This is an essay I wrote in 2022, inspired by Kyle Chaka’s 2016 viral essay, “Welcome to Airspace”. After seeing an excerpt from Kyle’s new book on the front of /c/Technology, I thought y’all might be interested in reading this piece of mine, which is less about the design of physical spaces, and more about The Algorithm™'s influence on creative practice in general.
This is a conversation I can have a million times, so I hope you enjoy.
Back in the day, both Harlan Ellison and Hunter Thompson wrote about the economics of being a writer. Around 1970 [iirc] Ellison said that if he sold one TV script a year he could pay his bills and write what he wanted. Thompson’s “Hell’s Angels” has a chapter on being a ‘drop out.’ A biker could get a Union stevedore job and save enough in six months to hit the road for two years. A part time waitress could keep herself and her musician boyfriend going.
I think Baldur’s Gate III Director/Dev Swen Vincke’s comments on Ubisoft+ asking gamers to get used to “not owning games” is exactly about this.
Whatever the future of games looks like, content will always be king. But it’s going to be a lot harder to get good content if subscription becomes the dominant model and a select group gets to decide what goes to market and what not. Direct from developer to players is the way.
Getting a board to ok a project fueled by idealism is almost impossible and idealism needs room to exist, even if it can lead to disaster. Subscription models will always end up being cost/benefit analysis exercises intended to maximize profit.
There is nothing wrong with that but it may not become a monopoly of subscription services. We are already all dependent on a select group of digital distribution platforms and discoverability is brutal. Should those platforms all switch to subscription, it’ll become savage.
In such a world by definition the preference of the subscription service will determine what games get made.
Trust me - you really don’t want that.
TLDR ; you won’t find our games on a subscription service even if I respect that for many developers it presents an opportunity to make their game. I don’t have an issue with that. I just want to make sure the other ecosystem doesn’t die because it’s valuable.
To me his thoughts are interesting, because he’s basically describing what already happened to the music industry with Spotify. As he pointed out, discoverability on digital distribution platforms was already brutal. Even if you were buying music from iTunes Store or Bandcamp, you’re still deeply limited on discoverability. That was kicked into overdrive in the music industry with Spotify.
Spotify’s catalogue is anodyne and too heavily curated. It means the popular artists will basically always get paid, while the unique and different artists will suffer and fail and probably stop making art entirely because it has become unsustainable for them.
It’s like how the story of Taylor Swift being a “real indie” is such a joke, especially with the leaked emails from her dad being angry about how he doesn’t get enough credit for basically buying her her music career. Basically it took a massive amount of money and propaganda (“advertising”) to get her career off the ground at all.
Any artist without a daddy with lots of Big Banker Money is basically twisting in the fucking wind at this point. Don’t even get me started on how AI art and music is further dropping the bottom out of the artistic industry.
Art is quickly becoming (“always has been”) something only available to the idle rich. Only the idle rich can afford to piss away all their time on something that could be completely unprofitable. While I’m sure some of it is good art, do we really think that art is deserving of only the ideas of the idle rich?
Further, Vincke is exactly right about the subscription service dictating what makes it to air. When banning an episode of Hasan Minaj’s Patriot Act, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings was quoted as “We’re not in the truth-to-power business. We’re in the entertainment business.” They absolutely can and will dictate what makes it to their streams.
It’s a complication of the nature of the art market, how we’ve hollowed out pay for artists over two decades (executives love to blame it on “piracy” but the real blame is “executives who are greedy fucks who want to keep all the money the artists made for themselves”), and the boom in generative AI “art.”
I, sadly, don’t see a good way out, but listening to people like Swen Vincke is a good start.
EDIT: One final thing. The “algorithm” is just something that The Suits rely on to justify any and all decisions. The “algorithm” isn’t making the decisions, The Suits are, just like always. The “algorithm” didn’t pull episodes of shows that were politically unpalatable to a certain nation, CEO Reed Hastings did. It’s just one more way to obfuscate corporate decision making, so they can always point to data. Surprise: you can prove/justify anything with statistics (data).
EDIT II: In respect to this statement from the OP: “which is less about the design of physical spaces and more about The Algorithm” I think perhaps it would be cool to get a reading group together for Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. Not discussed often enough in the modern era, “the medium is the message” still resounds, and considering McLuhan argued a physical space could be a medium for communication (the advent of bright lights allowing night-time baseball games, where previously no one would have been at a dark stadium trying to talk or watch a game, for example), I think it’s really time to be having more interesting conversations about digital spaces, their “shapes,” how they function as a medium, and their impact on human communication.
