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8 Key Themes For 2021 & The Middle Class Of The Creator Economy - Elaboration Issue #12

8 Key Themes For 2021 & The Middle Class Of The Creator Economy - Elaboration Issue #12
By Scott Belsky • Issue #12 • View online
Hope you are making the most of your holidays as we all seek to swim back to the surface for 2021. What a year. Just wanted to send along a few thoughts for the future of tech and share a few other things that made me think twice. Finally, I want to thank you for subscribing to this little ~monthly exercise of mine. And I encourage you to write a bit more in 2021 yourself. Have long believed: If you want to better understand what you do and why you’re doing it, write about it. Writing is such an underrated form of discovery.

8 Themes For The Near Future Of Tech 🔮
What has become an ~annual tradition, I took a shot at summarizing a set of themes for the future of tech that I am excited about. They stimulated quite a bit of discussion online, and you can read the full post here. I would say themes around “Eduployment,” “Channels Of One,” and every niche enterprise function becoming multi-player (and the implications of this) solicited the most feedback. But here are the eight themes:
  1. “Decentralized” is spreading to unexpected places.
  2. The Era of Eduployment: Identifying a trade, getting an education, and getting a job (or starting a company) become fully integrated.
  3. A few seemingly quirky social apps will tune into the under 16 demographic’s distinct approach to creation as a form of self-expression and tolerance for transparency by default.
  4. Talent will increasingly own their audience, with the rise of “channels of one” and community-as-a-service.
  5. More and more niche functions of the enterprise will become multi-player, powered by a next generation of highly specialized, AI-bolstered, enterprise companies with consumerized product experiences.
  6. Creativity tools will be deployed across the enterprise, much like productivity tools were deployed in previous decades.
  7. New and disruptive interfaces will emerge that aggregate and connect the underlying services we use to live and work.
  8. Another round of “the roaring 20's” is ahead of us, where the pent-up desires from the pandemic will be unleashed in the form of fashion, travel, and culture-bending creative self-expression.
[Full Post Here]
Worth Sharing & Top Of Mind...
Li Jin
The new American dream is to make a living from one's creativity. 1/3 of kids want to be YouTube stars.

But the inconvenient truth is few creators are actually attaining financial security today.

My new blog is about building the creator middle class 👇
https://t.co/xLjXxWlAjU
Li Jin’s essay on “Building the Middle Class of the Creator Economy” was chock full of insights and data. I especially resonated with her framework and deep dive around “platform design decisions that can help make success attainable by many.” (summary below). Highly recommend you read it on Li’s Substack.
scott belsky
Mobile revolution aside, increasingly finding the desktop as my center of gravity. A few factors at play, but implications are interesting for developers, app store policies, and evolving our assumptions about the workplace of the future.
Any other factors driving this? https://t.co/0loz1tDkHM
Having spent a lot of my career seeking to port desktop and web experiences to mobile apps, I have been trying to reconcile the great comeback of desktop in my own work and life (even before COVID). And the latest M1 chips from Apple add additional gravity to this trend.
And finally, for the collective grounding we all need….
Latest in space
Fun fact: It’s takes ~250 million years for our solar system to orbit the Milky Way galaxy — and it’s only done this about 20 times. https://t.co/5gvcVS5KeT
Behance
🌟 BEST OF BEHANCE 2020 🌟 Here's a look back at some of the most appreciated projects that were shared to #Behance this year: https://t.co/JH2fB7BaW5 https://t.co/IuoRrKSjoZ
Julia Ioffe
Honestly, if Shakespeare had social media and a smart phone, he would've written maybe one play.
Have a safe holiday and new year. Thanks again for the engagement, feedback, and idea sharing this past year. -scott
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Scott Belsky

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Scott Belsky, NY/SF