The problem with the internet that no one is talking about

hey uh have i got your attention can i hold it are you exhausted by content the fact that there's just so much of it and you can just scroll and scroll and scroll and never hit the bottom or the fact that if you're a creative person there's this weird pressure this gigantic pressure to make content content content and have you noticed that every single creative person whether you're a filmmaker a photographer or an artist everything that you make is now just called content and whatever it is that you used to do now you just called

a content creator when and why did this happen is it good is it bad and what can we do about it those are the questions that i'm going to try to answer in this video what the heck is going on baby that's the series title tell me if this sounds like a familiar scene you're a musician you got into it because you love making music you love production songwriting and getting lost in your instruments one day you make an amazing song you put it on spotify and nobody listens meanwhile you see another museo blowing up

because they're jumping on tick tock trends and sticking their songs underneath videos you take note and decide to do the same thing and it works one of your videos pops and your music get some listeners game on you repeat the process make a few more videos and you start building up a following you are now a musician content creator cool until it isn't one day you wake up and you want to make music all day but you feel like you have to make videos to keep up with the algorithm so you decide to do both

but the music because you're splitting your time it's just not that great and the content without your heart in it just flops instead of blaming the system you blame yourself the spiral begins you try resurrect your content because you feel like it's the only way that people will hear your music and meanwhile your music suffers because you are giving so much time to the content when you do go to finally sit down with your instrument you end up writing songs to go viral as opposed to songs that are good one day you wake up and

you realize that you haven't made proper music in months at some point you became a full-time content creator and you didn't even mean to so imagine that scene gets played out millions of times for millions of people the net result is that every creative person who's posting their work online is now just called a content creator and their work is now just called content my thesis is that this is a bad thing the main reason is that the label content limits creativity by calling art content our art is given a very specific purpose serve the

algorithm set out by a handful of tech companies instead of creative exploration these algorithms reward art that seek and hold attention this is because this attention is the product that these media companies are selling it's how they make money over time by very much intentional design the art becomes formulaic and it affects the three main groups i'm the consumer of art and content i am desensitized and bored but i will not stop scrolling because these platforms are designed to keep me actually addicted genuinely addicted on a neurological level why don't we check this with large

tech companies i don't know i'm an artist i keep posting stuff to serve the algorithm and i'm scared to post my actual work because i don't think it will work i don't think it will go well ah and i'm the technocrats any and all money that is being made by this process is going straight into my pockets yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah basically something that was designed to facilitate or push art and music out is now at its core a poison like a virus killing its host oh god that was quite dramatic but i genuinely

believe that but this kind of thing doesn't just happen overnight let's look at the history in the 16th century there was an explosion of creativity called the renaissance q shakespeare michelangelo da vinci much later renaissance fairs but more interestingly to this subject cue patrons a patron was a wealthy person who invested money into art typically this would mean that they would fund an artist's life so the artist could make what they made as an exchange the patron would often appear in these artworks something that was previously unseen in the middle ages and they would also

cultivate a large art collection thus it was in their best interest to make their art collection as valuable as possible by driving up the perceived value that art had just in general patrons could increase their personal wealth fast forward a few centuries and enter paul durand rual a name that i am most definitely butchering a french name now this fella paul he notices that there are a lot of underground artists who are really good but they're just not getting attention in 19th century france this is a bit of a problem for artists because to be

seen you had to have an in with the french academy so paul says this and he thinks nah and he invents a new system decentralized exhibitions basically instead of needing government backing for your art you could stick your art in a gallery and if somebody liked it because they went to that gallery they could buy it part of that money would go to the artist and part of the money would go to the person who owned the gallery something that seemed super simple right now but back when paul pitched it it was revolutionary the key

impacts of this were that promotion and private selling were now powering the art world and from this there was one strange side effect that we would see dominate in the 20th and 21st century people would value an artwork by the artist who made it as opposed to just the composition of the artwork a lot of people could paint like monet but only monet could sign the word monet the artist drove up the value of a piece as much as their art did thus placing an emphasis on branding andy warhol saw this a mile off and

took it to its extreme theoretically an artist could bring more value to an artwork just by having painted it than the art on the actual canvas warhol's thesis was this meant that an artist no longer needed years of training they just needed to be popular if the artist was famous enough then even art that was cheap and easy and fast to produce could sell for more than art that had taken years and years of dedicated practice hence marilyn monroe and campbell soup a nickname that i thankfully got all throughout high school since warhol a lot

