The Creative Underclass Is Still Raging(freddiedeboer.substack.com)
freddiedeboer.substack.com
The Creative Underclass Is Still Raging
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-creative-underclass-is-still
8 comments
I find this dismissive. The majority of people who desire creative fulfilment can't do that as a primary occupation, but it's still a perfectly reasonable desire. Our society should provide more opportunity for creative fulfilment outside of the culture industry, such as by reducing work hours and creating more outlets for amateur and semi-professional performance, such as community theatre.
One right-wing conspiracy theory about Kotaku, Polygon, and other mainstream games journalism outlets is that they're staffed by writers who don't enjoy playing games and don't particularly like the medium, because the endgame these young writers have set for themselves is not to be game journalists, but to be journalists for grown-up publications like the Times, the Post, the New Yorker, etc. and writing about gaming is just a way to get their foot in the door of the industry and build up a CV. But of course there are only so many jobs at major nationwide general-interest publications, so these game pub writers become a toxic seething brew of frustration that their careers aren't going where they'd like mixed with signalling the right virtues to the grown-up papers and magazines to increase their chances of getting a spot -- which leads to angry articles that problematize everything.
Why is this theory right-wing, or conspiracy? Sounds plausible, given the (oftentimes) poor SNR of said outlets...
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> Bullshit jobs really aren’t that bad. I had an email job for four years. I sucked at it and my superiors didn’t like me so eventually I was fired. But objectively, you couldn’t call it a bad gig. This was especially true because I was in a union, which almost nobody with an email job has, but still - strip away the collectively-bargained contract and its benefits and I still lived a relaxed, low-stakes day-to-day existence. Most people in email jobs have a browser full of tabs that have nothing to do with work. They watch YouTube endlessly. They listen to podcasts and they drink their coffee. They shop on Amazon. They don’t do a single thing that’s physically taxing, risk no injury in their work other than carpal tunnel, and are often minimally supervised. And all of that could be had in a cubicle; now a lot of people with these jobs work from home, expanding their opportunities to set their own schedules and to goof off relentlessly. Of course there are exceptions, but if you’ve got a nice low-level white-collar job doing some sort of administrivia for, like, a car insurance company or a commercial bank or on the bureaucratic side of an ad agency or in myriad other places, you’re enjoying an existence that most human beings can only look at and covet.
This really says something important for me. I was really pleased when an unashamed left-wing anarchist Graeber critique was a mainstream hit, but I didn't understand why it was a hit.
Eventually I twigged it; a left-wing critique on productivity and the priorities of society had been perverted by middle-class liberal arts and administrative strivers into a commentary about why their current jobs sucked and why they couldn't have their dream jobs. A condemnation of structural rot into a complaint about the obstacles to fulfilling the middle-class dream of being paid to express yourself, and to have fun. A commentary on useless jobs had been changed into a commentary on pointless jobs.
This really says something important for me. I was really pleased when an unashamed left-wing anarchist Graeber critique was a mainstream hit, but I didn't understand why it was a hit.
Eventually I twigged it; a left-wing critique on productivity and the priorities of society had been perverted by middle-class liberal arts and administrative strivers into a commentary about why their current jobs sucked and why they couldn't have their dream jobs. A condemnation of structural rot into a complaint about the obstacles to fulfilling the middle-class dream of being paid to express yourself, and to have fun. A commentary on useless jobs had been changed into a commentary on pointless jobs.
People enjoy being angry; and the Internet allows us to indulge that without the negative effects we'd incur elsewhere. How many people reading this have been in a bar fight? Would those be more common, still, if the internet fight hadn't mostly replaced them?
Heh I think about this with the recent popularity of critiques of "cancel culture." You used to be able to say all kinds of shit without long-term social consequences, or risk to your employment. But you also might eat a beer bottle for it if you misread your audience. I'm not sure what we have now is better but I don't think it's strictly worse either.
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahaha...anyone looking at creative culture as a path to wealth and status is missing like 99.9% of the picture. It's like looking at lottery winners and deciding that buying lottery tickets is the path to riches. The vast majority of creatives, even serious artists who spend a great deal of time and effort in their craft, don't even make enough money to subsist on their art alone.
>Of course, the rewards are far more humble today than in the heyday of magazine and newspaper writing; it’s totally common for people who write for “content” sites to earn $60,000 a year while paying New York prices.
If by "common", you mean people who work for the top 0.1% of content sites, then maybe. The vast majority of people who write content for the internet can't make an actual living at it anywhere, let alone Manhattan. They do it as a side gig.
I don't think the rage of the creative underclass is down to jealousy of other creatives who make more money, but rather that they feel exploited, that their work is making more money for others than it is for themselves. And now comes AI to automate their work entirely, completing a race to the bottom that has been in progress for decades.