How to Take Back the Vision of the Creator Economy

"How do you want to live?" that question—and a few more—are at the heart of my conversation with Charlie Gilkey and Kate Tyson.

Photo by Jacob Mejicanos on Unsplash

The promise of the creator economy is a life well lived doing what you love.

Fulfillment. Autonomy. Flexibility. Self-expression. Community. A stable, comfortable middle-class life.

"The model promises a more human and less automated interaction," writes Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker. "But this emerging field," he continues, "resembles a gig economy for digital content. Participants are still precarious workers, relying on the whims of corporations for their livelihoods."

To my mind, the creator economy represents a sort of overflow room for a particular brand of surplus labor—what I've called a "surplus elite."

I've been part of this surplus labor pool since 2009, long before Instagram was founded and YouTube started calling its users "creators." Over the past 15 years, I've witnessed the birth, growth, and maturation of what we now know as the creator economy. It's been a journey of ups and downs, of hopes and disappointments.

By and large, the people who are shuttled into this overflow room are those of us who punched our ticket to the middle class with a college education and colorful extracurricular interests. We may have entered the professional world and embarked on a chosen career. Or maybe we lost our way and ended up in one of the other overflow rooms like Starbucks or Barnes & Noble. We could have been doing just fine before the 2008 economic crash, the 2016 election, or whatever 2020 was.

For one reason or another, the traditional middle-class job market didn't want us or couldn't satisfy us. It failed to meet our needs, leaving us here—together—in the surplus labor pool doing what surplus labor does: fending for ourselves. Even across a broad spectrum of "success," what we've built is precarious.

Look. That sounds bleak. I know it does.

Many parts of this world—online and offline—that are bleak and give me little reason for hope.

But that's not what this essay is about.

Philosopher Rahel Jaeggi argues that our experience of alienation is bound up with the question of how we want to live. Alienation, she says, occurs when we don't even think to ask that question any longer.

An alienated relation is a deficient relation one has to oneself, to the world, and to others. Indifference, instrumentalization, reification, absurdity, artificiality, isolation, meaninglessness, impotence—all these ways of characterizing the relations in question are forms of this deficiency.
— Rahel Jaeggi, Alienation

The promise of the creator economy stopped many of us from asking that question. We took for granted that the vision expressed by venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and marketing machines was our vision, too. We took on that vision to de-alienate ourselves and our labor.

But today, there are murmurs. Whispers. And even some shouts. Perhaps we've ended up right back where we started.

Keep reading or listen on the What Works podcast.

We are asking, "How do I want to live?" and realizing that it's not like this.

This essay is the second half of my deep dive into the creator economy with

Charlie Gilkey

and

Kate Tyson

about the creator economy. In it, we ask critical questions. How do we want to live? How do we want to create? What do we want from this type of production? What do we expect from the technology we use? And, most importantly, what can we build together?

But let's start with a different question first:

What are we willing to do to be heard?

Politicians know that shaping a message is critical to getting that message shared. Sometimes, that can mean playing to unusual audiences. Charlie reminded us of the press junket President Obama went on to drum up support for the Affordable Care Act. "He ended up on all these random comedy shows that millennials watched," he explained, "because it was important enough to him to show up to do that sort of thing."

Obama, his speechwriters, and his press team were savvy—and, I think, more than a little playful. Their tolerance for the late-aughts media scene seemed grounded in both fervent belief in the message and genuine interest in mass culture. That's a great combination to have if you're in the creator economy.

"There are some pieces of work that are important enough to play the game," Charlie explained, "to get it out in that shape and form because it's more important to have that reach and impact than it is" to deliver it with the rigor of a philosophical essay (or stuffy political speech).

Features, fads, and formats

Spend any time in the waters of the creator economy (i.e., on a social media platform), and you'll learn that some kinds of content do better than others. There are features, fads, and formats that "work" when others do not. You'll also learn that these features, fads, and formats are not always what makes a message click with humans. Every time we send a piece of media out into the ether, we lean one way (humans) or the other (the algo).

