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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Haha I was a creator before it was easy
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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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People rooting for archetypes like bum and slacker to make it, dream on. This dynamic always picks out an archetype that embodies serious hustle. The whole trend runs on hustleporn.
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I know, I take jokes seriously... there’s actually a case there. Surfer dudes, Wodehouse gentlemen of leisure etc.
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There are historical periods of high prosperity where slackers do take the archetypal spotlight and hustlers are low status. Like 50s-60s America, late Victorian/Edwardian England etc.
