With the rise of platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, Twitter (with super follows), Patreon, Substack, OnlyFans, Snapchat and others, we are quickly turning consumers into creators who are incentivized with monetization.
I call this a content basic income, while others have suggested its some kind of Universal creator income. But how grand is this design really?
While people like Li Jin are overly-optimistic about the creator economy, I think it just allows platforms who take a 30% (or more) tax with a moat that just turns the entire internet into a bunch of subscriptions. Is that the model of the internet we actually want to live in?
So it will just be a clickbait creator economy where vanity metrics and influencers compete for a living, where “influencer” is a job description for kids who grew up on Instagram, switched to TikTok and god knows what next.
If Media has descended into the dystopia of digital subscriptions, it’s lowered the quality of News and doomed journalism as a whole. So what could be the future impact of the creator economy on freelancing in the future and the future of work itself? Is peddling your wares online in a multiple revenue stream hoping to FIRE as soon as possible the future for GenZ?
In Newsletter monitization alone, even now Twitter, Facebook and the NY Times will have their own products to compete with Substack. In gaming streaming, it’s even more competitive and lucrative. The creator economy is a seductive substitute for a real career, and it works until it doesn’t. You are a cog in the machine of the platform subscription economy based on Ads revenue, or trying to compete with it. As a creator eventually you are in a lose-lose situation.
Contrary to the article of Taylor Lorenz, we should not be proud of celebrating the emergence of the creator economy. It’s not an industry that’s very inclusive or a meritocracy as those who have won on TikTok or Twitch can attest to. It’s a complicated world of censorship, politics, arbitrary changes in terms of service and platforms that can de-monetize you, ban you, or change your entire future at any time. It’s an exploitive gig-economy of the cruelest algorithms, and the most brutal striving for attention.
Forget old notions of worker rights. No the attention economy and the creator subscription economy that is building up today, isn’t noble or educational or making the world or the internet a better place. It is however what GenZ stands for, hedonism and influencer monetization at scale.
While China leads in social commerce and live-streaming for retail products, in the West this video streaming movement takes on more an attention economy dynamic where platforms use these popular figures as a way to monetize their platforms better with Ads. It’s not service-based, it’s simply a gig-economy to drive traffic and eyeballs at the service of digital advertising growth. Companies like ByteDance and Facebook understand this well.
In the creator gig-economy of attention, it’s more about voyeurism then about real dialogue, debate or even education. If Instagram was pure unadulterated exhibitionism, what are the live-streaming platforms around gaming, soft pornography or exploiting writers and their op-eds really about? It’s clickbait and attention gimmicks at scale at service to a generation (GenZ and young Millennials) who have been conditioned to be consumers of such content.
So in the internet of the future, I’m not just subscribing to platforms but to creators, but how much discretionary income for these things will I really have? While the top 1% influencers lead very exclusive and glamorous lives the middle-class gig creators won’t be as lucky. We are just creating new pyramids in the sky with the creator economy that’s as bad as a gig-economy worker’s life, one of pure slavery.
When we put digital Ads at the center of the internet, such an exploitive eyeball factory fate for platforms was inevitable. We put the wrong incentives at the hub of the wheel, and the internet just becomes naturally more toxic and the creator economy lures new creators into platform hopping until they find their niche, with a platform just at the right point of incentivizing creators, until the money runs dry.
The subscription based creator economy isn’t treating creators with respect. Censorship is arbitrary, platforms take too big of a cut, and there are no rules and regulations to protect these gig-workers. They are the children technology, and the creative slaves of tomorrow operating in platforms build to exploit them. That’s not a viable path to a Universal Creative income, for the majority of people who product something on the internet for free with hopes of an income stream.
So this is the world we live in, where students aspire to be performers on OnlyFans, Twitch or TikTok. The problem is subscription platforms only help monetize a gig-economy of creators that fundamentally unhealthy, unhinged and dystopian. It’s a metaverse of attention antics till the ends of time in the metaverse. It’s a disgusting VR product with more data on you that you can imagine. It’s a TikTok sequence that goes viral and causes people to get injured, literally.
You can now pay to see someone’s Tweets. It’s been in test mode for the last few months, and now, Twitter has officially launched its new ‘Super Follow’ option, with selected creators in the US now able to charge a monthly fee for exclusive, extra tweet content for their biggest fans. Twitter is getting quite desperate here but in the crypto universe of DeFi and TikTok accounts making huge brand monetization, its a new dystopia highway for the gig-economy. Long live the attention economy and the warped empire of Mark Zuckerberg. Long live the YouTube recommendation engine. And the ByteDance empire that understands what GenZ is really about with even better AI.
The attention economy is a gig-economy of the lowest common denominator of eyeballs that’s a natural selection on-boarding into a metaverse that will practice behavior modification at scale. Millions of GenZ will gamble their careers on platforms trying to monetize their content online. Those kids from India, Nigeria, Indonesia and Brazil in the end will do good work, at an unfair price for their labors. But that’s okay, the platforms need to eat right?
The future of social media is bright right? A world where you can monetize if you play the algorithms right and learn the art of clickbait and the new limits of human attention on mobile. You will need bravery to ender live video, gaming, VR and join the right platforms at the right time in a dance for attention, tips and exclusive popularity. Bright lights, big metaverse, cyberpunk!