Why Only a Few Content Creators can be Superstars

Dominators need herds of sheeple, and sheeple want to be ruled

Hail the few superstar content creators that lionize the audiences and the riches!

Bow before the gods and goddesses in your midst! Worship at the feet of Jake Paul, PewDiePie, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Drake, and Jessica Wildfire!

On YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, Patreon, Substack, and Medium, only a tiny percent of the content creators that fill those networks with videos, songs, and writings earn enough from doing so to live above the poverty line.

The fame and fortune go to a very small minority on social media — just like in real life a small number of billionaires dominate the economy and reap most of the rewards from productivity.

As it is on earth, so it is in the heaven of cyberspace.

Pyramidal Society and Inexorable Inequality

Why do only a few become divine superstars?

• Are they the only ones with talent?
• Is luck so rare that it favours only this select few?
• Is the audience mostly made up of lemmings that follow each other, and cling to their routines, averse to experimenting with their diet of contents?
• Are the internet’s algorithms biased in their filters and are the homepages limited in their space to feature content creators?
• Are there too many artists and is there not enough time to consume all their output?
• Does the iron law of oligarchy reign over cyberspace as well as the animal kingdom?

Yes, to all the above. The bottom line is that the world doesn’t “want” us all to succeed. Contrary to some overprotective parents’ feel-good life lessons, not everyone deserves to win just for showing up and playing the game. The social game would stop if everyone became a billionaire or a superstar.

It’s winner take all.

The whole economy may grow according to some academic metrics, but the lion’s share of the wealth goes to the tippy top of the power pyramid. It’s been that way since civilization got rolling with the early kingdoms thousands of years ago, and it’s continued despite the reformist rhetoric of modern “liberty” and “progress.”

Middle classes are unsustainable exceptions to the late civilizational rule of grotesque economic inequality. The US built its middle class as part of its peace dividend when it dominated the planet after WWII. Since the early 1970s, big business has since stripped away most of the regulations, unions, and political culture that sustained that welfare society. The Soviet Union tried to play an egalitarian game and imploded. There are social democracies in Europe, but they’re constantly under threat by the neoliberal European Union.

Computer nerds once expected that the internet would be a refuge to explore their unpopular tastes. Then big business coopted nerdery and being nerdy became cool for normies. The internet became just another big business, run by the same cons, social network effects, and conventions of our sophisticated versions of the mammalian dominance hierarchy.

Jessica Wildfire, Goddess of Neo-Bloggers

Take Jessica Wildfire, for example.

Yet to speak of her as an “example” is to err because the superstars are more like unique, peerless angels. They’re the exceptions that prove the rule that there are too many people in the world, and most are supposed to toil and to suffer in obscurity. The superstars shine on like the fictional gods we worship to give us false hope, to distract us so we can pretend that the business of civilization doesn’t operate as a sham for its many dupes and patsies.

Jessica Wildfire is a fine writer. Here, at least, we don’t have a superstar who obviously only got lucky and doesn’t deserve her privileges. She’s not like Rupi Kaur or Amanda Gorman, fake poets who somehow seized the limelight in cruel jokes played on the philistine masses. No, Wildfire has lots to say, and her articles are well worth reading. Not just some of them but all of them, mind you since her craft is consistently excellent.

Her articles are relatively lengthy and substantive. She avoids jargon even though she’s an academic. Her writing is conversational without being vacuous. Perhaps she overuses the solitary short sentence to accentuate her main points, but the technique works.

Most importantly, she writes against the grain. She doesn’t succumb to social pressure, but challenges received wisdom and speaks truth to power. She has a philosophical perspective and never seems to waver from expressing it in her writings.

With over eighty-five thousand followers and her articles regularly garnering several thousand claps each, the audience evidently appreciates her work, as well it should.

The Creator Economy Isn’t Meritocratic

The problem is that she’s not the only writer who deserves such success on the internet. But it’s as though the algorithms, the audience’s appetites, and the very laws of nature conspire to prevent an outbreak of mass success.

