Admin. Admin. Admin.

Unlike what you've seen on YouTube and influencers starting their TikTok video with the line “here’s what I did to earn $xyz a month”, entrepreneurship is probably the easiest way to turn $20k into nothing (or negative if you are extra lucky), fast.

No amount of inspiration, good ideas, or AI agents can make each of us prosperous as individuals when winning requires others to lose. We hear about someone's autonomous agents earning tens of thousands a month, or a teenager selling their AI wrapper company for millions. That's an obelisk—something we're supposed to orient ourselves toward as we find our way.

Bets were open on Polymarket for nuclear war, with over $800k wagered before it was taken down. How does it feel to be the person betting on humanity's own demise?

I'm here, typing, drinking my morning coffee, nothing objectively bad directly outside my window. The sun is brimming. The air is crisp. The thought—maybe I have already won life for being able to have this moment of peace—rings eerily. And yet, it doesn't feel like enough. I need to have a purpose of some sort. I need to desire something more than this peace. 

In early February, Saad Ali, who runs the Creative Coding Club at OCAD U, asked me to speak on entrepreneurship. This is about that workshop and how all roads lead to admin (but you should build the thing you've always wanted regardless). Upon starting the workshop at OCAD, students expressed a coherent desire to start their own studio someday. It represented autonomy. Someday. 

There's a growing concern about AI and the job displacement it's creating in design, media, and entertainment—most of them entry-level positions that have traditionally helped young creatives find their footing. You do “boring” work for a few years, and you learn. AI does a good, half-baked job of the boring stuff, and it catches up to the rat race fast. Literally nobody wants to sit and transcribe the audio or do rotoscoping on the green screen when other options exist. Despite various tools and token usage often costing as much as a human employee, the fact that agentic workflows do not sleep or complain is a winning strategy. We have dreamed for millennia of the automata that do things (that are not chores) on our behalf, but probably did not envision that this dream would come true with this daily dose of misery attached. Perhaps AI didn’t take the jobs: it took the purpose that we associate with our vocation and the will to imagine something better. 

In practical terms, there has never been a better time to commit to a creative practice, an arts collective, or the studio you've always envisioned. You don't need AI to do it, but it has, in many ways, made starting and managing these things exponentially easier. The hard part is identifying the core values that will guide you—and AI can't do that for you. If you find yourself turning to a chatbot for advice on how to be human, it's time to close the tab and go touch grass. 

Wayfinding happens through small experiments, in real life, with people.

But where to?

It increasingly feels like every collective experience is fragmented, and creative third spaces are co-opted as aesthetic backdrops for social media posts. On the Chinese internet, netizens call going to an aesthetic influencer hotspot and posting on social media “clocking in” like clocking in for work. What’s been trending in the advertising and marketing world is the rise of celebrity artists and their creative besties. We crave our creative autonomy and a secret third space where all the magic happens with OUR people. All we got are reels after reels of other people getting what they have always dreamed of, not us.

If the dream is to run a creative studio with like-minded peers, the best place to begin is to actually try starting one rather than romanticizing the future.

Everyone wants to work on interesting projects together. Far fewer want to deal with operations. I don't think art or design schools adequately prepare students for the weight of maintenance and administration—especially when it comes to doing those tasks themselves. I think this stems from the assumption that there will be a job after graduation and that, in a large enough organization, someone else will handle it. There will be a finance person who sends out payment for invoices once a season (we love a net 90). There will be an HR person who finds another person to run the social media accounts.

In the workshop, we sketched out a scenario: a shared, collaboratively run studio space. Half an hour in, not a single creative project had been mentioned. Instead: rent, utilities, insurance, decision-making. What happens if the group can't make rent? Who does the accounting, cleans the toilet, mops the floor, fixes the broken printer, makes the poster for our own events, and curates our own shows??????? (aren't we... artists and designers?) A few people from the group (presumably couldn't stand the silence) said they wouldn't mind taking on extra work—and we all know that's exactly how good people in arts organizations burn out.

We paused the "creative studio" scenario when it hit a wall, and shifted to something smaller: a collective working on creative projects together. What are the terms of collaboration? How are creative decisions made? Are you close enough to actually give each other honest feedback? This direction felt more alive. People were more open to working through problems together—but the same sticking point kept coming up: admin. Even without the overhead of a physical space, the boring side of things keeps popping up. At one point, someone needs to manage the budget.

