EP 468: Figuring Out the Creator Economy with Charlie Gilkey & Kate Tyson
Welcome to the unwieldy conversation hour.
Tara McMullin:I'm Tara McMullin, and this is what works. The show that re thinks work, business, and leadership for the 21st century economy.
Kate Tyson:Like, I I love, believe in creation and creative work and, like, all of these things. I feel like, you know, one of the things that's been happening is the creation and content creation and the, like, creator economy have become over time conflated or or the creator economy is sort of like eating creative acts.
Tara McMullin:That was longtime friend of the pod, Kate Tyson. She and I, along with another longtime friend of the pod, Charlie Gilkey, decided to have as Kate said, an unwieldy conversation. The reason? Well, for lack of a more concise description, we wanted to put our heads together and talk through this particular moment on the Internet. It's a moment that I've called the social media apocalypse.
Tara McMullin:But really, we're talking about the even more dystopian creator economy.
Kate Tyson:So I was like, I don't think the creator economy should exist. And then I think to both of you, I was like, I don't think I can really say that out loud, though. That feels like some kind of third rail, but I'm not sure I wanna get into. And then I think you were both like, no. We should get into that.
Kate Tyson:But and I've come around. I think we should get into it. But,
Tara McMullin:According to reporting from Taylor Lorenz and Drew Harwell in The Washington Post last fall, the creator economy is worth about $250,000,000,000 globally. That number is projected to nearly double over the next 3 years. YouTube estimated that its creators supported nearly 400,000 full time jobs in 2022. That's 4 times the number of jobs at General Motors. Platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are quite happy to advertise the ways they support creators with features and advice.
Tara McMullin:Their aspirational creator hubs give the distinct impression that becoming a creator is akin to getting paid to be yourself. But at the same time, and this leads me back to this particular moment on the Internet that Kate, Charlie, and I wanted to talk about, people are frustrated. I know there are still people out there who like using social media. However, it's increasingly talked about as a necessary evil for a gilded precariat that's trying to look good sound wise, stay hip, and just figure out how to put food on the table. Further, in the circles that Charlie, Kate, and I run-in, and probably you too since you're listening, there is a huge misunderstanding about the incentives, market forces, and algorithmic nudging at work within the creator economy, especially as they relate to marketing and micro business.
Tara McMullin:As you can imagine, this conversation was quite long, quite heady, and a little all over the place, although less unwieldy than I expected it to be. So I'm splitting it into 2 parts. We've got today's episode and then next week's episode. Today, we're thinking through the economics of the creator economy. What's valuable, how that value flows, and who the stakeholders are in this economy.
Tara McMullin:Next week, we'll talk about some of the business mechanics in the creator economy and the impact of intitification on both creators and their content. I'm gonna keep my interruptions to the conversation to a minimum, but I will jump in a few times to clear things up or point out something extra important or just to make sure you're following along. Finally, you do not have to identify as a creator for this conversation to be relevant to you. All of us do work that in some way intersects with the so called creator economy. And at the least, you consume information and ideas on the Internet.
Tara McMullin:We approach this topic as business owners who also make a lot of content in various forms. We think strategically about how we show up online and the diverse goals we have, and I think that's going to make this topic relevant to anyone listening. So without further ado, Kate Tyson, Charlie Gilkey, and me.
Kate Tyson:You know one of the things I was thinking about and I guess this pertains to like who is this for is that like, I think I was getting confused because I don't think people are actually clear on what they are trying to do. So people are getting confused about, like, am I marketing? Am I just being an artist? Am I just getting to do the thing I love, but I need to make money off of it because that's what the economy tells me or because everything is so precarious, that's the only way to do it. So I feel like there's some, like, threads that if we can, I'd love to try and, like, make some sense of around what what is actually happening in that muddy soup.
Tara McMullin:Well, I think that might be a good place to just kind of dive in because I do think that defining the term creative creator economy is really important because I think, actually, a lot of the people that this conversation matters to either don't consider themselves part of the creator economy, or they know that that label is being applied to the kinds of things that they're doing online. But, Kate, to your point, they can't reconcile, like, their activities and their goals with this kind of bland, beige, weird, amorphous thing that we're calling the creator economy.
Kate Tyson:Which might be because we can't, actually, because these larger economic forces and these platforms have a set of values and things that they're trying to do that are, by definition, going to be misaligned most of the time with what we are trying to do and how we're trying to thrive as individuals.
