Multiplayer Media

Writing is usually seen as a solitary pursuit.

Rather, the author or journalist is typically depicted as a lonely figure bludgeoning away at a blank page in hermetic seclusion.

The reality is more nuanced, of course. Even the artists we think of as singular geniuses were, in some sense, collaborators, entering into productive communion with others. Vladimir Nabokov relied on his wife Véra for translation and first impressions; an elder James Joyce, eyesight failing, relied on the help of a young Samuel Beckett to finish Finnegans Wake.

What might look anecdotal is really adumbrative — a synecdoche for the web of contributors required to bring a work to life. From researchers to editors, translators to publicists, writing in the public domain has always relied on multiple parties. Even in seducing the reader, a kind of consensual collaboration forms.

And yet no one would confuse the focal point of such works. Though they may be flanked by lieutenants, the writer, the author, is unmistakably the point of the spear. The boxer may have his brow wiped by a manager and train with a coach, but only he can walk into the ring and get punched in the mouth. Writing is authorial, in the etymological sense, originated by one person.

This may be changing. As new economic structures and orchestration systems develop, writing may take on a different shape, one that unfetters the adjuncts that have typically remained in orbit and bring others to the task.

The end result will look less like a lonely pursuit, subtly aided by others, and more like a shared game, with each participant bringing their own skills to bear and profiting on the upside. The same opening and decentralizing powers that visit writing may appear in other artistic endeavors. In time, this shift may formalize as an entirely new model for creation and communication, best described as multiplayer media.

In today's treatise, we'll fumble (and hopefully find our way through) the following:

On a list of exciting ways to begin a theorem, a caveat must surely rank near the bottom. While I am tempted to bluff, ornamenting the weaknesses of argumentation with a poetic flourish here and there, I know this readership is too astute to fall for that. (If I can't interest you in a flourish, may I offer you some flattery?)

So, a divulgence: I believe in the coherence of this next section and find it to be true. But there are convolutions and exceptions at which a reader might reasonably point or poke. I hope you will — if this piece had one overriding wish, it would be to break the wall between "audience" and "creator" as frequently as possible.

The first complication: despite what I noted in the introduction, traditional creativity has — in relative terms — been monolithic. On a spectrum of collaboration, though not solitary, classical novels have been comparatively individual.

This paradigm can be reasonably referred to as monolithic media, and it is an apt descriptor for the model of creation to which we are most used. Though participants are involved either pre or post-opus, the burden for creativity tends to rest on a single individual. The final product is disseminated to many people.

Let’s continue with the example of a novelist.

A muse may influence the pre-opus process, and an editor may sharpen post-opus. But it is up to the writer to fabricate the story in all its richness. The same outline holds for the creation of more commonplace written works, like a news article. Researchers may help beforehand, fact-checkers may lend a hand after, but the creator is solitary.

Even in cases in which there are dual-creators (or more), the rough ratios hold. One (or a small number) of creators create one piece to be distributed to many.

The power in this model lies with the distributors. Only those that had access to distribution power could have their work seen. It didn't matter whether you were the best journalist in the world — without a paper, no one could read your work.

The internet changed this dynamic entirely, with social networks playing a crucial role. While brand power translated into online distribution power in some cases, the totality of control was attenuated. Sure, you're likely to have more readers if you write a piece for The New York Times, but your random Medium post may outstrip it. At the very least, others are more likely to see your work.

In loosening the grip on gatekeepers' distribution power, a new model of manic media emerged. A few vital shifts characterize this epoch:

Each is meaningful. Let's work through them.

By providing the platform to find an audience, social media allowed everyone to be a creator. You no longer need permission to share your thoughts with the world.

