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AI and the Myth of the Creator Economy

Once upon a time, I wrote poems. And I sing to myself quite often, so I had this kind of typical random thought, ‘maybe I should learn some easy musical software thing and write some songs.’

And then I thought, oh, well, what would be the point of that? AI will certainly get better at writing songs before I ever will. That self-defeating thought did spark a little bit of insight, though. What am I creative for?

One way to see it: creative practice is for oneself. For example, people learn woodworking or other crafts to make things that would likely look better, take less time and energy, and be cheaper if they just bought a product from an industrial producer.

If you become good at your craft, you might be a maker. You can go out to craft fairs and sell your items, but chances are, you’ll be operating at a loss when materials and labour are factored in. When you start woodworking, you are not thinking, “now maybe I can be rich and famous.”

Even before AI began inducing a mass pearl-clutching about artists’ rights, being a ‘creator’ was a pretty unlikely path to wealth.

Some kinds of creative work seemed like they might lead to a big payout: the ‘artistic’ careers that fell under a lottery system. The lottery system was always primarily one of overall exploitation and extraction.

Making music is an example. Right now there are so many people making music, perhaps more publicly and intentionally than ever before. Platform algorithms primarily drive discovery and popularity, and those things reinforce the patterns that were already in place. In other words, things that are like other things are most likely to surface. And once something does surface, it benefits from network effects- there’s great research that indicates that people listen to things because they think other people like them far more than as a result of their own individual tastes.

Few artists even make much money from the platforms. Even before there were algorithms, there was the corporate consolidation of the music business, which meant that just a few corporations owned nearly all of the sizable record labels and many of the small ones as well, so homogenization had already begun. And from the beginning, stars of the recording industry made little in comparison to their record labels.

This pattern is true in general for creative or generative work. We went from a pre-industrialized situation where ‘artists’ were mostly wealthy or beholden to the wealthy but there were plenty of people practicing creative crafts for themselves or a few people in their community, to a time when companies began to profit from the distribution of other people’s creative work. Within that system, there have been small companies that were not as extractive, but as time has gone on, the direction has been one of ever-increasing disparities between the creators and the distributors in terms of relative individual profit.

We recently went through a kind of collective delusion with the proliferation of creator platforms and the so-called Creator Economy. Many people were called to put out their ideas, art, and creative work as products. As the wave of industrialization-employment has ebbed due to automation, and because industrialization, media, and the internet have created this sense of global scale on which to market ourselves, we found ourselves looking for ways of expressing ourselves for money. And we were seduced by the corporations who distribute creative work into thinking that ‘owning’ the work was the path to protecting creators (had this ever have been true, these companies largely would not have existed, since they are the primary predators).

But many ‘creators’ were willing to buy into creator economies and copyright, perhaps because they thought they might be the exception. (Does this remind you of other delusions of social mobility that have led to many collective positions that reinforce the benefits for wealthy people against non-wealthy people’s own self-interest?) We were willing to believe that platforms ‘allowed’ creators to make a living being creative, when they would have otherwise laboured in penniless obscurity. (In fact, artists can be streamed millions of times on Spotify and not receive enough money to pay for two months of a Spotify subscription (on the individual plan, mind you). And most people don’t garner millions of streams).

Many years ago, I wrote about the idea that creators might be best served thinking about making a living much the way one might by having a shoe repair business. It could be possible to create enough direct relationships with people who like your work to get by, and that would be a remarkable success- you’d have a basic income, be in your creative practice, and not have a boss telling you what to do or what to make. Instead, I’ve seen people trying to negotiate the systems by learning how to ‘make more of what people want,’ and creating a glut of sameness, which honestly makes it that much easier for AI to step in and be as ‘good.’

Now, we’re perhaps confronting something that could be transformational to the whole notion of art-as-commerce. It might be that the only real value in being creative is in the practice itself. In the learning, experimenting, doing of the thing, not in the marketing of the product. It might be that we value human-made things because we are part of the process, because the creative output has meaning.

