Creative work is undervalued, but not because people won’t pay $5 for your newsletter.

There’s been an uptick of notes floating across my desk, well-coifed with likes, all essentially arguing that creative labor is undervalued— more specifically that the small percentage of people who actually pay for something they read on Substack vs the people who subscribe or read it reflects something about how our culture values creative work.

I’m not going to link to any of these notes because I have no bones to pick with the folks writing them, and I agree with the underlying need, which is that people want to make a living and not feel so precarious and shitty about their endeavors. We also want to feel that our efforts are valued!

However! There’s “stickiness” inherent in this frame that’s worth thinking more deeply around—

~ The trap of Value Equivalence: this is the idea that $5 spent on coffee is the same as the $5 spent to read a paywalled newsletter ("buy me a cup of coffee")-- in other words, that the exchange value is equivalent for any $5 spent. However, labor as effort expended over time creates different compensation outcomes depending on who is doing the work, and also the context of the output…monetary value and creative value are conversation partners, but also often in conflict. Care and creative work will always come out undervalued when placed in equivalence with commodities.

~ …Speaking of Commodities: I find it useful to remember that sometimes creative work does not feel valued because of the many ways creativity resists commodification— a very useful friction! The cultural conditioning isn't so much that we undervalue creativity, the conditioning is that we get stuck in monetary value systems that devalue creative labor. Valuing a $5/month newsletter like a $5 coffee, well, what an alienating way to relate to our work! Art and creative work have always been mismatched with monetary value systems (and I wouldn't have it otherwise).

~ It's the System, baby: the overall economic system of Substack is really crappy for individuals. There’s so much content on this platform! A lot of people who subscribe to a wild number of newsletters…but there’s no way someone is going to pay for 100, 50, even 25 newsletter subscriptions.

Paywall fatigue is real, and the system and environment of Substack stacks (heh…) the deck against the many. It’s easy to mistake this as an individual value and choice thing, but that misdirects focus from the larger underlying tension.

There’s lots of capital being thrown around attempting to fit art into a commodity and monetary value system, but one of the beautiful things about the the qualities of art and creative work is that they will continue to resist!

Instead of saying silly things about people not valuing creative labor because they balk at paying for newsletter content, I would love to see more notes thinking about alternative systems of value. What’s great about Substack is that it has the qualities of a big messy commons. But the economic model, at least right now, does not support the messy commons; there’s a mismatch of value systems and forms…on the surface that can feel like an individual consumer/subscriber, individual creator problem, but dig a little a deeper, and there’s something else going on.