Lynx and hares
The creative ecosystem is going through a major bust. So what can we do?
Housekeeping: I’ll be putting this newsletter’s paid subscriptions on hold as soon as this lands in your inbox so that I can take a break over Christmas. I’ll be back some time in the New Year, though exactly when remains to be seen! I hope you all have a wonderful festive season!
Over the weekend, two newsletters I love both talked about the challenges facing the arts, though from two very different directions.
Michael Marshall Smith wrote about “the arts, and living, and making a living in the arts” and loosely concluded that perhaps we need to focus our energies on better serving a smaller audience and rejecting the push towards mass market culture-lite.
Meanwhile, Julian Simpson talked about how screenwriters, feeling embattled and exploited, seem to have largely stopped writing on spec. But you can’t make progress in the creative industries without having something to pitch, and that requires you to do unpaid work.
Although these topics seem different topics, I think they’re both talking about the same thing, to wit, the destabilisation of the creative economy by late-stage capitalism.
The problems we’re facing run deep and answers are hard to come by. Indeed, I’ve been wanting to write about this for months, but I’ve shied away from it specifically because I couldn’t come up with any answers. Though maybe that’s also just a symptom of late-stage capitalism — I can’t come up with answers because there aren’t any that don’t require a magic wand (though there are a couple of things you can do).
So, instead of writing a beautifully argued piece that comes to a neat little conclusion all tied off with a beautiful festive bow, I’m just going to vomit some thoughts out and hope that some if it makes sense to somebody somewhere.
Progress at your own risk.
In fact, stop now, grab yourself a beverage and make yourself comfy, because this one’s a long one.
I’m gonna start with foxes and hares, a fairly well known analogy for boom-bust economic cycles:
Let’s say you have an ecosystem in which foxes and hares live side by side as predator and prey. When hare numbers boom, so do foxes. But if there are too many foxes, they eat too many hares and hare numbers crash. The foxes then starve, and fox numbers crash. When fox numbers crash, predation reduces, and hares can boom.
In real life, this happens with the Canada lynx and the snowshoe hare, which exist in a 9-11 year boom-bust cycle. But rather than just starving in situ, it turns out that hungry lynx either look for other prey, like pets, or they get the hell out of Dodge in search of dinner.
The causes of this cycle are a lot more complicated than one side of the equation, the lynx or the hare, getting bigger or smaller and causing changes to the other side of the equation. There are other predators that put pressure on the snowshoe hare population, and when it crashes “these species return to other food sources, whereas lynx, which specialize in hunting hare, are left in the lurch”.
Poor lynx.
In the creative industries, we have a supply of creative works which are largely produced via unpaid labour. A very large percentage of all creative projects are created on spec, in the hope that they’ll be picked up by some sort of middleman who will help them reach their audiences. So, as with the lynx and hare, our equation is not so simple. It has three sides instead of two: creatives, middlemen, audiences.
The early internet disintermediated the middlemen by allowing creatives to connect directly with their audiences. From that era sprang Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans theory, which posits that for any creative to earn a living they only needed to connect to 1,000 people willing to pay good money on a regular basis, and Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, which suggested that it was possible for a business to thrive by selling lots and lots of products that don’t individually sell in huge numbers but do in aggregate.
Self-publishing, blogs, guerrilla film making, selling your music or art direct to your audience — all these things connected creatives to their audiences. For a while it seemed like it might be possible for creatives and audiences to exist in beautiful financial and cultural harmony.
But that disintermediation wasn’t total. Intermediaries remained, because it turns out that some intermediaries are necessary. Most films remain expensive and need to be made by studios, as does TV, because you do actually need quite deep pockets.
Other intermediaries like publishers might not be strictly necessary, but they fulfil an important role that writers and readers continue to depend upon. Self-publishing has not made them redundant.
But this initial wave of disintermediation revealed a weakness in the industry, a weakness that Amazon was the first to fully exploit.
