[undoware]

Yikes. Good points. And a good time to admit that the person described is an amalgam of what I heard from (at least) two artist friends, in somewhat different industries, about things that happened in the early days of the pandemic. No actual creatives were harmed in the making of this post :)

In the future, I'll try to avoid exaggerating, and additionally, think more adversarially.

All the same: it's very, very hard to be a creative right now, if your creativity is anything other than coding. My fellow coders need to realize that the circumstances that have led to our overpay are indeed temporary, because of the way job titles function as positional goods, and become themselves fought over.

The other field I've seen this occur in are postgrad humanities, where the adjunctification of academe has been accomplished by inflating the status of the work. (And I speak as someone who dropped out of a PhD in the humanities.)

If you're expected to be honored just to be in the room, you can expect to earn only an honorarium.

And that's the future I see for our industry as well, eventually.

There must be some sort of general principle of growth and decay involved.