The trouble is that humans may never see something that isn't made for the algorithm. "If you post it for the humans," Charlie illustrated, "and three humans see it, you haven't actually [accomplished your goal] if the point is to provoke and inspire and change minds."

There are some pieces of work that are worth molding into the shape the algorithm's code filters for. However, there is a point at which what the code filters for is irreconcilable with the integrity of that work. I don't think we're there yet—but I do think we're inching in that direction. "We're at a maximal extraction point," Kate observed, "where it's about advertising, and it's about people paying for access [to platforms and audiences]."

So, what are we willing to do to be heard?

To answer this question, we need to define not only the actions we're willing to take but also what it means to be heard and what we want others to hear. Many of us take for granted that social media marketing, or even online marketing in general, is the only way to spread a message today. And we take for granted that getting a message to spread on Instagram or TikTok is akin to people hearing it.

Each of these variables needs to be defined independently to determine a course of action. Once we've come up with a course of action, we must critically assess whether our goals are actually being met or whether we've succumbed to value capture.

What do we expect from platforms in return?

Today, more people know that they're providing free labor to social media platforms than they did a few years ago. But it's less common to consider what we're getting in return. And it's that exchange that's at the heart of any labor relation.

In capitalism, workers trade their time and capacity for work (labor power) for a wage. Even when that exchange is grossly unfair, it's acknowledged and, ostensibly, agreed to by both sides. In feudalism, workers provided labor, agricultural production, and crops to feudal lords in exchange for land use rights and military protection. Again, this exchange was grossly unfair in practice, but it was still acknowledged as such.

Despite their technofeudal structure, most platforms do not offer such exchange. The work we create, upload, and share is done entirely on spec. We might benefit from the work in some way. Or we might not. It's anybody's guess.

Creator math

That said, there's some insight we can gain from the few platforms that do offer a form of exchange. Substack is one of those platforms. For every dollar that Charlie, Kate, or I collect on Substack as a result of your premium subscription, Substack keeps 10 cents. Add to that the 3 cents that Stripe, the payment processor, claims, and "right out of the jump, [a creator] is only making 87 cents," explained Charlie. Fair enough, "it takes money to make money and all that." But Charlie continues, "At a certain point, enough people are going to [ask] : What am I getting for that 10%?"

Substack gives me an opportunity to put numbers to the exchange. I have some imperfect analytics, some revenue figures, and a year's worth of data to take a look at. Very, very few other platforms allow even that much transparency when it comes to figuring out what we get from them.

With Substack, the thinking goes that the 10% revenue share buys us the email delivery system, the website, and new subscribers through Substack's recommendation engine. I know what an email delivery system costs and I know what a website costs. So, if I subtract those expenses from the 10% of each paying subscriber that goes to Substack, I can get an idea of what those new subscribers are costing me. Is it worth it? I'm not sure. The attribution information isn't precise enough for me to really figure it out.

But Casey Newton, a tech journalist who founded the Platformer newsletter in 2020 and has considerably more data than I have, recently explained the relative value of Substack's recommendations to Nilay Patel of The Verge:

I ran the numbers, which, you know, I never should do because I'm bad at math, but I did run the numbers at the end of 2023. And as far as I can tell, despite adding 76,000, free subscribers to Platformer through this dark pattern on Substack in 2023, we ended up net 200 paid customers on the year. So, in other words, we basically stayed flat for the entire year despite adding 75 percent to our free subscriber base.

Now, I can't go and do this same math with Instagram or LinkedIn, so three cheers for some transparency.

Instagram claims I have 13,000 followers—but I can only reach maybe 1000 of them at a time. So what has that platform really given me? And what have I given that platform? Is the trade off worth it?

There's a tendency to think that creating content and using social media for marketing is just a nice add-on for our businesses. It can't hurt, right? And maybe we'll get something out of it: new customers, more brand awareness, customer research, etc.

