Dead, Loud and Snotty

Nicholas Carr, as great as ever.

The question for anything in our day is: can you make money on it?

the entertainment industry has long been obsessed with bringing the dead or merely defunct back to profit-generating life.

If you can give the consumer what they’re used to consuming, that’s “good enough”.

They may, to quote Mander, “contain no life at all,” but that doesn’t matter as long as they offer a reasonable simulation of what the consumer is used to consuming. Slop’s good enough.

Take music, for example. We don’t need albums from individuals or groups of individuals, generic vibes are good enough.

Because the songs, again, feel like the genres listeners are familiar with, they stream by unnoticed. Cue up Chill World Vibes or Lazy Sunday Morning, and let it flow.

All of this is interesting when viewed through the lens of “supply side” economics in social media:

Discussions of feed algorithms tend to focus on the demand side — the matching of a bit of content to an individual consumer through the instantaneous analysis of the triggers of that consumer’s behavior. Less attention has been given to the supply side — the sourcing of bits of content through the instantaneous analysis of the cost of the content to the supplier. In contrast to traditional media companies, which produce and distribute a fairly limited set of offerings, social-media platforms operate vast, complex cultural supply chains that have to be optimized to generate profit through a multitude of tiny informational transactions. Because they deliver billions of bits of content every moment around the clock, it’s imperative they find the cheapest possible content to feed to consumers.

It’s the real life equivalent of the production supply chain: optimize, optimize, optimize, cost over everything else.

What Spotify has been engaged in — and it’s hardly alone — is a large-scale experiment to test the fungibility of culture. How far can we go in replacing creative work (and the artists who create it) with manufactured slop? With generative AI, the scale of that experiment is going to get much, much larger. By automating content farming, platforms will be able to further drive down the cost of content — and further reduce their reliance on actual artists. More than that, they’ll be able to generate the content in real time, custom-fitted to individual demand. The supply is unlimited.

It’s a giant A/B test on all of us, to see whether we’ll be satiated with something that’s cheaper for the supplier even though we didn’t demand it.

What’s really being tested here is human taste. Will we accept a simulacrum of a work of art or craft as a satisfactory substitute for the real thing? Will we even be able to tell the difference?