The Mystery of the Disappearing Job Title
A few years ago, you could point at the screen and name what you were looking at. “Influencer” meant someone who monetized the soft power of attention; “content creator” meant someone who produced a steady stream of on-platform media to keep that attention fed. These were not slurs then; they were job descriptions—inelegant, maybe, but accurate enough to capture the cadence of the work: the planning, the posting, the perpetual calibration to platform whims. Somewhere between then and now, the words curdled. They began to sound like a diagnosis. Burnout wore them like a coat. The audience flinched. Platforms sensed the flinch and issued a rebranding decree without ever saying it out loud. The result is a strange linguistic fog: the jobs persist, but the names have been sanded off. People call themselves “digital storytellers,” “community builders,” “educators,” “multidisciplinary creatives,” “founders of personal brands,” anything and everything that suggests organic humanity while avoiding the fluorescent glare of “influencer” and “content creator.” The labor did not change. The label did. And if you try to talk about the original terms now, you are treated like you’ve brought a rotary phone to a launch party—nostalgic at best, embarrassing at worst.
What this does, beyond making conversations exhaustingly coy, is scramble the ability to critique the system on the level where it actually lives: work. If the internet’s cultural labor class keeps dissolving its own job titles into vibes, audiences lose the vocabulary to recognize exploitation. The result is a theater of authenticity where nobody is “selling” but sponsorships still flow; nobody is “creating content” but upload schedules still rule sleep; nobody is “influencing” but purchase behavior still follows the feed. The work goes on; the name disappears; the accountability evaporates. If I sound like I’m yelling at clouds when I use the old words, it’s only because the clouds have rebranded themselves as morning mist.
From Creator to Cloud Ghost
There was a time—early YouTube, gold-rush Instagram—when “creator” was a banner people rallied under. It promised an end-run around old gatekeepers. It suggested that if you could shoot, edit, and post regularly, the world might meet you halfway. The bargain was never fair, but it was legible, and the legibility felt like power. As the ecosystem matured (and calcified), the term picked up barnacles: hustle culture, relentless self-optimization, parasocial exhaustion, a kind of performative intimacy that ate its hosts from the inside. The audience learned to spot the gloss and roll their eyes; the platforms learned to sanitize their own involvement and push “community” instead. The creator economy did not collapse—if anything, it metastasized—but it learned to hide the gears by renaming them. The influencer is still influencing, only now they are “sharing their journey.” The creator is still creating, only now they are “documenting their process.” The sponsor is still buying reach, only now it’s a “partnership.” The euphemisms became a hygiene ritual: a way to wash the fingerprints of commerce off a body of work designed to move units.
When language moves this way, it isn’t evolution; it’s evasion. The underlying mechanics remain intact: planned output, surveillance metrics, algorithmic compliance, a conversion funnel dressed up as friendship. But because the words are softer, everyone can pretend the stakes are lower. You’re not working; you’re vibing. You’re not selling; you’re aligning values. The audience is not being influenced; they are “discovering.” Even criticism gets caught in the semantic tide. You try to name the machine and your words slip on the new Teflon. You are told you’re being unkind, or worse, outdated, as if precision itself were a faux pas.
The Aesthetic Cleanse
This linguistic cleanse would be funny if it weren’t so effective. The goal isn’t merely to rename jobs; it’s to restore the illusion that the feed is a “natural” space, a digital commons where sincere people happen to share what they happen to be doing. “Content” has become an allergic word because it admits the industrial nature of the thing: that posts are raw material turned into ad inventory, that engagement is a commodity, that emotions can be formatted like export presets. The new language insists the opposite. We are not engaging; we are connecting. We are not following; we are joining a community. The surface becomes soft and human again; the structure remains steel and debt underneath.
It’s the same logic elsewhere in culture: the gallery doesn’t sell; it “places work.” The app doesn’t track; it “remembers what you like.” The company doesn’t market; it “tells stories.” And yet the financials are unchanged. The pressures are unchanged. The weekly calendar of what must be released to keep the algorithm attentive is unchanged. Words soften the blow not to protect the worker, but to protect the machine that needs the worker cheerful and tireless. If you want to know whether a term is a euphemism, ask who benefits from its ambiguity. “Creator” once helped workers stake a claim. “Digital storyteller” now helps platforms pretend labor is leisure.
