Towards a theory of the creator
A survey of the 21st century content creator's most important characteristics.
It is too late to push back against the term “creator.” Most culture industry people I know never say it out loud, much less discuss the ways it displaces many of the things we love. But for better or worse, the creator names an important figure in our society (or lack thereof, following Barrett Avner’s riff on a popular meme, “We don’t live in a society.”)
This is no doubt in part because creators have essentially replaced authors, artists, and directors, along with dancers, cellists, and whoever else. These titles are fossils left behind by the tectonic shifts of 21st century mediatization. Painters and the like will continue to exist because they supply experiential commodities favored by highbrow petit bourgeois types, but they are no longer dominant in the larger cultural field, and rarely important in any meaningful sense. Even popular musicians have to turn themselves into omnichannel brands partnered with Nike or McDonalds if they want more than a couple years of success. Going forward, we can group all of these fossil-titles under the single term “specialist”; following Barthes in 1967, one could try the term “Author,” too.
The specialist’s defining characteristic is its imagined sovereignty: they create a work, they are responsible for it, it is an extension of their self, and that self might be nominally promised a certain amount of self-determination if the characteristics of its race, class, gender, and so on line up in the right way. The industrial revolution killed the specialist a long time ago, and after years of uncertainty, a successor has finally been named.
What are the characteristics of a creator?
1. The form that creators use is the post. Songs, movies, and books are not posts. Snippets are posts. Improvised podcasts are posts. Blogs are collections of posts. Et cetera. The post should not require interpretation or specialized background knowledge. It should be self-explanatory for its target filter bubble. Creators often try out numerous styles of posting before they find their niche; this R&D process requires creators to “move fast and break things.”
2. The platforms creators use can be changed at any time. Instagram continues to pivot to video despite complaints from Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner. If Instagram doesn’t swear fealty to its most-followed, it doesn’t swear fealty to any user. Platforms can also seemingly delete users’ posts at any time. These users may try to utilize existing appeals systems to get them back, but the process is opaque and unpredictable. Users do not have “rights.”
3. Creators only produce small-scale pieces of content: everything they do is a minor, if not wholly ephemeral, work. In fact, many creators barely make anything at all. For those that do produce work, it takes the form of short videos, trend forecasts, Shopify pages, and advertisements. In other words, content: informational-affective fast food. A creator may convey aesthetic depth through the production of many bite-size pieces of content, but no individual piece can be described as genuinely substantial on its own, in any conceivable sense. While creators may convey a sense of expertise across a large body of work, their individual pieces of content will rarely demonstrate expertise on a given subject. Compare a semi-researched TikTok or podcast to a book that took years to write.
4. Creators are generally better at persuasively aggregating other peoples’ work, herding pieces of information like cattle, than producing insights of their own. One of the skills of the creator is the ability to strategically curate influences. This is a fitting engagement with the form of the post, which comes to be because of the ever-increasing technical automation of culture, an ongoing universal tendency whereby machines do more and people do less. The transition from the song to the snippet echoes the previous transition from the live performance to the studio recording.
5. Content is designed to tactically engage with the present, shifting contemporaneous currents of information in one direction or another. Creators tap into and channel the mediatized energies of a moment. Great creators are able to shift the form and content of moments; the term “cybernetic” itself derives from the Greek kubernētikós, meaning “steersman.” Sometimes moments last months, sometimes they last half a day. A moment can be a meme or a niche political ideology. Moments are network-expressions free from concrete delimitations of space and time: they appear and reappear unpredictably. “I’m chillin’ in Cedar Rapids.”
6. Creators must post consistently and frequently. The most important currency for creators is attention. They seek regular bursts of fleetingly intense engagement, and avoid producing media intended for sustained contemplation. “Controversial takes” in any direction on the political spectrum (relative to a given filter bubble’s de facto center) are a tried-and-true form of attention bait.
7. Creators are concerned with signal-to-noise ratios more than anything else. Informational integrity in this context has little to do with what a piece of information says; it has everything to do with what it’s like or how it feels to consume it. These two qualities – what something says and how it feels to receive it – become indistinguishable. The parameters of this realm of saying/feeling are obtuse, because they have to do with desire, which is hard to know; it is normal for users to indulge in content that feels “bad” to consume (examples include hatereads, hatefollows, etc.)
8. Creators are more likely to say something that feels true than something which reveals itself to be true through careful consideration. They define themselves against the figure of the “institutional authority,” which was the realm of the specialist. Arguably, creators simply preside over different kinds of institutions, specifically those built upon the infrastructures of the social web.
9. Creators are extended considerable leeway through the credit of iteration. Creators are able to release something, change their mind or receive backlash, and then update their work, leaving no trace of the original artifact. This quality is inherited from the form of the software update. “Ima fix wolves.”
10. Creators must convey an authentic personality through their work in order to generate signal. Charisma, magnetism, and consistency are crucial. So is the ability to incite fear; my friend Thea Ballard describes this as “creating an aura of authority through self-seriousness or doom-mongering.” Humor and attractiveness are often important, too. Users enjoy the feeling of connection or even proximity to creators they appreciate; thus the “parasocial” discourse.
11. Creators rarely produce work which crosses more than a couple filter bubbles. Because of this, they are part of a media-structure which intensifies larger processes of epistemic fracturing.
12. Everyone with a smartphone is a creator. Two random examples: Trump is a highly skilled creator, Biden is a horrible creator. Creation occurs across both public and private channels. When you share something funny with your group chat, you are a creator. A text message is a post.
13. Many creators take up creation in order to graduate to a professional role within a more traditional, “real” industry, like Hollywood or academic publishing. These creators produce content as a means to an end, in order to be “discovered.” As a result, more traditional formats like film and television have become increasingly indistinguishable from content.
14. Some creators are able to transcend the apparent limits of the post and produce media that could be called Great Art, but most do not. Posts are generally placeholders for other posts, a link in the larger chain of content keeping the eyes and ears focused on the feed.
15. Creators resemble celebrities but celebrities do not resemble creators. Celebrities have more autonomy, and more license to defy consumers’ expectations. Celebrities are granted the ability to be auteurs but creators are not. At the end of the day, each individual creator is simply a replaceable part of the infrastructure of the social web.
16. There is no reason for a “rational economic actor” to post unless they have some kind of ulterior motive. To post in pursuit of genuine self-expression rather than commercial or ideological interest is delusional; nonetheless, a lot of people do it and the results can be incredibly beautiful.
17. In true creator form, this list is incomplete. I have other things I need to work on. I will iterate.
Personally, I like fast food. I admire the corporate flavorist who synthetically crafts the perfect taste in a lab. I like dumb, funny tweets. I like snowcone-flavored energy drinks that make my skin tingle. Nonetheless, the richness and quality of popular discourse is in the sewer, and this has something to do with the figure of the creator. For better or worse, many of the people I know doing serious, sustained work right now — work based on research, craft, and rigor — are doing it primarily in private.
Creators who provide what feels like fleeting insight into current events offer users a very real form of value; the world is immensely confusing, and it seems like few of us have true north stars of our own. Creators can provide users a much-needed form of support, helping people find their way. At the same time, creators typically enact deferrals: posts are usually just placeholders for other posts, as mentioned above. Creators might have been sent here to lead us astray. The passivity-inducing qualities of the forms they wield often intensify feelings of aimlessness among their followers. Engagement is a form of debt creation. Content drains us.