I actually think that this is part of a larger phenomenon. It’s something that Adorno and Horkheimer identified all the way in the 1940s (in “Dialect of Enlightenment,” especially in the chapter “The Culture Industry”) that is now greatly accelerating because of computers. The result is what I call The Tyranny of Data. The essay isn’t that long and most of the length comes from examples, but I’ll try to do a super quick tl;dr of my argument. Here’s some Adorno and Horkheimer quotes that I cite:
For enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion.
and
Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities. For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion[.]
Basically, modern society culturally values arguments presented in numbers, especially when expressed in units of currency. I argue that now that we have computers, aka a machine capable of turning everything into numbers very easily, we can easily collapse everything into units of currency. This is a homogenizing and conservative (as in change averse) force (quoting myself):
You can measure how people feel about another Marvel movie, or a politician they already know, or whether they prefer this version or that version of a product. It’s much harder to measure interest in a brand new movie idea, or an unknown politician, or a radically new invention. The bigger the change, the harder it is to measure.
Because it’s so easy to turn things into numbers now, and because we culturally value data-based arguments as superior to other kinds, like moral or ideological, our collective ability to think in other ways is atrophying. As a result, we struggle to take the necessarily irrational risks that we need to take to make real progress, be it social progress, artistic progress, or whatever.
I go through a bunch of examples, like Joe Biden, who I call “a statistically generated median in corporeal form. He’s literally a franchise reboot, the single most derivative but fiscally sound cultural product.” I specifically talk about digital media too:
When deciding how much to value websites or podcasts or any other online media, we simply add up the number of downloads. No one actually thinks that’s a good way to decide the value of art, writing, journalism, story-telling, lascivious true crime blogs, or reality TV rewatch podcasts. It’s just the first number that fell out of a computer. Just like that, a complex social situation was transmuted into a number.
TL;DR: Adorno really hated Jazz.
😜
EDIT: More seriously, Debord and Society of the Spectacle come to mind as well.
Yes absolutely! Debord comes up a lot on my blog too. I fucking love the Situationists. A lot of these theorists that lived through the earlier days of mass media saw it with such clarity for exactly what it is in a way that those of us born later I think would struggle to see were it not for their writing, not that we bothered to heed their warnings.
And now we accelerate the process with generative AI, resampling data into “new” content for profit. But I can’t shake the feeling this will be an undoing, like it somehow devalues the collated data becauce it becomes so abundant (and synthetic).
Totally agreed. In fact, I’ve written about almost exactly that.
Fantastic read, shared at work and now following on mastodon. Also had this thought in regards to my own work:
… I find it reflects a similar problem we’re having with our code base: “simple is not always easy”. This article points out that Generative AI does what is easy/cheap, when what we really need is simplicity (or simplified complexity)
There’s probably another article to write about this, I would title it: “Generative AI won’t solve your Cynefin domain problem”
Couldn’t agree more! We shouldn’t outsource planning the world that we want to make to oversimplified heuristics, including “whatever is cheapest.”
That’s well documented already. The near-instant proliferation of AI generated content on the internet means that in short order, AI’s are ingesting data from earlier, more crude implementations of AI. The AI doesn’t know that one source is better than another, so as it scrapes the internet, and the internet becomes more full of AI content, the content produced begins to slowly become useless as more and more AI-generated content becomes the source for the AI to generate content.
AI is an ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail.
Fuck this is a great comment. Thank you.
Thanks! Plenty more like it
“Before you dismiss me as a curmudgeonly millennial in nostalgia-colored glasses, realize that I am not implying that art that falls closer to the “challenging” side of the accessibility spectrum has gone away, or that it has a smaller market share (though it wouldn’t surprise me) only that it does not bleed into the mainstream as often as it once did.”
This appears to be the thesis statement of the piece, but considering you’ve not defined what constitutes “mainstream” in any meaningful way or offered any evidence that the content of creative works entering this hypothetical “mainstream” are fundamentally more “safe” (another questionably valid construct) now than before 2008, all this whole thing really boils down to is anxiety over social media algorithms.
In order for your thesis to work, you’re going to have to explain why “algorithms” (who’s, exactly?) are going to lead artists to make worse stuff than what was approved by the average MBA nepotism hire that used to be responsible for gatekeeping what made it onto TV in the 90s. Because uh … we’ve seen a lot of that guy and an algo’s taste could hardly be worse. At least the algo can be influenced by what I like.
