Creative Monopolies
The Dark Side of Creativity: Part 2
Hi,
I’ve noticed that some people seem to have a problem with freedom. Especially when it comes to business, there's an undeniable draw towards wanting power and control in order to guarantee your success. It makes sense! Making things of value that people want to support is hard, especially when your goal isn't to actually make anything other than profit. Instead, wouldn't it be nice if people didn't have a choice and they were simply forced to be your customer?
I've been reading Empire of AI by Karen Hao and early on she identifies this monopolistic desire for money and power over everything else with this choice quote from notable monopolist Peter Thiel (mentor of monopolist Sam Altman) in a lecture transparently titled "Competition Is for Losers."
Monopolies are good, Thiel said, because "they are much more stable, longer-term businesses, you have capital, and...it's symptomatic of having created something really valuable…"
"There are all these areas of innovation where there was tremendous innovation but no one made any money…"
"If you have a structure of the future where there's a lot of innovation and other people will come up with new things in the thing you're working on," he concluded, "that's great for society. It's actually not that good for your business."
Monopolies are nothing new in society, but their growing hold on our global economy is really starting to show us just how damaging this can be. Nowhere is this a clearer conflict of values than when people (companies are run by people, so lets not let them off the hook by pretending corporations are autonomous beings) want control over your creativity. As Thiel said himself, creativity and innovation are actually bad for business, so why not get a stranglehold on the very essence of competition?
Creativity is infinite. Isn't that inconvenient?
The central problem for anyone wanting to profit off of other people's creativity is that, fundamentally, creativity is infinite and impossible to limit. If you ever feel stuck in the way you make things, there's nothing stopping you from doing things in a different way. The history of art and creativity is essentially just an ongoing process of reinvention and discovery, where generations of artists reject norms or build on fundamental ideas and come up with new ways of expressing thoughts and emotions.
Remember this: you can always be creative in another way. That doesn't mean it will be easy, but it will always be true.
That's pretty fucking annoying if you want to limit people's creativity to working within the boundaries of your business model.
The first step of building a creative monopoly is in fooling us into thinking we can't make things in other ways. If you can successfully convince someone that they need you in order to do their work or to express themselves, then they will see immense value in what you have to offer. That is the ultimate goal of creative monopolies: to propose limits on our ability to create, and to make us believe that these limitations actually exist.
Creativity is all tangled up in capitalism.
When you paint something because you're moved to, you'll paint with whatever you have on hand. You can write a poem in your head, without pen, paper or publishing advance. But when you rely on your creativity to put food on the table, you start to have more constraints on what you make and how you make it.
This isn't our fault. It's the world we live in. The reality is that money has become the key to life's necessities, and work has become the thing that takes up the majority of our waking time on this earth. Many of us see this as an existential problem with a solution: if you have to work for most of your life because you need money to be alive, then why not make your work something you value? Why not use your creativity and self-expression to earn a living?
I'd argue that no matter what your job is, you're being creative. Creativity is just how we do things. We solve problems. We space out to get through boring work. We come up with shortcuts or systems to make things go faster. Creativity isn't a commodity to be sold, but we do treat it that way in commercial art industries and that makes us vulnerable.
You need to eat, and food costs money. Now imagine that your art is how you get paid. What happens when you start to rely heavily on a tool to make that art? Just like how a manufacturer is vulnerable to limited supply chains, if someone can cut off your access to your creativity then you're fucked. So you swallow the increasing monthly Adobe subscription fee, buy the official Pantone colour book, and consider splurging on the premium ChatGPT tier since they've all become essential parts of your workflow. And just like that, the monopolies have dug in a little deeper.
The Power of Tools
Tools are, in many ways, what make us human. We started using tools waaaaaaay back in the cave-man days, and that simple technology of a sharpened stone literally got us to having people on the moon, curing disease and having highly advanced computers in our pockets. Tools made it all happen.
When you rely on tools, it's useful to be able to make them yourself or to repair them when they break. But since computers and digital technology have become core to how most of us interface with our work, that understanding of our own tools has become less and less common. How many people with iPhones really understand how they work? Could you write your own program to help you with a specific task? If Adobe vanished off of the face of the earth (I can dream, can't I?) how many artists do you think could turn around and write their own version of Photoshop to keep their business running?
We've given tech companies a monopoly not just on how we work, but on the ability to create the tools we work with. Now, with generative AI being pushed as a new paradigm for all workers, we're even offloading the ability to run the software that we rely on to remote servers and proprietary systems. All of this takes power out of our hands and puts it into the hands of the kinds of people who don't want to make things, they want to make money. Why did we let this happen?