Perhaps we’re headed into a farmer’s market model of ideas, songs, or art. There was a moment when it seemed like NFTs were a version of this (only if you squinted) but Open Sea showed that mostly the money was in applying the same kind of platform economics that the streaming platforms have. Extraction for the few. And so, you may ask, where does that leave creators for making a real living?

Well, right. Corporate capitalism evolves to take more out and leave less for most people. And this is where I think (being fairly ignorant about political science) I don’t resonate with Marx when I think about what’s next. Because “workers” seems to me like a function of industrialization itself, and what’s happening is that we won’t have work. This may seem kind of nice for those people with enough advantage to enjoy leisure and minimally-paid creative pursuits. There will likely still be work for those who sell access to their own status for a time, and perhaps people at the upper echelons of corporations will still be needed to formulate strategies or be figureheads for a time.

There are still low-wage jobs and service providers who are more challenging to replace, but industry is plugging away at making them dispensable too. From my life on the edge of Silicon Valley I see that there are ideas to automate everything from drivers to service workers to doctors, lawyers, and therapists.

If we keep going down this path without alternatives, most of this displacement will come without alternatives for ‘making a living.’ Capitalism is a vacuum hose trying to suck every particle of wealth and power out of the earth and its inhabitants. In the US, the top 1% have more wealth than the bottom 90%. Even with supposedly more access to investing with the advent of platforms like Robin Hood, the top 1% own more than half of all stocks. Access to wealth overall is decreasing, with the top 10% owning about 90% of all stocks, and every year the gap widening. A group of 725 individual people have more wealth than a collective 50% of Americans, and that doesn’t even factor in global disparities.

I can see why cryptocurrency seems attractive as a solution. If we just had a way to create capitalism for ourselves! seems to be the idea. I mean, was capitalism a good thing, leading to post-scarcity where, once we find a collective way to revolution our way out of disparity, we can all live in a happy place where we have all our needs met and can just play and be creative and garden and get on up in the Maslow’s hierarchy? (Or a more appropriate framing.) Hmm. As we experience massive climate upheaval, intense scarcities in housing, pandemics, and all the other things that in the short term, money can still largely mitigate, I don’t know if post-scarcity looks imminent.

And yet. We are darn resistant beings. If we can resist the commodification of post-capitalism itself (not a joke- capitalism is cunning, baffling, and powerful!) we might discover this truth- that it really is all about practice. That if we give up the idea that our identities, relationships, and creative process are all really products, we might find out that there’s a lot of power in our collective and interdependent practice. Doing that practice gives us the opportunity to find new ways to collaborate and contradict the idea that it’s just naive to find an alternative to states, corporations, or other systems of control.

AI is not benign. We can regard it with curiosity and wonder, and also recognise that the vast majority of the energy around it right now is focused on figuring out how to make more money and add it to the arsenal of corporate domination. Creative hackers may find ways to use it as a tool of subversion as well. But the general idea that it’s going to put artists out of business implies that artists were in business in the first place, and that’s something we can see through without any help from GPT.

Centralized power is violent

Note: This isn’t a fully fleshed-out argument, but a provocation- I’d love to hear what you think.

As we ‘evolved’ (or devolved?) from hunter-gatherers into agrarians, humans became ‘owners’ of property. I imagine that the first owners were also workers of the land, but it didn’t take long in most cultures for there to be people who owned land and then hired other people to work that land, and then enslaved other people to work that land and build palaces and such, and then began developing ways to go out and get more land, leading to systems of speculative investments and colonialism and eventually, Facebook (or whatever the best symbol of global tech imperialism might be – Palantir?).

David Graeber and many other authors I’ve read recently propose that violence underlies all systems of bureaucracy, and I suspect, all centralized systems. Humans are more rhizomatic than programmatic and self-organize in unorderly ways. To achieve ‘efficiency’ in a way that might directly serve one aim (or capital returns) requires hierarchy, and to do so at scale requires that hierarchy to be backed by violence. Maybe to have organizations with more than a marginal amount of inequality also takes violence.

