Our online ecosystems now play an outsized role in our relationships, culture, and values. Yet the strongest communities will emerge from the creators who can successfully bridge the physical and the digital.

Essay 3.4 drops on our YouTube channel soon — you can subscribe to get notified as well as read the script below.

In 2005, New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman wrote a book with a simple message: The earth is flat.

Unlike Kyrie Irving, Friedman wasn’t talking in literal terms. His metaphor was a prediction, that with overarching trends in technology, trade, and manufacturing, any city could develop into a major player in a post-Y2K world.

While Friedman’s ideas spread like wildfire, they didn’t actually come to pass. In fact, throughout the 2000s, talented, creative people ended up clustering even closer together, with cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and New York City benefiting greatly.

Nevertheless, Friedman wasn't totally wrong. He was just two decades – and one global pandemic – too early.

And as the remote revolution changes our modern world, online communities built through creators will shape our future.

Part I – Peaks, Hills, and Valleys

Friedman opens his book, The World Is Flat, by identifying ten forces of globalization (or “flatteners,” as he calls them) that played a major role in leveling the playing field. Referencing how historical moments – such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the invention of Netscape’s web browser – changed our accessibility to connect with one another, the journalist proclaimed:

“In a flat world, you can innovate without having to emigrate.”

This, however, would not prove to be backed with the empirical evidence that such a bold statement requires. Citing how more than half of the world’s population is housed in cities (a trend shared across rich and poor countries alike), urbanist Richard Florida rebutted Friedman in his 2008 book titled Who’s Your City? by charting economic topography.

The reality, Florida says, is that locations have become divided into four different buckets:

The Tallest Spikes – cities with the capacity to attract global talent and new knowledge while constantly innovating (think San Francisco and Tokyo)
The Shifting Hills – cities that use established innovation to produce goods and services (think Guadalajara and Shanghai)
The Megacities – cities often balancing concentrated wealth with poverty, overpopulation, and hunger (think Kinshasa and São Paulo)
The Huge Valleys – rural areas with little population concentration or economic activity

Guadalajara, Mexico has been a shifting hill as the city has embraced major manufacturing companies (Photo by Alejandro Castro)

No matter where somebody lives, there are tradeoffs. Some swap wealthy, professional careers for communities near and dear to their hearts, others to be closer to their families. Some want to be around people similar to them, citing factors such as education level, political and social beliefs, or potential for meeting a life partner.

Yet for how much Americans in particular move — at the time, once every seven years — most individuals don’t realize just how much location matters to every facet of their lives. Florida referenced a survey with over 28,000 people which found that it’s just as relevant to well-being as a person’s jobs, finances, and relationships.

Today’s key economic factors — talent, innovation, and creativity — are simply not distributed equally among Florida’s four different types of cities. In China, he wrote, the top ten regions by economic output house 16% of the population, and yet 45% of the top universities and 60% of patents emerge from them. Not only does this lead to increasing the wealth gap among the rich and educated, it also leads to socioeconomic unrest.

In 2005, the Chinese countryside reported an estimated 87,000 riots and demonstrations, a huge leap from just two years prior as the country accelerated its industrialization of cities. This development went hand-in-hand with the strategy and investment of international companies. For American tech companies like Apple, it makes sense to house talent and design in Silicon Valley — a “spiky” area — and hire cheap industrial engineers to oversee manufacturing in Shenzhen — a “shifting hill.”

Innovative people aren’t jumping ship to move elsewhere, either; in fact, they tend to flock to environments that will breed further innovation. In 2013’s The New Geography of Jobs, Enrico Moretti wrote that when Microsoft moved to Seattle in the 1970s (mainly because its founders were from the area), the city featured mediocre schools, a high crime rate, and an outflow of manufacturing jobs.

By 2000, Seattle had 35% more college-educated workers than Microsoft’s previous home of Albuquerque, and the average employee made $14,000 more. Additionally, Microsoft alumni would go on to start 4,000 new businesses in the area upon working in an entrepreneurial, innovative environment, and the region became so appealing that Jeff Bezos decided to move Amazon there to find sufficient financing and talent. Moretti also wrote that for each new tech job, five additional jobs were created across both skilled and unskilled occupations, leading to a healthy economy that supports more individuals.

Nevertheless, the author made sure to point out that the “sorting of highly-educated Americans into some communities and less-educated Amerians into others tends to magnify and exacerbate all other socioeconomic differences.” It’s a sentiment shared by Florida, with both coming to the conclusion that society would hinge on leaders who can build bridges amidst a tense environment of peaks, valleys, and hills.

And the following decade would bring along new benefits and challenges with the rise of the gig economy.

Part II – An Uber For Everything

In over 100 cities around the world, e-scooter startups like Bird and Lime hire tens of thousands of freelance “juicers,” workers who the companies pay $3 to $10 for every scooter they retrieve, recharge, and release.