Tara McMullin:Boom. Done. We're done.
Charlie Gilkey:It was wonderful to see you all.
Tara McMullin:Well, okay. So on that note, let's start with the first word in the phrase, creator. Who would you put in the bucket of creator and or creative within this larger system? And do you consider yourself a creator?
Charlie Gilkey:So the distinction I'm making between creative and creator is when I start applying creator in the context of this conversation, I mean someone who is taking their creative skills to market and selling those in different ways, whether it's via video content or whatever content is, like, when that's the distinction. So when I said creatives, I allowed people who are not entrepreneurs and trying to sell that in the market place to do their thing. But I think in the context of our conversation, creator now means someone who is dollarizing, economizing their creativity on the different platforms that exist via, you know, YouTube. We can go down the list of those. But that's the the Yeah.
Charlie Gilkey:The most specific I can be on that because if I go more specific, I think it starts to exclude a lot of people who would then put themselves in that camp.
Kate Tyson:I cosigned that. I think that makes sense to me.
Charlie Gilkey:You know, it's weird. I sort of am a reluctant creator. Mhmm. I joined the what we now call, the creator economy back when it was blogging. Right?
Charlie Gilkey:So I think we have 3 bloggers here. And as the creator economy got bigger and expanded around us, we realized that, you know, we're not just bloggers. We've got podcasts. We've got video. We've got social media stuff.
Charlie Gilkey:We've got communities, and there's just all sorts of different ways and vehicles for parsing out that creativity and and advice and counsel in different ways. So I kind of consider myself a creator because I'm more than just a blogger and author. But when I see, like, if I get into Comparasitas and, like, people on YouTube and people on doing this and doing all the things, I'm like, well, I'm not doing that. That's way too much. Like, I'm I'm mostly writing and talking centered, when it comes to how I'm a creator in in this world.
Charlie Gilkey:So, yes, reluctantly?
Kate Tyson:Well, in my constitutional rebelliousness, it will become as no surprise to you both that I don't really use. I don't think I've ever used that term for myself. No. I mean, I think of myself as an artist, and I think about of myself as a creative. And I've never thought about myself as a creator, and I think part of that's because, again, constitutionally rebellious.
Kate Tyson:Like, I've I don't know that I've ever done things in a way to try and follow the economy around how one should, produce content or, like, put work out into the world. And that's mostly because I just, like, can't. It's a bit feels like what I should do. I'm not gonna do it. So some of it's just about my own particular makeup as a human.
Kate Tyson:And I remember this, you know, when I was an art student, kind of confusing my professors because I was pretty adamant that I didn't wanna make my money from artwork. Like, I just did not wanna go down a professional path around that. And I think I've been consistent about that, my whole life. And that's really for me about not wanting to, like, stress myself out by having my creative output be the thing that my livelihood is dependent upon. Because I know for me, that is a road to some kind of, like, abysmal future that, you know, it's just not how I work, well.
Tara McMullin:It took me a long time to come around to the term creator. I still don't love it, but I accept it. I remember 6 or 7 years ago now being in a meeting with a tech CEO. They wanted more insight on the kind of people in my audience because they believed that my audience was their audience, and they kept calling my audience creators. I gently pushed back.
Tara McMullin:I said that people in my audience don't think of themselves as creators. They're not trying to make money from the content they post. Their content is marketing for their small businesses that sell products and services and subscriptions. I mean, honestly, I still think that. My guess is that you, person in my audience, only ever plan to generate revenue from your content indirectly, if that.
Tara McMullin:You don't ever expect to be paid for your content. I'm sure someone out there does, but most of you? No. What's changed? Why I've come around to the term creator is that I have become a creator.
Tara McMullin:I sell access to my content directly. I get paid to write articles. I've always created a lot of content and I've always seen it as a core business function, but now it is my business. So there's our take on who's a creator and whether each one of us is. Let's take a closer look at one of the fundamental market forces in the creator economy.
Charlie Gilkey:Well, first off, we have the economization of creativity. And that's kinda this idea that if you have some creative outlet, you should start putting dollar signs to it. And it kinda becomes from a hobby to something that you become pro prosumer and then, virtually, you go pro pro. Right? And in that journey, so many people get lost with that very basic assumption that we have to dollarize creativity.
