Conversation

I’m done with the “creator economy” frame. Plays to narcissistic flake types a little too much. The backstopper economy is much more interesting. People who step up to keep collaborative efforts going through uncertainties and lean patches. Including necessary grinder work.
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I’m very sympathetic to younger people being focused on establishing a creative identity/voice/making their bones in commons culture… but the older the person, the less patience I have for this, and the more I appreciate their willingness to play backstopper.
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Maintainer is the natural opposite of Creator, but Backstopper is actually an endpoint of an orthogonal dimension. The opposite of a Backstopper is an opportunistic participant. The collaboration equivalent of a fairweather friend.
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2x2: X: Opportunist vs Backstopper Y: Creator vs. Maintainer It’s actually possible to be an opportunist-maintainer type — willing and able to do grinder maintenance work, but only in opportunist mode when the rewards are high.
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The key trait of a Backstopper is that they don’t impose artificial limits on their effort based on a private sense of fairness or whether or not others are pulling their weight/displaying gratitude etc. They just contribute with a free generosity of spirit to their actual limit.
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Backstoppers are to be distinguished from Martyrs-in-Denial — people who act like Backstoppers but are unconsciously keeping score, and when they are finally stressed past their limits of thankless contribution, they kinda implode-and-explode and others are genuinely surprised.
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I’ve been pretty fortunate in that over the last few years, I’ve had a growing number of Backstopper types joining me in various adventures. Makes a big difference to what you can take on if you can be certain of even a couple of others showing up with Backstopper mindsets.
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This is so ridiculously important that I now design my collaborative projects based on who might reliably show up, rather than picking goals first. It’s that whole Good to Great idea of “get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, then decide where to go”
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Don’t mean to dunk on good individual creators with genuinely little/no reserves to spare for backstopping anything. This isn’t a case of “creators should be lowered in status, backsoppers should be raised in status” It’s not a zero-sum thing. It’s an all-nothing thing.
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It’s backstoppers who make or break an effort for the simple reason that during the hardest, leanest patches, it’s only the backstoppers who are still in. Which means whatever happens through the lifetime of an effort is contingent on the Minimum Viable Backstopping.
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If you don’t have the backstopping reserves to carry an effort through its hardest times, it doesn’t matter how many genius creators you have through the best times. Their sublime contributions will net to zero.
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This of course takes a certain amount of privilege and resources and spare capacity, but if you have that, playing Backstopper is one of the most valuable things you can do, because so few are able to, for practical/material/psychological reasons.
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Screwed up threading… this tweet is now out-of-order By contrast, when a true Backstopper runs out of reserves, or lose faith in the project, they tend to gracefully withdraw, harboring no resentments, and doing their best to mitigate the consequences for those who are still in
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I want to re-emphasize that I’m NOT talking about maintainers, which several people are bringing up. I was conflating maintenance and backstopping for a long time and it was clouding my thinking. Backstopping is a pattern of engagement, not a kind of contribution.
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A project that only has backstoppers will tend to go on indefinitely but mediocrely — an outcome that is undervalued. But to the extent that’s not enough, backstoppers do appreciate the less reliable drive-by participation of non-backstoppers, who can often level up a thing.
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Backstoppers tend to mess up “rational” effort/reward accounting, because often they put in, and are seen to put in, Herculean survival-ensuring efforts at critical junctures. Even if they do do freely, it can cause others to feel guilty/resentful.
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So it takes some wisdom to backstop lightly, and ensure that your “extra” efforts are simply left out of regular accounting and treated as gifts. If you don’t actively work to have your surge contributions treated as gifts, you’ll destroy the effort with psyche debt.
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Thus doesn’t mean you can’t participate in rewards. Backstoppers aren’t bodhisattvas. They are simply graceful about separating their gift-like contributions from their accounted contributions. And anyone with moderate success past say 40 has the resources to tag >0% as gifts.
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It’s hard to write a thread like this without coming across as attacking creators, but that’s really not my intent. Creators who are genuinely committed to their Thing, tend not to be narcissistic flakes, but occasionally react like they are due to being taken advantage of.
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This is partly underdeveloped political instincts. The trick for creators is to develop enough political instincts to avoid being taken advantage of WITHOUT losing your capacity to also do the generous gift backstopping thing when/where you do have the spare reserves.
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Another way to think of backstoppers is as deep players (Geertz) or infinite gamers. People who play to continue the game. Fundamentally different mindset, needed to get through “game singularities” when finite game shifts and shallow players hit division by zero error states.
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A lot of people blaming extractive investor discourses for inventing this “creator economy” but while that plays a part, there’s a real thing here; there really are people with natural creator personalities. They just can’t serve as pillars of an economy.
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There’s some rhyming with the lionizing of entrepreneurs a decade ago that led me to write my “entrepreneurs are the new labor” series. But then as now, extractive attention can’t operate without a natural foundation in a Type of Person.
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Backstoppers though are hard to turn into that sort of heroic archetype targeted for extractive attention. A backstopper economy is infinite game so is larger than finite extraction games
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