Graphic design, the discipline of aesthetic production, is facing a crisis as it reconciles with catastrophic effects of network technology on its profitability. Even prolific designers who produce work with a characteristic original aesthetic are quickly copied. As their work is pillaged and reproduced downstream (leftstream), it becomes... See more

Another vision is that there's a hybrid model, where companies embrace the fact that human-generated content a) has less scarcity value in a world where things that look like the output of hours of work from talented people can be produced in seconds[4], but b) is valuable as a unique input into such content creation. That's the direction The Diff... See more

A more pessimistic prediction is that the current True Fan revolution will eventually go the way of the original Web 2.0 revolution, with creators increasingly ground in the gears of monetization. The Substack of today makes it easy for a writer to charge fans for a newsletter. The Substack of tomorrow might move toward a flat-fee subscription... See more