Subterranean Homesick Blues (2008 NYC Media Club Mix)
CREATOR NEWSLETTER Issue #178 | October 19, 2023 Last weekend, Passionfruit threw its first-ever live event: an afternoon creator party at Karat House celebrating the release of Taylor Lorenz’s “Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence and Power on the Internet.” (And hey, after you’re done looking at the pictures, check out this new…
Content Feels Very Trivial Right Now
CREATOR NEWSLETTER Issue #177 | October 17, 2023 “Ahsoka” reactions, TikTok Halloween trends, MrBeast challenges. While these things normally are a source of levity in our lives, ‘content’ feels, at least to me, meaningless right now. And even worse, the normal things we post can seem out of touch with the current global humanitarian crisis…
Meta AI Launches This Month’s Featured Flavor of Techno-Dystopia and It’s a Kendall Jenner Chatbot
CREATOR NEWSLETTER Issue #176 | October 12, 2023 It’s been a tough week. I don’t know how other people are coping, but not since September 11th have I felt such sickening dread upon waking up every morning. I don’t want to say anything publicly — well scratch that, I very much do — but fear…
An Anti-Algorithm Manifesto
CREATOR NEWSLETTER Issue #175 | Oct. 10, 2023 Last Wednesday, Jack Conte, the founder and CEO of Patreon (and former co-creator of 2010s YouTube-viral band Pomplamoose), dropped a flashy, musical, vloggy video explaining his company’s new vision and platform updates. The 39-year-old-creator-turned-entreprenuer shows himself mixing beats on keyboards and drum machines, passionately explaining that the…
Sell Out With Me, Oh Yeah!
CREATOR NEWSLETTER Issue #174 | Oct. 5, 2023 Anyone catch the Reel Big Fish reference in the subject, anyone? Bueller? That’s another reference to an even earlier cultural touchpoint, back when our media was more of a monoculture than a multiverse. There was a time when there were only so many movies on the shelf…
The Creator Economy’s COVID Problem
CREATOR NEWSLETTER Issue #173 | Sept. 28, 2023 This weekend, I was scheduled to moderate an LGBTQ+ panel in Baltimore at the go-to convention for creators, VidCon. I was so excited. The panelists were some of my favorite creators — iconic video essayist ContraPoints, queer TikTok icon Cristian Dennis, our club-kid bimbo representative Griffin Maxwell…
Which Came First: Content or Community?
CREATOR NEWSLETTER Issue #172 | Sept. 28, 2023 Back when I was the publisher of Futurism dot com, I used to go on stage at dorky futurist conferences and tell people “there was more content produced in the last hour than in all of 1990.” Just in terms of raw hours filmed, words published, songs…
A Love Letter to the Writers Strike
CREATOR NEWSLETTER Issue #171 | Sept. 26, 2023 After a weekend of deliberations, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) announced on Sunday night that they have come to a tentative agreement for 3-year-contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) — one they assure writers is “exceptional” and guarantees substantial “gains and…
In the Wake of Kast Media’s Crumbling, Smaller Channels Take Heaviest Hits
CREATOR NEWSLETTER Issue #170 | Sept. 21, 2023 If you haven’t heard the news about Kast Media and why we are all so very angry at them, it’s not because you’ve been living under a rock. It’s actually the opposite: If you haven’t been hearing about the podcast ad agency that made millions on multi-year…
Red-Pilled Children in Trucker Hats
CREATOR NEWSLETTER Issue #169 | September 19, 2023 Yesterday, I had the unfortunate luck of setting my eyes upon a viral clip of a fan meet-and-greet gone wrong with a notoriously transphobic, YouTube-banned, self-proclaimed Red Pilled Rumble streamer known as “Sneako.” In the video, three little boys (probably around 12 years old?) dressed up as…
