Zack is back, baby. And of course he has blessed us with another piece of cyber-optimism, another calls to arms, another rallying cry that puts all of the whining of the naysayers and moaning of the doomers into perspective. As always his work is as refreshing as a cool drink on a hot day. Which is exactly what I am now off to acquire.
Enjoy.
I am not an erudite enough student of internet culture and lore to pinpoint when exactly the Creator Economy trend began, but by this time everyone is certainly aware of this rosy vision. In an era of ungated media outlets, decentralized platforms, and lowered barrier to entry, in theory, the individual artist ought to be able to command attention, audience, and livelihood through their work. This probably had its heyday during the explosive organic growth of major media social networks. Think Facebook back when anyone actually read what was written there, YouTube when it was possible for anyone to discover strange and arcane content there, Twitter in the glory days of the anon-poaster.
Let's call this the Legacy Creator Economy. I use legacy specifically because I think it has become relatively obvious to everyone that this model is at the very least not a golden ticket to artistic and cultural success. Ideally, it would work exactly as laid out and we would all be able to walk the path of the most successful creators whose stories are always trumpeted as typical examples. However, we really are dealing with a lottery winner's fallacy here. And increasingly so, as the networks that allowed for organic growth in order to create network effect begin to lock down platform growth so that they can monetize in various ways. At this point, it should be relatively obvious to most people that the idea of simply quitting your 9-5 job, throwing yourself full-time into content creation for an algorithmically sorted social content platform, and hoping that you will reach sufficient audience for this to all pay your bills, is for most people an impossible dream. Or at the very least, the number of qualifiers attached to that path becomes so numerous that for most people, it is completely unrealistic. This becomes exponentially more difficult, by the way, if the cultural work or art or whatever that you're creating aspires to be anything beyond the most bland, mediocre lowest common denominator pandering possible.
So we've stated our problem. What are some of the newer models that may be suggested as solutions? The first one I'm going to call aggressive hobby creation. Given all of the noise surrounding the explosive ideation of the creator economy, one truism that I never felt was sufficiently examined was the idea that every artist, in order to be a real artist, must be working full-time at their art and compensated for their entire livelihood through their art. I'm not entirely sure that this is historically accurate. One only has to go look back in the annals of history to find numerous examples, to the point of stereotype and trope, of artists who simply created for the love of creation with very little to no remuneration during their lifetime, or artists who barely scraped by cobbling together various jobs, gigs, and side hustles to enable them to produce their art on nights and weekends. While it's all very hopeful to imagine that modern day platforms have entirely changed the game, I think we've begun to see that that may not be the case yet.
Aggressive hobby creation, for me, is the path that allows for artistic sovereignty while managing the significant risks associated with throwing one's time and energy completely into art or culture work without any other lifelines. The false expectation that all artists inevitably desire a full-time artistic life, or that all those who desire it will end up succeeding in this endeavor, is filling our horizon to the extent that it's obscuring many alternative pathways. These pathways are at least equally viable to the long-shot mass audience growth pathway, and in many cases much more viable for the normal person who is attempting to use their skills, talents, and drive to produce something good and beautiful without needlessly sacrificing their family, their health, and their mind. By intentionally pursuing your writing, filmmaking, illustration, or what have you within the restrictive boundaries of hobby or side gig status, you remind yourself that your goals are necessarily different from someone forced to regard their art as both a spiritually satisfying pursuit and simultaneously payer of bills and filler of bank accounts. It is my experience that much of the tension felt by the modern creator between solvency and artistic integrity simply disappears when you allow your art to be art.
The removal of pressure both frees your work to be uniquely strange and exciting and allows you to strike out in new artistic directions, experiment, and crucially fail without that failure causing stress that will end your artistic career. This to me is the paramount benefit of intentionally pursuing your art as a less than full-time endeavor. Now, we can't simply look at this from a rosy-eyed perspective. There are no doubt challenges to part-time creation. The first that I've experienced is the constant awareness that you could be advancing further in your craft, building your skills faster, and even growing your audience quicker were you devoting all of your time to your artistic endeavor. While this may or may not necessarily be true, it seems plausible enough to be a temptation or frustration in most cases. The feeling of stealing early mornings, late nights, and weekend hours from family and friends to create work that is, especially in the early stages, all but unknown can be quite discouraging. The only solution here that I've found is rigorous discipline in boundary setting. If I am aware of the number of hours and the amount of focus that my life allows for artistic pursuits; if I calculate this reasonably and realistically, it enables me to enjoy those pursuits guilt-free and to set reasonable goals based on the time I have to devote to my craft. Once you take the pressure of exponential growth off of your work, you will find that it is much more enjoyable to create and simply allow the audience to grow steadily as they will. This boundary setting also allows your work to be more fun and engaging. Your work can thrive mentally as an enjoyment, an outlet, and a psychological release, rather than stagnate as a dreaded Job.
