The Value of Twenty Bucks

Back in the early 2000s, when Limewire was state of the art and piracy was rampant, Hugeuenard said something that stuck with me: You have to buy the music you like, or they won’t know to make more of it. It’s an obvious statement. At the time, it felt like advice about products. About whether something you enjoyed would quietly disappear. But what he was really describing was feedback. Signal. The basic mechanism by which creative systems decide what survives.
If you remove that signal, you don’t get silence. You get noise.
Today, most people experience culture passively. Essays appear. Videos autoplay. Podcasts queue themselves. Someone somewhere does real work and it arrives fully formed on a glowing rectangle. The labor is abstracted away. The cost is invisible. It feels like weather.
That abstraction matters.
When something arrives frictionlessly, it stops feeling like a product of effort and starts feeling like a natural resource. Like water. You don’t think about who made it any more than you think about who maintains the power grid.
So I keep a standing budget — about twenty dollars a month — to support creators I support.
Not because it feels generous.
Not because I’m cultivating a personal brand of virtue.
Because systems that matter do not sustain themselves.
Occasionally I try to bring others around on this topic. Typically I am told something like, “I don’t really have any creators I support.”
I believe them, in the same way I would believe someone who says they don’t really think about where their water comes from. If you read essays, watch long-form analysis, follow critics, listen to podcasts, play indie games, or use open tools, then you already have creators. You just haven’t framed your relationship to them correctly.
You don’t need a favorite. You don’t need a parasocial attachment. You don’t need to feel inspired.
You owe the money, so pay it. You don't owe it to the creators; you owe it to the creation and to yourself.
You don’t need to love a bridge to help pay for it. But we don't coerce support for ideas, creativity, or entertainment. Ben's line wasn’t about music. It was about feedback loops.
If you consume something and provide no signal in return, the system learns nothing. It cannot distinguish between what matters and what doesn’t. Everything collapses into the same flat field of attention metrics and algorithmic guesses. But when you support something — even modestly — you are telling the system: This mattered. Make more of this.
That’s it. That’s the whole mechanism. People today are lazy, unserious. They struggle with the concept of duty without emotional activation. They support things they feel strongly about. They don't support things simply because they participate in them.
But that is how civilization actually works.
If you actively consume creator output, allocating a small fixed amount to sustaining that ecosystem is not charity. It is participation. It is acknowledging value.
Pick someone competent. Someone doing real work. Spread it out or concentrate it. The mechanics don’t matter much. What matters is signaling value.
You don’t need a grand theory. You don’t need perfect ethics.
You just need to remember what Hugeuenard already told us twenty years ago:
If you don’t pay for the things you value, the system cannot know to make more of them.

Later

Bob