Charlie Gilkey:Like, you can't just have it and use it and and channel it, like, because you have to find these other reasons and you have to sell it so and so forth. And that's where so many people get stuck. And then we go to the platforms that have their own ends. Just the very basic concept of digital sharecropping that so many people don't understand, right, as a part of this work. And, like, we spend so much of the time and even Substack now have with the introduction of notes and what they're doing.
Charlie Gilkey:Like, we're doing a lot more sharecropping than people think, and that's different than it was even last year this time.
Tara McMullin:Okay. What is digital sharecropping, you ask? 1st, sharecropping, the way you might've learned about it in history class, is a system of land management in which the land owner allows tenant farmers to work a share of land in exchange for part of the crop. In this way, the land owner profits from land ownership by virtue of others' labor. Now digital share cropping is a term coined by Nicholas Carr in 2006 that basically describes how the Internet functions today.
Tara McMullin:I'm gonna read straight from Carr's 2006 post. His explanation is a bit lengthier than I prefer to quote, but he really describes it perfectly. Carr writes, quote, what's being economic value of content. Platforms economic value of content. Platforms have realized that they can give away the tools of production, but maintain ownership over the resulting products.
Tara McMullin:One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2 point o is the distribution of production few. It's a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self expression or socializing, not in making money. And besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It's only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale that the business becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy.
Tara McMullin:Alright. Back to Charlie.
Charlie Gilkey:I think starting with Kate's provocation and sort of unwinding it from, what are we actually talking about here? Can is this the Wittgensteinian language game to where, like, we can't precisely define it, but we know we we know it's a realm of thing, which is why this actually, like, we're confused, but we can't get clarity at the same time. And that's a very frustrating position to be in for people whose business it is or whose business becomes trying to get clear what to do with these platforms and content.
Tara McMullin:Well, okay. So on that note, I think it leads us to another term that I'd like to parse before we move too much further, which is art versus content. And, Pete, I know that you have opinions, so why don't you share them?
Kate Tyson:I don't you know, and I also see I was, like, god, I hope they have a way to talk about this because I don't know that I have a good way to talk about this right now. I think probably as I was trying to, like, think through this whole conversation, I made my head spin a little about about it. But what I I think what I was trying to parse out is it's not that art doesn't exist within commerce and markets and isn't something that people make livelihoods out of and sell and stuff like that. And it's not even something that doesn't follow market trends because that also happens. And so this is where I was trying to figure out, like, well, where's the where's the distinction then?
Kate Tyson:Because there is a way in which artistic practice and output allows certain kinds of expression and types of creation that content creation tries to weed out. Uh-huh. And I think that's about stuff that might not be palatable to an audience, might be mediocre, might be not salable or not commercialized. Like, there's sorts of, like, qualities I think the art making allows for even in a hyper, like, art market, like, a lot of folks exist within. That is very different from content creation.
Kate Tyson:Like, I think the the feedback loop is different in terms of, like, audience to creation.
Tara McMullin:I really like the way you put the feedback loop is different. And I need to think about, like, what that feedback or what those 2 feedback loops look like. But I think you've hit on something that I haven't heard someone else say before that I really like.
Charlie Gilkey:For me, content can be neutral. Mhmm. Right? It's It's just a particular form in which a piece of work shows up, right? And I can, at the same time, that I can see we in the broader conversation we're talking about with the creator economy, if we're talking about marketing, if we're talking about platforms, what is often implied is content that meets like, it it it fits into the different shapes and holes that the systems need for it to work.
Charlie Gilkey:Right? And that piece is, I think, fundamentally different than what we might call formless art that is not trying to find those particular, like, this triangle piece of content goes into this triangle hole. This this square content goes into that square hole. It's just what it is because of how it needs to be expressed. And so for me, that's what I would say.
Charlie Gilkey:It seems like the point of creating art in that way is to create art. And the way we're talking about it in a creator economy, the point of making content is to get an outcome. Yep. An outcome is specified by the platforms, you know, and whatever they call it, likes, follow, shares, repost, whatever. Right?
Charlie Gilkey:We're creating for that effect, which may not be the effect of connecting with humans and, you know, transforming humans
Tara McMullin:a and creator, but their definition was that an influencer is someone who has leveraged platforms to basically transcend algorithms, whereas a creator is someone who plays the game of the algorithm to right? To to get the outcomes that they're looking for. And so, Charlie, when you said, like, it has to fit the triangle content has to fit in the triangle hole, like, I think to me, that's very much what that definition was describing.
