Among Glenn O’Brien’s many incisive aphorisms, his assertion that “parties are work” has always stuck with me. O’Brien claimed to have learned this from Andy Warhol: “When Warhol turned to me at a party and said, ‘This is such hard work!’ it struck a nerve.” I’ve never doubted this was true for O’Brien and Warhol, but what about everyone else? If the elite’s present norms do indeed anticipate those of the masses by a decade or so (as I discussed recently), maybe O’Brien was prescient in declaring that parties would one day be a sort of job for everyone—that more leisure activities would become suffused with opportunity that must be seized, and that the remaining boundaries separating work and play would collapse. To the degree that any IRL object or experience is potential content, it is also theoretically monetizable; it’s a cliche by now to describe social media usage as a form of (largely) uncompensated labor, or to point out that offices have kegs and ping pong tables to trick employees into staying there longer. As games become more like work, the rest of life becomes more gamified. The “creator economy” is O’Brien’s party-as-work writ large, an array of erstwhile pastimes reimagined as small businesses offering each proprietor the chance to “jump the queue, advance directly to Go, and collect $200.”