'The Creator Economy Is Eating Creative Acts'

This moment on the internet is weird—and more than a little frustrating. I sat down with Charlie Gilkey and Kate Tyson to hash it out.

Photo by Federica Campanaro on Unsplash

“I love and believe in creative work, but the creator economy
is sort of eating creative acts.” — Kate Tyson

According to reporting by Taylor Lorenz and Drew Harwell in the Washington Post last fall, the creator economy is worth about $250 billion globally. Experts expect that number to nearly double over the next three years. 

In 2022, YouTube estimated that its creators supported nearly 400,000 full-time jobs. That's four times the number of jobs at General Motors. 

It seems the creator economy is booming. Or is it?

Platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TechTalk are happy to advertise the ways they support creators with features and advice. Their aspirational creator hubs give the distinct impression that becoming a creator is akin to getting paid to be yourself.

But that said, when Kate Tyson (of Wanderings) told me that she doesn’t think the creator economy should exist but that she couldn’t put that in writing, I told her she was wrong—about not being able to put that in writing. It turns out that our mutual friend Charlie Gilkey (of Productive Flourishing) had told her the same thing. So I arranged a meeting of the minds.

“I love and believe in creative work,” Kate said toward the beginning of our conversation. But she added that she feels like “the creator economy is sort of eating creative acts.”

From our three separate vantage points, we observe the confusion and frustration among creatives who are trying to make a career for themselves, given the tools and opportunities of the current internet era. Social media platforms are increasingly talked about as a necessary evil for a gilded precariat¹ that’s trying to look good, sound wise, stay hip, and just figure out how to put food on the table.

We also see how the confusion and frustration felt by creative people—including our friends and clients—stems from (and adds to) a considerable misunderstanding about the incentives, market forces, and algorithmic nudging at work with the creator economy. 

Today, we want to clear up some of those misunderstandings, turn some frustration into clarity, and shed light on the machinery behind the so-called creator economy.

Keep reading or listen to our conversation on the What Works podcast.

#CreatorGoals

Let’s start with what seems like an easy question: who is a creator? 

As you can imagine, that is, in fact, not an easy question. 

“I don’t think people are actually clear on what they are trying to do,” observed Kate. Does being a creator mean trying to be an influencer? Does it mean making content for social media? Does it mean scratching a creative itch on the internet? Does it mean marketing a business or building a personal brand? It could mean any or all of those things depending on what sales funnels an aspiring creator ends up in.

This indeterminacy exists because the commercial systems we work within have different goals and considerations than we do. “These platforms have a set of values and things that they’re trying to do that are, by definition, going to be misaligned most of the time with what we are trying to do and how we’re trying to thrive as individuals,” Kate explained.

At first, we thought we could end the conversation there—about 10 minutes in. But, fortunately for you, we realized we should probably unpack that.

So, who is a creator?

Charlie offered a simple definition of a creator: “someone who is dollarizing, economizing, their creativity on the different platforms that exist.”

When asked whether he considered himself a creator, he replied, “I am a sort of reluctant creator,” adding that he certainly does things creators do (e.g., blogging, making podcasts, making videos, etc.) but not at the scale that, say, professional YouTubers or TikToks do. After all, the man has a successful coaching and consulting company to run!

“In my constitutional rebelliousness,” Kate shared, “it will come as no surprise to you both that I don’t think I’ve ever used that term for myself.” Kate is an artist. She’s happy to call herself a creative. But for her, the label creator carries a lot of baggage. “If it feels like what I should do, I’m not going to do it,” she added. Even when she was in art school, she was clear that she didn’t want her livelihood to be dependent on her creative output.

It took me a long time to come around to the term creator. I still don't love it. But I’ve accepted it.

I remember six or seven years ago being in a meeting with a tech CEO who wanted more insight into the people in my audience because they believed that my audience was their audience. This tech CEO kept calling my audience creators. I gently pushed back. I said that people in my audience don't think of themselves as creators. They're not trying to make money from the content they post. Their content is marketing for their small businesses that sell products, services, or subscriptions.