Charlie Gilkey:Yeah. I love that. I mean, because we can think about influencers or thought leaders at a certain level where people like, I wanna be like that. I wanna be James Clear. I'm just gonna do what James Clear does without understanding the total platform power that James has or Tim has or Seth has or Brene has or, Mel has, like, all of those people.
Charlie Gilkey:Like, it doesn't fundamentally matter where they go. They are going to be successful. They are going to create the trend that other creators follow but don't get that result because they don't understand the behind the scenes machinations and the fact that they can do whatever they want at a certain point.
Kate Tyson:Which is a little bit like to I mean, to pull it back into the economic realm, this is like we're talking about market cap. Mhmm. Like, can these folks just have a level of quote, unquote, market capitalization that they can go and shift and morph, and it doesn't really impact their value over time. Like, they can continue to pull that value with them because they cast such a large shadow. Yeah.
Kate Tyson:Whereas, like, even those of us in this room, and you both have larger platforms than I do, like, that's not really true. Like, we could you know? Yeah.
Tara McMullin:Another way to think about what Kate is talking about here is preferential attachment. Preferential attachment is the idea that once something or someone becomes popular or powerful, their popularity or power will grow. Power and popularity create reinforcing feedback loops. The more popular something is, the more likely someone is likely to see it and decide they like it too, making it even more popular. The more powerful someone is, the more likely people will try to get into their network, making them even more powerful.
Tara McMullin:Digital humanity scholar Colin Brook characterizes social media this way, quote, it's a system that rewards early entry, popularity, originality, and other factors. It's a system where the rich get richer, and entry into the market gets progressively more difficult the longer it exists.
Charlie Gilkey:Well and we see that because that person can have their own platform power, right, at a certain size and can become the Jupiter of their industry, which means everyone just sort of drug along with them. Right? Because they're winning, they continue to win. So if you become the true Amazon best seller for your category, it is incredibly difficult to be toppled, right? Because it's gonna keep feeding that more people are gonna buy it and it's gonna keep feeding that.
Tara McMullin:Okay. We're at about the halfway point in today's episode. And I wanna pause here for a moment to recap. So far, we've talked through who a creator is and why we might respond to that term in a variety of ways, depending on our orientation to the work we produce and the businesses we run. We discussed the sort of macroeconomic forces that differentiate art making from content making.
Tara McMullin:We talked about digital sharecropping and preferential attachment. Now, we're going to examine the theory of economy that not only explains how value is being created, but also why it's so exhausting for people like us.
Kate Tyson:Can we talk about vector economics now? Please. Because I I feel like this is such a helpful it's been such a helpful frame for me, and I know, Tara, you've read this too. I don't know if, Charlie, you've read Mackenzie Werk's work on this, but it was really helpful for me to start thinking about the larger systems in a different way. Mackenzie Work has written about the vector economy as basically a new mode of production that has evolved outside of capitalism.
Kate Tyson:So it's not I think the title of the book that this, work is situated in is, I'm liking it.
Tara McMullin:Mackenzie Bork is the author of Capital is Dead. Is This Something Worse? I loved this book, and I wrote about her ideas last fall while examining why the revenue promises that marketers make always seem to go up often to ludicrous levels. In Capital is dead, she explains that capital is dead the way god is dead. That is, by proclaiming capital's death, we free ourselves to describe today's political economy without relying on the seemingly eternal nature of capital and its machinery.
Tara McMullin:Wark argues that we keep adjusting our understanding of capitalism in order to fit reality rather than simply describing reality for what it is. Wark sees our current political economy as one based on vectors of information and data rather than labor and production. This new form of value production, which has been around now since at least the turn of the century, creates new class relations, the hacker class and the vectoralist class. For Wark, the hacker class is made up of those tasked with continually creating something novel from their experience, expertise, and perspective of the world around them. For some, it's code, but others create political hot takes, video essays, books, newsletters, art, songs, vaccines, social media posts, live streams, and heck, podcast episodes.
Tara McMullin:She writes, we are the hackers of abstraction. We produce new concepts, new perceptions, new sensations hacked out of raw data. Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colorings, we are the abstractors of new worlds. In other words, if you're listening to this, I'm nearly 100% certain you belong to the hacker class.
