Conversation

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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.
Replying to
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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