What's changed is that I have become a creator myself.

I sell access to my content directly. I get paid to write articles for other publications. I've always created a lot of content, and I've always seen it as a core business function. But now it is my business.

Because it’s my business now, I have an even more intimate relationship with the economic forces that shape a creator's work than I did before. And those forces exert themselves at the most fundamental level of creator economics.

#DigitalSharecropping

Aspiring creators enter the market because they see an opportunity. They might have been underutilized in previous work. Their industry might have undergone significant disruption. They might just want to give the whole ‘making stuff on the internet’ a go. Often, aspiring creators operate under the assumption that “if you have some creative outlet, you should start putting dollar signs to it,” observed Charlie.

To put dollar signs to it, aspiring creators look to the platforms that promise to connect them with fans (er, sorry, community) that will support their work and pay their bills. Unfortunately, the platforms aren’t in the ‘connecting creators to paying fans’ business. They’re in the data business. For a platform like Instagram or TikTok, the benefits of having creators making content for the platform include producing “organic” content to run ads against, generating user behavior that produces marketing data, and increasing time on site to maximize ad inventory.

The platforms own the land, and creators work it.

Charlie pointed out that this is otherwise known as digital sharecropping.

First, sharecropping, as you might have learned about it in history class, is a system of land management in which the landowner allows tenant farmers to work their land in exchange for a share of the crop. In this way, the land owner profits from land ownership by virtue of others' labor.

Nicholas Carr coined the term digital sharecropping in 2006, and it describes how the internet functions today.

Carr writes:

What’s being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value of content. [The platforms] have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It’s only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale—on a web scale—that the business becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy.

Sharecropping, as a system of labor, worked really well for landowners. Landowners got to enjoy their lives of leisure while other people worked their land. But the tenant farmers had no hope of upward mobility, no hope of working hard enough to take a break. The ruling class designed the system to keep laborers stuck in a constant struggle for survival.

You might notice some similarities with digital sharecropping. Sure, there are the millionaire creators who’ve made it big—although most still have grueling workloads. But they are vastly outnumbered by the people who have tried, and tried, and tried, and tried—and might still be trying lest they feel like a failure—and have not even been able to quit their day jobs (or day businesses).

#CreatingContent

I’ve come to despise the word content. I know I’m not alone. The word itself feels so commercial even when the media we call content isn’t strictly commercial. Since Kate is an artist, I asked her how she differentiates between content and art. She admitted that trying to name the difference makes her head spin.

“It's not that art doesn't exist within commerce and markets and isn't something that people make livelihoods out of and sell. And it's not even something that doesn't follow market trends because that also happens,” she explained. Instead, “artistic practice and output allows certain kinds of expression and types of creation that content creation tries to weed out.” The category and practice of art encompasses a vast variety of expression—and variety is antithetical to the category and practice of content creation as we’ve come to recognize it. What’s weird, deviant, deeply personal, unpalatable, or even just mediocre is still art.

Art matters to the artist. Content matters to the audience.

That’s an oversimplification, of course, and the two are not mutually exclusive. But it’s a helpful distinction for understanding the mechanisms at play. 

Content is contingent on distribution in a way that art is not. When we make content, we’re attempting to attach an idea to a form that a distribution system (e.g., a social media platform) can recognize. “This triangle piece of content goes into this triangle hole,” Charlie quipped, “This square content goes into that square hole. It’s just what it is because of how it needs to be expressed” to achieve distribution. “The point of making content is to get an outcome,” he added. 

The success of mega-influencers or thought leaders who have, in effect, transcended algorithmic management can make it difficult to see that. The Seth Godins, Mel Robbinses, and Brene Browns of the internet don’t appear to be trying to “get an outcome.” They don’t have to. Their influence transcends distribution as a primary goal. The sheer gravity of their influence and the size of their platforms guarantee the distribution of their content—regardless of whether they tailor-make it to the algorithm’s specifications. 

This platform dominance is the effect of preferential attachment. Preferential attachment is the idea that once something or someone becomes popular or powerful, that person’s popularity or power will grow since power and popularity create reinforcing feedback loops.

