Do algorithms make culture boring?

0:00Hey guys, it's Andrea and Emily here with The Culture Journalist. So, question. Are algorithms actually making culture boring? It's easy enough to point to the Spotify's and Instagram feeds of the world and lament them for what we perceive to be stagnant cultural production, flattened tastes, and generally bad vibes. But, in a recent piece for The Atlantic, titled The Technology That Actually Runs Our World, journalist Teddy Brown argues that we're worrying about the wrong algorithms, the ones we should really be directing our ire towards, he says, aren't controlling the next song on our streaming playlist or recommending our next YouTube video.

0:37They're the mundane ones, the ones that don't tend to make headlines, or that we may not even be aware of at all. They're the ones that fix real estate prices, determine who gets what medical care, and dictate Uber prices during a hurricane. And that's just a start. For this subscriber-exclusive episode, and don't worry, you get a free preview if you're not signed up, Teddy joins us to talk about what this era of culture has in common with earlier systems of artistic patronage, the importance of connecting artists' struggles to wider material conditions, and why Rent is the real creative director.

1:33Hey guys, we are here with Teddy Brown. You may otherwise know him by his byline of T.M. Brown. Teddy, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me on. So you wrote this piece about the more deep-seated, darker side of algorithms. Darker than the ones that maybe tell us what music to listen to on Spotify. Excellent piece for The Atlantic. And you wrote it as a response to your refrain that we've been hearing quite a bit in 2024, which is this idea that algorithms kill culture or at least cause it to become stale or boring or samey. We actually kind of did a whole episode about this earlier in the season with Kyle Chaka, but this takes it a level farther and perhaps even more insidious.

2:10Where and when did you see this conversation coming to a head and what irked you about it? Yeah, so this piece came to mind when I read Jason Farragh's piece, I believe last October in the New York Times Magazine. And Jason's, you know, one of the main arts critics for the magazine. and the thrust of the piece was about how culture has really come to a standstill and a lot of the thesis was based around we haven't really seen any new mediums develop we haven't really seen any new types of culture or art emerge out of the 21st century and to me you know i'm not someone who is a huge booster of like stuff that comes out on tiktok or instagram like that's whatever to me that's sort of pop culture that's always been around in different formats and things but It struck me as such a sort of almost curmudgeonly assessment of what young people consider art and expression.

2:59And I was just sort of thinking about that. And then I actually reviewed Kyle's book for Daily Review of Books when it came out earlier this year. And I had this sort of same misgivings about it in that there was this accusation that culture was somehow slowing down or getting more boring and more staid. and it was pinning all the blame on algorithmic recommendation engines that are first controlled by giant tech corporations. And it struck me that the way that Spotify suggests a song to you, or the way that Instagram suggests an aesthetic to you, or the way that a new video is served up to you on YouTube, it's all of the same purpose, right?

3:33It's all to sort of attract you as a subject for advertising in order to sell you something. And I was thinking about this, and I'm like, that's kind of what culture has always been, at least in terms of the connection between capital and culture. I mean, if you think of a Renaissance painter or sculptor, like this was sort of in an earlier draft of the piece that eventually got taken out, but I made the comparison between someone like Donatello, who was supported by the Medici's in Florence. And the point of that, incredible painter and sculptor, everything else, but the point of the support was not because the Medici's somehow thought that the beauty was the only merit of art that needed to be created, that sort of the only thing important in this was how beautiful this was.

4:11it also served a political purpose. And I think that was a really important sort of quarter turn of all this is that when they commissioned something, it was in order to show off the soft power of the Medici family in Florence. And you go through the evolutions of these things, you see that in the record industry in the 50s and 60s with Paola, where this was about certain record label executives getting artists that they invest a lot of money in to be successful, a lot of radio play. You see that in the major gallery movements from the 70s and 80s. This quote is sometimes, it may be apocryphally attributed to Lurke Ghosn, but the idea that I don't like this because it's good, it's good because I like it.

4:49And the fact that this is sort of capital influencing culture, capital shaping things that we want, things that we get exposed to, it really, the algorithmic recommendation engines really struck me as just another sort of point in that timeline. And then sort of what I wanted to get at with this essay. And then of course, the sort of the larger aspect of that was about, well, these algorithms do exist, but really the cultural ones are sort of, you know, part of the course. It's sort of how this has been happening for a long time. There are algorithms you do need to actually worry about that we don't talk about as much just because they're really much harder to sort of understand and analyze.

5:24And honestly, it affects us as an individual. That's such a great reference that you made with Donatello and the Medicis and all that. It's too bad that they took that out of your piece but I'm really glad that you brought that up here because it's a good flag art always has obviously a patron class or it's always informed by its systems of patronage I think there's like a myth sometimes that when art was sort of opened up to the free market instead of like more of like a system of patronage like there's a long history of various like powerful governmental religious entities right like acting as patrons of art and using artists as a way of like, you know, communicating their strength or their glory or getting a certain message across.

6:06And I think there's sometimes this like myth that art was opened up to the free market and then the rules entirely changed. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But it's but but but also, you know, actually, this is maybe getting like too deep too quickly. But when you look at like the algorithmic recommendations systems of today and the platforms that we receive these recommendations on, And I guess it's like, this is why people call it digital feudalism or something. Right, right. Right. And it's just like a really important context, too, that I think gets left out from a lot of these conversations and I think can be short-sighted when people are talking about solutions or where to sort of direct their frustration or dissatisfaction.

6:45Because it's a really critical thing to keep in mind, in my opinion. I've had this conversation and argument with several writers. Dan Sinekin's book, Big Fiction, which is really well done. I have my own, you know, there's some shortcomings in it, but generally a good look at sort of how big five publishing works and how large corporations reward certain types of fiction over other sort of more literary types. And there are two sides of the argument where on one side, there are people where talent always wins out. Good writers will always be discovered by X, Y, and Z person. They'll always sort of rise to the top.

7:15You'll always have this incredible class of geniuses who can produce anything they want. And from my side of things, it's like, no, capital controls that. There are many geniuses out there who will never get recognition, who will never see a piece published in a HarperCollins or an FSG or anything else because they just simply don't have access to those people. They don't know who to talk to. They don't know how to get their manuscripts published. They don't know how to query people. And I think that that's a really important thing to understand is that these sort of gates are still down for quite a lot of people.

7:46And I think that we don't talk enough about how stuff doesn't rise to the top. Like Serena Carpenter, and I think I can't remember if she was in the piece or she got taken as well. But like, there's a reason she's famous. And it is a project from a major record label to make her famous. She's talented for sure. But like, there are also several other people who are probably just as talented or going through the exact same process. And that was the bet that paid off. And that's it for the free preview version of this episode. There's lots more ahead. Get full access to this episode and all of our bonus content, plus access to our discord community Cujoplex, which actually is how we met Teddy and found this article, by signing up for a paid subscription, just five bucks a month, over at theculturejournalist.substack.com.