OUTPUT. OUTPUT. OUTPUT.

Another girl I went to high school with just announced she’s starting to "post content" online. Over the past two months, that makes her at least the sixth or seventh person I know personally who, prior to this announcement, had shown zero interest in the arts or content creation. And if I'm being totally honest (feel free to call me a hater), none of them seem to have the personality or raw passion for the content they're creating. But here they are, venturing into the space anyway.

I can’t say I’m surprised about the why, that's obvious: the economy is crumbling and everybody's been told we must all now think of ourselves as "personal brands." We have to put ourselves online just to if we want any chance of staying afloat in these turbulent economic waters. Which, I get! That in and of itself, isn't the problem. My problem is something I've been thinking about for a while, which is: if we all become content creators, who’s gonna actually be supporting the content?

Because, do you know what all six of these people I told you about earlier share in common? None of them, even though we all follow each other, publicly share anyone else’s work. The extent of their "support" for each other doesn't go beyond a double-tap on the screen. No shares to stories, no reposts, no word of mouth. Yet all six of them are venturing into the same space, and we all know each other. So, if they won't even consume each other's content, at least publicly, but want others to consume theirs? Then, are they themselves even good consumers? And who are they making their content for?

When I take a step back, I see a much bigger, quieter failure of the entire creative ecosystem right now. We are living through a time where thousands of people are entering into creative fields—podcasting, music, filmmaking, writing—but almost no effort is being put into building the community required for these ventures to thrive and grow.

If anything, we are losing community, and this is most evident in the gradual eradication that is happening to third spaces. In case you're not familiar, a third space is a place that isn't your home and isn't work. It’s a space like the library, or the local cinema, or a book club, or comedy club. They are the pipelines that connect a creative person to an audience, especially where they had none before. But look around today. While we have more people than ever writing books, local libraries are struggling for funding and independent bookstores are closing. While thousands of people are making indie films, the local cinemas are constantly complaining about how no one is coming out to cinemas the way they used to, and we don't see as many film clubs, as much as we do people solitary scrolling on five-inch screens.

So much money is being pumped into making fancy new tools to help us work faster, create more volumes, OUTPUT OUTPUT OUTPUT. But we’re spent almost nothing on the infrastructure of shared creative communities. It's like we’re constantly building this high-speed train of production, but forgetting to build stations where people can actually get on, off, and gather.

There's this thinking that if we just post enough, the algorithms will connect us with our people. But so many people have been disenfranchised by even this. Some artistes make work that's so complex, they can not afford to pump out a new piece of content a day. Some art isn't even best experienced on a screen. There needs to be more of a place, or a community, where these artistes can go today to get the opportunity for their work to be seen, instead of waiting many months and constantly pumping out content, in the hopes that one day the algorithm would shine on them, and finally give them 100 new followers in one day that may/may not actually become a real community of devoted supporters.

Algorithms want to keep us scrolling and staying on their respective apps, and we need to find a better system. If I’m only liking your post so that you’ll like mine back, that’s not a community, that’s a transaction. And transactions don't sustain art. Communities do. A book club isn't just about reading a book; it’s about the thirty minutes of arguing afterward. That’s where art is actually dissected and gotten into. Without this direct pipeline of artist to consumer, creators would just forever end up shouting into a digital void, and never get their phsyical applause.

The promise of the digital creative age was that we’d all finally have a voice. But a voice only matters if there’s a system designed to listen. Right now, it feels like we’re all creating in our own little silos, hoping for a breakthrough that the current system isn't actually designed to give us. We need to start creating for each other, supporting each other, and most importantly, building real long-lasting communities whose support will far extend just us, but leave a door open for other new creatives who wouldn't be able to find an audience as immediately.

We don't need more stuff, we need more places to put them in. WE NEED COMMUNITY.