Mercury Retrograde
For creative people this hits especially hard as social media’s invention of “personal brands,” “influencers,” and the “Creator Economy” turned the few remaining aspects of life that hadn’t yet been marketized into the last ways we could make a living without working for somebody else. Gradually and then suddenly creative people found themselves do... See more
Sell out without selling out
In a world dominated by the merchant classes, these artists no longer had aristocratic sponsors to flatter, which was emancipating, but they had to fend for themselves in the marketplace, which brought its own traumas. To succeed, artists and writers had to appeal to an impersonalized audience, and many of these creative types came to resent their
... See moreDavid Brooks • Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
Indeed, many of us have found ourselves in some way in the business of creating content, messaging, ideas, designs, identities. Even our leisure time somehow seems bound up in producing or consuming free content for the platforms of the attention economy. All that was solid has melted into air.