The Boiled Frog is Starting to Burn
Most of us don't start using a new tool because it's expensive, inconvenient and unhelpful. We adopt new technology into our work because it's interesting, novel or helpful in some way. That's where creative monopolies begin. They offer you a way in: a new way to express yourself, to be heard or to simplify a laborious task. At this stage it's often cheap or even free to try, and you immediately notice the benefit. The sneaky thing about this stage of a monopoly is that it's the same as someone offering a genuinely useful tool that may not change or devolve at all.
It's exciting to feel empowered. There's a rush to making something in a new way and immediately seeing a result. I was just a kid when I started using Photoshop to draw, and it was amazing to be able to draw, colour and print out a picture faster than it would take me to simply go set up some paints and a canvas. Technological innovation often emphasizes speed and "efficiency" when it invades an existing workflow. Eventually, we start to wonder how we ever inked a drawing by hand or mixed our own paint or copied our notes with paper and pen. It all feels so slow. How could you ever go back to doing it the old way?
Once you realize the monopoly has power over you, it's too late. You typically don't notice until you suddenly wonder why you're paying so much for a particular program or you become frustrated with a persistent bug in a tool that hasn't been fixed for years. You might think "maybe I should try a different tool" only to realize that the learning curve will be too steep or that "another tool" simply doesn't exist.
Often, while we aren't watching, monopolists buy up competitors and either absorb them or simply shut them down. While you were busy working away with your head down, your other options were being taken off the table without you even realizing it. Suddenly there’s nowhere to go… I guess we’re stuck?
And here we are. Our creativity held hostage by a handful of companies that few of us actually like and that most of us are afraid to leave. Sounds pretty inspiring, doesn't it?
Can we notice it before it's too late?
If noticing you're stuck under a monopoly happens after it's too late, then are we just doomed to be at the mercy of giant companies in every domain of our work? I hope not. One way we can try to avoid this is by embracing a mentality of prevention.
What are the signs we ignore or miss about monopolization that could be a warning for us?
Any time one company tries to buy another for insane amounts of money, you should assume they're monopolists.
Adobe tried to buy Figma in 2023 for $20 Billion. In a rare case of antitrust law (kind of) doing its job, the merger wasn't legally blocked but was made annoying enough that the acquisition was eventually cancelled. This is rare for Adobe, considering most of their popular tools (including Photoshop) weren't actually originally developed by them, instead being brought in by buying another company (i.e. monopolising the industry). That's just how Adobe works.
What could this signal? The obvious sign is that companies trying to exchange huge sums of money like this is never a benefit to the customers of these companies. If you rely on tools from a company that regularly buys competitors in this way, you should be weary and look for ways out of relying on tools from that company (e.g. Adobe, Microsoft, Apple).
As an example, I'm currently using the Affinity suite of tools a lot in my work, but I'm trying out a lot of alternatives at the same time precisely because Serif (the company that makes Affinity) was bought by Canva in 2024. This hasn't affected the tools very much at all at this point, but it's a signal that this tool is being folded into a monopolistic enterprise and I don't want to be stuck relying on it once I realize its too late.
Any time you lose value with nothing in return, you should assume you're dealing with monopolies.
Most businesses are afraid of scaring away their customers, but monopolies aren't. They know you have nowhere else to go. That's why the Adobe/Pantone drama from 2021 was so revealing. Up to this point, the cost of licensing Pantone's colour system in the Adobe suite was included with your subscription fee. But when Adobe and Pantone couldn't come up with a deal to satisfy eachother's bottom lines, they both opted for the choice that made things worse for people relying on their tools (the colours were stripped from the programs, including from your existing work, unless you started paying Pantone a subscription on top of your Adobe subscription fee). In a normal business situation, this should have lead to both companies losing a huge amount of their customers, but Adobe has a monopoly on creative software and Pantone has a monopoly on print colour matching, so they knew there was no other game in town and nothing really happened. That should scare you and prompt you to look for a way out.
As an aside, I'll have a rant about Pantone existing at all on another day, I'm sure. But suffice to say we shouldn't be fine with a company that wants to copyright colour. They're one of the worst creative monopolies around and we shouldn’t be reinforcing that by insisting that their products are “necessary.” They just aren’t anymore.
Any time there's a gatekeeper on your access to an audience, you should consider them a monopoly.
Creative work doesn't really work without an audience. Especially in entertainment, your access to an audience is the key to your ability to do what you do. So what if the audience could be held hostage?
This is the reality of YouTube for artists who making videos on the internet for a living. There's no way to export your subscriber list from YouTube and bring them to another platform, and there's no way to fight back if YouTube decides you've violated their terms of service and shuts down your channel. Even when you’re getting started, there isn't a real viable alternative to build a new audience on. You're entirely at their mercy.