The violence is often invisible to many in these systems, particularly people who have power. It’s only been in the last few years, for example, to have widespread dominant culture awareness of the frequency of examples of white people summoning armed men when they encounter Black folks performing such activities as barbecuing, jogging, or bird watching. But there are more subtle examples, like what might happen if you have medical bills or even parking tickets you can’t pay, or choose to walk around in a park at an hour in which the park “is not open,” or publish academic articles to a website without permission. In all of these cases, people with guns may be summoned with the force of law justifying their presence.

This is important because there are counter-examples in which people figure out how to handle almost all situations without needing strongmen, who can handle non-normative behaviour that is not violent without resorting to dominance. These happen in community settings, where people build trust among one another.

There’s a bit of a truism in the startup world about “flat” companies not being very successful (or being covertly hierarchical). If you want to get things done as a business that ‘can scale,’ you require forms of dominance. People will roll their eyes at more creative or esoteric Lalouxian structures. Part of the reason for this may be that it is, as I’ve noted before, simply easier to rule with dominance than to lead with a collectivist mindset, but that doesn’t mean it’s ultimately sustainable. It may work in the time horizon of most startups (fail fast!) but at least some of the hundred thousand tech workers who’ve been laid off in the past few months were the casualties of hierarchy and power structure that made no sense. (I want to connect those dots more explicitly- but for now I’ll just point out that in the US, at-will employment itself is a system backed by violence).

I’m not a communist. I’m not sure it’s possible to live in a world as ‘connected’ as we’ve become without forms of centralized power. But I do think we will be much better off if we can learn to live within additional systems that work differently, without the threat of physical danger or incarceration for non-violent actions. We can actually figure out how to work things out together, in spaces that orient around accepting difference and minding our own practice. We can come to see that when the trappings of the centralized systems are stripped away, we’re pretty good at finding common ground.

The spaces that contain this kind of shared power, self-empowered spaces, are small. We can develop decentralized autonomous groups that work when they operate at the speed of trust and don’t scale rapidly.

But they can proliferate rapidly. It’s really about shifting the ideas of dominance, monopoly, and scale into pollination, pullulation, and emergence. Interconnection within and among but not as a monolithic network.

Making Space

People often come together to do something, especially when it comes to activism, community work, social justice, or project collaboration. Having a common purpose can help people find each other and motivate them to invest in building relationships.

You might even extrapolate this to people coming together in any kind of democratic context.

The problem is that we often don’t take the time to build the trust necessary to making these situations sustainable.

The result of a failure to build trust can manifest in many ways. In some cases, the whole thing just implodes and people stop showing up, or numbers dwindle down to a core group of people who already had the trust with one another.

In other situations, democracy starts to look more like autocracy, perhaps with a benevolent dictator, perhaps with a shadow group running the show while the illusion of democracy is maintained.

What does trust allow for that allows democracy to function?

First, it means people understand that in a group of people, there are always differences in the level of commitment, understanding, status, and personal liberation for each person in a group.

Second, it means that making a decision can be collaborative and people can share what they really think without fear of reprisal or ostracism.

Third, it means the group is more invested and aligned with a decision because even if they disagree, they believe the choice was made in good faith and that their dissent was recognised and acknowledged.

There’s a bit of a circularity here, but before a group can be effective at making any decisions, they need to build trust. And trust largely comes from getting to know one another, having boundaries and container that allow us to be vulnerable enough to be known, and to practice listening-focused engagement. When those conditions are met, we can move on to conversations that work, and then to decisions.

For many of us who like getting s*** done, it can be uncomfortable to be in the trust-building stage. Let’s just make a decision, let’s see the fruits of our collaboration! We’re wasting time!

The problem is that when groups move quickly without building trust, they inevitably invite dominance into the process. Not everyone feels heard. The loudest voices lead the way. We start creating situations where some people feel uninvested in or confused by decisions, and people begin creating factions or leave the group.

I’m going to skip over what this looks like in nations or large-scale platforms, but in groups where we want to achieve something that requires any level of sustainability and ongoing commitment, we are best served by making sure we’ve spent the time to talk to each other.