The Taxonomy of Digital Labor (A Field Guide for Adults)
Because this fog is useful to everyone except the people doing the work, I want a moment of clarity. Not to score points, not to catch anyone out, but to make sure we can have a conversation that isn’t all pastel smoke. Here is a plain taxonomy—the difference between content creators, influencers, and what I’m actually doing—so the word police can relax and the drive-by “gotcha” crowd can stop mistaking documentation for performance.
Content Creators. A content creator is a personified upload schedule. The core product is attention, measured in views, likes, and watch time. The job’s central mechanic is volume: consistency over risk, cadence over depth, novelty as survival. If the platform de-prioritizes photos and favors short-form video, the content creator learns video. If the algorithm likes three posts a day, the calendar expands to three. The point is not what any single piece says; the point is the ongoing presence, the familiarity of return. It’s a craft in its own right—editing, scripting, producing—but the telos is engagement.
Influencers. An influencer is a curated persona designed to monetize visibility directly—through partnerships, affiliate links, merch, live reads, speaking fees. The product here is not content so much as trust, or the appearance of it. The central mechanic is consistency of image: a reliable self that brands can graft onto. The posts themselves may be fewer or more polished; the goal is to maintain a believable through-line of identity that can host other people’s messages without tearing. It is theater of self with a business model.
Artists / Craftspeople / Independent Makers (What I’m Doing). I make things—objects and essays—that exist and matter independently of whether a platform rewards them. I share process because it teaches the work, not because it feeds the feed. The core mechanic is expression and iteration, not cadence. The product is the work itself, and the relationship it sustains with the people who care about it. When I post behind-the-scenes notes or works-in-progress on Ko-Fi, I’m not optimizing attention; I’m documenting craft. That distinction matters. “Content” points away from the object to the metric. Documentation points back to the object to deepen understanding. If I show you a rough edge, it is so the finished edge can speak more clearly, not because the algorithm needed me to keep talking.
This difference is moral, temporal, and economic. Moral, because the point is to honor the work rather than slot it into engagement slots. Temporal, because depth requires pacing that algorithms do not easily tolerate. Economic, because support here is participation in continuity—commissions, purchases, mutual aid—rather than conversion events on a brand’s dashboard. If you want to call that “creating content,” you can, in the same way you can call a meal “calories.” It is not wrong; it is useless.
The Algorithm’s Preference for Performance
Part of why this taxonomy is hard to hold in public is that the machine recognizes none of it. Algorithms do not distinguish between attention and affection. They do not understand the difference between documentation and performance. They only see engagement—time on page, click-through rate, comments per minute—and amplify whatever causes those numbers to rise. A maker sharing a quiet clip of a glaze test is flattened into the same category as a creator doing a sped-up time-lapse with commentary bubbles; both are “high-performing” if they keep eyes open and fingers moving. The pressure to translate process into content is not a moral failing; it’s a mechanical one. If you are a person who needs to keep a roof over your head, it is rational to bend your practice toward what platforms reward. The catch is that the bending often becomes the shape.
This is where I plant my flag. I refuse to act like visibility is the same as work. I won’t let the necessity of showing become the point of the show. If I take you behind the scenes, it’s to increase the density of meaning in the finished piece or to invite you into the cadence that produced it—not to satisfy a quota. The moment documentation starts teaching the algorithm what to expect instead of teaching the work what it is, I step away. That isn’t purity; it’s self-preservation. The feed is a hungry thing. It will eat you and ask for a tip.
The New Disguise of Authenticity
Because everyone feels that hunger, “authentic” has become the new magic word. The same apparatus that used to recommend perfect grid layouts now recommends messy desks and half-lit confessionals. Vulnerability becomes a filter. Burnout becomes a carousel post with worksheets. None of this is inherently bad; people helping each other survive public work is a good use of bandwidth. But it’s a short hop from help to theater, from sincerity to cosplay. Once audiences are trained to expect “realness,” realness can be produced, scheduled, and sold. It becomes another tone in the palette: this week, raw; next week, aspirational; the week after, educational. You can feel when you’re being handled. The choreography is too clean.
True authenticity requires the risk that something will not convert. It requires the risk that the thing you made will sit on a table and do nothing but be itself in a room, and you will love it anyway. It requires leaving evidence of a process that does not flatter the platform’s preferences for momentum. That kind of authenticity cannot be sustainably faked without a person eventually cracking. The new euphemisms protect the appearance of authenticity by making sure we never have to admit who is paying for it and how.
