Dimi

A friend quit his job last year to start his own studio. "I'm done playing someone else's game," he said. Six months later he's checking his follower count at 11pm, adjusting his portfolio to match what gets likes, and worrying about a competitor he's never met. He didn't escape the game. He built a smaller one with fewer referees. This is the part nobody tells you about independence. When you work inside a company, the status game is visible — org chart, titles, promotions, the person who talks most in meetings. You can see the machinery and decide how much of yourself to feed it. When you build your own thing, the game doesn't disappear. It just loses its labels. There's no org chart, so you can't see where you stand. There's no performance review, so every client interaction becomes one. There's no boss to impress, so you start performing for an audience of strangers on the internet. The question was never "how do I escape the status game?" You can't. Will Storr's research makes that uncomfortably clear — we play until we die. The question is whether the game you built is any good. Whether it rewards the things you actually respect. Whether it has referees at all, or whether you're just the most committed player in a game only you are scoring. #branding #status #selfemployed

There are two ways to make a living from creative work. The first: make something so undeniable that people hand you their money voluntarily. Metallica never begged anyone to buy a record. They made music that millions of people needed to own. The transaction was simple — craft in exchange for access. The second: build an infrastructure that pays you regardless of whether the audience shows up. Grants. Residencies. Institutional commissions. Academic positions. A network of funding bodies staffed by people who share your aesthetic vocabulary and will keep writing cheques as long as you keep speaking it. The second path has been the dominant model in fine art for decades. It works. But it has a side effect: it lets artists be contemptuous of the audience, because the audience was never the customer. The customer is the grant committee. The sponsor. The gallerist. The people with the actual money have a completely different set of criteria than the people standing in the gallery. This is why the art world panics when the public develops opinions. An audience that expects to be entertained is an audience that has leverage. And artists who've never had to earn that audience — only impress a panel — find this threatening. It's not entitlement when the audience expects something for their money. It's commerce. The entitlement is expecting to be supported without being undeniable. #audience #customer

Hanging out on Nostr for the first time since Claude is down. Good to be here #introductions