Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.
How Creative Industries Work in a Post-Money World
The $400 Million Absurdity
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One cost somewhere between $300-400 million to make. Think about that number. Four hundred million dollars. That’s more than the annual GDP of several small nations—to capture Tom Cruise hanging off things in creative new ways.
Where does that money go?
Break down any blockbuster budget and you’ll find something strange: almost none of it is “consumed” in the way you’d consume groceries. The money doesn’t disappear into a furnace. It circulates. It pays:
- Hundreds of people salaries they need to survive—cinematographers, editors, costume designers, caterers, accountants, the person who makes sure Tom Cruise’s harness won’t snap
- Rent for equipment from companies that need to pay their employees—cameras worth more than houses, lighting rigs, sound stages the size of aircraft hangars
- Marketing campaigns designed to scream louder than the other 600 films released that year in a brutal attention economy
The astronomical figure primarily represents the cost of keeping people alive while they work on something that won’t generate revenue for years. It’s survival overhead, dressed up as “production budget.”
Here’s the absurdity we’ve normalized: we’ve built an entire economic system where the primary cost of making art is paying artists not to starve while making it.
Why this matters for understanding “costs”: When people hear “$400 million movie,” they imagine intrinsic value—expensive equipment, rare materials, irreplaceable talent. But most of that money is actually survival distribution: salaries that let workers pay rent, buy groceries, keep their kids in daycare while spending months on a project. The cinematographer doesn’t need $500,000 because her skills are worth that much in some abstract sense; she needs it because her landlord charges $4,000/month, her health insurance costs $2,000/month, and her kid’s college fund needs feeding. Remove the survival overhead, and you reveal the true cost of creation: astonishingly small.
Remove survival pressure from the equation, and the equation transforms entirely.
The Foundation Frees Creation
In the Unscarcity framework, every person working on a creative project has their survival guaranteed through the Foundation. Housing, food, healthcare, education, transportation—these aren’t contingent on employment or project success. They’re universal rights, delivered through distributed infrastructure as automatically as electricity flows through a power grid.
This means creators don’t need salaries. They need access.
Access to what? The resources creative work genuinely requires:
- Compute clusters for rendering CGI sequences or training game AI
- Facilities for filming—sound stages, location permits, production offices
- Equipment for recording—instruments, microphones, mixing boards
- Raw materials for physical production—costumes, sets, props
- Distribution infrastructure for reaching audiences
That’s it. That’s the actual cost. Everything else was overhead for keeping humans from dying while they worked.
A cinematographer doesn’t need $15,000 per week to survive. She needs access to cameras, lighting equipment, editing software, and the time to apply her craft. A composer doesn’t need a $50,000 commission to eat. He needs access to recording studios, session musicians, mastering engineers, and freedom from survival anxiety.
When survival is decoupled from employment, the entire cost structure of creative production collapses to its essential components: coordination overhead, resource allocation, and genuine material consumption.
The $400 million blockbuster becomes… what? A few million in energy costs for rendering, raw materials for sets, and the logistics of coordination? The “cost” of a film drops by 95% because 95% of that cost was never about making the film—it was about keeping people alive during the making.
The Cultural Commons: How Projects Get Greenlit
Creative projects in a post-money world don’t compete for capital from investors expecting financial returns. They compete for allocation from what we might call the Cultural Commons—a federated network of Guilds and local Commons that collectively govern shared creative infrastructure.
Think of it as Wikipedia meets the old studio system, minus the exploitation.
These Commons operate at various scales. Local nodes might govern community theaters, recording studios, or maker spaces. Regional networks steward larger facilities—film studios, game development campuses, concert halls. Global Guilds coordinate access to truly scarce resources—orbital filming platforms, quantum compute clusters for real-time rendering, rare archival materials.
Projects compete through a transparent allocation process:
Proposal submission: A creative team outlines their vision, required resources, timeline, and expected cultural contribution. This isn’t a business plan projecting revenue. It’s a case for why this project deserves access to shared infrastructure. No pitch decks with hockey-stick growth curves. No SAM/TAM/SOM nonsense. Just: What are you making, and why should it exist?