The more popular something is, the more likely someone is to see it and decide they like it too—making it even more popular. The more powerful someone is, the more likely people will try to get into their network—making them even more powerful.

Collin Brooke, a rhetoric and technology scholar, characterizes social media as follows:

...it’s a system that rewards early entry, popularity, originality, and other factors—it’s a system where the rich get richer, and entry into the market gets progressively more difficult the longer it exists.

Yep, that checks out.

#TheVectorEconomy

If we take a look under the hood of this whole creator economy thing, we might just find a different economic system entirely—what we might call “the vector economy.” 

In her book Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, McKenzie Wark examines 21st-century megacorporations and notices that they don’t follow the same formula as truly capitalist corporations. Instead of appending yet another adjective to capitalism (e.g., platform, neoliberal, monopoly, etc.), she suggests that these corporations have developed an entirely new way to extract value from the market. 

“The vectoralist class owns and controls the vector, a concept I use to describe in the abstract the infrastructure on which information is routed, whether through time or space,” writes Wark. What the vectoralist owns isn’t a factory, land, or machinery. They own the flow of information and the digital structures through which it passes. They can then use the flow of information to generate revenue in a myriad of ways. Labor power or material assets no longer limited the accumulation of wealth. Any way they can reconfigure that flow can add billions of dollars to their bottom line.

Kate told Charlie and me that Wark’s theory has been helpful in understanding who rises to the top within today’s information systems and how these systems fundamentally alter class relations. “So those of us that are creating content and information are the sort of new labor—in Wark’s terms, hackers,” explains Kate. And then the owners of the means of production are now the folks that own the vectors of information.”

Hacker labor (the kind I’m doing right now!) isn’t limited by time, place, or physicality. It happens constantly. The vectoralist doesn’t merely own the flow of information we create; they also exert influence over what we think about and what we do with those thoughts. The vector absorbs resistance (like this essay!) and uses that content for its own ends.

What we believe, how we act, and who we hang out with are all influenced by platform constructs. In other words, we’re all platform-pilled. “Once you start seeing this in terms of a larger structure of extraction,” Kate shared, “[you realize] ‘Oh, right. Of course. If we’ve run out of natural resources to extract from … what better thing to jump to than individuals’ own authenticity and souls and how they make meaning in the world. Great. That sounds infinite.’”

#NowWithMoreAI

When it comes to Wark’s brand of “hacking,” the challenge used to be coming up with new ways to package the same old ideas—that is, making more content. Now, Charlie observed, producing content is handled. Artificial intelligence can do it for you. 

The speed of the generative AI rollout—from LinkedIn to Grammarly to Canva—reveals the disconnect between what users (and creators) value and what platforms value. Platforms value information flowing through their vectors. If Grammarly or Canva makes it easier and faster for people to churn out content, the platforms are happy because that’s how they extract value from the system. Users (and creators) don’t want feeds full of AI-generated content. They miss seeing their friends’ photos and hearing from the people they care about. 

But, as Cory Doctorow—Mr. Enshittification himself—recently put it, platforms are “too big to care.”

The catch-22 here is that thanks to deliberate social engineering on the part of platforms, we’ve all agreed to value the “virtual social goods” that platforms mediate. Whether it’s a like, or a share, or the relative clout of a personal brand, “we have created a new virtual social good that can be exchanged and parlayed into other goods,” explains Charlie. Like for like. Follow for follow. And also engagement metrics for brand sponsorships, subscriber counts for book deals, “know, like, and trust” for online course purchases, and so on.

Charlie notes that some of the backlash to social media over the last few years has come from a reckoning with the value of these virtual social goods. People are considering what virtual social goods are actually valuable to them and which they can opt out of.

“We run into problems [when] people stop questioning whether social goods are actually good for us,” Charlie cautions. For instance, he notes that when Substack rolled out direct messaging on the platform, the Substack team presented the feature as an obvious good. “I don’t know that more people DMing me is a good that is actually good for me,” he explains. I agree. It’s not good for me! But it’s good for Substack because it concentrates more activity on the platform, where that activity becomes part of the vector. 

