Creativity Is a Gift, Not a Grift
Dispatch from my writing bunker.
Hi friends!
If you read my last dispatch, you may recall that I was threatening to revisit my Substack vendetta. Well, in the short time since, there has been a popcorn-worthy plagiarism scandal on the platform and a Nazi-promoting push notification sent by the team that runs the app. Jah provide, but I shan’t be revisiting my vendetta today.
Because, in other very good news, I finally got my ass into my writing bunker to make some serious progress on my book proposal, aka the blueprint for my womanifesto. So today, I’ll be using The Curious Case of the Substack Grifter to share a little bit of the thinking I’ve been doing on the state of creativity, the pressure to monetize every last drop of it, and how we can stop this version of the internet from eating our souls like a deranged mother hamster.
When you’re done reading, I’d love to hear what you think!
your fav unhinged philosopher xx
The Grift
I have known for quite some time, because I am a digital diva and my ability to observe and game algorithms on social platforms has kept me employed for many years, that one of the surest pathways to virality on Substack is to write a think piece about how our phones have turned us into a bunch of depressed, drooling, stay-at-home eunuchs with no attention span or agency, mere slaves to daddy algo, while AI is getting ready to come in and finish us off. Add a bold statement in the form of a headline that will make people feel smart and superior when they share the piece and you’re really cooking with gas.
Recently, one of those pieces, written by maalvika, a woman who self-identifies as “your fav gen z philosopher,” has a large TikTok following, and is apparently also a published academic getting her PhD at Northwestern, went extremely viral. And since she paywalled it, I can’t read it to comment on its contents, but the all-lowercase headline, “compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting,” proves my point enough.
Her paywalling was shrewd. It converted enough of her 32,000 subscribers to paid that she ended up at the top of Substack’s “New Bestsellers” list, one of the depraved leaderboards that the platform launched earlier this year to rank writers based on earnings; think no media jobs meets Hunger Games with the aesthetics of Family Feud. That ranking prompted another writer, Katie Jgln, to get out her most excellent receipts and expose the newly minted bestseller and viral darling as a confirmed plagiarist.
Was I surprised by any of this? Obviously not.
The creator economy and the algorithms that drive its monetization favor mass consumption, not original expression. Virality often has an inverse relationship to integrity because people are generally dumb and have terrible taste. Also, times are fucked and the upward mobility of building and monetizing a following on social media is what’s left of the American Dream.
According to one survey, more than half of Gen Z would like to be professional content creators and other generations aren’t far behind. How many of those aspiring content creators realize the amount of work that would actually take? And how many, once they do realize — especially now that outsourcing the creative process to ChatGPT has become normalized and generative AI models are trained on stolen words — are cool with ripping people off to expand their reach?
Sure, this version of the internet is easily monetized, which is a good thing for artists looking to get paid, but it’s also mind-numbingly trend-driven, its pace is hostile, and its algorithms tend to reward shamelessness and volume over craft, a boon to grifters who are much better at playing the game.
I’m not a grifter, but I do have a bag of magic beans you might like to purchase if you thought that Substack was somehow above the fray. If I were to grift, however, like some run-of-the-mill trendwashed maniac, then I would have sent this week’s newsletter a while ago and given it the subject line, “Sydney Sweeney’s Huge Tits Did WHAT!?”
My piece would’ve been a magnificent work of rage bait, pissing everyone off with my nonsensical screed: the left, the right, the alt-right, leftists so far gone they’re also alt-right, incels, wine moms, horny old men, and TERFs.
For my final act, I would have used Ms. Sweeney’s huge tits for the thumbnail pic to stop your little thumb from scrolling and get me lots of clicks.
The Gift
My longtime readers know that the only reason I turned on paid subscriptions last year was because a very forceful psychic from New Jersey named Mary told me that I give too much away for free. It was time for me to make money from my writing, she insisted, and then added, and this is a direct quote because I took copious notes while she was reading me to filth, “climb and shake the tree.” But I didn’t start this newsletter as a growth-hacking, money-making scheme. I started it with very earnest intentions: to be myself, to live out my lifelong dream of telling it like it is with nobody to stop me, and, after so many years of making social media content for work, to stop letting algorithms control my creativity.
My generation came of age with the great, creative dream of the open internet. And we got to experience that version of being online. In fact, we were native to it. We learned HTML to gussy up our MySpace pages and uploaded photos with abandon and wrote blogs for fun. No one was gunning to be an influencer because that job didn’t even exist. When we started using Instagram there were no ads and we posted weird pics of god knows what.
