Everybody has to self-promote now. Nobody wants to.

If there was a decade defined by its obsession with authenticity and artistic purity, it’s the 90s, an era where trying too hard or caring too much about anything was embarrassing, where “selling out” was the ultimate sin.

he “online business industrial complex,” the network of hucksters vying for your attention and money by selling you courses and coaching on how to get rich online.

A world in which artists think like entrepreneurs, he writes in the Atlantic, is one where “You’re a musician and a photographer and a poet; a storyteller and a dancer and a designer ... which means that you haven’t got time for your 10,000 hours in any of your chosen media. But technique or expertise is not the point. The point is versatility. Lik... See more

the “online business industrial complex,” the network of hucksters vying for your attention and money by selling you courses and coaching on how to get rich online. She’s talking about the hustle bro “gurus” flaunting rented Lamborghinis and promoting shady “passive income” schemes, yes, but she’s also talking about the bizarre fact that her “65-ye... See more

“You’re getting worse at [your art], but you’re becoming a great marketer for a product which is less and less good”

Under the tyranny of algorithmic media distribution, artists, authors — anyone whose work concerns itself with what it means to be human — now have to be entrepreneurs, too.

A society made up of human beings who have turned themselves into small businesses is basically the logical endpoint of free market capitalism, anyway. To achieve the current iteration of the American dream, you’ve got to shout into the digital void and tell everyone how great you are. All that matters is how many people believe you.

In his essay collection The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman defines the term “sellout” not as someone who sells something in order to get rich, but someone who compromises their values to do so.

We like to think of it as the work of singular geniuses whose motivations are purely creative and untainted by the market — this, despite the fact that music, publishing, and film have always been for-profit industries where formulaic, churned-out work is what often sells best.