The history of creative work is the history of distribution dependency.

Before recorded music, you had to be in the room. Then physical distribution changed everything — and immediately created a new class of gatekeepers. The label. The studio. The publisher. The retailer. Every link in the chain extracted a toll. The creator was always last in line.

Then the internet arrived and promised to change all of that. Democratize access. Level the playing field. Cut out the middlemen.

But we didn’t cut out the middlemen. We replaced them.

We traded the physical distribution mafia for the digital gatekeepers — and the economics got worse. Spotify pays fractions of a cent. YouTube takes 45%. Getty owns the client relationship. TikTok owns the algorithm. The creator reaches more people than ever before and makes less from each one of them than at any point in history.

Scale without sovereignty is not progress. It is a more efficient form of extraction.

The promise of the digital age was never fulfilled. That is the work in front of us.