of artists have invested more time into their branding and their story than their work also since warhol technology has done a bit of growing up we've gone from broadcast media to the internet the key difference being paid distribution broadcast media was owned by a company for example a television network somebody that you had to pay money to in order to be distributed by on the internet though distribution is relatively free and if you make something good enough it can potentially be distributed to millions and millions of people i'm talking about going viral but for the

early internet this wasn't really a commonplace thing and it didn't really happen that often for creative work it was really more reserved for you know funny cats and dogs until this happened [Music] lyrics lyrics lyrics sorry if i put the actual music i'll get a copyright strike so you know an indie band out of nowhere hit the big time on next to no money okay go we're a hit all they needed was a decent song an okay camera and a brilliant idea something that most musicians around the world had access to this kickstarts a wave

of indie bands filmmakers artists writers all trying to go viral naturally the tech companies who are hosting these artworks catch on and start adjusting their platforms and algorithms to suit the market to suit the growth they're getting views so why wouldn't they want to grow the indie creators the more artists that were trying to go viral the more users they had the more eyeballs they had the more engagement they had and the longer that people stayed on those platforms the more money they could get from advertisers everyone was winning well not everyone record companies weren't

winning tv wasn't winning a lot of broadcast media wasn't winning but they could pay to get those views while indie bands had to have a brilliant idea a record company just needed a lot of money to get their exposure on the internet this drove up the price of exposure diluting feeds with sponsored content making it even harder for independent artists to grow organically but while all this is going on you know what's happening in the background the modern day influencer was born the person who could make all of their money without a day job they

could just get all of their cash from being a person online and doing whatever it is they do but the message was clear to a lot of us watching instead of having a job you could just make content it was a viable alternative baby travel the world with a little mavic 3 freaking last cool right wrong we'll find out later why being an influencer looked a lot more fun than having a desk job and for a lot of people it looked like it would genuinely make more money this ignited a cambrian explosion of people actively

making content people actively participating as opposed to just lurking and consuming a new generation of people chasing the influencer holy grail with so many categories growing everybody had more competition than ever before for eyeballs the one thing that it seemed like you could exchange for cash then tiktok comes along pours a pool worth of petrol onto this forest fire skippable ads mean that now sponsored content is everywhere so people will actually consume the ads and all these forces are working in tandem driving up the value of having a following online then the pandemic hits now

those already valuable online platforms have become even more valuable which means more people are chasing them which means it's even harder to get through everyone is suddenly indoors all the time just staring at their phone and now it's not just the internet the economy starts to change as well people with actual money advertisers networks record companies they need a safe bet and a safe bet for them is people with a lot of social media followers who don't look like they're a flash in the pan the result andy warhol was kind of right man commercially speaking

branding and audience size becomes more important than the work you actually produce but it's not all bad i mean for some people this actually pulled them out of poverty the online follower lottery was not gay kept the cost of entry was just having a phone and an internet connection you could build a following from anywhere in the world and if you hit a big you could strike the big bucks but to sum up all this history where we are now is this a lot of people are chasing branding and audience size they're doing these things

by making content and sticking them on social media platforms and a lot of these people assume that when they get the audience size that they'll be able to experiment make the creative work that they actually wanted to make but there are two big problems the first is experimentation is now a risk to their core asset and the second problem is they have now trained their creativity to suit an algorithm the end result is that suddenly all creativity just looks like content so have i still got your attention the real question is can i hold it

to the end i mean surely right i feel like i just set up a gigantic problem and i haven't even solved it and i feel like we both know that a resolve is coming because i mean look at the time bar there's still a little bit left so with that in mind here goes nothing the current system places an emphasis on width go viral siphon some fans from that viral hit and then you know figure out how to monetize later that's the platform right and for what it's worth this totally works but there are two

problems the first is that width often leads to 15 minutes of fame the other thing that andy warhol was talking about viral attention is pretty unsustainable and mass attention is really hard to keep it's just the fact we've seen this time and time again and the second problem is that width is often seen like it's the only method that will work in the internet age it might seem like a viral breakout hit is necessary for a creative online career but i just don't think this is true so the big question what else works you guessed