“We run into problems [when] people stop questioning whether social goods are actually good for us.” —Charlie Gilkey

#FeedTheAlgo

In the creator economy, more activity is good for platforms, so platforms code their algorithms to prioritize more activity. That means that content that generates more activity will always beat out content that generates less activity. Platforms claim that this means they fill our feeds with the content we want to see, but it’s really the content that we will respond to most. That might seem like the semantics. However, there is a fundamental difference.

Kate has noticed that people she follows, especially those with larger platforms who offer a capitalist critique, have taken to creating “for the algo” posts. Knowing that images or videos with their face in them get more engagement and are therefore likely to reach more people, these creators will post a selfie or reel of them to entice engagement. Then, the caption or additional images will contain the “real” content of the post. 

“They’re very aware of the trade-off that they’re making,” explained Kate. Creators acknowledge that the platform has these “rules” that they hate, but they have to play by those rules to share what they want to share. “There’s almost this sigh and link, ‘I’m gonna feed the beast, and then we can go talk over here about what I actually want to talk about,’” she added.

Something similar happens on LinkedIn. “One of the things that pisses me off about LinkedIn is that you have to do the stupid ‘link in comment,’” Charlie complained. It’s pretty unusual to hear that anything “pisses off” Charlie, so I had to include this line! He continued:

What they’re essentially telling us is:’ Your job, Charlie, is to keep people on this platform. And anytime you try not to do that, we are going to penalize you.’ So we have to do the stupid [thing where] we’ll write the content, say ‘link in comment,’ and then go comment to three or four people [on other posts].

To be completely transparent, I didn’t know that was how it worked! Sure, I know to put the link in a comment (although I can’t be bothered), but I didn’t realize you were supposed to go comment on other people’s stuff first. Amazing.

“How many games do we need to play with the bros for us not to have them get in the way and be mediators in the relationship that we've had with people who ostensibly opted in?” Charlie added. “That's where it gets super frustrating.”

“We’re trying to have this conversation between self and audience or business and audience,” Kate reflected, “and that’s relational, and it’s real … that’s very valuable.” But that relationship is interrupted. “There’s a third elephant in the room,” she added, “we’ve got to deal with this platform over here. It’s part of the conversation, too.”

That “third elephant” is what's at the heart of the creator economy. The concept of the creator economy is predicated on peer-to-peer exchange. It's a supposedly disintermediated economic structure. I can do business with you, and you can do business with me. Value flows freely between interested parties. There are no gatekeepers, no institutions deciding who gets to publish, speak, or present.

“There’s a third elephant in the room. We’ve got to deal with this platform over here.
It’s part of the conversation, too.” — Kate Tyson

But that's not how it works in reality. Instead of a human gatekeeper with taste and personal preferences, there's code. Instead of an institution rooted in tradition or public support, there's a for-profit corporation, accountable to shareholders and often operating in economic realms that regulations and laws still need to catch up with. Platforms present themselves as mere tools or free marketplaces. But in fact, their logic is woven into every transaction we make in the creator economy—be it a like, a share, or a purchase.

Platforms don't stand by and let peer-to-peer exchange happen. They're not absent from these relations. 

The creator economy isn't peer-to-peer. It's peer-to-machine-to-peer. 

I finally understood this while reading Richard Seymour's The Twittering Machine. He writes:

They have created a machine for us to write to. The bait is that we are interacting with other people: our friends, professional colleagues, celebrities, politicians … We are not interacting with them, however, but with the machine. We write to it, and it passes on the message for us after keeping a record of the data.

Here's the thing, though: it doesn't only keep a record of the data. The machine also decides whether or not that message gets passed on. And as Charlie said, the machine is optimized for its own goals. It doesn't care that others have opted in to follow us. The algorithm delivers the output that the platform coded into it—time on site, engagement, ad delivery, etc. And those outputs all come out in the wash as shareholder value. 