A juicer featured in a 2019 New York Times piece emphasized how the side hustle is a good way to make money quickly, about $160 a day with the potential to bring in a near $40,000 annual salary. Arguably the biggest benefit of all for him, however, is the social component: the juicer mentions how he can do his work without “[having] to deal with or talk to people.”

Welcome to the gig economy, which has made the invisible work normally done in the shadows highly visible, mere clicks away at the touch of a button.

Uber brings one inexpensive travel without needing to own a car; Fiverr connects small businesses with affordable freelance work from skilled designers to well-versed copywriters; and Airbnb allows homeowners to “monetize” their assets by renting to tourists. Yet with all the supposed freedom that the gig economy creates — allowing workers to become their own “entrepreneurs” by ditching the traditional 9-to-5 — comes complications.

From 1880 to 1980, the prevailing notion of working life in the U.S. was that an individual would survive by working for a big corporation that paid solid wages and covered benefits. In the decades since, however, industrial relations have withered, and unions have lost their influence, leading to for-profit companies opting to replace workers with cheaper overseas counterparts while further automating jobs away.

Caption: A Lime "Juicer" collects and recharges scooters (Photo by Ryan Young)

As tech startups started to create scalable platforms that matched those who have time with those who have money — leading to the “Uber for everything” model popping up everywhere — the pitch from Silicon Valley visionaries became simple. They were “saving the world” by offering viable, flexible alternatives to Corporate America.

For some people, these types of gigs are perfect. On their website, Uber tells genuinely inspiring success stories, from immigrants carving out a life for themselves to moms choosing their hours so they can attend their kids’ baseball games.

Additionally, platforms have greatly reduced the friction that comes with finding reliable work for both sides of every transaction. Information like reliability and skills are already provided when a user logs onto an app. For Lyft, it might be a driver’s or rider’s star rating, while for Fiverr, it might be a portfolio of a designer’s work.

Nonetheless, a lot of the arguments for these types of gigs start to unravel when they are more closely scrutinized. 60 million jobs are now threatened by technological unemployment from AI and automation; as one author wrote in 2017, “the invisible hand now has a robotic arm.” Consumer and social welfare is plummeting, as workers are forced into inconsistently-paying, unsatisfactory jobs that leave them at risk of losing their homes just two months down the line and with no real influence in driving the economy. After all, the top five percent of households in America contribute to 30% of the nation’s spending.

And yes, being one’s own CEO sounds appealing in theory, but unlike most business owners, gig workers don’t have real control over the customers they receive. Platforms often operate as a “digital work intermediation” while workers suffer the consequences of paying a 15% self-employment tax alongside their own healthcare and more. Therefore, many of the huge companies behind these platforms avoid paying tremendous amounts of taxes and benefits, all while losing billions of dollars supported by cheap capital they’ve accrued through wide-eyed investors.

So between the rise of spiky cities and the gig economy, the world has changed quite a lot throughout the last two decades. What happens, then, when you add in a global pandemic and throw this volatile mixture into a blender?

Part III – The Remote Revolution

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that COVID-19 disrupted the way we choose how to live, build a career, and pursue our pastimes.

Remote work, in particular, began out of necessity for many companies, though it went on to become a fixture even after the worst of the pandemic had come and gone. According to a Gallup poll, 45% of full-time U.S. employees worked from home as of September 2021, including 25% who worked from home all of the time and 20% who worked from home part of the time. Looking towards the future, one survey found that 81% of remote workers believe their employers will continue to support these types of models – whether going hybrid or dropping the traditional office entirely – in the coming years.

Additionally, it’s important to note that this isn’t purely because employees overwhelmingly support optionality on their ends. According to one HR firm that spoke to over 800 employers, 94% reported that productivity was the same as or higher than it was before the pandemic. In other words, from a pure business perspective, if remote ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

A narrative that emerged from the early days of the pandemic was that with this newfound ability to work from anywhere, people were bidding adieu to crowded, expensive cities like New York and San Francisco, flocking to established suburbs in droves. For example, in spring 2021, The New York Times ran a piece that described my hometown of West Hartford, Connecticut as a great place for young couples to move to while staying close to their city friends, labeling it a “liberal enclave equidistant from Boston and New York.” In step with increased demand for the housing market across the country, the average sale price of properties in West Hartford went up 20% over the course of the following year.

West Virginia's pitch to remote workers: We'll pay you to come explore the outdoors here (Photo by Morgantown Mag)

More rural regions have welcomed new tax-paying residents with open arms, too. Last year, West Virginia began Ascend WV, paying remote workers $12,000 to relocate to the Mountain State. In courting those who love the outdoors, Governor Jim Justice declared the program “will allow adventurers to enjoy world-class recreation, uncrowded spaces, and a low cost of living while staying fully connected to their jobs.”

