T.M. Brown: “You might have heard that algorithms are in control of everything you hear, read, and see. They control the next song on your Spotify playlist, or what YouTube suggests you watch after you finish a video …”
“In 2024, culture is boring and stale due to the algorithms calling the shots on what gets produced and praised—or so the critics say … And yet, cultural algorithms are only downstream of the larger, intractable forces that shape how art is made and supported. It’s not that Spotify has made music more boring or that Instagram has made art more stale, but rather that skyrocketing rents and yawning inequality have destroyed many of the necessary components for culture to spawn and mature. Galleries and playhouses have closed; music venues get turned into luxury condos and bank branches. Some of these outcomes *are* the results of algorithms—albeit ones that garner far less attention than those powering TikTok or YouTube.
“Part of the fixation on cultural algorithms is a product of the insecure position in which cultural gatekeepers find themselves. Traditionally, critics have played the dual role of doorman and amplifier, deciding which literature or music or film (to name just a few media) is worthwhile, then augmenting the experience by giving audiences more context. But to a certain extent, they’ve been marginalized by user-driven communities such as BookTok and by AI-generated music playlists that provide recommendations without the complications of critical thinking. Not all that long ago, you might have paged through a music magazine’s reviews or asked a record-store owner for their suggestions; now you just press ‘Play’ on your Spotify daylist, and let the algorithm take the wheel.
“In that way, some consumers have yielded to a type of techno-fatalism. People know that algorithms exist and often dictate how culture is disseminated to them—and that there’s not much they can do about it, save for abandoning the platforms altogether and embracing a retro-Luddism about their consumption choices. (Not a bad outcome, actually.) But algorithms aren’t just being used to feed you content. They’re also employed to fix real-estate prices, make probation and asylum decisions, determine Uber prices during a hurricane, dictate whether elderly people receive potentially lifesaving medical care, assess the risk posed by an abusive partner, and decide who gets targeted in a war zone.
In the United States, algorithms are now embedded in companies and various levels of government, speeding along processes that used to be handled by humans. In the private sector, algorithms are attractive because they can automate such tasks as price adjustment in real time … These sorts of algorithms are a lot more sinister, and harder to untangle from our everyday life, than the ones making every coffee shop look the same.”
It could, I assert, be equally valid and accurate to state that **currency** is the “technology” that runs our world — given its ubiquitous prevalence and impact on any & **all** operations and power/control ‘levers’.
Unfortunately it also has the (unintended?) “bug”/feature of fomenting and amplifying **avarice**.
….and we’ve all been seeing where *that* leads.
“Bigly.”
ale_93113 on
I disagree completely with the point of the article, because if it were true, how come periods where housing and inequality were much worse than today were such cultural behemoths, at the same time, inequality has not grown in most of europe, in the US has and in china it has declined from the heights of 2012 when it was above america and is now halfway between america and europe
so, these two factors cannot explain, at least not alone the cultural stagnation, and there is a much much easier reason: fragmentation and choice
culture becomes culture when it is seen by the entire society and that, in turn, can have a shared understanding of a piece of art and build upon it, however in the modern world i share almost nothing culturally (of the past few years) with anyone because i have retracted to the topics that interest me which are so narrow that they cannot be part of a new culture
we make very few new traditions because we have too much freedom of content and thus, there is no incentive in creating art that appeals wide audiences
3 Comments
T.M. Brown: “You might have heard that algorithms are in control of everything you hear, read, and see. They control the next song on your Spotify playlist, or what YouTube suggests you watch after you finish a video …”
“In 2024, culture is boring and stale due to the algorithms calling the shots on what gets produced and praised—or so the critics say … And yet, cultural algorithms are only downstream of the larger, intractable forces that shape how art is made and supported. It’s not that Spotify has made music more boring or that Instagram has made art more stale, but rather that skyrocketing rents and yawning inequality have destroyed many of the necessary components for culture to spawn and mature. Galleries and playhouses have closed; music venues get turned into luxury condos and bank branches. Some of these outcomes *are* the results of algorithms—albeit ones that garner far less attention than those powering TikTok or YouTube.
“Part of the fixation on cultural algorithms is a product of the insecure position in which cultural gatekeepers find themselves. Traditionally, critics have played the dual role of doorman and amplifier, deciding which literature or music or film (to name just a few media) is worthwhile, then augmenting the experience by giving audiences more context. But to a certain extent, they’ve been marginalized by user-driven communities such as BookTok and by AI-generated music playlists that provide recommendations without the complications of critical thinking. Not all that long ago, you might have paged through a music magazine’s reviews or asked a record-store owner for their suggestions; now you just press ‘Play’ on your Spotify daylist, and let the algorithm take the wheel.
“In that way, some consumers have yielded to a type of techno-fatalism. People know that algorithms exist and often dictate how culture is disseminated to them—and that there’s not much they can do about it, save for abandoning the platforms altogether and embracing a retro-Luddism about their consumption choices. (Not a bad outcome, actually.) But algorithms aren’t just being used to feed you content. They’re also employed to fix real-estate prices, make probation and asylum decisions, determine Uber prices during a hurricane, dictate whether elderly people receive potentially lifesaving medical care, assess the risk posed by an abusive partner, and decide who gets targeted in a war zone.
In the United States, algorithms are now embedded in companies and various levels of government, speeding along processes that used to be handled by humans. In the private sector, algorithms are attractive because they can automate such tasks as price adjustment in real time … These sorts of algorithms are a lot more sinister, and harder to untangle from our everyday life, than the ones making every coffee shop look the same.”
Read more here: [https://theatln.tc/JlLZEMZ4](https://theatln.tc/JlLZEMZ4)
> The Technology That Actually Runs Our World
It could, I assert, be equally valid and accurate to state that **currency** is the “technology” that runs our world — given its ubiquitous prevalence and impact on any & **all** operations and power/control ‘levers’.
Unfortunately it also has the (unintended?) “bug”/feature of fomenting and amplifying **avarice**.
….and we’ve all been seeing where *that* leads.
“Bigly.”
I disagree completely with the point of the article, because if it were true, how come periods where housing and inequality were much worse than today were such cultural behemoths, at the same time, inequality has not grown in most of europe, in the US has and in china it has declined from the heights of 2012 when it was above america and is now halfway between america and europe
so, these two factors cannot explain, at least not alone the cultural stagnation, and there is a much much easier reason: fragmentation and choice
culture becomes culture when it is seen by the entire society and that, in turn, can have a shared understanding of a piece of art and build upon it, however in the modern world i share almost nothing culturally (of the past few years) with anyone because i have retracted to the topics that interest me which are so narrow that they cannot be part of a new culture
we make very few new traditions because we have too much freedom of content and thus, there is no incentive in creating art that appeals wide audiences