Conversation

Getting mildly sick of the word “creator” It’s like how “entrepreneur” was going through a peak halo moment a decade ago and people were lionizing them, calling them heroes etc. Society always needs a hero archetype beyond the basics like soldiers, first responders.
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Calling it now. I’m moving on to the next one, “explorer” which is highly undervalued right now and due for a comeback.
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Happens within a few years of a major democratizing wave. With entrepreneurs, it started alongside “lean startup” which brought the marginal starting cost of being an entrepreneur down from $2m to $5, immediately allowing 1000x as many blustery wantapreneurs to claim the label.
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To be fair entrepreneurship *did* increase 10x, but wantapreneurship increased 1000x. I was one too, very briefly. Same thing with “creators” — 10x as many good writers/musicians/artists coming online, thanks to creator monetization stack. But 1000x bad ones too.
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There’s something about costly signaling with time/effort/risk/money. Something missing in the “democratization of X” discourse is that when it gets easier, you get those wild extremistan effects that seem mostly like luck+aggressively optimizing a formula.
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Old farts like me talk about how hard Wordpress once was. Then even older farts chime in with how they ran underground zine presses in the 80s. In 10 years, today’s newbies walking into the Substack world will be gassing on about how winning Substack back in the day was so hard.
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But there’s a there there about working with tech that is just short of ready for mainstream so you can ride it on the way up. I try to do that to some extent. I need the leverage, since I lack the raw talent to win a mature, non-frontier medium.
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I know, I take jokes seriously... there’s actually a case there. Surfer dudes, Wodehouse gentlemen of leisure etc.
Replying to
Actual slackers (c. 1993) might have been the last swing of a pendulum. Yuppies looked weird, and got lots of press, compared to beatniks, hippies, and punks. Think becoming a hustler is what you do when your parents were slackers, even normcore slackers/hipsters. Alex P. Keaton
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Say you get VR-playstations for Pennies and Automation has butchered the labor field on a worldwide scale, Would the bums and slackers turn into hustlers in VR-worlds to earn digital monies? Or will there still be a different category of people who are VR hustlers?
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the creator economy is just the gig economy for internet work: you get to call yourself independent, but 90% are below the API divide and on the long, long tail of not making any money