Also this image? Yeesh dude. A lot to unpack here. But suffice to say, people don’t make deeply challenging art because they crave clicks. They make it because they have to. Because it speaks to their soul or gives voice to their trauma. That’s not going to stop because they’re aware that shitty hotel art made with goofy materials gets more views on the TikToks. The phrase “spiritual growth in society becomes stunted” isn’t just jumping to conclusions; it’s multi-stage rocket launching to conclusions.
Ps. AirBnB literally never existed to provide a “rich cultural experience.” Come on.
Eh, what you’ve identified as the thesis is actually just a butt-covering footnote to prevent Reddit-style “ackchually” comments. When I wrote it I was still submitting posts to Reddit. I guess that’s on me for assuming the central point was more obvious.
genXers and older millennials will remember how this started happening to music on the radio around 1999 when ClearChannel started taking over every radio station in the US, effectively killing indie rock. all music had to become conformative pop trash, or it wouldn’t get radio play.
Something I think about a lot is how the “hipster” movement in the early 2000s was extremely anti- consumer culture. They were building easy to repair “fixie” bikes instead of driving cars, they were brewing their own beer and buying/mending clothes they bought second hand. They were moving to abandoned factory loft apartments in similarly abandoned urban areas.
Then, the artists living in lofts, making zines and and knitting sweaters got priced out. And now in pop culture the term “hipster” has largely replaced “yuppie” to mean an elitist, snobby, and extremely pro consumer culture sort of person, which is basically the opposite of what the young people in the early 2000s were doing. I’m not a conspiracy theorist but I have to imagine that the big corps saw the movement as a threat, and did an classic rebrand on them, like car companies did with the minivan to sell more SUVs.
Dissent is always eventually commodified in a capitalist system. Your hipster example is great but also think Black empowerment a la Beyonce. Just another trip to the simulacra
Example: Tim Pool got his start as a livestreamer at the Occupy Wall Street protests. In 2018, he would say he was never politically aligned with OWS. Yes, that giant piece of shit Tim Pool was instrumental in livestreamed coverage of OWS.
The world got wild here for a minute.
This is true of every artist scene eventually. The SoHo crowd from the 60s, the Beat generation in the 50s (North Beach and Greenwich village), Montparnasse in Paris in the 20s.
The artists of Rome where probably replaced in their neighborhoods by gentrification too, we just don’t have written proof. This isn’t some new fangled conspiracy. This is the cycle. Artists flock to cheap neighborhood and make it a famous cultural center with their art. Rich people want a piece of that atmosphere and move in eventually pricing out the artists they wanted to rub elbows with. Pretending this is a new phenomenon ignores the very nature of human society.
hipsters still exist, although i don’t think the name applies so much anymore.
For sure, they also don’t congregate in Williamsburg much anymore.
it’s not so much that we got priced out. many of us grew up and had kids (not me, ew), and the rest of us don’t want to be around those assholes anymore, lmao. coke-fueled drinking binges and after-hours parties don’t mix well with the kid life. so we all went to ft. greene, bed-stuy, and bushwick.
Popular shit has always popular and shit. Avant-garde art has always been avant-garde. This is a lot of words to say nothing new at all.
I might even go so far as to say you’ve fallen victim to what you’re talking about: drab gray product designed to appeal to as many people as possible.
You’re not wrong but that’s not at all what the essay is about. I actually anticipated this how-shall-we-say reddity response in the post itself:
Before you dismiss me as a curmudgeonly millennial in nostalgia-colored glasses, realize that I am not implying that art that falls closer to the “challenging” side of the accessibility spectrum has gone away, or that it has a smaller market share, only that it does not bleed into the mainstream as often as it once did.
And that’s what I’m disagreeing with. When experimental or edgy art moves into the mainstream, it always gets sanitized for the general public. It has never bled into the mainstream unchanged. Look at the bowdlerization of Shakespeare for mass-market publication in 1818. Look at the literal fig leaves added to works of art for display in the 16th century.
How do you define “bleeding into the mainstream” such that doing is less often doesn’t imply “smaller market share”?
I mean, I explain it in the essay. But picture a Venn Diagram with a big “mainstream” circle, and smaller “artsy fartsy” circle. Now picture them slightly further apart so the overlapping area is smaller, but the circles remain the same size.
Don’t get me wrong, if you told me weird and challenging art indeed does have a smaller percentage of the market share than it used to, I would believe you, that’s just not what the essay is about, and I also don’t have that data to back it up anyway.
I think they also meant to say that challenging art has always failed to bleed into the mainstream much
Yeah I understood with what they were saying, it’s just not at all what the actual post is about.
