The Price of Being Early

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — March 20, 2026

A Plain Statement

There’s something I want to say, and I’m going to say it plainly.

I’ve spent years putting together a body of work. Not a handful of posts, not a quick series, but thousands of essays—written, organized, structured, and preserved with intent. The last phase of that work was completed with the assistance of ChatGPT, an AI tool I learned to use effectively while finishing the project. It didn’t replace the work. It helped me complete it.

That matters, because there’s a narrative out there that if AI is involved, the work somehow doesn’t count. That’s not true. The foundation was already built. The thinking, the writing, the years behind it—those were mine. The tool just made it possible to bring it across the finish line.

The Payoff Problem

Now here’s the part people don’t like to talk about.

As of this writing, I’ve earned roughly 4.5 cents per essay.

Not per hour. Not per page. Per essay.

That’s not just below minimum wage. That’s not even in the same universe.

And before anyone says it—yes, I know the standard response. “You have to market it.” “You have to build an audience.” “You have to figure out distribution.” I’ve heard all of it.

What almost nobody says is that the system itself has changed in a way that makes those expectations unrealistic for most individuals.

The Attention Economy

Media scholar Clay Shirky once observed that “publishing is no longer a job… it’s a button.” The barrier to entry is gone. Anyone can publish.

But that didn’t solve the real problem.

Economist Tim Wu explains it clearly: “The business model of the internet is to capture and resell human attention.” If attention is the product, then creators are competing in a system designed to filter most of them out.

Writers like Cory Doctorow have described how platforms evolve to extract more value over time, often at the expense of users and creators alike.

Anyone can publish. Almost nobody can be seen.

The Compensation Gap

This leads directly to the next problem.

Jaron Lanier warned years ago that “we cannot have a universal information economy without compensating the people who provide the information.” That problem has not been solved.

If anything, it has become normalized.

Scholars like Nick Srnicek have shown that digital platforms are structured to concentrate value rather than distribute it. And Andrew Keen has argued that the internet has “decimated” traditional creative industries without replacing their economic stability.

The result is simple: more content, less compensation.

The Collapse of Structure

Not that long ago, this kind of work wasn’t expected to be handled by one person.

There were editors. Publishers. Distributors. Marketing teams. Printers. Sales channels. Entire systems designed to take a body of work and move it into the world in a way that connected it to readers and returned value to the person who created it.

Now all of that has been collapsed into one individual.

Write it. Edit it. Publish it. Promote it. Distribute it. Monetize it.

And if it doesn’t work, the conclusion is simple: you failed.

The Individualization of Failure

Cultural theorist Mark Fisher described this kind of pressure as a system where “all problems are reframed as personal failings.”

That’s the quiet shift we don’t talk about.

The burden didn’t disappear. It was transferred.

We call it independence. We call it empowerment. We call it democratization.

But what it often looks like in practice is isolation.

A Structural Problem

A single person doing the work of an entire structure, expected to compete in a global environment against organizations that still have those structures in place.

That’s not a level playing field. That’s a structural imbalance.

And it leaves a lot of people in the same position—producing real work, real thought, real effort—without a clear path to turning that into something sustainable.

This isn’t about blame.

It’s about acknowledging that something in the system doesn’t line up with reality.

Because this is not a creative problem.

It’s a structural one.

And sooner or later, it’s going to have to be addressed.

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

References

Doctorow, C. (2023). The enshittification of platforms.
Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Zero Books.
Keen, A. (2015). The internet is not the answer. Atlantic Books.
Lanier, J. (2013). Who owns the future? Simon & Schuster.
Shirky, C. (2008). Here comes everybody. Penguin Press.
Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform capitalism. Polity Press.
Wu, T. (2016). The attention merchants. Knopf.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism. PublicAffairs.