Collaborator commitments: Team members pledge their participation, demonstrating this isn’t vaporware. A director without a cinematographer doesn’t get greenlit. A game designer without programmers remains a concept document. Skin in the game—just measured in time and reputation rather than money.
Allocation review: Guild members—themselves creators who’ve built Impact through past work—evaluate proposals based on two criteria: ability to execute (does this team have the skills and track record?) and expected cultural contribution (will this project expand human experience, challenge conventions, delight audiences, explore new territory?).
Notice what’s missing: financial return on investment. Committee members don’t get richer from approving projects that become commercially successful. They gain Impact if projects they greenlight succeed artistically—if they expand the cultural commons, if they’re celebrated by audiences, if they influence other creators.
This changes incentives fundamentally. A Guild member isn’t asking “Will this make money?” They’re asking “Will this be worth making? Will audiences be glad this exists? Will I be proud to have supported it?”
Why different incentives produce different art: Hollywood’s current calculus is grimly straightforward—a film gets greenlit if projected revenue exceeds projected cost plus profit margin. This favors sequels (proven audiences), franchises (pre-built worlds), and four-quadrant films (broad appeal, maximum market). Original stories, challenging themes, and niche audiences are financial risks. When the gatekeepers’ incentive shifts from “profitable” to “culturally valuable,” the calculus changes. A deeply moving documentary that reaches 100,000 people becomes as valid as a mediocre blockbuster that reaches 10 million—because impact isn’t just about reach, it’s about resonance.
Bad faith allocation—greenlighting projects because the proposer is a friend, or blocking projects out of rivalry—becomes transparent and costly. Guilds that consistently approve mediocre projects while rejecting excellent ones lose reputation. Their members lose Impact. Other Guilds route resources around them. It’s accountability through visibility, not bureaucratic oversight.
The Game Industry: RIP Crunch Culture
Let’s talk about an industry that perfectly illustrates everything wrong with capital-driven creativity: video games.
The numbers are ghastly. In 2024 alone, 14,600 people lost their jobs in the game industry. Microsoft cut 2,800. Unity cut 1,800. Sony cut 1,339. The first quarter of 2024 saw 8,619 layoffs—the highest quarterly number in gaming history. Since 2022, approximately 45,000 jobs have vanished.
And before the layoffs? There was crunch. Months or years of 80-hour work weeks. Developers sleeping under desks. Relationships collapsing. Health deteriorating. According to the 2025 GDC survey, 58% of developers expressed concern about their job security. Nineteen percent were laid off without even being given a reason.
Why does this happen? Because studios funded by venture capital or publisher deals operate on brutally tight timelines. Miss your release window, lose your funding. Lose your funding, face layoffs. Face layoffs, accept crunch to keep your job. The leverage comes entirely from survival pressure.
In a post-money world, crunch culture dies. Not because studios become altruistic—because the leverage evaporates.
A developer whose survival is guaranteed through the Foundation doesn’t need a paycheck badly enough to destroy their health. If a project lead demands unsustainable hours, team members simply leave. The project stalls not from capital constraints but because humans refuse to be exploited. You can’t threaten someone with unemployment when unemployment doesn’t threaten their survival.
Why “just leave” works when survival is guaranteed: Today, quitting a toxic job means losing health insurance, falling behind on rent, and explaining a resume gap. The costs of leaving often exceed the costs of staying, even in abusive situations. Workers calculate—consciously or not—whether their misery exceeds their fear of destitution. When food, housing, and healthcare are unconditional, that calculation changes completely. The power dynamic flips: employers must compete for workers by offering meaningful, sustainable work, not just survival wages. Exploitation becomes impossible not through regulation but through irrelevance.
