#class warfare

…a billionaire wins and we all lose.

And every time that somebody who makes $150,000 a year thinks that they’re better than somebody else who makes $100,000 a year thinks that they’re better than somebody else who makes $50,000 a year thinks that they’re better than somebody else who makes $30,000 a year thinks that they’re better than somebody else who makes $10,000 a year

…a billionaire wins and we all lose.

... what world do you live in where most independent artists are petite bourgeois?

I dunno which artists you know, but literally every artist I know has spent their entire lives in a constant churn of labor, either barely keeping their head above water or fully enmeshed in poverty. The vast, overwhelming mass of artists, independent or not, work for a living. They are fundamentally in and fundamentally of the working class. They are workers.

It is a tiny, miniscule, vanishing percentage of artists who become successful enough to achieve any kind of class mobility, and even when they do, that mobility is often fragile and tenuous. Even successful and famous actors can be one medical emergency away from precarity, because their wealth is not backed by capital or ownership, but predicated on continuous creative success and the constant maintenance of access to the capital of the actual bourgeoisie. Most of the people you've ever seen in TV daytime dramas and soaps are not wealthy, and never ever will be, despite racking up hundreds or thousands of credits across decades of labor. Despite being famous and popular. There is a reason so many actors and artists end up spending the twilight years of their careers touring the convention circuits, charging a pittance for selfies and signatures (or, nowadays, hustling for retirement money by filming cameos).

Van Gogh, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Bach, Monet, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Gaugin, William Blake, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, Vivaldi... history is an infinite cavalcade of artists who became extremely famous in their time, and then died penniless and in poverty, because their success did not actually grant them access to capital and ownership, it did lift them into the truly moneyed classes.

And those are just the names you have heard of because their fame survived past their time. The list of artists who were famous in their time and are now completely forgotten who died in poverty is even longer, and even more depressing.

Billie Holiday (fucking Billie Holiday!!!) famously died with a net worth of about a thousand dollars, because she had been so thoroughly swindled out of everything she earned in her life, and she did not have the deeply baked-in class protections of the bourgeoisie immunizing her from the threat of poverty and precarity.

So no. "Independent artists" (however you even define that term) are not petite bourgeois as a group. And the vanishingly small percentage of them who are, they are not the demographic of artists whose livelihoods are most meaningfully threatened by generative AI.