it depth depth is the idea that you nurture a smaller group of people for a longer period of time instead of focusing on going viral or serving an algorithm you focus on creating brilliant work regardless of what the algorithm is serving it might hit less people but for the people it does hit it'll be far more memorable i mean think about the last time you got lost in a scroll how many of those videos do you actually remember instead of jumping on trends it's focusing on creating an actual community but why does this work what

is the actual reason behind it the idea here is that going for depth is catering to a need that i believe has been forgotten the market is made of humans and as humans we still want to connect to deep resonant art but with 99 of people just trying to go viral a gigantic chunk of that market is now left starving for something good now that's a nice thing to say yeah depth is better than width make good art blah blah blah but firstly does it actually work and secondly is there a practical strategy that can

help you with this yes and yes here it is [Music] kevin kelly was the editor of wired magazine and a whole lot of other things i do recommend checking him out and in 2007 he made this call right he said that with so much scattered attention on the internet your best bet is not to try chase all that scattered attention but to just build 1 000 true fans so what is a true fan a true fan is somebody who will follow you from piece to peace regardless of whether it's your best or you're you know

you're most average they'll buy the products that you launch they'll migrate with you from one platform to another they're just there to support that's a true fan kevin kelly's thesis is that with one thousand of these people minimum you can have a sustainable career here's why if 1 000 people are buying the things that you make for example then you are financially self-sufficient these 1 000 true fans also work as your marketing they evangelize your message to other people thus growing your platform so now the question becomes how do you get these 1000 true fans

before i answer this we just got to take a quick dose of reality i wish i could just say hey ring true to yourself and you'll ring true to the world kid but the market and making stuff it's all just way more complex than that so here are some practical strategies that i've seen work make one for me one for them a journalist once asked john mayer about how he crafts an album the journalist asked how many of the songs are for you and how many of the songs are for your audience assuming that the

ones for him might be slightly more indulgent or a bit weirder and the ones for the audience might have a bit more of a crowd-pleasing aesthetic to them and john replies i make one for me one for them 50 50. and that seems like a pretty good idea so if you think 50 to get new people and then 50 for i don't know creative expression and also for the true fans who actually want to see what resonates with you that seems to be a pretty good number the second strategy is serve the people who serve

you instead of trying to chase new people it's cultivating a community around the people who've already said yes to you it's writing back to dms or making memorable one-on-one interactions with people the third strategy is make something big it's pretty tempting to get the short-term rewards of say tick-tock virality making an album or a comic book or a full stand-up special has a far higher chance of converting somebody for life as opposed to just converting somebody for the day so how do you conclude a video like this well i think for me the best way

is probably just to make a couple of predictions what i think we might see in the future the first prediction is that i believe that exhausting content schedules will decline in relevance and i think that reasonable content schedules will take their place for example i think we'll see a decline in daily video creation and a rise in people who make a few quality videos every month secondly i think that community-based platforms like discord and twitch will continue to rise thirdly i don't think going viral as a strategy for internet fame is going anywhere anytime soon

i think that will still be a method that people use and still be profitable for a lot of people that said i also predict that a lot of social apps will start promoting content that doesn't look typically viral in order to stay fresh the best example i've seen on this is probably on youtube the dude who blew up like in the past year or so called nate the hoof guy he just cleans cow hoofs and it's pretty great i predict that this will start a wave of creators making non-viral content or content that just doesn't

look like it does right now another example would be francis bourgeois on tiktok he's found his place on the internet not because he's trying to go viral but because he genuinely just loves trains what i think this is is the start of the wave of content that just doesn't seem viral on the surface my next prediction is that taking breaks will be normalized in a similar way to how sport is played in seasons i imagine that creative people who are posting things on the internet for a living will start making things in seasons and they'll

start pulsing their work as opposed to feeling like they have to be on all the time and then my last prediction is that the ability to create in-depth work work that takes time and effort and research will become the ultimate indicator of commercial success if you can make something deep powerful and well thought out it'll mean so much more to so many more people than a few viral hits i mean those are just my predictions but hey at least i kept your attention right thanks so much for watching i really hope that you enjoyed that

if you didn't that's cool man with different people subscribe if you're new and also let me know what you think your predictions are for the future what do you think is gonna happen do you think things will continue to stay as they are or do you think we'll see a mass migration towards deep work who knows not me nobody that's the nature of predictions maybe anyway that's it for me have a beautiful day catcher