This means AAA games still exist—produced by Mission Guilds with deep expertise in game development—but their character changes:
- Development cycles lengthen naturally as teams optimize for sustainability instead of artificial deadlines
- Quality increases as burnout decreases
- Games ship when they’re ready, not when financial pressures demand it
Meanwhile, the indie explosion accelerates. A small team with a brilliant concept no longer needs to secure funding from publishers who demand creative control and majority revenue share. They need to convince a Creative Guild that they can execute—that their vision is compelling, that the game will contribute something meaningful to the medium.
The barrier to entry plummets. A solo developer with proven skills can access development tools, computing resources, and distribution platforms through the Commons. The difference between an indie hit and a failed experiment isn’t capital—it’s vision, execution, and resonance with players.
Blockbusters: The Death of the $300 Million Marketing Campaign
Here’s a fact that should make your brain itch: major studios routinely spend as much on marketing as production. Sometimes more. A $200 million production budget might pair with a $300 million marketing spend. Marketing costs often exceed film production costs.
Why? Because in a scarcity-driven attention economy, films must compete by shouting loudest. Billboards, TV spots, social media campaigns, influencer partnerships, premiere events—all designed to penetrate the noise and capture opening weekend box office. The film that spends less on marketing loses screens to the film that spends more, regardless of quality.
In a post-money world, that $300 million marketing budget vanishes. Not because marketing becomes unnecessary, but because the competitive dynamics transform.
Films no longer need to maximize opening weekend revenue to satisfy investors. They need to find their audiences organically through recommendation networks, cultural commentary, and sustained word-of-mouth. The algorithm isn’t optimizing for ad revenue—it’s optimizing for connecting viewers with films they’ll actually love.
Some films still reach enormous audiences. But they do so because they resonate, not because they were advertised most aggressively. The “mid-budget” film—too expensive for indie distribution, too small for blockbuster marketing—stops being an endangered species.
The creative consequences are profound. Directors and writers no longer optimize for “four-quadrant appeal” to justify marketing spend. They optimize for artistic vision and cultural impact. A film that deeply moves a passionate audience of millions becomes just as valuable as a film that mildly entertains a casual audience of hundreds of millions.
Films still require coordination of hundreds of specialists. They still need cameras, sound stages, editing bays, visual effects studios. But the question shifts from “How do we raise capital?” to “How do we demonstrate to the Cultural Guild that this project deserves allocation?” A director with a track record of compelling work and a committed team makes a strong case. A first-time director with an unproven concept faces skepticism—but not impossibility. If the vision is compelling enough, allocation happens.
Music: Patronage Without Patrons
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: Spotify paid $10 billion in royalties in 2024—the largest payout in music industry history. Nearly 1,500 artists earned over $1 million.
Sounds great, right?
Here’s the catch: Apple Music pays artists twice as much per stream as Spotify—$6.20 per 1,000 streams versus Spotify’s $3. And the per-stream rate gets carved up: 56% to the recording side, 30% to the streaming service, and just 14% to publishing—of which the songwriter gets 68%. Do the math. The songwriter sees about $0.0003 per stream. A million streams earns them $300.
The system isn’t designed to pay artists. It’s designed to pay the infrastructure that surrounds artists.
In a post-money world, that infrastructure becomes shared. A musician doesn’t need label backing to access a professional recording studio. They need to demonstrate their craft and commit to producing work.
Distribution becomes essentially free. No pressing plants, no truck logistics, no retailer margins. Digital distribution costs approach zero. A musician releases their work into the commons, where it finds audiences through cultural networks and algorithmic curation designed to match listeners with music they’ll love—not music that generates the most ad revenue.
The manufactured star system fades. The machinery that turned mediocre talents into superstars through relentless marketing and algorithmic manipulation loses its economic logic. Stars still emerge, but because their music actually resonates.
Musical diversity explodes. Genres that couldn’t support themselves commercially—experimental composition, regional folk traditions, avant-garde improvisation—flourish because musicians don’t need commercial viability to justify existence. They need artistic merit and audience connection, however niche.
