1.
You are valuable.
More specifically, you create value, for yourself and those around you.
Even if you do nothing more than simply exist, you create value. If your parents are proud of you, you create value for them. If you walk down the street and someone is inspired by your outfit, you create value for them. If you discover a new way to exhale weed smoke so that your neighbors cannot smell it, you created value for yourself and for them.
Of course, if you deliberately do, say, or make something with the explicit intention of creating value, this is obvious. If you design new notetaking software, you create value. If you post sexy pictures of your travels on Instagram, you create value. And if you write essays to share your thoughts with the world, you definitely, unquestionably create value for yourself and all your readers (right, guys?!).
For now, let’s set aside the costs of generating that value—materials, time, labor, negative externalities, downstream consequences, social dilemmas. Much has been, and will be, said about the costs we impose on ourselves and others.
Let’s stay focused for the moment on a less popular topic: what we’re getting in return.
We create value everyday in thousands of ways, big and small. We’re comparative creatures, constantly measuring ourselves against one another, so next we might ask: how much value do we create?
This is a tricky question, because so much of that value is simply not quantifiable. How do you measure the value of a mother’s love? How do you measure the impact of life-changing inspiration? How do you measure the satisfaction of buying your first Ferrari?
The popular answer: we measure them comparatively.
Would you trade your mother’s love for your first Ferrari? If so, then you value the Ferrari (or, more accurately, the object plus all your feelings wrapped up in it) more than your mother’s love.
But how much more?
An economist would tell you that’s what money is for, to solve exactly that question. It’s a medium of exchange between things of different values that cannot be easily compared. The amount of money we’d give to acquire something, or accept to surrender it, is its price.
In theory, price equals value. In practice, price almost always fails to map to value, because there’s a second component of any exchange besides the agreement on price: the actual transfer of that value. And in order to transfer something of value, you need to capture it first.
How do you capture a mother’s love, such that it can be transferred? Is there a switch a mother can flip, if her son sells her love to someone else? Or, if her son wishes to liquidate his mother’s love—to turn it into cash, so he can buy that Ferrari—how exactly might they go about doing that?
They can’t, obviously. At best, they can agree to certain actionable terms that might look an awful lot like the liquidation of love, but not fully. They might agree to cut off contact, to disown one another, to sell off any shared assets and end any joint projects, to change their names, to burn any items attached to memories. They might promise to try hard not to think about each other ever again. Add all that together, though, and you haven’t fully captured a mother’s love—you’ve captured quite a few things associated with it, but not the whole thing.
Price does not measure value. Price measures the amount someone is willing to pay for value that can be captured and exchanged—which is not the same thing.
2.
Value radiates, like light. If I am reading by candlelight, and you sit close enough to me, you can read by that light, too. If I physically prevent you from getting close enough to the light unless you pay me a certain amount, I am capturing some of that value, and making you an offer in exchange. I don’t have to do this, of course. But I can.
Why would I want to? Why would anyone want to capture value? Seems selfish and antisocial. Let the guy read, you might insist. It’s not costing me anything.
For many interactions, that’s absolutely true, and you’d be absolutely right. It’s not costing me anything to allow you to read this essay. What’s more, I gain tremendous value by writing it—it clarifies my thoughts, it builds my brand, it brings like-minded thinkers into my life, it satisfies my expressive urges. In fact, I get so much value from it, I’d like to do this more often. I’d like this to be a central part of my life. So, if I never charge you anything for it, I’ve still created value. Isn’t that enough?
But clarified thoughts are not self-sustaining. Everything needs to sustain itself, otherwise it’s a tree that one day stops giving. In order to keep doing the things I want to do, I need to secure the means to keep doing them. The best way to do that is to capture back some of the value I’m already creating.
Capturing can come in many forms. It doesn’t need to be charging access. Musicians can sell concert tickets, collect streaming royalties, sell merchandise, sell physical recordings, shout out sponsors in songs, tokenize their offerings, and dozens more. Capturing value exists in a delicate balance with value creation; some attempts to capture value can end up destroying it. Nevertheless, to capture value and bring it to market is the most direct and efficient means for people to continue making the value they want to share with the world. Though, like anything, it can be perverted or self-destructive, capturing value is at core a good thing. Without it, people who are not independently wealthy couldn’t dedicate themselves to value creation.
