In a 14-minute documentary that recently premiered on The New York Times’ Op-Docs, filmmaker Faye Tsakas offers a glimpse into the lives of tween influencers Lyla and Peyton. It’s unsettling to watch the young sisters preen for the camera and plug fitness bikes, all while their parents manage their social media channels. But Tsakas’ critique of the changing career aspirations of today’s youth—what she caustically dubs the “new American dream”—is hardly new.
Over the last half decade, countless surveys indicate that social media-borne careers top young people’s list of “dream jobs.” This research suggests that anywhere between half and a staggering 86 percent of children and teens harbor influencer career aspirations. Cultural critics have responded with generational handwringing—if not alarm. Yet, beyond the moral panics about tech-addled youth, a larger story emerges: tech companies have successfully recast social media labor as a form of monetizable leisure.
The Creator Pivot
The cultural industries have long peddled the myth of “work that doesn’t feel like work,” akin to what sociologist Gina Neff and colleagues described nearly two decades ago as “‘cool’ jobs in ‘hot’ industries.” Rhapsodizing about self-starter careers has intensified in the post-pandemic age, as many laborers reckon with the reality that “work won’t love you back.”
Against this backdrop, tech companies that once billed themselves as “social networks” have taken a page from YouTube’s twenty-year-old playbook by courting creator-aspirants with resolve. Accounts of this Entrepreneurial Promised Land—where workers are unencumbered by 9-to-5 drudgery—abound. In a just-released report, urban theorist Richard Florida describes “millions upon millions of dedicated creators across the globe are using social media to follow their passions and work on ideas, activities, and causes that give them a sense of purpose.” This unabashedly upbeat take on the creator economy glosses over the precarious nature of platform labor.
Meta (which commissioned Florida’s report), exhorts visitors to Meta for Creators: “Get rewarded for your passion and talent, make money doing what you love.” Snap offers a similarly seductive promise: “You can easily create, grow your audience, and monetize your content by being your authentic self.” This seeming pivot to creators testifies to larger churn in the tech sector: waves of layoffs and intensified legal scrutiny are compelling platform companies to seek a new economic lifeline. Outsourcing the labor of amateur entertainers isn’t new; the reality TV industry was borne from what Andrew Ross calls “the political economy of amateurism.”
Today, while creative aspirants supply “content,” superstar creators furnish built-in audiences that can help lure advertisers. Earlier this year, X (formerly Twitter) allegedly attempted to sought to woo Mr. Beast by manipulating the revenue incentive system. Last month, Spotify unveiled its so-called “biggest change ever,” positioning itself as the “new home of podcasting” for creators. And Snap’s just-launched “creator monetization” tool is auspiciously timed to coincide with a wider creator economy shakeup, with TikTok’s future hanging in a delicate balance.
Burnout and Algorithmic Bosses
Such upbeat framings of the creator economy belie the perilous realities of work in this field. Though some creators rake in jaw-dropping salaries, only a handful earn more than $100,000 annually, with significant gender and racial pay gaps. The ideal of individual self-expression is, moreover, offset by the relentless demands of audiences, advertisers, and capricious algorithms. Conditions of overwork are rife within a field when it involves—as “Queen of the Mommy Bloggers” Heather Armstrong told me during our 2014 interview —“mining my life for content.” Today, however, creators worry that taking a break will lead to punishment by the algorithm. As one TikToker put it, “It can feel like you’re gonna get dinged by the algorithm if you take any kind of a break.” Just as the industrial revolution put human beings at the whims and grueling pace of machines, the social media revolution has recalibrated how workers perceive their time, productivity, and value.
Creators experience anxiety about the potential for public backlash, too. For highly visible workers, hate and harassment are“occupational hazards.” But such angst is compounded by fears of content suppression or landing on the “wrong side of the algorithm.” Audiences themselves are leveraging platform visibility in increasingly slick ways as they boost, bash, or block creators and other public figures.
Performative Gratitude
Lamenting these career risks is, as my collaborators and I learned in our research on influencer vulnerability, a defiance of norms that structure the relationship between creators and audiences. As media scholar Mark Deuze explains, the creative industries have a long history that compels creators to express gratitude even (or perhaps especially when) the work is grueling or emotionally straining. Through such a glamorized social media prism, complaints of burnout are dismissed as “champagne problems.” Until social media work is legally—and socially—recognized as work, piecemeal solutions remain insufficient for mitigating the hardships of the creator economy.
The promotion of “passive income” and escapism from “the 9-to-5”—both utterances of Lyla and Peyton’s parents—ring hollow. As TikToker Jae Gurley reflected of the “full-time content creator” workstyle: “I traded my 9-to-5 to work 24/7.”
Big Tech companies have long urged us to channel our passionate labor into “content.” But today, the scrappy “garage-to-startup” path has been supplanted by a ring-light-to-riches parables of success. Notwithstanding such influencer success stories, the “New American Dream” encourages us to keep posting and preening, hoping we’ll be the next viral sensation.