What was non-obvious was that (almost) everyone wanted to be a creator of some kind or another. A labor surplus was revealed, a creative surplus, that showed that even those with arduous jobs and serious responsibilities would make time for tasks that might feel like work in a different context. Writing a story under the auspices of a newspaper feels like work; writing one on Twitter feels like fun. This resulted in a step-change increase in output that we are still grappling with. Whereas fifty years ago, the average citizen might have read the morning paper, written by the same fifty writers, today, we dance from one platform to another skimming hundreds, thousands, of perspectives in miniature.

Compared to monolithic media, this aspect of manic media gives it a very different shape. Typically, it involves many users, creating many pieces for an enormous audience; a ratio of many to many to many.

This alludes to the second shift: the fracturing of the opus. The successful social media platforms constrained means of expression, either overtly or implicitly. Twitter restricts the storyteller to 280 characters; Facebook rewards short, high-emotion commentary; Instagram, Snap, and TikTok prioritize brief clips.

Creators adapted by splitting what might have once been one cohesive piece into dozens of micro-stories. In doing so, storytellers opened the door for others to interact with their content piecemeal, effectively line by line or frame by frame. We're used to this now, but it represented a seismic adjustment of the boundaries between artist and audience. Whereas in the past, you might have written a letter to the editor to cavil with a particular argument, now spectators can react in real-time, signaling approbation or condemnation.

Stand-up comedy often feels like the most Pavlovian of art forms; the dog is the performer. Comedians hone their set, navigating by the sound of the audience’s laughter. The jokes that work are embroidered upon, extended, repositioned, while those that don't are jettisoned. The art changes and improves with the help of the audience.

This same dynamic guides much of online creativity now. The Twitterer that sees a thread about bitcoin go viral may lean in to post almost exclusively about crypto-currency; the TikToker that pops off by making a single funny expression (think Khaby Lame) will find ways to resurface it again and again. Art is developed both with and for an audience.

(This principle can be boiled down to the general advice: lean into your winners. This is something both money-men and retailers speak about. Both public and private investors frequently counsel doubling-down on winning bets, while it is accepted wisdom among consumer businesses that you should usually lead with your most popular offering rather than your newest. If your best-selling item is a little black dress, put that in your storefront window.)

This shift changes the texture of the creation. Classic Greek tragedies often employed a "chorus." This cohort commented on the play's action, highlighting major themes, filigreeing a character's emotion, and enriching the piece's fabric. Social media platforms give modern creations the same dynamic, serving as a modern chorus: every fragment of an opus is accompanied by a layer of critique. The audience can not only participate, but the art it sees is contextual, striated.

The difference between the ancient and modern "chorus," of course, is one of control. The original chorus was a narrative device, defined and contrived by the author. It was not a collaboration, so to speak, so much as the appearance of one. The modern chorus is very different; it is a collaboration, but an entirely chaotic one. The creator holds little to no control over the direction or degree of cooperation.

These "chaotic collaborations" are a defining feature of social media and can lead to genuinely memorable creations.

In 2019, for example, user @Fred_Delicious asked his Twitter followers for the "most ridiculous name[s]" they'd come across:

The responses are fantastic. There are the two brothers, "Timothy" and "Dimothy"; "Charity Hamjack" the call-center worker; "Dijon Outlaw" a youth wrestler; and one "Dr. Barney Softness."

Whether you consider this thread and others like it art is a matter of perspective and context. But the output functions similarly to an open-mic comedy night: someone appears on stage, makes you laugh, and then yields the floor to the next performer. This is a chaotic, spontaneous collaboration that succeeds as a piece.

A more direct example might be something like the "Zola Thread." The 148-tweet storm from Aziah "Zola" Wells is a twisty-turn tale that has since been adapted into a film from Academy favorite A24. Since the original thread has been deleted from Twitter, it's difficult to ascertain to what extent the piece was collaborative. Still, the version that exists on Genius's archive suggests responsiveness to audience commentary.

TikTok appears particularly geared for this kind of creativity both implicitly and explicitly. Memes — often through dance or music — spread rapidly, contributing to a sort of large-scale "suprawork." "Duets," in which a clip is positioned side by side with a successor, invite participation and reinterpretation of the initial work.

