Morton, In Progress update #3
It’s been a few weeks since an update, so as a reminder, this project began with a question and a goal:
More art = better world.
Can a modern artist avoid becoming a brand?
It seems like I redefine that question in every update, but that’s kind of the point of this project. To not know where it’s going. If the question had not changed by the end, that would feel like a failure of the project, because it would run contrary to progress.
I believe art is entangled with lived experience, and the best art I have found is the art that can translate what it feels like to be alive into a non-living medium.
Art allows you to experience someone else’s lived experience. In that way, there is no bad art. If your first reaction to that statement is to think of art you hate, that’s a great first instinct.
Now ask yourself: what is it about that perspective that upsets me.
That’s the beauty of art. It allows us to share our perspectives.
Can a modern artist avoid becoming a brand?
Today's update will focus on defining the word brand in my original question, because I have seen many different interpretations of what that word means. I was originally interpreting it as digital identity, or how you are perceived online.
But there is a lot more complexity behind that word than can be summed up with digital identity alone.
Attention as Currency
You may have heard of the term attention economy. If not, here is the usual take summarized:
Attention is limited. Everyone wants it. Platforms are built to capture it, creators are pressured to perform for it, and branding is the mechanism that makes identity legible enough to function inside that economy.
Maybe you have heard the line, “if the product is free, you’re the product.” Meaning: platforms give us free access, then make money by selling access to our data.
But that framing flattens the complexity the same way brand flattens the complexity of identity. It is incomplete, but it gives us an entry point: before you can become a product, you first have to become legible to the institution selling you as one.
For this project, branding means the compression of identity into something recognizable enough to function inside the attention economy.
That branding moves both ways. Creators become recognizable characters the platform can recommend, and users become patterns the platform can predict.
Obviously, in an attention economy, attention is the currency. Don't think of attention like money. It behaves more like electrical current. It only has value while it is moving through a system that can convert it. You cannot really store raw attention. You can capture it and convert it into something else.
But attention moves both ways inside this economy, and that is the complexity the usual framing misses. The platform does not only sell attention. It also pays creators in attention, and for most creators, attention is the first real reward. Views, likes, comments, shares, followers, recognition, and social proof are all forms of payment within the attention economy.
And all that payment has real value because attention can be converted into power outside the platform. It opens doors because it proves a person can gather attention, and that promise is what institutions are willing to pay for.
This is the first layer of complexity the usual framing misses. Attention is sold to institutions, but it is also paid back to creators for extracting more of it.
In economics, production is usually described through three factors: land, labor, and capital.
Land is the raw material. Labor is the human effort. Capital is the infrastructure used to organize production.
If we apply that to the attention economy, the mind would be the land. It is the raw material attention is drawn from. Human behaviour would be the labor, because people create content and organize content through their engagement. The platform would be the capital, because it owns the infrastructure that makes this extraction scalable.
But this is where the old economic model gets strange. In older models, land and labor can be separated. The worker can withhold labor from capital. The owner of land can withhold access to land.
In the attention economy, the land and the labor are fused inside the same human being. Your mind is the resource, and your behaviour is the work that makes the resource extractable.
This is where the labor comparison becomes more than a diagram. People often say platforms are stealing your data, and that is not wrong, but it's too passive. The platform is not only taking something from you. It is getting you to perform a job for it.
You finish your paid work, come home tired, sit down to rest, and start working a second shift organizing content. Through your engagement, the platform learns what kind of content belongs with what kind of person.
Your second job is disguised as your time off.
So the usual line is not wrong. If the product is free, you are the product. But inside the attention economy, you are also the unpaid worker helping sort yourself into a more valuable product.
This is the weirdest part. The platform does not seem to be modeling what I enjoy as much as it is modeling what I am useful for.
TikTok will send me videos it already knows I like, but it will also slip in videos with very low engagement because it has learned I take those seriously. That makes my role to judge whether those videos deserve attention.
The more I perform that job, the more the feed gives me chances to do it again.
I came to the platform thinking I was choosing what I like, but the platform was also training me toward the work it found me most useful for.
Do I like this, or have I been sorted into liking it because liking it makes me useful?
After you spend enough time inside the feed, creation starts to feel possible. You start thinking, I could do that. Sometimes you even think, I could do that better.
And if you have been paying attention, you probably can.
You have been training your pattern recognition on how the platform organizes attention, and now those patterns become the starting point of your own performance.
That is how the user becomes the artist.
As a user, your sortability is extracted, often without your knowing. As a creator, you start paying it willingly, and the payment gets called your niche.
Because the thing many creators want most is recognition, and recognition is also the proof that you have become sortable. And when you're sortable it is easier for other people to recognize you.
Fame is your payment for maximum sortability.
Creator advice is a manual for becoming recognizable. Find your niche. Build your brand. Know your audience. Stay consistent.
That advice works because fame filters people into digital archetypes. The productivity person. The healing person. The contrarian. The expert. The relatable burnout account. The spiritual-but-grounded thinker.
Each archetype comes with expected values. A productivity creator is expected to value discipline, efficiency, routine, optimization, and self-control.
That is what makes the brand readable. The audience learns what kind of message to expect before the creator even says it.
That is the darker truth of a niche.
That's where my original question came from
When I first started posting on Substack, I noticed certain kinds of notes got more attention.
So I started making more of those.
That sounds normal because it is normal. That is how feedback works.
But after a while, I noticed some of it did not sound like me anymore. It sounded like the version of me that had learned to perform well.
So I tried to go back to posting directly from my own identity, and that's when my question first appeared.
Can a modern artist avoid becoming a brand?
Because once you see the feedback loop shaping you, you cannot unsee it. And the loop is not only Substack. Substack is shaped by social media, social media is shaped by the attention economy, and the attention economy is shaped by the larger culture that taught us what is worth rewarding.
That is where I am in the project right now.
This dive into the attention economy has made my original question feel more important. I started by asking whether a modern artist can avoid becoming a brand, but it's bigger than artists now.
It is about everyone trying to exist inside a digital economy where labour, value, attention, identity, and status have been redistributed into non-physical space.
None of us really know what social media is yet, or what it is going to become. But I think one part of the shape is already clear.
Social media is not separate from the culture around it. It is that culture compressed into a digital world. The same roles show up again, only abstracted. The capitalist looks for the factory and builds the platform. The worker becomes the user. The artist becomes the creator. The audience becomes the market. The brand becomes the self.
So of course the system feels familiar even when the technology feels new. It is emergent from the culture that produced it.
Social media is a microcosm of the world that created it. It reflects our shared beliefs about attention, status, labour, identity, ownership, and value, then feeds those beliefs back into the human ecosystem faster than culture has ever been able to move before.
As I have explored the attention economy, I have started to understand more clearly how I want to appear digitally, and how I want to help spread creativity.
That has shifted the project from observation into action.
I have been developing resources for artists on social media.
My next update will go into what I have been building and how people will be able to participate.