The Problem with Pretending We’re All Just Sharing
Here’s the practical harm in all this soft focus: when you erase professional language, you erase professional expectations. If nobody is an influencer, then no one is accountable for the ways influence is wielded or sold. If nobody is a content creator, then nobody gets to say that the creation of content is work deserving of terms, protections, boundaries. If everyone is just sharing, then the platform is just facilitating, and no demands can be made of its extractive logic. The blur doesn’t free workers; it frees the systems that rely on their blurring.
My own practice depends on the opposite: naming what something costs, what it took, what it will take to continue. The words are not ornamental; they are structural. “This is a hand-built piece.” “This took six hours of firing time and three tests.” “This essay required a week of notes and a day of editing.” Those are not confessions; they are ledgers. When people accuse me of hypocrisy because I post a work-in-progress image and refuse to call it content, what they’re noticing is my refusal to hand over my vocabulary to a machine that eats nouns and excretes categories. If you can’t name the job, you can’t demand that it be valued. If you can’t name the job, someone else will rename it for you, and it will conveniently line up with their profit center.
The Craft Ethic vs. the Content Cycle
Consider the fundamental incompatibility here. The internet wants infinite scroll. Craft is cyclical. The internet wants the next thing before the last thing has cooled. Craft is a deepening spiral: return, adjust, refine, risk, listen, repeat. The internet wants you to be consistent so it can predict you. Craft wants you to be honest so the work can grow. You can ride both horses for a while, and many people do beautifully, but if you forget which horse is carrying the other, you will end up writing captions for a practice you no longer have time to keep.
A simple metaphor: content is foam; craft is sediment. Foam is bright, plentiful, instantly legible, and gone in a breath. Sediment accrues. It settles. It pressures itself into something permanent. You cannot live on foam, but foam can lead you to water. The point of my public writing is not to expand the foam; it’s to route people toward the river that’s been running underneath the whole time. My work isn’t a feed. It’s a lineage. If the language I use sounds unfashionably direct, it’s because the lineage predates the platform and will, if we’re lucky, outlast it.
Why the Language Matters
We did not lose the words by accident. We were encouraged to put them down because precise language makes visible the unevenness of the deal. If “influencer” sounds crass, maybe it is because the influence is being sold at scale; if “content” sounds depressing, maybe it is because the word reveals that our days are being measured in uploads. The cure is not to invent gentler words. The cure is to realign the work with the values we claim for it and to insist on terms that match reality. That includes the right to say: I am not a creator in the platform’s sense; I am a maker who sometimes documents. I am not an influencer; I am a person whose life is not a campaign. I am not “sharing my journey” as a brand; I am inviting you to witness a practice that exists when the Wi-Fi doesn’t.
If I sound like “old man yells at cloud,” it is because the clouds learned to sell ad space and call it weather. I am not mad at people who make their living within the system; many do it with grace. I am mad at the system for training us to salute euphemisms as progress. Words are tools. If we hand them over, we lose leverage. If we keep them sharp, we might yet carve out room for work that refuses to be digested.
The Return of the Visible Maker
So let me end where this began: with names. I do not want to banish “creator” from the earth; I want to return it to scale. A creator is anyone who makes, yes, but on platforms it denotes a role with specific obligations to machines, sponsors, and metrics. If that is your job, you deserve the dignity of the title and the protections that should come with it. If your job is making things with their own clocks and their own meanings, you deserve a word that refuses to be annexed by engagement logic. Call it maker, call it artist, call it craftsperson, call it “the person who is still there when the app is down.” The important part is that the word points to the work, not to the graph.
Nobody stopped influencing. Nobody stopped creating content. We simply stopped admitting it because the honesty was starting to itch. I am not here to police anyone’s bio. I am here to make sure my own language does not surrender my practice to a set of incentives that cannot love it back. If that makes me sound old-fashioned, fine. The clay was old-fashioned before any of us were born. It will be here after the last platform pivots to whatever it pivots to next. Call me what you want. I make things that still exist when the tab is closed. And when I show you how they’re made, it’s not because the algorithm needs feeding. It’s because the work wanted company while it became itself.
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