It seems that individuals earn income by navigating a channel lined by important people in fancy offices; the path to the American Standard of Living was straight, stiff, and white as a Doric column. But now you can turn in any direction to make a living; now anyone can make a song, a video, a skirt, or any other token of their unique desires, obsessions, and perspectives, and let a network of glass cables and transistors find the right person to give them money in exchange. Whether an important person “gets” them, whether they are rich enough to own a darkroom or a printing press, are not boom barriers in any market whose logic is managed by a global data platform. The only limit is, does anyone else on Earth’s personality make them a match for what a creator makes?
In a society where these unique desires, obsessions, and perspectives are recognized to have been created equal; where the happiness they are aimed at is everyone’s birthright to pursue; and where the time-consuming activity of work is one of our heaviest tools of this pursuit; couldn’t this new capability result in many, many more people using their internet to monetize their personalities through creative expression, to a degree that redefines art away from a mark of privilege to mainstream moneymaker? I believe it might, or at the very least, think that we’d all be better off if it did.
Data networks have only begun their door-to-door sweep through the economy. Engineers will build machines to provide all logic and brute force; with enough data these machines will fit into the most unlikely spaces, into coal seams and atop port cranes. Statistical models astride even the most curious of niche markets will decide who gets what and when for how much. Firms where people answer phones and allocate resources will survive a while; businesspeople enjoy negotiating with their account reps, and there is no pressing reason to not buy cigarettes at a bodega. But people’s behavioral attachments change, and networks matching inputs and outputs in training data to reach the optimal decision are here to stay.
Where does this leave us fleshy humans? With our silly little feelings and intuitions, about why the most random and ethereal sounds and circumstances are cute, funny, or sad. The creation and synthesis of which will remain ours alone, bubbling up from our pungent psychology. We won’t be able to get paid by digging holes or directing traffic, but we will each be more able than ever to notice, mix, and deliver expressions of our unique selves, in forms we find familiar, like music, coaching, writing, or design, and in forms we find as unimaginable as a yoga class to a 19th century farmer. Maybe millions won’t find a person entertaining; but the networks that know us will find the thousands that find a sense of deeper recognition and expression of their own in our creations. Instead of building and carrying, the deepening and intermingling of appreciation among the unique will be one of the economy’s primary aims.
Will we all have enough money? Not as things stand. The money value of creating inputs is pennies; of connecting those inputs with outputs, equity. Exchangers on networks beg for tips and Patreon subscriptions while network owners get richer than anyone’s ever been rich before, all while feeling that they’ve done us an enormous favor out of their genius goodwill. This has to change if we want culture and identity to be shared instead of stratified; equality will depend on a balanced relationship between networks and the acts of care and creation they float atop.
And what does this mean for America, the story? What we do and how we get paid to do it, the question of every glossy report on the “future of work,” is just the overture. How this changes how we narrate ourselves our country is the soaring aria; mass creativity can be our turn from stagnant decadence. After millennia of nothing but subsistence, being able to relax in consumptive comfort was a real thrill. But each new convenience and contraption makes us less happy each time; like with any hungover entity, the realization that the recent euphoria could not be permanent has made us pull the covers over our heads and snap at the slightest intrusion of sound or sunlight.
We can keep stacking new forms of consumption to absurd heights, or we follow the path to greater happiness that is agreed upon by most psychologists: slow down, and offer deeper recognition and connection to ourselves and others. Creative production, delivered to perfect audiences by data networks, offers the possibility of sustaining self-actualization for everyone. In doing so, America could redefine progress – away from the expansionary religion of European modernism and towards something that’s never been done before.
Will this make us happy forever? Nothing can. But hopefully by the time we’re tired of making art, we’ll be ready to go to space and make subsistence great again. Until then, we would have a lot to do, and be proud of.