Similarly, for almost a hundred years, there's been a near monopoly on larger-scale entertainment like film, television and music. The internet offered a chance to break free of these studio gatekeepers but instead we've swapped them out for a new set of monopolies. Now a musician needs to be on Spotify to find success, a filmmaker is essentially at the mercy of streaming companies like Netflix, who don’t share much information about their audience with them, and the audiences of all of these artists are somehow less aware of who makes all of this work than they were in the 1950s.
Gatekeeping is key to what Cory Doctorow calls "Chokepoint Capitalism," and that middle-man position between artists and their audiences is a golden opportunity for any aspiring creative monopolist.
What can we do about it?
The problem with everything I've just described is that it fits firmly in the "too late to do anything about it" side of things... so, is that it? Are we just fucked?
Other than, going forward, resisting monopolies before they happen, the first step in resisting the existing monopolies is identifying and acknowledging the problem. Especially with creative monopolies, I think there's a tendency to treat the tools we become stuck with almost like a part of who we are. We identify strongly with our tools because they become essential to how we work. That means it can be hard to admit that they're doing us harm. People still stand by Adobe, Microsoft and (especially right now) OpenAI, despite the fact that they are so transparently acting against our best interests. Admitting that we're being taken advantage of by these companies makes it easier to talk about finding a solution.
Beyond that, a healthy dose of luddism will go a long way towards making change in this area. We need to fight back and undermine the power of these monopolies. In the 19th-century, that was done through machine breaking. In the 21st-century, that can be as simple as through reputational sabotage and bad PR. Talk about how scummy these companies are being and undermine their marketing efforts. You don't need a giant platform to do this, either. Talk to your family, colleagues and neighbours about it. Spread the word.
Reject these tools when you can and do your best to make it socially unacceptable to uncritically support these companies (without causing collateral damage to your comrades. Be nice, compassionate, and don't mistake fellow victims for enemies). And, if you're technically minded or feeling destructive, a bit of 21st-century machine breaking is welcome, too.
Ultimately, though, creative monopolies are a symptom of the same systems that create any monopoly. It's a political issue, and the strongest tool we have to fight back against monopolies in politics is in regulating and dismantling them. If you care about this issue, you should vote with that in mind and pressure your government to step up anti-trust enforcement. Here in Canada, we've become pathetically gentle with tech giants and monopolies, including scrapping something as minor as a Digital Services Tax that could have helped bring in more money and (even better) encourage people to move away from US tech monopolies and towards supporting our own tech industry here in Canada. If that annoys you, talk to your MP or send Mark Carney a letter (but be kind, 'cause he's turning out to be a bit of a coward and we don't want to scare him). If you're not Canadian, then engage in your own country's version of these kinds of advocacy and protest.
At the end of the day, creative monopolies are just monopolies. But they're extra insidious because they seek to control one of the most fundamental ways we can connect and empathise with each other. Wanting that kind of control over anything is wrong, but wanting to control how people express themselves is particularly dark. The monopolists don't care about making anything of actual value (remember, "Competition Is for Losers"), and so we need to be sure we protect our creativity from their decidedly uncreative ideals.
Love,
Simon 🐒
🔗 Links & Thinks 🧠
The illustrations in this piece are from Ernst Haeckel’s “Bats” c. 1904.
The fonts used in the images are Avara and Reglo Bold
Linked throughout the article but worth highlighting here:
Empire of AI by Karen Hao is incredibly revealing. If you use any products from OpenAI, you should take the time to understand the people behind this company before you make their tools an important part of your work. This interview with Karen on Blood in the Machine is a good starting point, if you don't want to read a whole book (which isn't that hard, don't sell yourself short) as well as this interview with her, too.
Speaking of Blood in the Machine,
will once again get a shout out on Everyone's Creative. His work bringing the story of the Luddites into the modern zeitgeist is incredibly important, and you should follow his newsletter to learn how tech companies want to get more control and how people are fighting back.In addition to those links:
This post from
is a good example of how you can start to pivot away from relying on tools and products from a particular area you don't want to support. In this case, Paris is exploring getting out from under the thumb of the larger monopoly of US tech in general. How much US-based technology do you use in a day? No wonder they have so much power, right? This is a good place to start chipping away at that.I want to shout out Pivot to AI as a great example of the reputational luddism I was talking about above. In a world dominated by people (including journalists) echoing the marketing talking points of tech companies, this represents an effort to undermine that messaging. If AI is really as good as AI companies say it is, then Pivot to AI shouldn't be able to publish refutations to that almost daily.