Brien Niemeier retrospectively points out what should have been obvious, but wasn’t, to everyone all along:
For most of the twentieth century, creative ambition followed a single script. You studied the field, polished a manuscript, hunted for an agent, and prayed for a contract.
If you were in film or music, the process was different in details but identical in structure: Everything hinged on the approval of an institution. Success came from being chosen. Talent mattered, but luck mattered more. Most creators knew it but kept playing the game because the alternative seemed unthinkable.
That expectation didn’t come from nowhere. It grew out of a period when the gatekeepers could actually elevate an unknown. They possessed the distribution networks, the advertising budgets, the corporate partnerships, and the capacity to manufacture stardom.
That pattern repeated enough times to take on the aura of tradition. If you wanted a career, you knocked on the same doors everyone else knocked on. The problem is that the doors stopped opening long before artists realized the hinges had rusted shut.
By the late 1990s, the blockbuster mentality had consumed the traditional institutions. Every division—publishing, film, television, and music—became obsessed with scale. Risk tolerance flatlined. Executives seeking hits that could justify their salaries clung to anything that produced reliable profit and panicked at the unfamiliar. Innovation came to represent risk instead of opportunity.
At the same time, audiences aged. The properties that kept the lights on were the ones that debuted thirty, forty, or fifty years earlier. Instead of cultivating younger talent, the corporations recycled the same brands over and over, hoping nostalgia would substitute for relevance. You saw endless sequels, remakes, reboots, and spin-offs. The cultural oxygen was consumed by dying giants.
Creators sensed something was wrong, but most didn’t grasp how deeply the rot ran. The old structures no longer had the ability or the interest to launch new creators into the mainstream. The institutions that once acted as kingmakers had lost the will and the means to fulfill that role.
Yet legacy outlets continued promoting the old discovery narrative because it kept the talent pipeline flowing. As long as artists believed salvation waited inside the old system, they wouldn’t look for alternatives.
This conditioning left scars. Many creators still cling to the hope that one good pitch or lucky submission will unlock a career. They believe someone in a skyscraper will pluck them from obscurity and grant them access to an audience. This belief persists despite decades of evidence that the system has no interest in fulfilling creators’ expectations.
Worse, some artists internalized the idea that bypassing the old gatekeepers equates to failure. Seeing independence as a last resort, they imagine legitimacy comes only from institutional approval, even though the institutions abandoned their curatorial role.
That psychology runs deep: Creators were trained to think of themselves not as people who produce value for audiences, but as supplicants waiting for an authority figure to validate them.
The irony is that while creators waited for help, audiences changed faster than the institutions could track. Once internet access became ubiquitous, people stopped caring about traditional pipelines. Their interests moved to quality and authenticity, not pedigree.
The challenge now is that the playing fields are not even close to level. How can a podcaster compete on YouTube or Spotify when he’s banned from one, the other, or as in some cases, both? How can an author compete when the A9 algorithm, or whatever Amazon calls the way it makes winners out of losers and losers out of winners, fails to favor him?
The answer, as we were forced to figure out much, much earlier than most, is direct sales and patronage. That’s why Castalia thrives while many other publishers, including the big ones, are struggling more and more every year. It’s because we were forced to rely on you readers early on, long before
There are still challenges posed by structural elements like the payment processors, but even those challenges are starting to fade as Russia, China, and the BRICS countries improve their financial products. And what that means is that independent creators don’t have to go down with the collapsing mainstream infrastructure.
As AI improves, as the number of options improve, it’s only going to keep getting better for true independents and worse for those who still cling to the idea that the gatekeepers matter, no matter how propped up they might be.
Speaking of the collapse of the mainstream gatekeepers, shame on all of you Rabid Puppies. Shame!
I was in a small bookstore just after the Hugo blow up, and this old guy was asking the clerk for recommendations. She straight face recommended NKJemison, “She won 3 years in a row, and it’s never happened before!” Poor guy.
And that’s why it only takes 11 votes to get nominated for a Hugo these days.
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