Art has always flirted with visibility. The Medici didn't fund Michelangelo because they loved abstraction, but they loved what his work did for their name. The Sistine Chapel is as much a PR operation as it is a spiritual project.
The artist was always pushed to negotiate with whoever controlled the resources. The only thing that changed is who sits on the other side of the table.
Substack is, in a way, a dispersed patron. Instead of one sponsor, you have a thousand subscribers. Instead of an explicit commission ("paint my ceiling"), you have the implicit pressure of metrics. The form of patronage changed, but I think the dynamic didn't.
But where your argument really lands is that the quality of that attention is fundamentally different. A patron had taste. Good or bad, but articulated. At the same time, an algorithm has no taste; it has signals: clicks, dwell time, shares. When a creator optimises for that signal, he's not answering to a person with a vision. He is answering to statistical noise pretending to be an audience.
The problem was never that art flirts with attention. It always did. The problem is the difference between a patron who says "make something great" and a dashboard that says "your title had 3% better CTR with an emoji."
That said, I think the platform gets too much credit as the agent of change here. Substack doesn't cause identity drift. It accelerates it in people who never had a stable centre to begin with.
A creator with a clear internal position won't collapse because of an A/B test :)
I've never cared for the term 'creator' since it started being applied to identify certain people as 'special'. I.e. it is about status from the get-go.
In a perfect world, everybody on the planet would be engaged in producing special *creations* that have meaning. I believe 'creating' is something we should all have access to. So IMO the term 'creator' is redundant.
I think this aligns with the thrust of your article Philipp. You have well-described the danger of identity drift when the activity is about metrics - where people with high subscriber counts are deemed to be 'special'.
And your 'contrarian' advice, to instead build and express a real identity, puts the focus on creating well-crafted objects as vehicles for this goal.
Some great points. Even financially independent writers want to expand reach and influence. Unless you're writing for purely therapeutic reasons, feedback and opinions in response to output are going to matter. It's essential to take those occasional pauses to re-evaluate your reasons and purposes.
It's a tale as old as time. When blogging first became a craze, I worked at a company who helped people set up their blogs. The domain and CMS, but also the brand and writing, etc. People wanted to create blogs about writing, even though they had 2 weeks of experience writing, but they were reading blogs about writing. People wanted to start a blog about marketing, because they read blogs about marketing (without any real world marketing experience).
And that was before they had thousands of metrics pushing them into certain directions. Nowadays, this is pushing people into being essentially scam artists. Faking it til they make it. C'est la vie, I guess.
“I’m throwing rocks at the creator economy because the machine is broken, and we have to smash some windows to let the fresh air in. We have to make some beautiful vandalism called art”
I’m truly grateful someone is, while also inspiring myself (and I’m sure others) to start throwing those rocks
as well. Showing that things can be different, and it should be different. For that I’m eternally grateful to you.
Art has always flirted with visibility. The Medici didn't fund Michelangelo because they loved abstraction, but they loved what his work did for their name. The Sistine Chapel is as much a PR operation as it is a spiritual project.
The artist was always pushed to negotiate with whoever controlled the resources. The only thing that changed is who sits on the other side of the table.
Substack is, in a way, a dispersed patron. Instead of one sponsor, you have a thousand subscribers. Instead of an explicit commission ("paint my ceiling"), you have the implicit pressure of metrics. The form of patronage changed, but I think the dynamic didn't.
But where your argument really lands is that the quality of that attention is fundamentally different. A patron had taste. Good or bad, but articulated. At the same time, an algorithm has no taste; it has signals: clicks, dwell time, shares. When a creator optimises for that signal, he's not answering to a person with a vision. He is answering to statistical noise pretending to be an audience.
The problem was never that art flirts with attention. It always did. The problem is the difference between a patron who says "make something great" and a dashboard that says "your title had 3% better CTR with an emoji."
That said, I think the platform gets too much credit as the agent of change here. Substack doesn't cause identity drift. It accelerates it in people who never had a stable centre to begin with.
A creator with a clear internal position won't collapse because of an A/B test :)
Well said, thank you.
I've never cared for the term 'creator' since it started being applied to identify certain people as 'special'. I.e. it is about status from the get-go.
In a perfect world, everybody on the planet would be engaged in producing special *creations* that have meaning. I believe 'creating' is something we should all have access to. So IMO the term 'creator' is redundant.
I think this aligns with the thrust of your article Philipp. You have well-described the danger of identity drift when the activity is about metrics - where people with high subscriber counts are deemed to be 'special'.
And your 'contrarian' advice, to instead build and express a real identity, puts the focus on creating well-crafted objects as vehicles for this goal.
The Linkedinification means I’m far less keen on this platform. Spend most of the time muting the bollocks and lunatics.
The experience is driving me towards printed zines and localisation.
The day of the internet as a place has ended.
Some great points. Even financially independent writers want to expand reach and influence. Unless you're writing for purely therapeutic reasons, feedback and opinions in response to output are going to matter. It's essential to take those occasional pauses to re-evaluate your reasons and purposes.
It's a tale as old as time. When blogging first became a craze, I worked at a company who helped people set up their blogs. The domain and CMS, but also the brand and writing, etc. People wanted to create blogs about writing, even though they had 2 weeks of experience writing, but they were reading blogs about writing. People wanted to start a blog about marketing, because they read blogs about marketing (without any real world marketing experience).
And that was before they had thousands of metrics pushing them into certain directions. Nowadays, this is pushing people into being essentially scam artists. Faking it til they make it. C'est la vie, I guess.
“I’m throwing rocks at the creator economy because the machine is broken, and we have to smash some windows to let the fresh air in. We have to make some beautiful vandalism called art”
I’m truly grateful someone is, while also inspiring myself (and I’m sure others) to start throwing those rocks
as well. Showing that things can be different, and it should be different. For that I’m eternally grateful to you.
Thanks for this reflection.
What I take with me: I have the option to “be the work” or to become a worker (ants analogy).
“The artist makes something because it demands to exist.”
Thank you for this x