🔴 How liquid is your content capital?

The closest analog to a short-form, feed-based platform “creator” as a unique job in Scarry’s Busytown is a farmer. More specifically, it’s a sharecropper. TikTok splits 50% of ad revenue with creators who have at least 100,000 followers. Sharecroppers did not own the land they worked; the farmer provided the land and often housing and equipment, o... See more

Scrolling, consuming all these videos, each one becomes functionally crumpled after I consume it. Firestarter. But the accumulated piles don’t heat my home; scroll consumption simply burns the minutes of my life, providing me with fleeting entertainment while converting the heat to two forms of capital, neither of which flow to me:

• Content capital:

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Without getting too deep in the weeds, Elon is basically saying that control of and the ability to contribute to public narratives has shifted from traditional media (i.e., broadcasters, newspapers, and the people they employ) to everyone else; creators, especially on X.

He’s not wrong. Neither is he precisely right. He is certainly the media. And a... See more