think for people who have been formed by the creator economy, people who have grown up in this space, the impulse to create and SELL seems almost pathological.
Then, there are the people who are afflicted with what I'm calling curatorial neuroticism. These are people who view curation as creation—they curate and share at a frantic pace. They gather, organize, present, and archive information obsessively. There's no stopping them. They spend more time writing in their seventh iteration of their Zettelkasten than they do interacting with people. If only I could get organized, if I could only "cultivate my second brain", I will unlock my creative potential, I'll figure out how to make money on Substack with a highly curated newsletter, or something.
What I sense in the curatorial creation is not really a "product", but a need to be seen. People share what they share—all of the lists, and links, and archives—so that they are viewed as having a certain literary taste, or wanting to be seen as having read these books, watched these movies, and so on.
Anyway, a quote from: Leisure, The Basis of Culture:
"I have never bothered or asked", Goethe said to Friedrich Sort in 1830, "in what way was I useful to society as a whole; I contended myself with expressing what I recognized as good and true. That has certainly been useful in a wide circle; but that was not the aim; it was the necessary result."
Despite these realities more people regard themselves as "artists" than ever before. Amazes me how many people enroll in art schools at $40K/yr. Student loans have to be paid off later on, from a hard financial viewpoint it doesn't pencil out. Yet year after year no shortage of people sign up, level of talent notwithstanding.
You're probably right. What you observe is an expression of form over substance. Maybe it's a "cargo cult" sort of thing where people think wrapping themselves in the trappings of "creatives" is the same as being genuinely creative.
The demise of hobbies probably speaks to denigrated value of "work", that is, expending effort to reach goals. I can tell you that printmaking is 5% design, color, etc., and 95% painstaking physical and cognitive labor, in short, it's work. OTOH looking for shortcuts eventually fails, and failure is followed by yet another round of seeking shortcuts.
Here's my prediction, sooner or later the "shortcut culture" burns itself out, though I won't place any bets on when that will happen.
Here's Bored Ape Yacht Club's pitch deck.[1]
"BAYC is just the beginning. We are building the next frontier".
"The FOMO is real. For every BAYC member there are hundreds dying to gain access."
[1] https://twitter.com/LeonidasNFT/status/1505058932758360064
I did co-create a kid. Should I be demanding residuals?
Phooey.
Are there people churning out crap hoping to make a quick buck? Yes. Are there corporations trying to exploit creators and fans? Yes. Are there other problems I'm not even aware of? In all probability, yes.
But I also see a lot of good things happening. Examples from my own interests:
Table-top RPGs: before, you only got to play whatever was available at your local store (if you even had one) which was probably whatever the big companies put out (D&D) or your own crappy homebrew system. Maybe you hear about something amazing someone else has done and if you're lucky you get a photocopy/scan of their notes and try to figure things out from that. Today, you can discover heaps of amazing games and support their creators through Kickstarter, YouTube, Patreon, etc.
Muay Thai: I support someone on Patreon and YouTube who puts out tons of content. Hours and hours of her own training footage (with fighters past and present, many of them legends) with commentary. Full videos of all her fights (270 and counting), again with commentary. Commentary on legendary fights. Interviews with MT legends. A long-form podcast. Long-form articles. These cover not just technique but also culture and history. All done for love of the art but also costing money. I don't know how else all this can be made available to a wide audience and be preserved for future generations.
The need to make money modifies the artistic process. Some expressions will be modified or straight up suppressed if they are perceived as unprofitable or offensive.
Advertising is the simplest example. All it takes for a website to censor itself is for someone to complain to Google that some page is offensive, causing them to suspend their revenue stream.
But that's always been true, the creator economy didn't create that dynamic. But now, people across the world can support art that wouldn't otherwise exist.
In my Muay Thai example, there are no government or large organisations that I know of doing or funding the work to document, preserve, and spread the art in the way it's being done on YouTube and Patreon. There should be, but there isn't. I'm happy I found and am able to support the two people doing the work.
https://aurdia.com/creators/