"The Airbnb-ification of the arts." How social media algorithms are gently nudging the art world towards sterility, comfort, and predictability

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.

"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.

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.