From a 30,000-foot view, it appears that the core idea behind Friedman’s thesis has come to pass, and you can now work from – and live – anywhere. The world might not be flat just yet, but America might as well be…right?

As with everything, the answer is somewhere in the middle.

First, it’s difficult to paint a definitive, overarching picture, when in reality, 55% of Americans still do work completely in person. We simply tend to hear more reports about the high-salary and college-educated whose jobs require little more than a laptop and wifi connection. Plus, it’s not like most people employed in sectors like retail and hospitality can always afford to move on a whim.

Second, as evidenced by rising rent in – and decreased migration from – “superstar cities” over the last several months, many are already swapping suburban life back for the urban world. Richard Florida believes that if the price is right for young people, all the benefits of living in spiky areas – such as relationships, culture, and values – still outweigh the costs…even if you’re working out of your bedroom.

Yet in an increasingly online world, what happens when the Internet begins to play an outsized role in our relationships, culture, and values?

Part IV – From URL to IRL

Stop me if you’ve read this headline before:

“How a 23-Year-Old Zillenial Makes Passive Income From YouTube (and 7 Other Online Side Hustles to Diversify your Revenue Streams)”

While a tad on the nose, there’s a nonzero chance CNBC has posted at least one article featuring that exact same title.

In all seriousness, this is the underlying idea driving the creator economy. Trading the traditional office for a webcam and a Twitch account, anyone, anywhere can build a business off some combination of streaming, brand partnerships, and t-shirt sales. The beautiful thing is that through the democratization of resources and education, we can figure it out on the fly, whether one’s an ice cream artist in Missouri or a prankster in Texas.

Sure, platforms and their algorithms control how creators find potential customers, while it’s on us to cover self-employment taxes and healthcare costs. But, in this new career, you get to be your own boss and control a flexible schedule.

Sound familiar?

I’m not the first person to compare the creator economy to the gig economy. Along with the dynamics of intermediation and taxation mentioned above, burnout is a real problem, particularly given limited job security and an abundance of supply. As we covered last season in “The New American Dream,” when 86% of young Americans say they want to be an influencer, there simply can’t be enough views – and advertising dollars – to go around.

However, here’s the conclusion we came to in that piece:

“...the path to success will be about finding your specific niche on YouTube, and owning that direct relationship with your audience to the point where they’ll follow you and wherever your journey is regardless of a singular platform.”

Ownership is everything. It’s not enough to get discovered on TikTok when your work – as in, your content – is ultimately replaceable, at the mercy of a simple tweak in some zeroes and ones. Access to data and lines of communication will continue to be increasingly paramount through models that make said access a priority, whether through e-commerce (e.g. Shopify), distribution (e.g. Substack), or governance (e.g. Mirror).

In June, creators converged in Anaheim, CA for VidCon 2022 (Photo by Jefferson Graham)

But what will ultimately separate creators from Uber drivers and Bird juicers isn’t just the ability to foster a one-to-many relationship with an audience. It will be through building communities under the blanket of a creator and our niches to the point where meaningful connections – and lives – can exist without requiring the creator to be present.

In other words, virtual versions of Florida’s spiky cities will rise, where residents speak the same language and share the same passions…but without the same barrier to entry of up and moving to a New York City or Los Angeles.

If you hang around the Internet as much as I do, there’s a phrase you’ve probably seen floating around a lot more recently. Cheesy but accurate, “from URL to IRL” implies that connections made at specific web addresses will naturally spill over into real life.

A friend of mine thinks there’s a misconception that the continuous advent of the “metaverse” will lead to the destruction of in-person interaction. He argues that while we might spend less time in the real world moving forward, the quality of that time will increase dramatically, working in tandem with virtual spaces to help people find their, well, people. Therefore, the focus will be on producing high-impact dinners, meetups, and conventions – less frequent, more filtered.

Will this vision come to pass? The jury is out, and early returns have been mixed. Spiky cities will only go so far as their unique communities take them; plus, with a recession looming, the onus is on us as creators to redefine narratives around the utility of everything we’re building. We can’t all just be entertainers; a functioning society requires artists, electricians, educators, and engineers, after all.

To conclude, I believe that the creator economy will play an outsized role in the future, from the people we interact with to the products we buy to where we live – both physically and digitally. Therefore, neither Friedman or Florida are right or wrong, per se. The real world might flatten through the virtual world, but it’s necessary that the spikiest cities – as in, the strongest communities – will flourish across borders between both worlds.

And the very fabric of society will hinge on leaders who can build bridges between the physical and the digital.

Coverage from Creator Mag.3 continues on! Plus, make sure to catch our video essays by subscribing to our channel.

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