Creator destroyer
It's common in the business press to read about the "creator economy," another terminological stab at what they used to call "Web 2.0," which itself was the new New Economy. When online platforms figure out ways to profit from their users "creating" things, you have a "creator economy" or, more holistically, a "creator ecosystem." Typically these "creators" are building on the apparatus of the "attention economy," another dubious catchphrase that refers to the tools that platforms have developed to distribute the works of the vast "creator" army at scale and the algorithms that sift through it all for consumers.
What separates the "creators" and the consumers? Once upon a time, many were excited by the idea that maybe nothing did — that we were now post-consumerism and well into the realm of "prosumerism," in which production and consumption were inseparably intermixed. User-generated content was going to ground a democratic and participatory culture; everyone would have their sustainable niche on the long tail. In practice, much of prosumerism could be reduced to and replaced by data surveillance: By consuming, we "produce" the value inherent in our taste profiles, which can then be aggregated and exploited by marketers. We no longer need to actively produce these profiles; we remain passive as they are determined for us by layers of surveillance we have imperfect awareness of and no control over. User-generated content then became less significant as potentially profitable material in its own right and more a kind of meta-data for content made by an emergent class of "creators" — the influencers, streamers, YouTube/Instagram/TikTok/Twitch celebrities that no one over 40 has heard of, and so on.
Creators occasionally seem like regular platforms users who managed somehow to hit the jackpot and go viral, but it's probably more accurate to view them as a substrata of the conventional advertising and entertainment industries. They are scouted by talent agencies and slotted into the established hierarchy. Though they can command thousands or millions of people's attention, they are hardly A-listers; they have far less leverage and are more or less beholden to the platforms. The platforms, meanwhile, can point to them to convey the fantasy that anyone can "make it."
The distinctive thing, then, about creators is that a disproportionate amount of what they create is necessarily self-promotion. A lot of what they do is perform the possibility of success on the terms of contemporary labor conditions, in which more and more people are being forced into gig-economy work and are bossed by opaque algorithms. The "creator economy" is just a euphemism for neoliberalism, for "human capital" taking itself to market. Creators are there to make selling yourself in a piecemeal way seem redeemable, relatable. They put an optimistic spin on the idea that "thanks to platforms, everything is for sale."
So it is no surprise that, as Taylor Lorenz reports in the New York Times, "a rash of new start-ups are making it easier for digital creators to monetize every aspect of their life — down to what they eat, who they hang out with and who they respond to on TikTok." This is only natural: Monetizing the self is the creator's medium. Lorenz cites a truly nauseating report from a venture capital firm that recasts the "creator economy" as the even more ludicrous "passion economy," and celebrates creators as "small businesses": i.e. petit bourgeois reactionaries who are the unwitting stooges of the giant corporations that benefit most from a pro-business environment. Most creators struggle against each other to survive while the platforms that support their "passion" in "doing what they love" — i.e. "owning the means of production and distribution that creators depend on for their livelihood" — become ever more dominant. Don't forget: It's not exploitation if you are passionate about it!
Lorenz reports on a startup that dreams of a "human stock market" in which investors can, in the words of one of these dreamers, "buy shares, which are essentially votes, to be able to control a certain level of a person’s life ... We’re building an economy of attention where you purchase moments in other people’s lives, and we take it a step further by allowing and enabling people to control those moments." This throwback to forms of human ownership of other humans plays out the logic of the "experience economy" (another terrible term for another relatively novel form of commodification) to its conclusion: all time will be abstract labor time that's up for sale to the highest bidder; no time will intrinsically belong to anyone.
A similar dream fuels the idea of turning anything into an NFT: Why should anything exist that can't be claimed to be owned by someone, ideally an expropriator who had nothing to do with it originally? Why should I be limited to "liking" or "sharing" things — I want to literally buy in! It's already become a meme to tweet about turning anything that seems worthy of a moment's attention (and nothing more) into an NFT. Often the joke is in expropriating whoever it was who tweeted or did something uniquely disgraceful: Not only will we mock them in their inadvertent virality; we'll try to cash in on it independently as well.
"NFTs are best understood as a form of marketing for the underlying blockchain tech," Kyle Chayka suggested in this tweet responding to an article about digital collectors. The same can be said of "creators," who are best understood as marketing for the underlying platform tech. Economic self-exploitation is represented as an artistic pursuit, and the value is there to harvest as long as people believe that.