“They are the consummate consumers of a culture that they don’t produce.”

This Bullshit Industrial Complex has always existed. But thanks to the precarious economics and job prospects of the creative person, it is often in a creative’s financial interest to climb the bullshit pyramid. In the short term, it’s creating a class of (often young) creatives deluded into thinking they are doing something meaningful by sharing “... See more

The notion that creative people aren’t motivated by money, are always happy to be working, and prefer odd gigs to a stable career normalized the precarity and overwork of the post-Fordist world. The successful creative life calls to people like a siren song but fails to materialize for so many, who chalk their failure up to deeper personal deficien

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The playwright and novelist Ayad Akhtar described our “click-bait consciousness,” trained to interact with anything in the feed designed to be triggering. “The worship of algorithms is mutilating creative industries,” the television writer Cord Jefferson complained. “Culture is no longer made. It is simply curated from existing culture, refined, an

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