It’s no wonder so many kids want to be content creators, when the currency of our age is attention.
Fame has allured human kind for aeons, but it’s now been programmed into our psyches. Tech products train us to want more attention so that we post more attention-worthy content — so our followers spend more time on the app and receive more ads.
Fame is also a pre-cursor to financial stability for creatives. But unfortunately, we’re in a bit of a vicious cycle:
Digital tools for production and publishing increasingly lower the barrier to entry — > More aspiring creatives enter the arena — > Content proliferates — > Attention pie is cut into more slices — > More eyeballs are needed on content to make money — > Creators make more content to compensate…
So we have a great spiraling snowball of free content rolling through YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Spotify, etc.
The recent NFT craze is trying to cut through by injecting scarcity and creating an alternative, direct marketplace. Now instead of paying YouTube with my eyeballs who then pays a very small fraction to whoever video I watched, I can just pay a creator for directly for a cool thing that essentially represents a share of their creator stock.
This is of course, just another stab at the Artist as a Celebrity model that I contrasted with the Artist as a Craftsman on Day 5.
You don’t buy an NFT because you love the artwork or the song, you buy based on the perceived value imbued by the creator’s identity.
There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but as long as we’re stuck on any solution for artist monetization that relies on Celebrity, we’re in a race to the bottom. Attention is a finite resource.
Oh and before I forget… make sure to buy my coin on bitclout.