Kate Tyson:Their, sort of thesis is that we have a new mode of production that's based on ownership of information, not means of production. And so those that have power able to extract value most in this current economy are the owners of, information. So Amazon, Meta, those kinds of things. And it's not that this has supplanted capitalism entirely because we still have those kinds of modes of production, but in the sense that economies are always made of different types of isms happening. But I found this so so helpful.
Kate Tyson:And even in just thinking about, like, who are these sort of top dogs within these information systems, like, what makes them rise to the top of these information economies and be able to kind of work within that. And then the other part that I have found extremely helpful and I think is helpful to think about in terms of this conversation is that it also creates a different class dynamic and a new class relation outside of, like, the traditional capitalist owners of the modes of production and worker and labor. And so it's those of us that are creating content and information, are the sort of new labor, In WARC's terms, this would be hackers. And then the owners of the means of production are now the folks that own the vectors of information.
Tara McMullin:Because I really love the way they characterize hackers versus workers, as workers being someone who does the same thing every day and hackers being people who take the same information and come up with a different way to deliver it every day? Because dear god, that, like, describes my life. Right? And it is, like, this completely like, it has a different effect on the body and the mind, the soul. You know, Sean and I were just talking about sort of the, you know, his he gravitates to that more manual routinized labor so that he can leave the rest of his creative brain free.
Tara McMullin:And, like, how that fits into this whole thing and, like, where that falls in a in a class order is, like, really interesting to me.
Kate Tyson:But it starts to explain things to me, like this sort of return to, like, pottery and bread baking and sort of things that don't involve intellectual work in the same way. And it also kind of explains some of the mechanisms of platforms and, like, what they demand of us. Something like you should publish your newsletter weekly. Like like, constructs like that and sort of the way that we accept the norms of how we should be creating and what that looks like. Also, entirely, like, once you start starting to see this in terms of a larger structure of extraction, and even, like, personal brands.
Kate Tyson:I mean, what what this really, like, cemented for me was oh, right. Of course. If we run out of sort of natural resources to extract from, if, like, you know, traditional modes of production are you know, those are becoming more difficult to extract more wealth from in a linear way, then, like, what better thing to jump to than individuals' own authenticity and, like, souls and how they make meaning in the world. Like, great. That sounds infinite.
Kate Tyson:Yeah.
Charlie Gilkey:Well, I love that because, you know, I've been saying for at least the last 12 years or so that to be successful in the creator economy long term, you have to become a synthesis. Because if you're just creating information, you're just creating information, you're just sort of pushing that out, you are inevitably competing with Wikipedia. Right? And you're not gonna win that. But now we can say you're competing with AI.
Charlie Gilkey:Like, there's an inevitability where we can go to Amazon and type, you know, I wanna read a novel from, you know, the 19 forties that features a red headed heroin who falls in love someone who rides a motorcycle, and loves cats. And it's going to spit out what looks like a novel. Right? And it's going to read like a novel and it's going to be mistaken for or maybe perhaps be what is now considered a novel. Well, it turns out you don't need writers for that anymore.
Charlie Gilkey:And what does that mean when that's how we orient to entertainment and art and things like that? Like, in the in the creator economy as we've been talking about it, until maybe 2021, the difficulty was creating content. How do you do it? How do you get your button seen right? How do you publish?
Charlie Gilkey:How do you do all of those? Like, that was the hard part. It's not the hard part anymore. Creating remarkable content to steal from Tara, creating something that really connects, creating that artful content that will still do that in a way that meets the market and market demands is gonna be difficult. You know?
Charlie Gilkey:And it reminds me of, this comes from Sapiens by Harari. Right? So there are 3 levels of reality or three kinds of reality. So there's objective reality, which is just facts in the world. Right?
Charlie Gilkey:Rocks are hard, Water's wet. So on and so forth. It doesn't matter about the observer. There's subjective reality, which is our feelings, our beliefs, our expect or, like, our internal narrative. And it's true because it's true for us.
Charlie Gilkey:But this 3rd level that's important for what we're talking about is intersubjective reality, which is the stuff that exists in the world, and it has value because we agree it has value. What we've done over the last 20 years or so is we've created virtual social goods. Things that don't have any inherent value whatsoever, but they become valuable because we say they have value. So, you know, high schoolers who are obsessed about how many likes their post get. Now that didn't exist when we were in high school.
