I’ve just been listening to this latest interview between Rick Beato and Ted Gioia. Gioia is one of today’s most interesting and illuminating cultural commentators, and it’s especially interesting to hear him in dialogue with someone like Rick Beato, who has been so successful in building an audience for high-level music content on YouTube.
Gioia’s take on the present state of the arts, culture and entertainment mirrors my own despair and frustration, while his view of the future remains hopeful for reasons I sympathise with entirely. Some of his optimism is embedded in a faith in what he calls the ‘micro-culture’, while another element of his hopeful outlook is based on the possibility of new platforms like Substack to empower artists and writers.
Earlier this week, I read Ted’s excellent post on the changing nature of algorithms. My only qualm with the piece is the title: “Let’s Just Admit it: The Algorithms Are Broken.” The title doesn’t quite live up to the piece itself – the algorithms are not broken, they are working exactly as they’re intended to. And that should scare the crap out of us all. The intention of algorithms used to be to keep us on platforms at all cost by trying to deduce the content that we were most likely to be interested in. Now, the assumption of the tech companies is that we have nowhere to go – our presence on the platform is a given. We’re not going anywhere. In this new climate, the algorithm is no longer trying to show us more of what we’re interested in. It’s trying to force us to watch and buy the content they want us to. It is force-feeding conformity and indoctrination on a scale never experienced in human history.
What slightly depressed me about Gioia’s take on the micro culture and new platforms empowering micro-creators is that it seems all too familiar. In fact, I was reminded of this post from over a decade ago: Facebook ate my blog. This post notwithstanding, the death of blogging is old news. Nevertheless, it’s pretty heart-breaking to be reminded of the empowering infrastructure that once existed around blogging – aggregators, blogrolls, googleblogs, etc. And then, at some point, Facebook lured us all in, got us to share our blogs via our FB pages, then, once it captured us, it cut off that connection between our blog feeds and our pages, forcing us to publish or share using their site if we wanted to reach readers. Google shut down their blog reader. Blogs were once a free a democratic alternative to sites like FB and Twitter. When the only way to reach new readers is via FB and Twitter, your blog is no longer an alternative, it’s food for their machine. Now we’re left to wonder just how much of our online blog archives are being mined for AI without our consent or knowledge. There’s enough niche stuff on here that I’m reasonably confident that if I asked and AI engine to whip up something on Urtext Beethoven editions or Hans Rott, I’d be served up a bowl of the liquified flesh of my own writing.
Bandcamp has established one of the few viable models for online music distribution which offers musicians a reasonable return on investment, even if its overall audience is microscopic compared to Spotify. However, we all ought to be worried that the company has gone through two major ownership changes in the last couple of years. How long until Apple or Spotify make Bandcamp an offer they can’t or won’t refuse? Substack’s success has already drawn pushback from Meta and Twitter similar to the moves which killed blogging. How can Substack be protected from the kind of corporate raiders that have already captured Bandcamp?
I once wrote here about how phenomena of micro-brewing, organic food, local sourcing, boutique wineries etc. ought to give musicians hope that we could reinvent our industry from the ground up. Almost 20 years later, many of those very microbreweries have been hoovered up by huge international corporations.
The thumbnail of this excellent video quotes Gioia: “only creative people can save us.” Amen, but we can’t do it alone! Creative people have been trying to save us for a generation. I fear the real solutions are only to be found in really robust new national and international legal constructs regulating things like media company ownership, intellectual property law, antitrust legislation and corporate ethics. We also ought to be looking hard at creating new ownership structures and distribution mechanisms that are resistant to capture and blocking. I often tell friends about the ownership structure of the Green Bay Packers. Unlike all the other billionaire-owned professional sports franchises in the US, the Packers are unique in that their bylaws make the team almost impervious to outside raiders by controlling and limiting who shares can be sold to and when.
Even though our modern media industry has posed an existential threat to the future of humanity since at least the turn of the century, not a single major political figure of any party in the English-speaking world has proposed or fought for meaningful change and reform of media law in my lifetime. There used to be legal constructs in place that prevented things like the dominance of Clear Channel in broadcasting. There were limits on companies or individuals owning multiple media outlets in the same market, and local ownership of radio, newspapers and television was almost inescapable. The internet makes these kinds of safeguards more challenging to put in place, but the effort needs to be made.
If you’ve found this interesting, perhaps check out this vintage post:
Ken, It’s more than art and music. It’s the whole culture. By the way, many problems date back to the Reagan years. Reagan made sure that Murdoch got citizenship faster than usual. Deregulation of broadcasting started with Reagan’s administration. I’m retired, but I spent well over 50 years in radio in both large and smaller markets. But terrestrial radio and TV stations have little value anymore. The internet is a major culprit, but the genie is out of the bottle, and there’s no putting him back.
All we can do is try.