Capturing back the value created is the best way to enable people to sustain the passions to which they devote themselves, that give purpose and bring happiness to their lives. That’s true for the model who wants nothing more but to travel the world and eat acai bowls in beautiful outfits. That’s true for bedroom music producers, and world-class video gamers, and dancers, comedians, chefs, personal trainers. It’s true for protein bar makers and toothbrush inventors and productivity gurus. The same is true for the sculptor of dick snails.
Each of them, like each one of us, is faced with a choice: (1) do we pursue a life that allows us to create the most value? Or, (2) do we pursue a life that allows us to capture the most value?
For most of us most of the time, the answer was always (2). If you wanted to be a glamorous travel influencer, you’d need to convince one of the handful of magazines or newspapers employing travel editors to hire you. More likely, you’d make that your hobby, and work a “real job” to pay for it. You’d pick whatever allowed you to capture and sell the maximum value—a middle manager, a nurse, an accountant—and you’d enjoy your one-week vacation once a year to live your dream.
The sculptor of dick snails would need to set up a roadside storefront and hope enough connoisseurs of obscene tchotchkes find themselves driving down that road. More likely, he’d sculpt for himself in his free time, maybe give his “art” as gifts to reluctant friends and family, spending most of his hours working in, say, a factory operating plastic molds that make souvenirs for the Walt Disney Corporation.
They can make different choices now.
Social media makes different choices, for the first time, possible and accessible. Social media connects people who want to be connected. It helps them find each other. It points those obscenity connoisseurs down the roads they were looking for, but didn’t yet realize.
It allows many of us—and more of us every year—to find those people who capture previously uncapturable value, so we no longer have to choose between the life that creates the most value and the life that captures the most, because the function of social media is to collapse those into the same life.
It might be simplistic to call the former “hobbies” and the latter “jobs”, just as the whole notion of a “work-life balance” is too simplistic to capture people who love their work and hate their lives, or those who don’t see a difference between work and life at all. But we’ll go with it, because social media fundamentally alters the balance between “hobbies” and “jobs”. And by doing that, it makes possible the pursuit of passion for more people than ever before.
That balance was never really about the activities involved. What distinguishes a hobby from a job is the perception of the people, and about the nature of their connections with each other. A “hobby” is done either alone, or in a community, but (usually) not in a market. A “job” is done in a community and in a market, but never alone. Social media makes it astonishingly easy to find (or build) your community, and for communities to find markets.
Another way of saying “pursue your passion” is “pursue the life that creates the most value for yourself.” If you believe that our society should promote human flourishing, if you believe that a life of passion should be available to as many people as possible, then you must support people’s ability to create—and, just as importantly, capture—as much value as possible.
Maybe there are positive social effects to having people work jobs they hate, but that create a lot of value for others. Some capitalists would make that claim, that happiness is not as important as doing whatever commands the highest market price for your time and labor, so that the overall wealth of the society is as high as possible (and, so, you gain from that, too). Some extreme collectivists—fascists, communists—might also make that argument, but their measure is not market price, but whatever they tell you your highest value is to the collective.
But, what if we could sidestep that tradeoff? What if we could live in a world where people pursuing their passions generates meaningful value and they can capture enough of that value to support themselves and their communities? What if they could spend most of their time on the things that bring them the most purpose and happiness?
A common objection here is that someone has to do the shitty jobs. Having met enough lawyers, accountants, and middle managers who authentically and earnestly enjoy their jobs, I’m not worried about there not being enough people to do jobs most other people hate. People choose to be morticians and coroners, after all. If there’s demand for work no one wants to do, the people who want that work done will find a way to get it done: delivery drones, customer service chat bots, and Roombas will replace postal, call center, and domestic workers. People who want the human touch of a courier, a concierge, or a housekeeper will have to pay the wages those who remain in those fields (because they want to!) can now command.
Social media is the most recent in a long-line of decentralizing and empowering social technologies, from the printing press to free trade to public transportation to the Internet. The history of these technologies is that, at each successive step, people are better able to develop and bring to market their unique talents. Said another way, they’re better able to maximize the value they create, and capture the value created.
3.
But wait: how, exactly, does social media do that?
By creating communities, by creating markets, and by encouraging the creation of technologies that bridge the two.
Social media, at its core, is about connecting people. It defines the technology: platforms where people can friend, follow, subscribe, or otherwise engage with one another as social beings. The platforms enable us to share things with each other: words, pictures, videos, sounds, products, services, thoughts, feelings, ideas. Through these connections our social graph sprawls, we follow the people our friends follow.