But creator economics can really fry your brain. A platform's system of incentives and penalties can hijack your ideas of success, growth, and effectiveness and start to shape not only how you think about marketing but also how you think about your whole business. It shapes how we spend our time, what we invest in, and even who we decide to hire.

How do we want to contribute to our communities?

Kate often reminds us that a business is a system for meeting needs, for caring for ourselves and others. Creator economics steers us away from that truth toward something more atomized and individualist. That, in turn, steers the way we think about our whole businesses and how we want to contribute value to our communities. During our conversation, Kate asked Charlie how his move to Substack has impacted his business model as a whole.

Charlie made the move to better care for his customers. "We had our communities split between four or five different platforms and channels," he explained. "At a certain point I was like, this is confusing for me. And if it's confusing for me, it's got to be confusing for them."

Six months into the switch, Charlie can see where there are holes he needs to plug to sure up the business. Without some of the features of his old email marketing system (e.g., welcome sequences and product-based autoresponders), there are both growth and customer service challenges to deal with. "We're a third as far as I would have hoped to have been by now," he shared, "we have recouped our costs from the transition. We might be getting close to breaking even on the team support cost to keep it going. Am I making bank on it? No."

Charlie's situation is different from the average Substacker's, though. He has a team of people that runs the content and product side of his company. And that means he has payroll—and people's livelihoods—to consider as he works on the next plan. "We're going to have to make some shifts to make this work long-term," he told us.

This is the trouble with being in a labor relationship with a company that doesn't quite see it that way.

That's "the risk of going all in on a platform which does not care about how you're running your business, does not care about your values, or what you're trying to do," observed Kate. "It's going to make decisions based on what the platform needs, not what Charlie's business needs."

Charlie acknowledged that having a team to look out for makes the decision of what platform companies to work with even riskier than it is for a solo creator. It's one thing to generate the revenue to support one income—but quite another to support two, five, or ten incomes.

To do that, Charlie has to keep his eye on that objective—even when platforms incentivize him to do otherwise. He tries to figure out "What's the best arrangement of time, energy, attention, and money?"

While not everyone has (or wants to have) a business like Charlie's, there does seem to come a point where "the calculus shifts, where you realize that the amount of effort and labor that I'm putting into this may not be viable for where this bigger creative business goes."

If we narrowly define the value we offer and the contribution we're making to our communities according to platform logic, we'll miss opportunities to forge more stable and sustainable contribution systems.

Rethink work, business, and leadership for the 21st-century economy. Subscribe free to get What Works delivered straight you!

What do we want to build together?

Platform logic and the vector economy (to borrow again from McKenzie Wark) "ultimately undermines solidarity," Kate argued. It pits hacker against hacker and creator against creator.

"There's a lot of individualism. There's a lot of exceptionalism," she observed. "'I'm really trying to differentiate myself, be the best I can be, that's how I'm going to get picked.'"

Like Chiarra Lohr from the Indie Sellers Guild put it, our challenges on a platform get transformed into personal challenges. The same spirit that energizes the entrepreneurial drive and says, "It's up to me!" also energizes the internalization of failure and says, "It's all my fault."

"Where this actually leads us," explained Kate, "is further away from any kind of collective success or caretaking." We can't face our shared precariousness when "everybody goes off on their own and feels like they have to make their own way."

Because platforms don't have to play ball with their huge unpaid workforce, each worker has to make a decision for themselves about what they're willing to put up with. Whether it's Twitter, or Instagram, or Substack, the platform will make a choice that hurts creators. Some creators will adapt. Others will ignore it. And still others will leave and take their talents elsewhere.

Noting the brief campaign against Substack's content moderation policies last winter, Kate shared:

I thought that it was really interesting to see some percolation of organizing and people actually trying to come together to [ask], 'What do we want from this platform that is running our lives and where we're spending all of this time?' [It was also interesting to see] how quickly it all diffused because the underlying economics and mechanics of the platform ultimately won out.

But what if it didn't diffuse quickly? What could we do together to resist the feudal power of platforms?

