This is a topic to discuss the newsletter in the title.
“We look for things that make us think.” – a creative Pakled (Star Trek))
I think the creative thinkers who are most influential among a growing movement are influential because they are driven. They make collaborations happen because they are compelled to. The most creative stuff happens before the ideas become widely known, because that’s when it can still grow and evolve.
I think you’re conflating commercial success with intellectual success. I don’t think we should worry about helping creative thinkers be commercially successful. I feel like 99% of people who spend time in creative endeavors have a “day job” out of necessity. The day job can be creative, but not what inspires them, or it can be a technical or a service job or whatever. We need to make it easier for creatives to get started without starving or selling out.
In previous generations you could work at a “day job” and have enough money to afford a typewriter and have your nights free. I think those days are at an an end because of wealth disparity. In order to have the time to pursue completely FREE creative activities you need to be wealthy or middle class. Otherwise all your time is spent earning enough money to feed and shelter your family.
But wait, we have new systems that can allow creative people to become successful with a very low barrier to entry. Youtube, blogs! What about those? As we’ve seen, it’s very hard to make money on those things. It’s very hard to get past the rake taken by the platform. They take it in exposure (by showing or hiding your content only in ways that make them money) or in actual money (monetizing your content with ads automatically and giving themselves almost all of the revenue). So an aspiring creative with interesting ideas gets sucked into the dark side where they learn to develop popular ideas, and they forget whatever truly interesting ideas they had before they started.
It’s the “junk food” of creative patronage. Seductive but almost always useless for changing the world (which is the purpose of all human expression IMHO).
Patreon started out as a way to help small-scale creatives reach a paying audience, but they keep trying to “grow” which is poison in today’s world. They add new features, they raise prices, and now the members have to worry more about making money to pay patreon and less about how to make good art. They should think about how to make their product serve it’s original purpose better. Make it cheaper and easier for people to use. Make it easier to people to find things through the personal web of trust, not by pushing stuff in their face chosen by a computer. Obviously that won’t satisfy the VCs, so it doesn’t usually happen.
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