When we share and engage, the platforms collect data and learn about us, algorithmically pointing us towards more people, pictures, and products that we might like, because we like people who liked those things, too. Connected people who engage with each other over shared interests are a community. Bonds form.
People within communities like to engage with each other, to strengthen the community. They like to do things for each other. They make content for each other. They create value for one another, value that other members are eager to encourage and reward. As they create value, their community becomes more valuable, radiating like a beacon to attract more people eager to join the club.
As a community strengthens, the incentives align for those within to participate, and to encourage others to participate. For example, let’s say you are the most talented reggae musician in your community of stoners (err, cannabis enthusiasts). They don’t want you to spend ten hours a day practicing law, they want you to make music that moves them. But, just as passionately, your partners at the law firm want you to spend more hours billing your clients, not recording music.
How do you choose which way to go? That, as the Cheshire Cat would say, depends a good deal on where you want to go.
The law firm, too, is a community. But it formed itself the way guilds and firms have for centuries in capitalistic societies. Your cannabis enthusiasts, though, would never have been able to form a community in the same way. And without that community —a community that could not be that large, or that engaged, without social media—the choice would be made for you, because you would only have one path to choose.
In this way, social media allows us to find our audience, our customers, the people who would love to receive some of the value we create. And, it allows us to find value in the world we never would have known existed, by encouraging us to share and connect and learn more about what and who we might like, and then bringing it—and the people who make it—to us.
Captured value alone is not enough to sustain a person. There must be a market for that value—that is, there must be people willing to buy and people willing to sell the captured value. The most important, most difficult, and most underappreciated part of markets is the market maker, the one who introduces the buyer to the seller and makes the exchange possible.
A social media platform’s targeting algorithm does exactly that.
The algorithms are designed to predict what and who you might like and connect you to them. This is incredibly valuable to marketers who don’t want to plaster their products on billboards or TV commercials that reach millions of random people. They want to find the specific individuals most likely to appreciate their products. Thousands of creators, startups, and small businesses can use the same technology to find their customers as those same customers use to find like-minded people and build communities. It’s the same tech.
Therefore, social media platforms, by connecting people, are market makers. You, that talented reggae musician, now have an audience of thousands of potential fans and customers, where before you had the handful of fans in your hometown and maybe, just maybe, by the grace of a record producer to whom you mailed a burnt CD, some exposure to larger pools of people who might or might not like reggae when they hear it on the radio. In that world, it’s probably more comfortable, if far less satisfying, to keep working at that law firm.
In that world, there’s one fewer talented musician enriching people’s lives, and one more disgruntled, mediocre lawyer overbilling an investment bank.
The social giants—Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube Snapchat, TikTok—enabled us to build communities. They gave us tools for connection. What was less well-developed, but is now being built at a rapid pace, was the infrastructure to capture and exchange the value being created in those communities. What we lacked were tools for capture. The giants supported influencers and creators who brought attention, and therefore value, to their platforms by allowing them to capture some of that back in the form of ad support. But they didn’t really allow them the tools to capture the value themselves.
We are now entering a new era, where we can all leverage the platforms of the social giants to find our people, and leverage a new suite of social technologies to capture an even greater share of the value we create for those people.
For example, I can build a brand and a following on Twitter, a community around my ideas. But Substack allows me to capture more of the value I’m generating for that community (and for Twitter), through subscriptions. People find me on Twitter, people buy me on Substack.
Models (and others) can now capture the value of their bodies and performance on OnlyFans. Personal trainers can capture the value of their knowledge and enthusiasm on Salut. Even dick sculptors can peddle their wares on Etsy or even their own Shopify stores.
Where before, a big Twitter following might be leveraged to get a job at Vice or Vox (where they capture most of the value you create, in exchange for your salary), now you can capture that value directly in a myriad ways—instead of this Substack, I could put together an ebook and sell it on Gumroad, or an online course and sell it on Skillshare, or some digital representation of my political theories and sell the NFT on Nifty Gateway.
The barriers to entry are lowered, the gatekeepers are no longer needed. We now have tools for connection and tools for capture that are accessible to all.
4.
I recognize that my claim—”social media is good, actually”—is no longer a popular one. Social media, we’re often told, is the cause of all of society’s ills—from polarization, to misinformation, to racism, to terrorism, to vanity, to eating disorders, to depression, to stupidity, to bad parenting, to atrophied libidos.
