How Capitalism Gaslit a Generation of Creatives
The rise of the middle class artist.
We have been fed the story that if you pursue a career in the creative arts, you will either be a) so fucking poor and unknown or b) so fucking rich and famous.
This binary (as so many binaries are) is a lie.
Society, capitalism, gatekeepers, hustle culture, technofeudalist computer overlords, and any number of ancient cultural forces, perpetuate this myth to scare artists. To pit creatives against each other. To exhaust us. To keep us from trying. To keep us in ‘acceptable’ employment. To steal artist’s wealth and keep it to for themselves. Fuck this story.
We’ve been sold a story that it’s go big or go home.
Creatives everywhere have been convinced that success = famous, adored, with millions of dollars, and vast mainstream appeal. We have been told, explicitly, that is the only way to be a truly succesful creative person. Gatekeepers look for the breakthrough artist, not the middle of the road creative, the STAR. The outlier. Algorithms look for viral content. Production companies want to make hundreds of millions of dollars from their films or it’s not worth it. The bigger the behemoth, the more they perpetuate the myth: only the few make it. “We are looking for the exception.”
Fuck that.
GROWTH CULT
How did the go big or go home, be poor or be Beyonce narrative come to be? It’s—you’re going to be surprised at this—Capitalism.
Everywhere, in every industry, the mantra is: bigger is better.
Late stage capitalism demands it. Everything must grow bigger and bigger. When capitalism isn’t monitored, when it isn’t restricted by specific government regulation, we see monstrosity. Phenomenons like monopoly and monopsony happen.1 Amazon eats all small retailers. The big five publishers eat up independent presses. If you cannot grow bigger you will be consumed by something bigger than you.
When we begin our careers as artists we believe we must be the biggest, otherwise we will not be able to keep doing what we love. Otherwise they will eat us. When we share our creations on social media we think, I must go viral otherwise there is no point. Even when we have mainstream success, we think, I am still not safe — I must have more.
It’s what we’ve been programmed to think. It is, we are told, how the system works.
The problem with trending towards big
The thing is, bigness is not a natural law. It is an ideology worshiped by huge corporations because, unlike small creators, they actually do need it to survive.
Big companies need huge revenues or they die. Marvel invested an estimated $275,000,000 in Thunderbolts. After accounting for all the costs associated with distribution and marketing, it needed to make just under half a billion dollars to break even. Spoiler, it didn’t.
These numbers are cooked. Modern movies need to be a global hit just to break even! It doesn’t have to be that way. There isn’t some BOOK OF CAPITALISM that sits in the president’s office, having come down from heaven. We make the economy every day.2 It is people making choices, laws, and decisions.
A few weeks ago, Colin and Samir interviewed Max Reisinger, founder of Camp Film Festival on their podcast.3 This year, Camp funded and showed ten independent films. 9 of the film makers received $10,000 and one got $100,000 to make a full feature. Max argues that, if you could make 250,000 dollars with these films that would be a huge win for that film maker, an amazing income (150k profit!). If a Hollywood movie made that much, it would be the biggest failure ever. People would get fired.
This is an amazing example of an alternative to the religion of go big or go home.
When you think about your careers as artists, I want you to consider that you don’t need to be working towards convincing a suit that you need a quarter of a billion dollar investment. You don’t need to build an empire in order to be succesful.
Do you actually even want to “go big”?
Another question, we need to ask ourselves is do I even want to be BIG? I love money and I love attention. I am ambitious. But what I actually want, more than money and more than attention is to live my life doing what I love. I love to create. I love to write. For most artists, the biggest reason they want to make money with their art is so they can make more art. Don’t get me wrong, I love business class flights. I am also weirdly keen on applause, girl loves to be clapped.
But as much as I love those things, I want a life doing what I fucking love more.
Creatives are process people. We are not like traditional entrepreneurs. John Techbro isn’t building a B2B company that increases the efficient of data transfers by 5% because he fucking loves it—he’s doing it for cash. It isn’t worth it John if he makes the median wage selling his data software. It actually is worth it to me to write books and make the median wage. It’s VERY worth it to me.
When society told me I could either be a poor artist or, unlikely, a famous and rich artist, I obviously preferred the latter. But I didn’t realise there were other options. I thought I had to go big or go home. But there is, I believe, a secret third option. And it is more accessible than ever.
Secret third option: The middle class creative.
I went to the Substack summer party in London a week ago. I looked around at all the writers and I thought, this is fucking it. This is the creative class. Not everyone would’ve been a full time writer there, but many of us were, and I would dare say everyone made some money with their art. We were not Stephen King. We were not George R R Martin. It was Amie! It was Claire Venus ✨ ! It was David Larbi , it was Jess Pan and Emma Gannon — all of us doing what we love with our life. None of us needing to be in the top 0.001% of writers in order to do this professionally. Probably making as much as our friends who became accountants or bankers.
