Forecaster Paul Saffo, writing for McKinsey's What Matters site, has decided that, "the consumer economy that was born in the 1950s is lurching to an end, and a new 'creator economy' is emerging." I'm thinking that yes, we'd damn well better get creative because the sands are shifting beneath our feet to a degree that most of us alive have never experienced. This is what I call the Age of Limits.
In this essay, Saffo describes what he calls the "producer economy" and the "consumer economy" that followed it, and now we see where those have brought us.
The consumer economy began when companies realized that they had a demand problem rather than a production problem and shifted their resources to finding new ways to sell their existing products. The consumer replaced the worker as the economy's central actor, resulting in dramatic power shifts. Within companies, for example, power migrated from manufacturing to sales and marketing, as corporations sought to generate ever-greater demand for what they produced.
The consumer age was one of insatiable desire, fueled by marketing through television and other glamorous media. Any of us who stood back and looked at the phenomenon objectively could have seen the inevitable end of the production-consumption binge. At some point, we were going to run out of some stuff and overload some systems - including the very habitat in which we live.
So now we seem to be working through systems that are more closed and less dependent on external entities. In this new era, as Saffo puts it, "...the central economic actor is someone who both produces and consumes in the same act."
Just as the mass media were essential to the rise of the consumer economy, today's emergent personal media platforms are making the creator society possible. The quintessential example of creation is a Google search. Two decades ago, online search cost money in the form of a monthly subscription, but now, thanks to Google, it is free to the user. Or, rather, it seems free but in fact the searcher is paying with each searchâ€"and the payment is the search string they enter. The string of text that goes into the search box seems valueless to the creator, but when aggregated with all the other search strings flowing in, it is valuable enough to make Google worth billions. A simple Google search thus typifies what drives the creator economyâ€"creative value flowing in both directions at the same instant.
Other examples of creator transactions aboundâ€"think of YouTube and Wikipedia. Interactivity is the common thread, which makes sense because interactivity is what defines the creator economy. The rise of interactivity is no more exotic than the 1950s notion of ordinary consumers being able to purchase items that had been luxuries just a few decades earlier. Now, everyone will create as they go about their daily lives. These transactions may not be art or deathless prose, but they create value. Thus, just as the time clock symbolized the producer economy and the credit card the consumer economy, the computer mouse is the symbol of the emerging creator economy.
Not everything in the creator economy will require interaction, any more than manufacturing disappeared during the consumer economy. But the most successful companies will be the ones that harness creator instincts, and the biggest winners will be the companies who harness the smallest creative acts. More people watch YouTube than post videos because creating a video is work. More people read blogs than write them because long-form writing is a hassle. Meanwhile, the telegraphic sentences of tweets, texting, and Facebook updates are becoming ubiquitous acts of creator haiku. And everyone can scribble a few words to compose a Google search, which is why Google dwarfs other creator companies.
There will eventually be a company that dwarfs Google. I don't know its name, but I know how it will growâ€"click by click.
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