There Is No Union for a Metric

A young comic I know says he has been making videos for two years and his mother still asks when he is going to get a real job.

I told him mothers have a gift for locating the bruise.

He makes the videos in the room where he sleeps. He writes them, shoots them, edits them, cuts the little rectangle that might make a stranger stop scrolling, answers comments, studies the numbers, changes the title, studies the numbers again. He has learned enough about cameras to make a man with a camera job nervous. He has learned enough about advertising to hate the words brand integration before breakfast. He has learned enough about the recommendation machinery to know that it does not love him, although it sometimes sends flowers.

On a good week, one of his videos gets carried out into the bright electronic street. He gains subscribers. A toothpaste company writes. His mother forwards it to an aunt who says she always knew he had talent.

On a bad week, he watches a thing he spent three weeks making get shown to fewer people than a man yelling about his breakfast in a parking lot.

This is freedom now.

The word creator is everywhere. It has the soft, affirming sound of a camp counselor handing you crayons. You are not unemployed. You are a creator. You are not working alone without health insurance, a predictable paycheck, colleagues, an editor, or anybody to tell you the joke is dying on the sidewalk. You are building a personal brand. You are your own boss, which is a charming way of saying the boss follows you into the bathroom and is made of numbers.

Adam Conover, who has spent enough years making comedy to recognize a trap wearing a lanyard, puts it better than I can. The platforms call people creators the way an old cosmetics racket calls a woman an entrepreneur. Here is a distant jackpot. Here is Mr. Beast with the lights shining off him. Work for almost nothing. Keep uploading. Maybe one day we will break off a piece of the ad money.

The dream is always one man at the top of the hill holding a large check.

The hill is covered with bodies carrying ring lights.

The old media business was no innocent church. I have worked enough rotten places to know that a paycheck can come with a supervisor who thinks cruelty is leadership and an executive who could ruin a room just by entering it. Hollywood had gatekeepers. Newspapers had gatekeepers. Television had gatekeepers. Some of them were stupid, some corrupt, some both before noon.

But a gatekeeper was at least a person.

You could pitch the bastard. You could call him. You could get drunk with his assistant. You could make something too good for him to ignore. You could organize against him. He had an office, a face, a lunch hour, a number to put on the flyer when the union came around.

The new gatekeeper has no lunch hour. It does not remember why it buried your work. It does not have a daughter who asks what it does all day. It does not feel bad when it feeds a person a little hope on Tuesday and turns off the water on Wednesday.

It is called the algorithm, which is a useful name if you want everybody to stop looking for the man who owns the building.

The platform people say the old world was closed. That is true. A kid in a town with no comedy club can put something online now. A woman with a camera can find an audience without asking some cigar-smelling vice president for permission. There is real good in that. I am not going to pretend access is nothing because the economics are rotten. A door that was locked for a hundred years has opened a crack.

But somebody owns the hallway.

And once enough people walk through, the company starts charging them for the light.

Conover talks about the part that gets lost whenever a man in a fleece vest praises disruption: the middle. Not movie stars and not the kid making clips for free between shifts. The working middle. Writers in a room arguing over a line. Camera operators. Researchers. Editors. Costume people. The strange, indispensable adult whose whole job is to know talented lunatics and keep them from setting fire to the production schedule.

Those people made culture with each other. Not always elegantly. Sometimes they made bad television, bad movies, bad jokes, and a lot of coffee. But there were rooms where a person could get better by being around other people who knew the job. There were salaries. There were union cards. There was somebody besides the landlord who noticed when you disappeared.

Now the same work is supposed to happen in thousands of little apartments, under the supervision of an invisible scorekeeper. A comedian becomes a production company because no company will employ a comedian. A writer becomes an accountant because the sponsor wants numbers. A camera person becomes an influencer because the camera job got folded into somebody else’s hustle.

Then the platforms have the nerve to call this democratization.

It is democratized in the way a lifeboat is democratized when they throw everybody into the water and announce there are no more first-class seats.

The cruelest part is that the system teaches people to betray their own curiosity. Conover spent weeks making a video about leaf blowers because the history interested him. It got fifty thousand views. His attacks on AI and tech giants do much better. So now the machine is asking the same dumb question of every person trying to make anything: why not make the thing that already worked?

Why not keep doing the face you made when the numbers went up?

Why not become a vending machine with childhood trauma and a good thumbnail?

This is how art gets narrowed without anyone banning it. No censor needs to enter the room. No committee burns the strange script. A dashboard simply explains, gently and repeatedly, that strange things do not travel as far. The person making them has rent due. Soon enough, the person learns to cut away the part that surprised him.

That is not creation. That is trained obedience with better lighting.

There are people fighting back in the unglamorous ways. Channel staffs are organizing. Writers are trying to rebuild shows with enough money to hire another writer. Some performers are refusing the poisoned sponsorship even when the offer would cover a month of bills. It is not a revolution. It is a few people trying to make a workplace appear where a marketplace has eaten the floor.

Good luck to them. They will need it. The companies have the pipes, the data, the advertising departments, the lawyers, the cheerful phrases about opportunity. They have an endless reserve army of hopeful people willing to work for free because somebody somewhere made it big.

But I keep thinking about the young comic and his mother’s question.

When are you going to get a real job?

The answer should not be cruel. The work is real. The hours are real. The fear is real. The little spark that makes a person sit up at midnight because he has an idea worth trying is as real as anything ever was.

What is missing is not labor.

What is missing is the part where labor gets to live.

Source: YouTube ruins everything