But don’t get it twisted, much like the internet, over the past twenty years, we have lost our pure, creative spark. Especially those of us who use our creativity to make content for a living. As the internet ate legacy media, it was boom time in digital, and brands were spending lots of money on new ways to advertise. Our lives have always been expensive, so what generations past called selling out, we saw as a way to pay our bills in a media landscape that’s been shifting since we entered our first open concept workplace. Which is how, in 2019, in a desperate, freelance moment, I found myself keeping farmer’s hours on a harrowing yet memorable expedition, a month-long trip across America to collect cow content for a butter-sponsored documentary series made for a now defunct platform called Facebook Watch.
I sold myself out for so many years and got paid to write in other people’s voices but never my own. When I started this newsletter with the intention of reclaiming my creativity, I didn’t consciously keep money out of the equation, although in hindsight, that was essential to the process. I just intuitively knew what I needed, which wasn’t to sell myself or my digital wares, but to share my words as a gift.
I think my most favorite thing about books is how they seem to magically appear when it’s time for us to read them. And Lewis Hyde’s The Gift found its way to me a few weeks ago, at the exact right moment when I needed to remember why I was doing all of this.
Originally published in 1983, The Gift is a timeless study, written by a poet, of how our capitalist hellscape is ill-equipped to properly value art. As it turns out, there’s an economy that is much more conducive to honoring the ineffable nature of human creativity. That economy is based not on the exchange of goods for money, but on the exchange of gifts.
While the edition of The Gift that I read was published in 2019, it wasn’t updated to reflect the carnage that the social internet has inflicted on creative expression. It did, however, discuss television as “commodity art” since it must be constantly fed money to exist and produce the numbers to justify its existence. Hyde suggests that “the more we allow such commodity art to define and control our gifts, the less gifted we will become, as individuals, and as a society.” And that feels prescient when you consider the state of affairs we find ourselves in.
We see a lot of finished work these days, but we rarely see what went on behind the scenes to create it. The creative process is messy, and that’s not what most of us post on main. Sometimes, my process is quick, fun, and easy, and other times it takes forever and involves freaking out for the better part of a week.
“An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation,” Hyde writes. And the gift of that invocation, the download of ideas to be shaped into a final form, is kind of the whole point and often the best part. But it’s only coming to you if you’re in the process and open to receiving it, not if you’re gunning for views on a trending topic or skipping the process entirely by copy-and-pasting from ChatGPT, let alone pilfering another person’s work in an effort to monetize a platform quickly.
I’m not into lying, so I won’t pretend that I haven’t considered having less integrity. Or that the numbers attached to posting my work on the internet don’t periodically drive me insane. But in my crazy-ass life, I’ve seen creative people so rich, powerful, and beloved freak out over Instagram metrics to an extent that it still sends shivers down my spine. And that gave me the rare gift of knowing that, no matter how high they may be on relative terms, numbers will never fill the void.
Of course, we live in a material world, and can’t live off of vibes alone. So to solve the problem of monetizing every last drop of our artistry, Hyde suggests a second job, finding patrons, or realizing your gifts to such an extent that they will remain true in the non-gift economy. That means you need to be willing to sacrifice time and energy on your work before you use it to make money.
That time and energy will be very well spent, because honing and sharing your gifts can be the gateway to a few soulful essentials that most of us are craving desperately: community, connecting with our spiritual nature, a better culture based on self-expression and honesty. And I must say, I am glad that Psychic Mary bullied me into turning on my paid subscriptions. There are quite a few of you who have become my patrons. What a gift it is that you showed me I am worthy of that reciprocity.
But the greatest gift that sharing my writing has given me has nothing to do with money.
I was once completely terrified of being perceived, but all of your support over the past couple of years has allowed me to finally see myself clearly and embrace my own voice fully.
That’s why, even though the grifters stay grifting, I’m not so worried about some dumb bitch on Substack stealing my copy.
Former astronaut Katy Perry and Canada’s first bisexual Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were spotted together in Montreal. Justin is OOO and needs a new job. Katy Perry’s boyfriend feels like a good fit. I can totally see him chatting up Jeff Bezos on the Kardashian caftan yacht.
Justin Timberlake is allegedly pretending to have Lyme disease so insurance will pay out his ruined world tour, where he made the crowd do all the work, and thus the great millennium boy band wars finally end with Backstreet’s capture of the Las Vegas Sphere.
And just like taking an old horse out back, And Just Like That — one of the great cultural artifacts of the Age of Unhingement™ — has been put out of its misery and won’t return to further haunt a generation of women and gay men who have forgotten they have free will.
Glamour Magazine has joined BIAD in naming crashing out as summer’s hottest trend. Few things please me more than being a verified thought leader in menty b culture.
OK. That’s all I got! Stay hydrated out there, my loves. Until next time …
Less Lessons More Blessin’s™
Liz
Unhinged philosophers... accept no substitute...