(2023-10-13) Levy The Curse Of The Creator Economy

Steven Levy: The Curse of the Creator Economy. Journalist Taylor Lorenz isn’t the first to declare legacy media a dead industry walking.

The future of media, she says, lies in social media influencers and the “creator economy.”

"It is often dismissed by traditionalists as a vacant fad when it in fact it is the greatest and most disruptive change in modern capitalism"." In fact? More than private equity, the rise of the tech platforms influencers build on, or the US Supreme Court’s multiple rulings giving corporations individual rights while weakening the rights actual individuals have to hold companies to account?

Her long-awaited tome on online influencers and creators—who have genuinely made a difference, though the “empowering millions” part is debatable—is a surprisingly conventional business book.

Lorenz practically invented the influencer beat, consistently clobbering competitors by chronicling the movement’s innovators and wannabes

While Lorenz stops short of outright endorsing the phenomenon, it’s clear she’s down with the scene. Especially when it comes to making legacy media look clueless

Her observations about how a generation takes these creators more seriously than journalistic warhorses comes with post-touchdown spikes worthy of taunting penalties

Does she think that influencer media is better than what came before?

“I think it's certainly superior in a lot of ways,” she tells me. “The traditional media is very strict in terms of format. They just often don't present content in a way that people want to consume it.”

People don't always prefer to read articles,” she says. “People want more multimedia content.

I ask if she thinks that creator content is superior to, say Hollywood movies. Yes, she kind of does. “What are movies except long-form content?” she asks.

there’s a lot of creativity and value in creator content. Yet also countless empty calories.

And then there’s the trust issue. Some people gleefully anticipate the end of gatekeepers. But the creator ecosystem has insufficient protections against toxic, even racist content. An oft-cited drive of creators is getting famous, and that compass too often points to the lowest common denominator.

A critical moment in Lorenz’s book comes when she writes about the FTC’s 2017 specification that any paid endorsement of food, hotels, beauty products, THC gummies, or anything else be labeled as an “ad.”

But users didn’t seem to care

In the world of creators, selling out was a virtue.

Lorenz paints a picture of a future where everyone has successful social media channels—each person a media company—that promotes their business and shares their interests and auditions for entertainment-industry jobs.

My bet is that this revolution, just as with the internet before it, will be one with a small pool of big winners and a mass of followers. Lorenz doesn’t really dispute this, but, in somewhat of a dystopian twist, blames it on the late-stage capitalism that the creator economy is allegedly transforming

Taylor Lorenz’s history of social media finds the first influencers in the early days of blogging. She didn’t go back far enough. In the early 1980s, an ex-Army colonel named Dave Hughes became an online celebrity to the 40,000 members of The Source. I profiled Hughes for Popular Computing in January 1984.