If you subscribe to newsletters, listen to podcasts, or watch videos on YouTube, I've no doubt that you’ve been asked to support the person or people who created them. You can always support with a like or a share, of course. But generally, the support they’re looking for is financial.
And for good reason, life is expensive. Jobs with good pay and decent benefit packages can be hard to find—especially in the culture industry.
But I gotta tell you, I’ve always been a little irked by the word “support.” It’s not inaccurate. Not unethical. Not even gauche. I just think it’s the wrong word.
Today's episode is in 3 parts: The first examines an article in the New York Times from May 10 about how much money we’re paying for newsletters. The second part considers a manifesto of sorts about the future of media organizations written by Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie in April. And the third part will draw on a new English translation of Mythocracy by Yves Citton to make sense of it all.
Whether or not you identify as a “creator,” whether or not you buy from creators, whether or not you even follow creators on Substack, YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram, I promise this will be relevant to you. Because, regardless of your personal or professional relationship with Substack and the so-called creator economy, their very existence and continued growth reveal a great deal about how we all work and consume in the 21st century.
Footnotes:
Let's (re)think systems this summer!
Join me for
Summer Seminar, a 7-week program that combines speculative fiction with curiosity about our own lives and work. This year, we're reading Sofia Samatar's
The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain and venturing through 6 explorations of systems thinking.
Learn more and register with choose-your-own pricing.
★ Support this podcast ★
What is What Works?
Work is central to the human experience. It helps us shape our identities, care for those we love, and contribute to our communities. Work can be a source of power and a catalyst for change. Unfortunately, that's not how most of us experience work—even those who work for themselves. Our labor and creative spirit are used to enrich others and maintain the status quo. It's time for an intervention. What Works is a show about rethinking work, business, and leadership for the 21st-century economy. Host Tara McMullin covers money, management, culture, media, philosophy, and more to figure out what's working (and what's not) today. Tara offers a distinctly interdisciplinary approach to deep-dive analysis of how we work and how work shapes us.