Charlie Gilkey:And so it had no value, but because enough people care, that is something that now exists. And so whether we like it or not, we have created a new virtual social good that can be exchanged and parlayed into other goods, and that's what we do at social goods. And I don't think enough people are really thinking about what are the virtual social goods that actually are important and relevant to me in my life and livelihood and which ones can I opt out of?
Tara McMullin:I think there's a a significant misunderstanding of what is valuable for people versus what's valuable for platforms so that, you know, we can say, oh, that that reputation that you've built on this platform is a valuable social good. But we're thinking of that in terms that the platform supplies as opposed to the effect it has for us. Us. And, like, one of the things I've been kind of really thinking through a lot lately is we take actions because they're effective. The question is what the effect is.
Tara McMullin:Right? And so if we're creating these virtual social goods, we're doing it because it's creating an effect. But that effect benefits the platform a hell of a lot more than it benefits me. And until I can swap that, if I can swap that, if I can recognize that, then that that virtual social good doesn't actually have any value to me.
Charlie Gilkey:Now that's the funny thing, like, about those virtual social goods is we run into problem as people when we stop questioning whether the social goods are actually good for us. You know, maybe on Substack, it's more people being like, I don't know that more people DM ing me. That attention is a good that that is actually good for me. Right? So this is using Michael Walzer's view of social goods from spheres of justice.
Charlie Gilkey:The problem he points out in that book is what where you get societies that aren't operating well is is one sphere gets too powerful. So when religious when the religious sphere gets too powerful and the social goods become dominant, other, then you have problems. Right? And you don't have other mediating spheres. What we see what I would say if I were going into full on philosopher mode is that platforms have have created another sphere of society.
Charlie Gilkey:And when it becomes too dominant that it can't be regulated, that the that our politicians turn it over to the the platform owners to regulate themselves. Right? Just things like that is where you see that that one sphere of our culture has gotten imbalanced and you have to create and pull some of the other spheres to to have a rectifying force on that. And that's not where we've gotten to yet because so many people, I don't think, are really recognizing the power that platforms have in our lives. Like, and not just the vanity stuff, but just like real getting paid and getting jobs.
Charlie Gilkey:And we need to know that and we need to operate accordingly.
Kate Tyson:Yeah. Well, the thing that started coming to mind as you were talking was this this has been happening on Instagram. I don't know for how long, but these posts that folks make, especially with larger platforms, that it's part of their business, where there are for the algo posts, where, I see this happen all the time now where and it's usually, like, folks that have some sort of capitalist critique. They're they're very aware of the trade off that they're making with having their content on this platform, but also this sort of, like, I need the platform for my business. I hate the platform.
Kate Tyson:The platform is abusing me, but I still have to participate in it. So there's that sort of dialogue in the background, but there's a lot of folks that post they're usually selfies. Mhmm. And the sort of tagline that people always say is, like, for the algo, now let me tell you the thing that's really important. So there's, like, this sort of phenomenon that I've noticed that folks are, like there's almost, like, this sigh wink of, like, alright.
Kate Tyson:I'm gonna feed the beast, and then can we go talk over here about what I actually wanna talk
Tara McMullin:Can I ask a clarifying question?
Kate Tyson:Yeah.
Tara McMullin:When they're feeding the algo, is it the post itself just posting that's feeding the algo? Is it the posting a photo with a face in it that's feeding the algo? Like, what is the actual
Kate Tyson:Yeah. It's basically I think it's people clocking what the algorithm is, privileging at any certain point. And so, like, we know that Instagram likes reels. Like, we know that Instagram likes pictures of faces as opposed to products. So it's sort of like, you know, priming an audience to be like, here's a picture of me still here.
Kate Tyson:Thanks for coming. To boost some visibility. So it might be like the first slide in a post, or it might be the beginning of a story. And then from that so it's like something to pull people in to grab the algo as a means to try and get visibility to the thing that your audience actually cares about that you care about.
Tara McMullin:Thanks. Because my reach sucks.
Kate Tyson:Yeah. Well, because you don't put your face on it anymore, Tara.
Tara McMullin:Years. Simple.
Charlie Gilkey:Look. I at the risk of getting myself fired from this call, right, we know that there are certain, ways you can produce content on Instagram that would increase your reach
Tara McMullin:I know.
