From Real Life Magazine, March 10:
Over the past decade, there have been numerous versions of the argument that creativity has stagnated, everything is recycled, and the genuine production of the “new” has become more or less impossible. Yet over the same stretch of time, the term “creator” has become inescapable, as any number of recent articles can attest to. It is as if the emergence of the “creator” as a cultural archetype, much like the similar use of “creative” as a noun, signifies nothing more than the end of creativity as an autonomous aesthetic possibility (if it has ever been one). Creativity is now understood first and foremost as a business resource, a component of an employee’s skill set, an ability to sell something, anything.
A creator, then, is someone whom platforms can put to use.
The emergence of creator as the preferred nomenclature for content producers stems from some of YouTube’s machinations in the early 2010s, as Taylor Lorenz has detailed, but it also echoes, probably unintentionally, the vogue for “co-creation” among marketers in the 1990s and early 2000s. “Co-creation” is when consumers contribute value to a company by suggesting ideas or providing feedback, as when fans help refine the plots and characters of their favorite shows or volunteer to “buzz market” their favorite products. In these arrangements, which emerged with the surveillance possibilities of the internet, consumers began to evolve into “prosumers”; that is, their consumption was understood as simultaneously a form of production that could be harnessed — or less euphemistically, a form of labor that could be exploited. Ideally, the prosumer wouldn’t understand their contributions as labor at all but experience it as affirming interactivity. With the new media technology, the labor of consumption was inseparable from the enjoyment one took in consuming: Consumer ideas and behavior could be “captured” as data as well as overtly elicited as “valued feedback” or as participation in enclosed fan communities....
....MUCH MORE
For whatever reason, when seeing the first part of the headline, "Taking Stock..." I keep flashing on "Dungeons & Dragons & Bitcoin: FT Alphaville Is Auctioning Interests In a NFT Of One Of Their Reporters":
...from the pseudonymous author, John Bull:
ADVENTURERS: We're here for your treasure!MANY MORE, Very, Very Good (plus your choice of delivery method)
DRAGONS: Congrats! Here you go.
ADVENTURERS: What... what is this?
DRAGON: DragCoin. It's my new crypto. Gonna be worth millions, bro
ADVENTURERS: Have you published the blockchain?
DRAGON: HAHAHA listen to little Bill Gates here!
Twitter | Threadreader
Did I mention they are very, very good?
ADVENTURERS: We're here for your treasure!Again, your choice for the rest:
DRAGONS: Congrats. Here.
ADVENTURERS: Um... this isn't as much as we...
DRAGONS: You also get equity.
ADVENTURERS: Equity?
DRAGONS: Equity
Twitter | ThreadreaderOne more:
ADVENTURERS: We're here for your treasure!
DRAGON: No problem. It's over there.
ADVENTURERS: But it's...
DRAGON: ...all in copper pieces, yes.
ADVENTURERS: But there's no way we can carry all that!
DRAGON: Logistics is a bitch, isn't it?
And many many more.
