The Creator Paradox: Cultural Stasis Amidst Creative Surplus

Part I:The Tension

There’s a new dilemma.

Only it’s not that “new” of a dilemma.

At the beginning of this summer, decades of glacier-paced cultural change was captured perfectly in a single weekend. The top of the charts revealed our endangered media ecosystem.

You’ve heard this song plenty before. Thanks to inclusion in Netflix’s fifth season of Stranger Things, Kate Bush’s 1985 song “Running Up That Hill (Make a Deal with God)” found itself back in the zeitgeist. It went from 22,000 streams per day to 5.1M. Momentarily, a 37-year-old track was the most streamed song on Spotify.

Meanwhile, Top Gun: Maverick, a sequel to the 1986 original, broke box office records, banking $156 million the same weekend. This was right before Jurassic World stomped in — the seventh installment since 1993. Then came Minions 2 — a sequel and a spin off to the Despicable Me franchise, which in itself already had three installments.

Further, in video games that weekend, 9 out of 10 best selling titles were from franchises. And the New York Times Best Sellers list saw James Paterson, the Guinness World Records holder for the most #1 New York Times bestsellers, taking up two of the top five spots in fiction.

It was the summer weekend for big premieres. But in fact, nothing about these releases were particularly that new.

Most noteworthy though, this pattern of mega-successful reboots stood against a backdrop of another story...

These titles were released at a moment when more people are creating more content than ever before in history.

Spotify boasts 70,000 tracks uploaded every day. YouTube is uploading 30,000 hours of new content every hour. Nearly 3M unique podcasts exist. Twitch is broadcasting +7.5M streamers, indie game releases and play are both growing year over year, and roughly 4M books are published annually in the U.S. — nearly half of those self-published, a +250% increase over just five years.

On one hand, we have a booming Creator Economy, with an ever-expanding democratization of tools for production to anyone with an idea. So much so, that according to 1,000 surveyed Americans by Zine, 86% of people believe there is an overwhelming amount of entertainment available today.

Yet meanwhile on the other hand, we seem to have also found ourselves culturally stunted. Our box office and streami