It turns out that there’s room in the food chain for another predator, and that predator slots in between the creatives/old-school middlemen, and the audience, fulfilling a distribution role. So now we have creatives who make something, then they might or might not work with a publisher or studio or record label to complete the work, but distribution has fallen to the new intermediaries: Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, Apple, etc, who control the relationship with the audience.
Complicating the picture is that the number of creatives has boomed, initially due to the promise of the first wave of disintermediation, but more lately perhaps due to a huge increase in the number of training opportunities that encourage people to create.
That’s a great thing from a personal, self-actualisation point of view, but it’s not great from a supply-demand point of view because the effective audience, ie the audience for any specific piece of creative work, has crashed. People only have so much time and money to spend, and they cannot support the vast number of creatives who want to sell their wares.
It turns out that the long tail is just too long and too broad to support people, though it can be lucrative for some businesses.
So there are now a lot more lynx around, along with some much, much bigger and better-organised corporate predators, but the snowshoe hare population is at best the same, at worst shrinking. There wouldn’t be enough hares to support the lynx even if the other opportunist predators weren’t around. But they are, and they are far, far more effective at hunting hares.
Sorry, all readers, listeners, watchers and culture lovers. I’ve reduced you to a prey species. Don’t feel aggrieved. Us creatives don’t think of you like that but, well, I suspect Spotify, Amazon and the like do.
Anyway.
Long story not at all short, the creative ecosystem is horribly fucked up. Everyone except the corporate predators are suffering, even a lot of the old-school middlemen who blithely thought that their business wouldn’t be affected by this stupid internet thing.
To blame for it all is, imho, Reagan- and Thatcher-era deregulation. The consolidation of the studios and the return to vertical monopolies/monopsonies, for example, the way that studios now own the means of production and the means of distribution. The consolidation of publishing houses through mergers and acquisitions and now the march of private equity.
I’ve written before about how the doors to the creative industries are all closed, and what my personal response to that is. But as per the above, there are now just fewer doors to knock on. That is perforce going to make it harder to get stuff picked up, whether by publishers, studios, or whomever.
With the promise of 1,000 True Fans now very obviously broken for the vast majority of creatives, the lustre might have returned to the old-school intermediaries had they not shat their own bed.
If, as an author, I have to do my own promo regardless of whether I’m self- or traditionally published, then why the hell would I give up so many rights for the privilege of doing my own marketing? Why should I, as a TV writer, do an absolute shit-ton of free work on a pilot script and pitch that probably won’t get picked up when I could use that time to do something else?
Writing a novel or non-fiction book is, frankly, a lot easier than getting any money out of the film and TV industry, and not just for emerging writers. It’s not like established writers are having an easy time of it either. We have to pick our battles and just maybe we need to take some time off the treadmill and think about what’s best for us.
I suspect that a lot of writers had to turn to other work during the writer’s strike, and I am guessing maybe some of them are still doing those jobs because bills don’t stop needing to be paid.
Perhaps the issue Julian writes about, how studio execs aren’t being flooded with passion projects now the strike is over, isn’t down to entitlement or writers feeling they shouldn’t have to pitch, but is instead down to exhaustion, demoralisation and the need to work another job. What if they are just opting out of a system that they have realised no longer serves their needs?
We saw the same during the pandemic, as people reconsidered their lives and made different choices that they felt would be better for them. It’s no surprise to anyone who even gives it a moment’s thought that the corporate push to return to the office has landed so badly, because employees realised they could work just as well from home, and got a nice chunk of leisure time back. Why would anyone give that up?
Maybe writers, during the strike, realised they didn’t much fancy returning to the grindstone, and are finding other ways to scratch their creative itch. I don’t know for sure, but it’s certainly possible.
Creatives are embattled. There are more of us, working harder, for fewer opportunities that are paid worse in the short term and with less repeating income in the long term. Why would we not take a minute and have a think about our life choices?
But our audiences are also embattled. I mean, just look at the conveyor belt of shit that we’ve all had to deal with in the UK alone over the last decade and a half: Tory austerity, Brexit, the pandemic, supply chain disruption, the impact of the invasion of Ukraine, greedflation, the Trussterfuck, and incredibly high wage inequality, to name but a few, all sitting on top of a 50-year long decoupling of wages from productivity which has resulted in wages rising incredibly slowly, if at all.
