The Economy of Erasure: How Modern Society Steals Creativity and Calls It Progress

By Cliff Potts
Editor-in-Chief, WPS News

The Illusion of a Creative Age

Modern society congratulates itself on being innovative, inclusive, and opportunity-driven. We speak endlessly about “creators,” “voices,” and “democratized platforms.” Yet beneath that rhetoric sits a far harsher reality: a system designed to extract creative labor while denying creators stability, recognition, or compensation. What is lost is not only income, but continuity, authorship, and personal agency.

This is not a flaw in the system. It is the system.

Creativity as Raw Material

In the contemporary economy, ideas are treated less as labor and more as raw material. Once expressed publicly, they are assumed to be free for reuse, reinterpretation, and monetization by others—often institutions or platforms with far greater leverage. Original thinkers become temporary inputs rather than ongoing participants.

The language of “content” reveals the truth. Content is meant to be filled, refreshed, replaced. It is not meant to endure, and neither are the people who produce it.

The Internet and Perfected Extraction

The internet did not invent creative exploitation, but it optimized it. Earlier systems of publishing were exclusionary, but they also created traceability: authorship, attribution, and professional continuity. Today’s platforms offer visibility without security and reach without responsibility.

Work can circulate globally while its creator remains economically immobile. Ideas spread faster than ever, but credit dissipates just as quickly. The result is reach without recognition and influence without survival.

Erasure Without Censorship

Erasure rarely looks like suppression. It looks like indifference.

Creative work disappears not because it is banned, but because it is absorbed, flattened, and redistributed without context. Complex arguments are reduced to sound bites. Deep analysis becomes anonymous “common sense.” Institutions benefit from insights they did not produce while the originator is forgotten.

This allows systems to profit from creativity while denying dependence on it.

The Inversion of Effort and Reward

The system rewards what is easy to consume, not what is difficult to create. The more time, care, and intellectual rigor a work requires, the less compatible it becomes with algorithmic distribution. Depth is penalized. Friction is punished.

Creators are told to “build an audience,” “optimize engagement,” or “monetize later,” while platforms monetize immediately. Recognition is always deferred. Compensation is always conditional.

Moral Camouflage and Blame Shifting

Perhaps the most damaging feature of this system is its moral camouflage. Exploitation is reframed as opportunity. Exposure is presented as payment. When creators fail to extract value from their work, the blame is placed on personal shortcomings—branding, networking, adaptability—rather than on a structure designed to extract without sustaining.

If no one explicitly stops you, then your failure must be your fault.

Creativity Without Preservation

A society that cannot preserve the people who think, write, analyze, and imagine for it is not advancing. It is consuming itself. The archive grows larger while the lives behind it shrink.

The economy of erasure does not need to destroy creativity outright. It only needs to make persistence irrational. Most people stop creating not because they lack ideas, but because continuing becomes economically and emotionally unsustainable.

Naming the Choice

Calling this “progress” requires selective blindness. Systems are designed. This one is designed to harvest without maintaining, to remember ideas while forgetting people.

Until that design choice is named and confronted, creativity will continue to be mined, stripped of authorship, and discarded—while society congratulates itself for moving forward.

For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com

APA Citations

Berman, M. (2006). Dark ages America: The final phase of empire. W. W. Norton & Company.
Dean, J. (2009). Democracy and other neoliberal fantasies. Duke University Press.
Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform capitalism. Polity Press.