Wildfire deserves her success, but her work isn’t orders of magnitude greater in quality than that of thousands of other writers who are virtually ignored. The lack of a middle class in the creator economy is at odds with the high quality of work that’s being produced by a great many impoverished writers and other artists.

Think of it this way: a monarchy isn’t a meritocracy. Lots of peasants would have made fine kings if they had an opportunity to be trained to rule from an early age. But that’s not the mechanism that put the royal family in charge. Monarchic rule in medieval societies was hereditary, so it was a genetic lottery, the unfairness being rationalized by the rhetoric of the state religions that provided theological cover for the scheme. Some royals excelled while others were incompetent or corrupt, as you’d expect from the randomness of a genetic lottery.

Similarly, while Wildfire deserves her superstar status as a writer, lots of other writers do too, yet they fail because the system is designed not to reward everyone who deserves it, but to protect the power of a tiny elite. There may not even be a more egalitarian system for doing otherwise in a sustainable fashion.

Democracies turn into tyrannies, given enough time, as the ancient Greeks understood and as we’re learning with Trumpism and with the authoritarian backlash against democracies around the world. Thus, giving the audience members the power to vote with their “likes” and with their choice to read some articles and to ignore others wouldn’t necessarily make for a meritocracy in the creator economy.

Most viewers would rule as the majority, but most people also have poor taste. Moreover, just as an election can be rigged behind the scenes, the internet’s algorithms can bias the selection process, tainting the pseudo-democratic election of superstars.

The Majority Want to be Ruled

There are many stars that shine in the night sky, but only a few can shine in society.

We are all mainly to blame, both the content creators and the consumers. We design and flock to use the social media that express our prejudices. We’re the ones with inferior taste, we’re the whiners who are appalled by the accumulated results of our choices, and some of us are the superstars that aren’t put off by their dominant status.

We don’t want everyone to succeed as superstars because most of us prefer to be ruled. For that to happen, the slaves must vastly outnumber the masters.

This might seem counterintuitive because in worshipping celebrities, we seem to want to be them. Consciously, of course, we do. Who wouldn’t say he or she wants to be rich and famous?

But our actions often speak louder than our words. Those who gain weight know they should be exercising more and eating more healthy food, but they do otherwise. We think we’re smart, good people, even as our so-called progressive consumption of the world’s resources is destroying the biosphere.

Most of us, then, are hypocrites.

We think we want to be celebrities. Meanwhile, we set up societies to prevent the attainment of that goal. We reward the usual suspects, the upper echelon of content creators with all our attention and money, causing the rest to languish because we secretly don’t want everyone to dominate.

If everyone became a master, who would be left to serve as slaves?

The master needs his slave. Jessica Wildfire needs her thousands of lemming readers, and they couldn’t read the tens of thousands of other capable authors on the internet even if they wanted to do so. Without the lemmings, there would be no superstars, and once there are superstars, many other participants must serve as lesser lights.

Imagine, then, a world with no gods or celebrities, no light of hope to brighten the drudgery, butchery, and injustice that prevail even in our mammalian ventures. With no leader to look up to, what would motivate the human beasts of burden to carry on? Genetic programming can go only so far once the genes equip the brain with virtual freewill and intelligence. Higher-order schemes are needed to drive the saga onward.

We must have, then, our leaders, masters, gods, billionaires, and celebrities. We must have the success stories, so we create them either by getting lucky and acquiring dominant status or more often by acting like slaves in serving the social systems that preserve the unjust inequalities.

We need masters to take the edge off our slavery, and we create those masters by doubling down on our servitude. We in the majority sacrifice our chances to become rich and famous by acting like dupes in herding ourselves towards only a handful of content creators when there are tens of thousands of equivalents calling for our attention.

We serve as slaves of dominators because a world of only slaves, with no illusion of transcendence would be intolerable. We must have our masters, but they must be only a precious few. Society is therefore inevitably pyramidal in structure.

So all hail Jessica Wildfire, goddess of neo-bloggers! May she reign for a hundred years and may the blazing light she casts blind us to our need for her to reign alone.