Life & Wisdom Quote by Eric Brown

It lands like a shrug and a warning at the same time: the gates are still there, but they no longer lock. When Eric Brown says professionals will be joined by the “average Joe,” he’s sketching the moment publishing stops being a trade and becomes an ambient condition. The kicker is the second sentence, a neat, populist mic-drop: “Everybody’s a publisher.” It’s optimistic in its grammar (everybody!) and suspicious in its implications (everybody?).

Brown’s intent reads less like tech-utopian cheerleading than a clear-eyed diagnosis of cultural power redistribution. “Professionals” implies training, standards, and an economy built on scarcity: limited pages, limited airtime, limited shelf space. “Average Joe” is a deliberately blunt figure, standing in for blog authors, forum diehards, self-published novelists, and anyone with a platform and a pulse. The subtext isn’t that expertise disappears; it’s that expertise has to compete in the same feed, on the same timeline, with the same frictionless tools.

Context matters: this line belongs to the long arc from desktop publishing to blogs to social media to newsletters and self-pub marketplaces. The democratization is real, and so is the clutter. Once everyone can publish, attention becomes the actual currency, and gatekeeping doesn’t vanish - it migrates to algorithms, influencers, and opaque platform rules. Brown’s cynicism is quiet but present: “publisher” used to mean someone who filtered and backed work; now it can mean someone who hit “post.” That shift is liberation, yes, and also a recipe for noise, misinformation, and a harsher burden on readers to become editors.