Session musicians, sound engineers, mastering specialists—all the technical experts who make professional recordings possible—participate in projects based on creative interest rather than hourly rates. A talented engineer doesn’t ask “What’s the budget?” but “Is this project worth my time? Will I be proud of the result?”
What Stays the Same
Strip away the economic superstructure, and certain things remain unchanged. These aren’t artifacts of capitalism—they’re human.
The drive to create persists. Painters still paint, writers still write, musicians still compose. They do so because creation itself is rewarding, because the act of making something that didn’t exist before provides satisfaction independent of compensation. We were making art on cave walls 40,000 years before anyone invented money.
The desire for recognition persists. Artists want their work seen, heard, experienced. They want to know it moved someone, challenged someone, delighted someone. This isn’t vanity—it’s the fundamental human need for connection and validation.
The satisfaction of craft persists. The cinematographer who nails a difficult shot, the game designer who solves an elegant systems problem, the novelist who finally gets a character’s voice right—these moments of mastery remain intrinsically rewarding.
Competition persists, but transforms. Creative professionals still compare themselves to peers, still strive to be excellent, still want their work recognized as superior. But they compete for cultural impact and peer respect rather than market share.
Collaboration persists. Films still require dozens or hundreds of specialists. Games still need programmers, artists, designers, sound engineers. Albums still benefit from producers, mixers, session musicians. Creative work remains fundamentally collaborative.
These constants remind us that the creative impulse predates capitalism and will outlive it. We’re not discussing the death of creativity—we’re discussing its liberation from survival pressure.
What Disappears
Other aspects of the creative industries—aspects we might have mistaken for inevitable—vanish when the economic foundation shifts.
“How do I get paid?” becomes “How do I get this made?” This isn’t semantic shuffling. It’s a fundamental reorientation. A filmmaker no longer spends years pitching investors, negotiating contracts, structuring deals. They spend that time refining their vision, assembling their team, demonstrating competence to the Guild.
Gatekeeping by capital disappears. In the current system, projects live or die based on whether someone with money believes they’ll generate more money. Brilliant work goes unmade because it’s “not commercial.” Mediocre work gets funded because it targets “the right demographic.” In a post-money system, projects are evaluated on artistic merit, cultural contribution, and team capability. Gatekeeping still exists—Guilds still say no to poorly conceived projects—but the gates are different.
Art as investment vehicle disappears. Wealthy collectors no longer buy paintings as assets expected to appreciate. Art returns to being valued for aesthetic and cultural merit rather than portfolio diversification.
Creative careers as survival strategy disappears. No one becomes a screenwriter because it’s a “stable career.” No one stays in game development despite hating it because they need health insurance. People create because they want to create, pursuing projects because those projects seem worth making.
The desperation vanishes. The “I need to eat so I’ll accept these notes from the studio executive,” the “I’ll work on this project I don’t believe in because I need the paycheck”—gone. Creative conflicts become about vision, craft, and execution rather than survival and profit.
The Transition
None of this happens overnight. The path from capital-driven creative industries to a post-money Cultural Commons requires deliberate transition.
Early steps are already visible:
- Creative cooperatives forming that operate on post-money principles internally while interfacing with the market economy externally
- Municipalities creating publicly-owned creative infrastructure—studios, maker spaces, equipment pools—accessible through reputation-based allocation
- Digital platforms experimenting with non-monetary recognition systems that reward cultural contribution rather than engagement metrics
The transition accelerates as abundant energy and AI reduce the cost of creative infrastructure toward zero. When rendering farms cost almost nothing to operate, when distribution is genuinely free, when survival is guaranteed through the Foundation, the economic rationale for capital-driven creative industries collapses.
What emerges isn’t a utopia where every project succeeds. It’s a system where creative work optimizes for cultural contribution rather than commercial viability, where the question shifts from “Will this make money?” to “Is this worth making?”
That shift—subtle in description, seismic in consequence—redefines what creative industries are for.
The answer, finally, is simple: they’re for culture. And they serve everyone.