Another attendant drawback here that many will suggest is that there is a perception that your art not being your full-time life's work means that it will never truly be pursued at all. This, I have found, is the case with many people who suffer from a romantic view of the artist's life that sees immense swaths of contemplative meditation as a necessary precursor to the creation of art, with a capital A. No doubt it is true that someone creating on a part-time basis will lose many benefits enjoyed by those unique few blessed to view art as a full-time occupation. However, one of the distinct advantages part-timers enjoy is this exact supposed “problem.” Artisitic hobbyists, if they are to create at all, recognize that they do not have the time to luxuriate in a few hours of espresso-sipping, note-jotting, and window-staring before and after every project. In order to be prolific, a part-timer will necessarily begin to distill their creative process from an airy, indistinct set of hopes and dreams into a workmanlike skill with the density of depleted uranium. My writing hours are between 5-7 a.m. and/or 8-10 p.m. on any given day. While I will rarely use all of that time, if anything is to be created on a given day at all, it must be created within those windows. This knowledge gives me a newfound intensity each time I sit at a keyboard. Creating, under even this gentle and artificial form of restriction, strips away my pretensions and forces me to learn what all successful artists inevitably master: production and shipping without excuse.
So, these are the benefits and limitations of life as a solo, part-time creator in the current market. But I want to present a not-so-new alternative that I see experiencing renewed traction in this environment. Even if you are able to surmount the obstacles that we've brought up, discipline your schedule, organize your life, and solidify your artistic process as a creator, one hurdle that I have not yet discovered a solution for is the reality that a solo creator stands or falls, well, on their own. One bad week, one prolonged sickness, one lost job is all it takes to trigger a significant artistic hiatus, during which time their loyal audience oftentimes dwindles and their forward momentum is arrested. Try as you might to mitigate the other factors, there's no getting away from the reality of the solo life, which is that without you, nothing will be produced.
And this is where a new old model begins to shine. Whether you call it a salon, or an artist school, or a tribe, a squad, or aMetalabel, this ethos embraces what is being termed“creativity in multiplayer mode.”A loosely affiliated band of solo creators animated by shared vision and organized under a flexible brand of sorts suddenly enjoys many of the advantages collectively of more traditional publishing house or record label models while still maintaining all of the freedom, flexibility, and creativity of the dreamiest versions of the solopreneur ideal. Three to five members of such a squad can produce at a prolific pace that would kill any one of them who individually attempted it. They are able to combine their skills and predilections when it comes time to parcel out the administrative tasks of editing, formatting, marketing and planning that often stall solo creators. As any attention and recognition is gained by the individual members, it in theory opens doors and provides new opportunities for every member. A rising tide doesn’t always lift all boats, but the chances might improve if you built an artistic ark.
You don’t have to look very far to see these models springing up. TheSoaring Twenties, for one, is a successful variant of this model. I am currently working away atPulp, Pipe, & Poetrywith four other industrious scribes to build another. Early signs are quite favorable. What’s your artistic vision? Wouldn’t it be better with some friends?
Great post! Our little Substack record label idea- LaBelaBel is doing something similar- it would be great to build and grow with more folks. https://miter.substack.com/p/signing-a-dotted-linelabelabel
From my perspective, we can make change and foster solidarity through collective and individual creation- it is about inclusivity, support, and creativity.
Thanks for this optimistic argument for artistic collectives.
Throughout the early parts of this piece I was thinking, "all well and good, but it assumes that the artist can efficiently navigate/ stomach social media.." When there's only so much time to create, there's even less time left to be a committed critic - which seems to be the only way to gain access to a network and potential audience. It requires a style of interaction online that simply doesn't sit well with a digital non-native. Moreover, it blurs the line between sincere appreciation and self-promotion in such a profoundly souring way that both the artistic producer and consumer in me threaten to quit altogether.
This is why the notion of the collective outlined here is really encouraging - the deeper interpersonal connection and support, the more centralised editorial work - it all feels so much more like home than confusedly stumbling through the dark cathedral filled with disembodied voices.
What I would like to see is are transparent entry points for such communities, but I'm still trying to imagine what they would look like. It certainly seems that these things work better if not restricted to local networking - the internet having facilitated the meetings of many like minds over great distances - one of its few virtues. But my distaste for the current social media based options for engagement remains. This very comment is submitted with such a heavy heart!