Therefore, the most influential people in the creator economy aren't creators. They're not influencers. They're not even software engineers. They are the shareholders who dictate what's valuable to tech CEOs who dictate what's valuable to the code that runs their platform.

Value hierarchy creates a real economic problem for creators.

Sure, it’s hard to get paid—but we’re talking about an even more fundamental economic problem. Based on our interactions with platforms, we have no insight into what the market (i.e., the people who could pay us) truly wants. We only know what platforms want.

“If your stuff’s not performing well … you might be aware that the algorithm is doing some shenanigans to tank your views or likes,” explained Kate, but that awareness doesn’t always translate into frustration with the platform. “There’s this doubt that creeps in about your own work, what you should be doing,” she shared. 

“Even if you’re aware that the algorithm is slapping you on the wrist when you’re posting the way it doesn’t want you to, there’s still this effect on what you publish, what you create, and what you put out in the world. Even if it’s subconsciously, that’s going to invade your work.”

#FitTrianglePegsInCircleHoles

To return to Charlie's earlier metaphor about content, creating content entails fitting triangle shapes into triangle-shaped holes.

If what you make is circle shapes, but all the holes you can plug into are triangle-shaped, then you have two options. You can either make your circle shapes and accept that people won't see them until a circle-shaped hole miraculously appears (if it ever does). Or you could take your circle shapes and sand down the edges to make triangle shapes. Eventually, you'll realize that it's just easier to start making triangles and skip the whole sanding down the circles step. 

Making triangles might be disappointing, frustrating, or uninteresting to you—and that sucks. But you have to play by the algorithm’s rules if you want people to see what you’re making. Your labor is now managed by the algorithm, even though you’re an “entrepreneur” who banks on “self-expression.”

Algorithmic management doesn't only impact individual experiences and labor relations. It changes culture. It changes politics. It changes every other sector of the economy.

Algorithmic management and the logic it emerges from have no room for authenticity despite championing authentic experience as its chief value. If making triangles (or selfies or reels or derivative life advice content) is the only way my work can get passed on, and I am not a maker of triangles (or selfies or reels or derivative life advice content), then either I have to find some other way to make a living or give up my circle-making no matter how authentic to me it might be.

Sure, that sounds like responding to the market or giving people what they want. But to be clear, making triangles instead of circles isn't responding to the market. I’m not making some economically logical decision.

Algorithms and platforms are not markets. And the creator economy? Well, it isn't an economy. Circles may well be in demand, but if circles don't provide the output that platform shareholders want, it doesn't matter how many people want circles.

That's very abstract. Frankly, it's kind of silly. 

However, a similar value hierarchy mechanism is at work in something much more tangible—like the US housing market. There is a massive demand for affordable housing. There is a considerable demand for multi-unit buildings. There is a huge demand for single-family homes that cost something reasonable to a family living off the median household income. Yet, a complex system of building regulations, local governance, lending policies, developer priorities, and tax policy means that contractors are busy building second homes for hedge fund managers and healthcare company bigwigs instead of building the kind of homes we actually need.

That complex system—well, it's a kind of algorithm. Its output satisfies a group of people with power and utterly disappoints the market—that is, the people who actually want to pay rent or buy homes.

#WhatToDoNext

At this point, you're probably wondering, “What do I do now?” And you also probably know that I'm not going to tell you what to do. Hell, I don't know what to do.

However, we can all pay closer attention. 

We can notice when our actions benefit someone or something other than us or the people we care about. We can notice when we start sanding down our circles to make triangles. We can notice when we're feeding the algo and ask if there is something else we could be doing with our time. We can notice that the virtual social goods we’ve accumulated aren’t actually valuable to us.

So, pay attention. You might not like what you notice, but you can’t do something different until you recognize what you’re doing right now.

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Next week, we'll continue the conversation and discuss the small business repercussions of working in the creator economy and how creators, small business owners, and independent workers could push back on platforms. 

1. Hat tip to Adrian Daub on this week’s episode of In Bed With The Right for the phrase “gilded precarity.”