Charlie Gilkey:That are just not authentic with who you are. I mean, we see the same thing on LinkedIn. Like, one of the things that pisses me off about LinkedIn is that you have to do the stupid link in comment. Right? Because if you write content and you put a link in there, LinkedIn is gonna be like, nope.
Charlie Gilkey:We wanna keep people here. That's your job. What they're essentially telling us is your job, Charlie, is to keep people on this platform. And anytime you try not to do that, we are going to penalize you. So we have to do the stupid, like, we'll write the content and we'll say link in comment.
Charlie Gilkey:And then, you know, you gotta go, like, comment to 3 or 4 people so the so the algos are like, okay. You're playing our games. You know, do all these things, and then you could jump back 5 minutes later and put a link in your comment so that people can actually see what you're talking about. Like, when we're talking about content, what pisses us off about it. It's like, okay.
Charlie Gilkey:How many games do we need to play with the bros for us to not have them get in the way and be a mediator in the relationship that we've had with people who ostensibly opted in to show up because they wanted to follow people. But now they're only able to follow the the frames and the pictures and the content that the people that are on the platform present playing their rules. That's where it gets super frustrating.
Kate Tyson:So it seems the platform is now abusing you because it's amassed enough followers and users and, like, people within its ecosystem that it doesn't have to be in service of the users anymore. So now, you know, it's gotten to this point where there are all these folks that have businesses that are now dependent on platforms. They know it's not working for them and the value they're actually the thing they're actually care about and wanna create, and even, I would say, the thing that their audiences care about. So we're kind of, like, trying to have this conversation between self and audience and business and audience and, like and that's relational, and and it's real like, I don't wanna dismiss that as something that, you know, that's very valuable. And then there's this sort of, like, 3rd elephant in the room, which is like, oh, but we gotta deal with this platform over here.
Kate Tyson:It's in it's part of our conversation too.
Tara McMullin:This is what's at the heart of the creator economy. The concept of the creator economy is predicated on peer to peer exchange. It's a supposedly disintermediated economic structure. I can do business with you. You can do business with me.
Tara McMullin:Value flows freely between interested parties. There are no gatekeepers, no institutions deciding who gets to publish or speak or present. But that's not actually how it works, is it? Instead of a human gatekeeper with taste and personal preferences, there's code. Instead of an institution rooted in tradition or public support, there's a for profit corporation beholden to shareholders and often operating in economic realms that regulations and laws just haven't caught up with yet.
Tara McMullin:Platforms present themselves as mere tools or free marketplaces, but in fact, their logic is woven into every transaction we make in the creator economy. Be it a like, a share, or a purchase. Platforms don't stand by and let peer to peer exchange happen. They're not absent from these relations. The creator economy isn't peer to peer.
Tara McMullin:It's peer to machine to peer. I finally got this while reading Richard Seymour's, the Twittering Machine. He writes quote, they have created a machine for us to write to. The bait is that we are interacting with other people, our friends, professional colleagues, celebrities, politicians. We are not interacting with them, however, but with the machine.
Tara McMullin:We write to it, and it passes on the message for us after keeping a record of the data. Here's the thing though, it doesn't only keep a record of the data. It also decides whether or not that message gets passed on. And as Charlie said, the machine is optimized for its own goals. It doesn't care that others have opted in to follow us.
Tara McMullin:It's programmed to deliver the output that the platform coded into it. Time on-site, engagement, ad delivery, And at the end of the day, those outputs all come out in the wash as shareholder value. The most powerful people in the creator economy, therefore, aren't creators. They're not influencers. They're not even software engineers.
Tara McMullin:They are the shareholders that dictate what's valuable to tech CEOs, who dictate what's valuable to the code that runs their platform.
Kate Tyson:I know, Terry, you've written about this and put it in our notes, which is that sort of like, people think they have a marketing problem, but what they actually have is a discovery and distribution problem. And I might even extend that and say, like, we have a larger economic problem. Like, it's not even doesn't stop there. Kinda like to your point, Charlie, part of that game of trying to get around the rules that are around digital share crapping, to use the term you brought in. It also distorts what we're creating.