Just off the top of my head, demanding a heads-up at least 30 days in advance of a new feature rollout (e.g., direct messages, follower recommendations, etc.) would be a start.

But beyond that, there are many ways that we can build things together that are completely unrelated to platforms. Even the real creator economy "winners" are building things together, explained Charlie. "They've actually created relational layers outside of the algos and platforms ... They're texting each other. They are emailing each other. They are going into joint ventures."

This is tricky territory, to be sure. "I don't think it gets talked about enough, partially because it starts to feel like an insider-outsider thing," Charlie acknowledged. Many of those personal networks have little diversity and rely on bought influence and access. However, it is true that a system of personal network distribution can work better than any algorithmic distribution over the long term.

Unfortunately, to Kate's earlier point, banding together in a small group feels like playing small when platforms espouse the potential to reach millions. After all, we're platform-pilled. Plus, learning how to gather that group and support each other "is a skill that a lot of people in our society do not have and do not want to build," Charlie noted, "because, at the end of the day, it feels easier just to do shit by yourself."

Kate added, "And it's easier for platforms to extract from us if we are atomized as individuals."

How will we organize?

"We have to develop off-platform relationships and packs and cabals," Charlie urged. "That's the way it's always worked, and it's going to be more important that we go that route."

Management researchers Katherine Kellogg, Melissa Valentine, and Angéle Christin looked into algorithmic management as a new mechanism of control for employers. They noticed that workers were "individually and collectively resisting algorithmic control through a set of emerging tactics" they called algoactivism.

Their observations of algoactivism included tactics that fell into four buckets: (1) practical action, (2) worker organizing, (3) messaging, and (4) legal mobilization.

One way of taking practical action is what Kate pointed out in our earlier conversation about the creator economy: "feeding the algo" with content that's designed to send all the right data signals while acting as a vehicle for a more subversive message. Another is exploiting new features (which platforms prioritize in terms of distribution) to spread a message or aesthetic that's typically not amplified by the algorithm.

Other forms of algoactivism include forming creative cooperatives, putting pressure on lawmakers, and taking direct action against corporations.

"What I'm seeing is pockets of folks being more clear about what they're building apart from what platforms want from them," observed Kate. She added, "My hope is that that leads to 'let's ditch these platform overlords and find our own distribution channels.'"

"We need organizing."

Platforms aren't the solution to our creative work woes. They're tools. Platforms won't ever be the solution because the solution is people—people working together to care for each other and leverage the power they have as a group.

So, how do we want to live?

At the very top, I mentioned that philosopher Rahel Jaeggi's theory of alienation is bound up in the question, "How do I want to live?" The state of alienation—disconnection, artificiality, and meaninglessness—both prevents us from answering that question and prevents us from even asking it.

Jaeggi's theory of alienation accepts that we become alienated through our interaction with alienating systems, such as capitalistic labor relations. We might not be able to avoid that, but, she argues, we can choose to interact with those systems differently.

Learning to choose differently is half the battle. So, I’m happy to say that we’re getting there. It’s time to take the next steps.

We can resist alienation by seeing our fellow creative workers as allies in the struggle for the lives we want to live. We can choose to see a problem and ask how we can solve it with others. We can build things together—on or off platforms.

We can cultivate solidarity in attitude and practice—and in doing so, we can live how we want to live.

---

New Workshop: World-Building for Business Owners

When: May 15 from 1-3:30 pm EDT (New York City) and May 16 from 1-4 pm EDT
Who: Small/micro business owners, freelancers, independent workers
Where: Crowdcast
What: Design an internally consistent business you want to work in (and on)
Price: $150-$400

Many small businesses result from combining disparate tactics, structures, and procedures. But a more effective and rewarding business design is one in which all of its parts make sense together—it’s a unified system.

In this 2-part workshop, I’ll guide you through an integrated process for designing a business that meets your needs, plays to your strengths, and utilizes your talents. Get all of the details here.