We’re not in a cost of living crisis, we’re in a low wages crisis.
And what do people with low wages not do? They don’t spend on unfamiliar culture. They don’t become one of a cohort of 1,000 True Fans. They don’t take a risk on a creator they’ve never heard of. When they spend money, it’s on an all you can eat buffet of comfort food, because who wouldn’t?
The hares are going hungry along with the lynx. Only the new, more ruthless predators have a full belly and that’s because they eat everything, hare and lynx alike.
But there’s so, so much more to this. The collapse of the attention economy. The inversion of the fame-success equation — fame often used to come after success; now it seems you need the fame first before you can become successful. The normalisation of the insanely heavy workloads that seemed necessary during the pandemic but are now taken for granted by employers, leaving less time to engage with culture either as a creator or an audience member. The rise of the gig economy and precarity, and the extension of precarity into waged and salaried employees. The erosion of the benefits/welfare safety net. The completely insane cost of housing.
Honestly, there’s a book here, and I hope someone writes it (because I have neither the time nor the stomach for it).
The way I see it, there are only two things anyone can do, one of them easy, the other incredibly hard.
1. The hard thing: Understand your own needs
Work out what being creative means for you. Yes, we all want to earn a living writing or making music or art. But what does that really mean for you? What’s your pathway to happiness? Maybe that involves finding a job you like that gives you the spare space and time to be creative. Maybe it means building up an income from selling direct.
Maybe it means accepting that you’ll never be a full-time creative and making peace with that. Maybe it means taking a break for a while. Maybe it means creating for a smaller audience, as Michael suggests. Maybe it means stepping back from scattershot self-promotion and focusing more on the creative act that makes you happy.
It doesn’t matter what it means, it only matters that you set aside all the magical thinking that the industry wants you to engage in, become painfully pragmatic, and do what’s best for you.
And that’s actually the hard bit, because the entire creative industry is based on wishful thinking, and getting yourself into a more objective mindset is not at all easy. It requires a lot of self-awareness and a willingness to confront and accept harsh realities that appear to destroy all hope. But once you’re out the other side, the hope does return. It just looks very different.
2. The easy thing: Support basic income
Basic income would solve a huge part of the problem here. It would provide creatives with a base level of income which they can then supplement however they want to. It would reduce, maybe even remove precarity and increase our choices. It would be a lot easier to work on an unpaid pitch document when basic income pays your bills. It would, I believe, lead to a blooming in the creative industries and we’d all benefit from that.
But it would also raise millions out of poverty, and create more financial stability and choice for our audiences too. When people feel secure and can put food on the table, they can also spend a bit more on culture. They can buy the books or go to the movies or directly support the creators they love because they aren’t having to count their pennies quite so tightly. The “chink of departing coin”, as Joel Morris puts it, would get at least a little less loud for a lot of people, freeing them up to enjoy more things.
If you’re new to the idea of basic income, then I highly recommend taking a look at Scott Santens’ FAQ. We know it works, we know it’s doable, but we need a lot more people to understand why it’s a solution to a lot of the problems we face as a society and to push for it politically before we’ll make headway.
Obviously it would be great to find a way to end to late-stage capitalism, but the global forces at play here are too powerful. Even if every creative person on the planet banded together, we couldn’t steer the ship away from the iceberg. That would be like a shoal of sardines trying to steer the Titanic.
So instead, we have to do our best to protect ourselves, and find our own routes through. We’re going to have to be flexible, inventive, kind to ourselves and supportive of each other. There’s no easy answer, no generalisable advice that will work for everyone. But we are creatives, so we’re gonna have to just get even more creative to craft a life that nourishes us both emotionally and financially, whatever that looks like.
That’s going to be hard, so here are some super-fluffy lynx to inspire you.
This is so interesting. Basic income would be incredible, but I can't see it happening. But I hadn't considered us in late-stage capitalism before. That makes so much sense. I wonder how long before the big predators start to fall.
Really good piece.