Hamish McKenzie, one of the co-founders of Substack, who is a fucking delight, spoke about the middle class creator the other day. It is what platforms like Substack and Patreon are helping to build. It is what I have been doing on Squarespace for years. It is the additional 100,000 self published authors who make at least 5k a month on KDP who would never have been given a traditional publishing contract.4 It’s Alexis Rakun selling her art on Shopify.5
What if you don’t need a ridiculously lucky break to be a pro artist? What if there are more and more ways to make this work without needing to be an outlier? What if you don’t need to go viral to become viable? What if you don’t need a huge investment to make it work? What if you don’t need millions of people seeing your work?
What if you don’t need a 7 figure, 3 book deal with a big 5 publisher. What if you found a couple hundred people who wanted to pay you 8 dollars a month for your writing? What if those same people all bought the books you self pub as soon as they come out? What if you need 1000 people obsessed with you and your vision.
I went to Amanda Palmer’s London gig a few days ago. 150 people in a small club. Everyone knew the words to her songs, there were people weeping with emotion at her music. The impact of her art was so profound it felt godly. It was also small.
Small is very very beautiful. And small, I believe can also be sustainable. Meaningful. A way of life.
My ‘been on the internet for over a decade’ spidey senses are tingling. I forsee this comment: “But it’s still so hard to get 1000 true fans!’ You’re right! It is hard; it’s also a fuck-tonne easier than trying to get Paramount to consider your script, let alone make it. But let’s talk about how we go about creating the small beautiful life of an artist. How do we grow the middle class of creators, how do we become one ourself?
How do you become a middle class artist:
Big question. One, I fear, may be my next book. Let’s begin with some ideas, I promise many essays will expand on this in the future.
You don’t solely rely on the creative institutions for your income. Relying on a publishing house, a film studio, or a music label is too risky. They are looking for the extreme outlier, and will drop you if you don’t make them back the ten million dollars in salaries they paid to middle managers to sit around and talk about you in meeting rooms. We don’t need to be that.
We need income streams more in our control. Levers we can pull when we want to, not when they say we are allowed to.
Commit to staying small. Not small as in not taking up space, or not taking risks. Small as in you don’t NEED to invest in a ten person team. You don’t need to have expenses go through the roof. You don’t need to have a huge operation. Creatives can have LEAN businesses and it allows us to make less revenue but take more of the profit.
Find ways to cultivate your 1000 true fans, and have ways for them to support you financially. Like a Substack, or Patreon.
We need to find ways where our creativity is rewarded, where we are PAID our value. In most circumstances, artists are robbed of our value. For example, Social media apps use our art to make money, and we see none of (or a v small amount) of that cash. When we think about how we are going to make money as a creative, a question we must ask is: will I see the value I deserve, or will someone else be benefitting more from my effort, risk, vulnerability and magic? We must ask ourselves, how can I capture most of the value? You deserve it.
How do we systemically encourage middle class artists
We need more companies like Substack. Substack says: you are the creator - therefore you should capture most of the value. Substack takes 10% which I think is a fair trade. Most publishing houses take 90%. I don’t even want to think about the % record labels and movie studios take.
I know that’s not an entirely fair comparison, but more companies need to realise that their business is built off the back of artists, and the artist deserve most of the value.
Look, ideally, we have new laws that stop monopolies and monopsonies, mandate fair pay or profit sharing with artists, break up huge corporations, support artists while they’re trying to get started with a basic income and health care, but it’s that mountain’s a little bit bigger to climb.
Who knows, maybe AI is about to disrupt the big dogs and we middle class artists are going to be the real, human touchpoints people go to when they’re sick of Disney’s 42nd AI generated Starwars movie of the quarter. Maybe these sort of changes aren’t as distant as they look.
Until then, be brave enough to stay medium. To strive for medium.
You have been sold a lie. You don’t have to be Beyonce or be destitute. You can do this your way, the holy way. The secret third way. There are so many ways to carve out the creative life that you have been called to live. Dare to question all the stories you are being told about being an artist, we are living in a world that is terrified of us and would rather we not do what we are doing.
I am so proud of you. Stay the course. Amie.
The only way to work with me is to join my creative community The Inspired Collective, my creative family, creative church - we meet once a week. Join the waitlist now to be first in line.
The definitive book here is Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Corey Doctorow. See also Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis; The Invisible Doctrine by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison; Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty.
I can’t find this quote. My gut tells me it’s either Hank or John Green. Maybe I'm a genius and made it up myself.
Colin and Samir interview https://pod.link/1379942034/episode/ea65c9b3086e79ad013b35d4448a874b
http://edwardwrobertson.com/self-publishing/quick-and-dirty-math-how-many-self-published-authors-are-making-a-living/
https://alexisrakun.com/
 | A guest post by
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I love this Amie but, actually I would love to see more representation and diversity in the list of middle class creatives. More ethnic voices, more people from disadvantaged, difficult and discriminated backgrounds, more mothers rising and sharing stories of creating new legacies. Without these voices, and more, the subculture of middle class creatives just becomes another elite class of those who are most privileged to make it.
My husband pays the bills. I make art. I make no apologies for this. We are equal partners in both things. His job lets me do the thing I love. This makes him happy and makes me happy.