Kate Tyson:Because if your stuff's not performing well, because you're an individual just trying to make it, you might be aware that the algorithm is doing some shenanigans to tank your views or, like, whatever you're trying to you know, whatever kind of feedback loop you're trying to create there. Because I noticed this all the time for myself. It's, like, there's this doubt that creeps in about your own work, what you should be doing. Like, is this the right thing to be publishing? And, like, I know that's kind of inescapable for folks, which because their work's being mediated by platforms.
Kate Tyson:And so when you have these distribution problems come up, even if you're aware that the algorithm is slapping you on the wrist when you're posting the way it doesn't want you to. I feel like there's still this effect on kind of what you start thinking about publishing and how, you know, what you create and what you put out in the world. Even if it's subconsciously, that's going to, like, and it's gonna invade your work.
Tara McMullin:To return to Charlie's metaphor about content from earlier, that is creating content entails fitting triangle shapes into triangle shaped holes, if what you make is circle shapes, but all the holes you can plug into are triangle shaped, then you have 2 options. You can either make your circle shapes and accept that people won't see them until a circle shaped hole miraculously appears, if it ever does, or you could take your circle shapes and sand down the edges to make triangle shapes. Eventually, you'll realize that it's just easier to start making triangles and skip the whole sanding down the circle step. Making triangles might be disappointing, frustrating, or uninteresting to you, and that sucks. But algorithmic management doesn't only impact individual experiences and labor relations.
Tara McMullin:It changes culture. It changes politics. It changes every other sector of the economy. Algorithmic management and the logic it emerges from have no room for authenticity despite champion authentic experience as its chief value. If making triangles or selfies or reels or derivative life advice content is the only way my work can get passed on, and I am not a maker of triangles or selfies or reels or derivative life advice content, then either I have to find some other way to make a living or I have to give up my circle making no matter how authentic to me it might be.
Tara McMullin:Now that might just sound like responding to the market or giving people what they want, but to be clear, choosing to make triangles instead of circles isn't responding to the market. It's not making some economically logical decision Because algorithms and platforms are not markets, and the creator economy, well, it isn't an economy. Circles may well be in demand, but if the circles don't provide the output that platform shareholders want, that it doesn't matter how many people want circles. Now that's very abstract and frankly, it's kind of silly. But the same mechanism is at work in something much more tangible like the US housing market.
Tara McMullin:There is huge demand for affordable housing. There is huge demand for multi unit buildings. There is huge demand for single family homes that cost something reasonable to a family living off the median household income. Yet a complex system of building regulations, local governance, lending policies, developer priorities, and tax policy mean that contractors are busy building second homes for hedge fund managers and health care company bigwigs instead of building the kind of homes we actually need. That complex system, well, it's a kind of algorithm.
Tara McMullin:Its output satisfies a group of people with power and utterly disappoints the market. That is the people who actually want to pay rent or buy homes. At this point, you're probably wondering, what do I do now? And you also probably know that I'm not going to tell you what to do. How I don't know what to do.
Tara McMullin:However, we can all pay closer attention. We can notice when the actions we're taking benefit someone or something that is not us or the people we care about. We can notice when we start sanding down our circles to make triangles. We can notice when we're feeding the algo and ask if there is something else we could be doing with our time. Pay attention.
Tara McMullin:It's the critical next step in the journey to building something better. Next week, we'll continue the conversation and talk about the small business repercussions of working in the creator economy, as well as how creators, small business owners, and independent workers could push back on platforms. Huge thanks to Charlie Gilkey, author of Team Habits and Start Finishing, and the cofounder of Productive Flourishing. You can find him at productiveflourishing.com. And huge thanks to Kate Tyson.
Tara McMullin:The only artist I know who runs a bookkeeping and consulting agency. You can find that agency at wonderwellconsulting.com and her writing at katetyson.substack dotcom. You can also find her podcast, Whiskey Fridays, wherever you listen to what works. What works is a production of Yellow House Media, a podcast production agency for people changing the way we think about culture, creativity, leadership, and work. Our production coordinator is Lou Blazer.
Tara McMullin:Our production assistant is Emily Kilduff. This episode was written and edited by me, Tara McMullen. Marty Ciefelt is our audio engineer, and Sean McMullen is our fearless leader and executive producer. What Works is produced on stolen land. We're grateful to the Susquehannock and Conestoga peoples who stewarded this land for 1000 of years before the arrival of white colonists.
Tara McMullin:The yellow house is on the unseated land of the Kutinaha Nation and the tribes of the.
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