The American Creator Economy is a Trap

The future of public discourse can't just be folksy, underpaid marketing, right? Right?

Programming note: As you’ll read in a moment, I’m doing my very best to get some traction under The Rip Current Podcast, and the platform I have my sights on is Spotify. If you’re a Spotify user, could you please take a moment to follow the show there, and maybe even rate and share it? It’s an ENORMOUS help in getting the algorithmic flywheel turning that could make the show a hit. I have lots of amazing guests coming up.

Paid subscribers will continue to get early, exclusive access to next week’s podcast here on Substack, before it goes live on other platforms. Thank you so much! On to today’s post…

You know that hydrophobic sand they sell for kids? Immerse it in water and it still comes out dry? Living in the Bay Area as an independent journalist who writes and broadcasts tech criticism is like being that sand. This place is awash in money. I’m submerged in it. But I cannot get wet.

Here’s what I mean: I was invited recently to an event for creators, billed as a chance to network with others in the independent online life, learn some tips and tricks, and perhaps get noticed by a few larger companies. I didn’t really understand what any of that meant, but I’m of the attitude these days that I’ll attend more or less anything if there’s a chance of learning something, because who the hell knows what’s going on anymore. I arrived in downtown San Francisco wearing a dark outfit I hoped would signal both seriousness and what TV people call camera-readiness, and made my way into a room of perhaps 500 people mingling before a live podcast taping, the main event.

Surf your authentic passion, everybody. Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash

I scanned the mishmash of creators nervously picking out their seats and looking for people they knew. It was a gallery of online archetypes. There’s the tattooed chef. Here’s the punk-rock crafter. Yonder the makeup artists. Surely someone there could tell me how one makes a living on social media, and specifically how I might.

I blabbed to the first person I met that she seemed too sophisticated to be a mere creator, which I meant as a compliment but was the perfectly wrong thing to say, as she turned out to be the host of the whole shindig. (This sort of thing is more and more common these days, as I spend a greater percentage of my days typing and taping alone.) She told me she’d been in the business for years as a marketer, and had it pretty dialed in. Oh amazing, I told her. Please explain it to me. How do you break through in a field as crowded — I waved around the room — as all this?

She told me that I should simply surf the authentic passion I have for my subject. I nodded along, confused. She also told me that the creator economy is just like nature, and that because she’d been informally studying nature for some time she could say with absolute confidence — and she did — that once I had a grip on the laws of the natural world this would all make sense to me too.

“Okay cool,” I think I said. “But how do these people make money?”

“Oh!” she said, eyes friendly. “Well, you have to have a day job. Only a tiny percentage of people actually make a living this way. And it can take years.”

Our conversation continued to teeter on the reef. She explained that this gathering was about putting these creators together in a room with brands that might want to pay them a couple thousand bucks to endorse some product or other — arranging those connections turned out to be the real business of the evening, not surfing each others’ authentic passions. Then she took a quick scroll through my social media presence on her phone, and wrinkled her nose in the friendliest way possible. At this point our ship broke apart.

“Oh, I see, so you’re pretty critical,” she observed sadly, eyes on her screen.

“Well, yes,” I told her, blinking. “There’s a lot to criticize right now.”

“See the thing is, the companies generally don’t want to be next to criticism. Only a handful would even consider it, really.”

And that was the end of my evening. She said goodbye and took her seat up front. I watched a few minutes of the podcast, and considered the idea that while these young artists and inventors were hoping to score a modest payday—maybe someday even break through to six figures—shilling carbon steel pans and anti-shine creams, I wasn’t qualified to do that at all. I don’t even drink booze anymore, shutting me off from the nation’s most constant ad sector. So I stood up, finished the non-alcoholic beer I’d ordered, glanced once more at the view, and went downstairs to unlock my bike and ride home.

While the U.S. waited to see whether TikTok would be banned a few months ago — a threat Trump is still holding over the platform — analysts cast about for parallel circumstances elsewhere in the world, and several landed on India. The world’s most populous nation banned ByteDance’s platform in June of 2020, and it remains forbidden to the population of nearly 1.5B today.

Most of the fallout covered in the press had to do with lost economic opportunity. TikTok is a highly curated slot machine of random-seeming content, which in any country can give people from any part of society a shot at going viral and developing a following, and in some cases even a living. That financial loss was the focus of much American coverage.

Others, however, pointed out that the Indian government’s shutdown of TikTok may have had more to do with stifling political speech than with cutting off China’s influence or trying to protect young Indians against brain rot. Raman Jit Singh Chima, the Asia-Pacific policy director at Access Now, told Time magazine that the TikTok ban in India “has built a precedent that has allowed the Indian government to continue blocking access to more web and social media content, including very often content posted by journalists or critics of the Administration.”

At the time I was most haunted, however, by the words of Pranjal Jain, an Indian creator and writer who described what social media became in India after the ban went into effect. She said she was grieving the death of long-form social discourse—people discussing politics, economics, their hopes for the future —the sort of stuff that for me makes TikTok so interesting at the moment. After the ban, she said, there was no longer a place for that sort of thing in India. “Short form content here is [now] mostly limited to skits and consumer-forward things…things to buy, things to wear.”

This is no coincidence, of course. The gravitational pull toward “lifestyle” social media began immediately. Instagram launched Reels — its TikTok knockoff — for the first time in India, a few months after the TikTok ban. YouTube debuted Shorts — same concept, and also for India first — a month later. Those companies don’t waste an opportunity, and their formulas reward consumer-focused content. Today India represents the single largest market for both Instagram (362M users) and YouTube (491M). It really is possible to kill off online discourse in a country, it turns out. In fact, it’s pretty easy.

I recently asked an experienced podcast producer for feedback on my own show. She told me to slap my face on the logo, and to focus on Spotify, among other very helpful pieces of advice, but chief among her messages to me was the admonishment to keep telling the audience what The Rip Current means as a metaphor, so I’m going to do it for you again here:

The Rip Current takes its name from the hidden, powerful outward flow of water off a beach that so often pulls swimmers off their feet and sucks them out into deep water. Those swimmers often wear themselves out trying to paddle directly against the rip back to shore, rather than cutting sideways to get out of it, and wind up exhausted and in true danger. I believe there are many Rip Currents pulling on us at the moment, and this newsletter and podcast are my effort to step back and analyze them, so we can see and avoid them in future if at all possible.

What I’m trying to describe today is a pull away from discourse and toward chintzy brand deals, away from paying people for considered, studied analyses of the current political and economic climate and toward paying people to say what companies want them to say, with a tiny bit of improvisation for authenticity.

And while I of course want someone to figure out a business model for journalism that allows folks like me to keep practicing it, I’m also concerned that the creator economy that is coming along to replace journalism is itself a trap. It’s paying people to push useless products, sure. I have all sorts of philosophical objections there. But it’s also not paying them enough. The creator economy, like the gig economy before it, consumes the time and energy of millions while only meaningfully rewarding the small number of people who build the facilitating platforms. As someone recently put it to me, “you’re working land you don’t own.”

So we’re in a world that increasingly devalues discourse, while tricking folks into replacing it with promotion, and stiffing them in the process. None of it adds up to a functioning democracy, in my view. But it also doesn’t even add up to a living. Surf your authentic passions, everybody. Study nature. But remember that we’re going to need raw, angry, thoughtful discourse to get through all this. And we’ll have to pay people for it.