creative pursuits

An aggregator like Facebook or Airbnb brings all the relevant goods, services, or information that a consumer might seek into one place, and it gathers all the consumers there, too. Netflix is a one-stop shop for film and television. YouTube is a one-stop shop for user-generated video. Uber is a one-stop shop for car rides. These aggregators amass ... See more

Rarely do we think of creatives as wealthy or successful, even cracking jokes about the wastefulness of art degrees and theater classes. We have heard how pursuing creativity is not a safe career move, whether that means chasing an interest in literature, music, or some other endeavor.

Henry James speaks of his deliberate consignment of an idea to the realm of the unconscious where it can be worked upon and realized: "I was charmed with my idea, which would take, however, much working out; and because it had so much to give, I think, must I have dropped it for the time into the deep well of unconscious cerebra-tion: not without t... See more

Thanks to the power of this myth, many of us take the safe route in life. We become lawyers instead of actresses, bankers instead of poets, and doctors instead of painters. We hedge our bets and hide from our true calling, choosing less risky careers, because it seems easier. Nobody wants to struggle, after all, so we keep our passion a hobby and f... See more

This new model takes what we have learned from the Aggregation Era and finds a way to blend it with the independence enjoyed by the “sovereign writer”—or, to be appropriately expansive, let’s call it “sovereign creator.” It is, I believe, the natural model of the internet, taking advantage of the web’s massive scale and interconnectivity and mergin... See more

There is a striking uniformity in the way creative people-artists, writers, mathemati-cians, scientists, and philosophers-speak about the process of production and problem solving. Ghiselin (1952) has collected into one volume a number of essays on the creative pro-cess by a variety of creative workers from Poincare to Picasso. As Ghiselin accurate... See more

Making the internet work for creators

The second reason why Ben’s milestone is significant is that he, better than anyone else, has identified and articulated the force that has overwhelmingly shaped online media over the past decade: Aggregation Theory.

Ben’s theory describes how and why a few major platforms have come to dominate the flow of infor... See more

The challenge, or opportunity, for companies like Substack is to figure out how to help creators reach new audiences and grow without having to compromise on ownership. The aggregators of the early internet unlocked great power for creators through building central gathering places. We are doing the same with the Substack app and features—like Reco... See more

What we forget, however, is that the story of the Starving Artist is a myth. And like all myths, it may be a powerful story, one we can orient our entire lives around.