Why does collaborating on a creative project feel so much easier than sitting down to update the Excel sheet? We've always wanted lateral, autonomous structures, but in practice, we surrender our power through the gaps we're afraid to fill: admin, cash flow, finance, marketing, writing the damn grants, selling out, dance on IG reels—all the stuff that gives you the shivers. 

Autonomy leaks through exactly what we fear.

One recent change at UKAI: we now do some of our admin together, once a month. No amount of bookkeeping changes the fact that we're waiting on a miracle in the funding department in the vast ocean of “unfortunately, you didn’t make the cut. keep doing what you are doing. consider reapplying!” However, making decisions about events and programming has gotten easier because we all have a vaguely similar picture of how good/bad things can be. We now have limited room to dip back into events, with the real risk that if they don't sell, we'll need to find other ways to replenish the well.

"It is always that crass thing, money."
—Evan Armstrong, The Art of Scaling Taste

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April 3rd, 7 pm–midnight:

The Funeral.

163 Sterling Rd, Toronto.

You are invited.

We are selling merch.

There will be music.

There will be tea.

Bring coins and wishes.

Show up.

For real.

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Is it really the money that we wanted? Probably, but I have imagined something else. I want a creative environment where artists build the infrastructure we need for our own flourishing. On March 14, Benjamin gave a talk on tiny infrastructures. What sounded utopian amid the avalanche of tech platforms is, in fact, very practical for small communities and artists. We have returned again and again to the idea of a multi-site art installation that implements some of the tools mentioned, such as Tailscale, an offline AI, a home server, and a long-range radio that we essentially can turn over to emergency communications when necessary. It would have been a good way to check on your friends back in 2021 during the Rogers network blackout at the very least. Maybe there’s a way of making this a fun, absurd thing. We just need to think very hard about it. We need a little whimsy in our lives.

Alas, the grant applications won’t write themselves. I dig my own grave. 

The 8-month wait for a “don’t be discouraged to reapply” has ruined many relationships where the opportunity itself requires a huge sum that only institutional support or public funding can fill. 

There's a widely held belief that a million dollars to a billionaire feels like $20 to a regular person—so why can't they just give it to the arts (here we differentiate from the Arts, which includes Ballet and Opera) or pay more taxes? Desire. The absence of desire is what stops them. A billionaire giving a chunk of their bitcoin to Truth Terminal—an autonomous AI agent, arguably art—is, at the very least, buying themselves something interesting to brag about on podcasts while the rest of us watch this spectacle unfold on X like a kid with an ant farm. Looking cool on the internet is a core element of what survives. The AGI darlings, like Roman Yampolskiy, have said things along the lines that humans will only survive the Singularity if we are interesting enough as subjects to be observed and not exterminated. I guess the fools and jesters were wise after all, and that pretty privilege can mean life (as a cute pet) or death (as meat on the table) for a little lamb. No, there’s not really anything more to life than being really, really, really ridiculously good-looking.

Maybe it is the way to go.

How to look good while admin.

“Did you ever think that maybe there's more to life than being really, really… really ridiculously good-looking?” 
 —Derek Zoolander 

We are already seeing a surge of artists opening their shared spaces up for doing admin tasks and grantwriting together. I do this at a smaller scale at my studio as well to make the grind less gruesome. Good things are happening when we no longer burnout alone. (yay, we now burnout together!)

What's next?

Who's in charge of the aux cable? This burnout needs some good tunes.

Who's taking pictures of our work sesshh? We need our own celebrity artists and their creative besties moment for the gram.

Last but not least, we are heading to Halifax, and we're already about $800 short of covering the absolute necessities because, idk, have you seen the price of everything lately? We thank Arts Nova Scotia for their generous support—it is the reason that this 4th edition of Goblin Market is happening at all. Unlike the previous ones, we will, for the first time, have a not-so-embarrassing budget for the participating artists. We thank The Centre for Art Tapes for believing in the goblin enterprising we are about to jointly unleash into the world, and for leading the grant application that took this collaboration out of the group chat and into real life.

We also thank the universe for showing us that there’s always light another government budget cut on arts and culture at the end of the tunnel. Makes us stronger and more resilient, ya know?

Some of the founding goblins are thinking of joining, as well as a few folks on this mailing list. We are scheming together about how to make our caravan fund happen. Likely writing more grants, but maybe there's another way.

Both our capacities (CFAT and us) have gone downhill as we navigate the “do more with less” future in sight. Different demons, but the same soul-sucking feeling.

We are goblins of many talents—

Benjamin Lappalainen (the goblin IT department of one) and Luisa Ji (your goblin writer and office admin) are doing a workshop: