Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday.

I really loved your video about how Google and other large companies are stealing from independent creators to train generative artificial intelligence. I suppose I should add a caveat. Some people would argue that they aren't stealing, that those large language models are just ingesting information off the web the same way you or I might ingest it. And just as I might synthesize everything I learn about tuberculosis from reading a lot about tuberculosis, and then create an original book about tuberculosis and make money from that book, Generative AI is just doing the same thing.

Now, I would argue this is a nonsense analogy, because computers doing what corporations have instructed them to do is fundamentally different from human beings engaging in intellectual labor. But I will concede that the point is arguable. What's inarguable, at least to me, is that the user generated Internet has always been rigged against the users who are generating that Internet. We have long been walking a dangerous path as Internet citizens, and today I want to explore some of that path's history, and also why I think it's future might not be quite as dystopian as many fear.

Okay, so I've been on YouTube since January 2, 2007, long before there was any way to meaningfully monetize a YouTube video. Like, I remember back in 2006, one of the first YouTube celebrities, one of the most subscribed people on YouTube, had to ask her audience for direct support so that she could get a computer to edit videos with which many people considered like, selling out. And selling out was a super visceral concern for early YouTubers, including me. Like, I didn't put my books in the background of my YouTube videos, lest I be seen as a sellout.

The general feeling was that nobody should make money from something so weird and artsy and fundamentally non commercial. Now, back then, YouTube had two kinds of investors, those who invested their financial capital and those who invested their intellectual property in the form of YouTube videos. The investors who put their money into early YouTube became phenomenally wealthy. Like, every hundred dollars invested into early YouTube, if rolled over into Google stock, is today worth more than $5,000. But the users who invested their intellectual property saw no return at all. Like, the creators and cast of lonelygirl15 did not become wealthy, even though they kind of put YouTube on the map. And as I recall, that creator who was on the top of the YouTube most subscribed charts in 2006 never even got enough money to buy a new computer. And, like, had Hank and I stopped making YouTube videos as we planned to in December of 2007 we would have netted $0 from our YouTube project. We are ingrained to think of financial capital as valuable in a way that intellectual capital isn't. But if lonelygirl15 and Brookers hadn't  become popular in 2005 and 2006, YouTube financial investors never would have gotten that phenomenal return.

Now some will argue that YouTube's financial investors were taking risks that YouTube's creators weren't, but I would disagree with that. Early adopters risk their time and talent and treasure on new platforms, and when they fail, and I've seen lots of them fail, from DailyMotion to DailyBooth, the creators get nothing. The difference is that classically they also didn't get much if the platform succeeded. Now today that has changed somewhat. If you bet on a platform and build an audience there, you do generally benefit. Like in 2011 built a large audience on Tumblr and then as it became more popular that sold a lot of copies of The Fault in Our Stars. Hank, you bet on TikTok in 2018 and when it blew up, you benefited financially.

This is partly because platforms have gotten very slightly better at sharing revenue with creators, but mostly because the culture has changed around selling out. Like back in 2007 I wouldn’t even hold up a copy of my prize-winning, best-selling novel Looking for Alaska, but that’s obviously changed. By 2012, I was reblogging every piece of fan art about The Fault in Our Stars with a link to where you could buy the book. Now this culture shift has allowed many more people to make a living, which I would argue is good news. But user generated content continues to be tremendously undervalued by the platforms that distribute user generated content.

On TikTok, for instance. Hank, it's true that you make some money from advertising. It's also true that something like 3% of TikTok's revenue goes to independent creators, while around 30% goes just to record labels. Because record labels have far more collective bargaining power than individual independent creators. Now Hank, as you pointed out on Friday, YouTube is very different from TikTok or Reddit or Facebook or Instagram in that it does more than just take content, turn it into money for the platform, and then offer users only an audience and karma in exchange. YouTube has become a massive business for Google precisely because they made a counterintuitive decision many, many years ago to share around 55% of revenue with independent creators and treat independent creators similar to, although not identical to, large corporations.

This decision has allowed hundreds of thousands of creators to make a living. It has also made YouTube the most desirable platform to create on, and it has led to a breadth and depth of content that nobody can match. You can learn American history or woodworking or what the world's largest yacht looks like on YouTube. It's incredible. And that's all thanks to a mutually beneficial relationship between independent creators and folks at Google who have the capital and experience and expertise in ad sales and server maintenance to make it all happen. But I would argue that long term, mutually beneficial relationship is now at risk because Google has, in a very roundabout way, as you pointed out, Hank, basically admitted to stealing our content to train large language models without our permission. These LLMs will generate literal billions of dollars for Google, and the users who generate the content that made those LLMs possible will get nothing.

Now this is obviously bad for the people who create intellectual value in the world, whether that's making YouTube videos or writing comments. But I also think it's bad for the user generated Internet and the social order in general, because it concentrates more capital and power into fewer and fewer hands, which over time, take it from somebody who studied a lot of history, tends to work out terribly. So what are the ways forward here?

Well, Google, where employees do have a lot of power, could suddenly see the light and stop stealing our content and start paying us for it. Or creators could unionize the way Hollywood creators unionized in the 1920s. Lastly, we live online in an insane situation where we are not really governed by governments but instead by corporate terms of service. Governments could step in and regulate those terms of service so that Reddit cannot simply sell your intellectual property to the highest bidder without your permission. And Google cannot simply take every video that it hosts and use it to create multibillion dollar products.

Hank, I've been online for a long time.This YouTube channel will soon turn 18. I've just spent too long watching the people who create value in online systems not realize that value because the Internet is rigged against independent creators who lack collective bargaining power. It often feels to me, and I think to humans in general, that we have to accept the world as it is. But it’s not just that the world might change. The world will change. And each of us has a little say in how that change takes place. Whether it’s cultural shifts toward or away from selling out or structural shifts toward or away from corporate power. The future is not inevitable.

Hank, I’ll see you on Friday.