We are within a gap, a lacuna between the invention of awesome capabilities and the technopolization of those innovations by market forces.
Right now is the best time in the history of capitalism (and possibly the human experience) to start a business, create a product, ship an idea, or launch your brand. For any person, from the educated to the layperson, from the wealthy to the poor, today is the day to begin working on your dream.
But it won’t last.
The explosion of products from Canva and Adobe to Claude Design and Manus.im, have shepherded in a new age of creative (or commercial, depending on your taste, goals, and outlook) scalability that will quickly come to an end.
I was able to lower my $300/year website costs to $20/year with Claude Code. Task automation and taking on a second job is as simple as working with Superhuman or agentic routines to cut through busywork and get stuff done.
For now.
In the next 6-18 months, the garden walls will rise, toll tags will be required, and the ever-persistent waves of this technopoly will once again widen the divide between the haves and the have nots.
CEO's already discuss rising rates on database usage. Labs have instituted higher tiers for their models to offset financial miscalculations and the hemorrhaging cashflow of research on the industry frontier.
Soon, the LLM landscape will become as gentrified as the web became. In the same shift that turned the open internet of Web 1.0 into a walled garden of enshitified customer abuse tactics, AI will take its turn commercializing within the new attachment economy.
I'm less concerned with the question of whether creatives should capitalize on these possible gains in the now, and more prone to reckon with the fact that, again, technology will rip a hole in the fabric of our social systems if we let it.
Neil Postman encouraged us to progress "with eyes wide open" to the effects of technology upon a culture. As we adopt, integrate, and attach ourselves to these new artificial ways of being, we must find ways to incorporate justice and generosity within our work. We must find paths to share resources, learnings, and the gains of AI with all and not allow an elite class to emerge off the wave of this new technology.
All the resources on my site, built with AI, are free.
You can visit here without a paywall gatekeeping my messy monologues.
These examples of turning gains into gifts are available to each of us.
We just have to decide today to give them back...