Value & inflation
How the structure built around creative products starves and imperils culture—and threatens the degradation of life.
Before entering Inferno proper, Dante and his guide Virgil pass by a group of people who moan. That gives him pause and begs the question of who these people are to be where they are in the afterlife.
“This miserable fate suffer the wretched souls of those, who liv'd
without or praise or blame, with that ill band of angels mix'd, who nor rebellious prov'd nor yet were true to God, but for themselves
were only.”
They’re the Opportunists—people with no beliefs or ideas of their own, who sided with the strongest.
I’m reminded of this passage often in relation to media and the illusory attempt to ‘look’ objective. Responsible journalism has become harder to fund, somehow. But it’s the arts where we find the most glaring gap between value created and extracted.
Publishers, tech platforms, streaming companies, studios, promotion agencies, and more intermediaries—all get paid before the writer or artist sees a penny. Then there’s AI, the vacuum that sucks value out of everything.
The money is in all the wrong places, says Kelsey McKinney in Defector. Perhaps you disagree with her choice of artist to argue the point, but the substance is valid. You can see it in all creative industries—from music and entertainment, to writing and other forms of cultural output.
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Marketing, administration, technology are all layers that take a slice of the profit from a work of art—slices that have become increasingly larger over time. And the creative industry more than any other (except politics), is rife with nepotism.
It has to be, or you won’t survive long enough to get a break the irony is not lost on me, it shouldn’t on you either—we’re in the same boat.) Those go to the opportunists, people who learn to play the game of layers.
The money produced by art has not disappeared. The issue is not that the people of the world value television less than they did in the 1990s. The reality is that the people with the most money have devised, at every turn, new and more bulletproof ways for them to make and keep more money, and for the people who make things to make less. This is the eternal story of labor and management; it just has hot people in it, in this case.
There are two parts to the argument. They’re both cultural and have contributed to the devaluation of original work. As I discussed elsewhere, most people embrace creative work only after someone else discovered and championed it.
It’s not just cultural gatekeepers—the media, publishers, studios, etc.—but also everyone else. The Pavolvian reaction is to first look and see if the person is popular, a celebrity, influencer, or the thing has already become a meme.
Social media has systems in place to train us to follow the likes, shares, and virality, not read and ponder what’s being said. The faster we react, the more we stay on and donate our activity to their algorithms, the better the algorithms become.
We get frustration and worse out of it. McLuhan understood how the medium changes us sixty years ago—we still believe ‘not for me because I’m smarter’ kind of stuff. Then do play into the first part of the argument, which is the nature of meritocracy.
Another narrative to imprint the primacy of the self in a system that uses you—we swallowed it whole without a second thought.
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