Not too long ago, we could imagine how social media could—and did—improve the world. We were excited about social media’s potential in the first half of the last decade. The election of Barack Obama, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party—depending on your geography and your politics, each one represented the organizing potential of social media to empower popular causes that were muzzled by existing gatekeepers, real or perceived. Even if the media didn’t quite understand the business models at play, they fawned over the social opportunity. It was the wonderful, educated, connected future we were all promised.
Then, as the immutable truth of the Innovation Adoption Curve tells us, more and more people joined in on the fun. Mom and Dad got Facebook accounts. Middle America got on Twitter. Suddenly, social media wasn’t just an exclusive, separate online space for cool kids and tastemakers that existed parallel to the real one, unbeknownst to anyone but the IYKYK crowd. Once the laggards got online, the worlds merged.
Everyone was eating at the same table, and we became disgusted with each other. The table manners, the food, the smells, the conversations. Oh, god, the conversations—if you could even call them that. We’d ask ourselves, why do they talk like that? Why do they talk about that? They think that is important? Why do they want to spend so much time talking about that… to them?!
The table became an asynchronous, perpetual, international Thanksgiving Dinner from Hell, and everyone’s spoiled siblings, annoying cousins, and racists uncles were invited.
I get it: it’s all so messy, and most of us don’t like what we see when we look at each other as we truly are. Before social media, we didn’t really have a clear look at each other. Our views into each other’s lives and minds were limited. We lived within our geographic communities, we controlled our interactions with one another, we kept things private that today we publicize. Only a tiny, tiny fraction of people ever became household names, and together with their handlers and promoters they ensured that those names remained sanitized—though, of course, our demand to peek behind the curtain encouraged the press to find the dirt we craved, the same dirt we now freely share… and complain about.
Many of us miss the cleaner, sanitized world. We got a good look at each other, and most of us really, really don’t like what we see.
But, no one is forcing us to use these platforms. Billions of people live fruitful lives, building and serving happy communities of geographically proximate people without any help from social media. Many of my friends deleted Facebook years ago, never made an Instagram, and live productive lives in blissful ignorance of what’s happening on Twitter.
And, no one is forcing you to hate the people you meet on social media You don’t even have to interact with them. You have that power. We all know the truth, that people can be crass, lazy, ignorant, cruel, especially to people outside their group. We are all those things ourselves, at times, though we try to be better. It is an entirely human experience, both offline and on, to share something with those who pay attention to us, and to be misunderstood or, worse, embarrassed, exposed in a way we hadn’t anticipated, our illusions of ourselves shattered. That’s what’s happening every day on Twitter. We’re all learning and living on the same timeline.
When someone we care about, within our community, misunderstands us, we feel shame. When some random from outside our community wanders into our comments and misunderstands us, we get hostile. Of course we get hostile. My thoughts were not for you, random guy! They’re for my customers, my audience, my community!
It’ll take some time to get used to all this, for social customs to evolve.
We don’t all have to like each other to get along. We don’t all have to like the same things, or care about the same causes, or associate with the same people. We’ve lived next door to these people before social media, and they were exactly the same then. They’re not any more brainwashed, or mind-controlled, or screen-addicted than they were with asses glued to the couch and eyes glued to the TV. It just wasn’t in our faces, but we all knew it then, too, on some level. Homer Simpson was a caricature, sure, but not exaggeratedly so. He was every other guy in the suburbs, and that was fine.
We can curate our feeds and our friends with finer controls than we ever could before, and call me crazy, but that’s a good thing.
Social media empowers us to find our people and to create value for them, and to support ourselves and our communities by doing so.
We’ve faced problems from empowered people in tight-knit communities before, whether they be apocalyptic cults or violent political movements or hostile foreign powers. Social media enables them to organize and create value for each other just as surely as they do for anyone else.
Many are worried that this time is different, that social media makes them too powerful, that the costs of allowing “bad” groups to organize outweighs the human flourishing enabled by allowing “good” groups to do the same. In this way, the discourse around social media echoes the moral panics of all other decentralizing, empowering technologies, from the printing press to the bicycle to the telephone. Democratization is scary, especially for those who were comfortable and happy in the old world. It can be scary to let new, different people into our world. It can be scary to see what people do with freedom and power, especially if they do things we don’t like.
Justice Brandeis famously said, where we are concerned with the bad things people say, “the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” I believe we can expand this, from free speech to freedom of association: where we are concerned with the communities people build and the value they create for each other, the remedy to be applied is more value creation, not enforced disconnection.
Make more things for each other. Build healthier, happier, more desirable communities. Shine a beacon so others can see you, and so that they can find you, and join you.