While these examples show the promise of mass participation and narrowing the divide between creator and audience, they are rarities.

By and large, chaotic collaborations result in incoherence. Though social media platforms provide some guidance, there are many ways to play the "game" and few rules. If I posted a tweet asking users to create a story, one tweet at a time, what would happen?

It's possible that something great would come of it, but unlikely. Without clearer guide rails, different degrees of permissioning, and perhaps some reward system, the likeliest outcome is an anarchic, senseless mess.

Why is that? Because everyone is playing a different game.

Each social platform is capacious enough to allow for a multitude of interpretations and styles of play. On Twitter, for example, some people are playing the "thread game," others play the "meme game," others play the "snark game." Each of these may have value within the context of the social network. But when committed to a collaboration without orchestration, they typically erode rather than contribute to the piece's value. (Often, this leads to mutual frustration as each participant blames the other for ruining their version of the game as if someone started playing hockey on your tennis court, or visa-versa.) The creative surplus described above is not quite wasted, but it certainly isn't optimized.

Viewed in totality, the manic media era enabled vital new behaviors, allowing many more people to create, forcing communion between artist and audience, and permitting chaotic collaborations. It falls short in many places, too. By focusing on fractal pieces and empowering a range of different games, the scale and coherence of collaborations have been capped. The next wave of media will take the best of this previous era but empower grander and more sophisticated play.

Unless you are a rather strict adherent, you will agree with me that one of society's most consequential pieces of media was multiplayer.

Most academics believe the Bible was written by dozens of authors, with many others potentially contributing in some fashion or another. Rather than an anomaly, we may come to see such collaborative creations as the norm.

"Multiplayer media” represents the next frontier for creativity and collaboration. The greatest novel of the next century, the most immaculate film or game, will be architected by vast, opt-in networks. Rather than involving a few dozen contributors, thousands will participate, creating something closer to an artistic MMPORG rather than a humble guild.

As with manic media, participants will be widely distributed and enter conversation online. The distance between artist and audience will not just narrow but entirely collapse as viewers become creators.

This will be managed by aligning users around a specific game rather than a platform that allows multiple non-consensual games. By doing so, creative surplus is better directed, with "coherent collaborations" taking the place of chaotic ones. Sophisticated permissioning and reward systems (not necessarily via DAOs) match and compensate participants appropriately. In that respect, creative endeavors may be structured similarly to open-source software projects.

The shape of creation is once again shifted. Within a multiplayer framework, many people work on one piece, viewed by many.

There are clear benefits to this system when compared to both monolithic and manic media.

First, by harnessing creative surplus, multiplayer media projects benefit from free or lower-cost labor at scale (think Wikipedia).

Second, by shifting creation downward toward the audience, multiplayer pieces effectively become headless. Unlike traditional media (or even social media), headless art is more resilient to censure — whereas the painter Gauguin might have been canceled in the modern era (three child brides? Really Paul?), curbing his production, a multiplayer rendition of the same art would be less vulnerable to individual foibles.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, multiplayer media offers viral distribution. By involving many more participants, multiplayer art simultaneously mints many more evangelists. Those that work on a product and bring it to completion are likely to want to share the output, particularly if their fortune is in some way tethered to the project's success (think Bitcoin). If attention is a war, it does not hurt to have one's own army.

While there are signs this movement is already emerging, empowering more mass-scale projects requires a logistics of creativity.

To bring 10-10,000x the number of collaborators into a project, creative fields will need to perceive and formalize work as a coherent process. That will involve mapping its steps, defining roles, choosing and distributing rewards, and employing "synthetic creators"...

We'll dig into managing massive communities, touch on DAOs, and talk about The Generalist's experiments. As a heads-up, leading CEOs, CMOs, CIOs, GPs, and technologists read The Generalist for practical business wisdom. For just $16.58/month on the annual plan, you'll unlock:

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