' Thom Bettridge, Joerg Koch, and Lucas Mascatello The Big Flat Now 283 — 289284 The Big Flat Now Cultural production in the third millennium is totally flat. The information we make and share travels through media that lack hierarchy or centrality. There is no principal authority, no recognized arbitrator, and no centralized archive. There is no perspective, no yesterday, and no tomorrow. Flatness has neither a limit, nor a horizon. It has perma- nently changed our relationship with time and space. As a contemporary metaphor, flatness describes how the invention of the Internet has restructured global society. More than 90 percent of our species has access to 3G, and there are more than seven billion mobile phones on the planet. Access to the World Wide Web is universally cheap, or even free. Any infor- mational format, from any period of human history, is available at anytime, anywhere, and to anyone. In 1993, there were just 23,000 websites and less than 40 million users. In 2018, there are roughly a billion websites, and more than three billion users. Flatness argues everything is the same everywhere. Nowness argues that it is the same time everywhere. In an era before instant communication, there was no such thing as the contemporary. Each location had its own rhythms, isolated movements and private concerns. A century ago, traveling from Lima to Linz displaced you in space, but the journey also relocated you into someone else’s time. By con- trast, the goal of flatness is a kind of real-time, i LEE Ee Thom Bettridge, Joerg Koch, and Lucas Mascatello | Earth time. On w or tota of us do i (0 is look at our Screens, syncing ourselyes back w. We feel Perpetually jetlagged. tness are not just con- t. They have colonized aking, the first thing most into the flo _ Nowness and fla ditions affecting the presena fleeting concentration of time, space, and money. Each platform has inherent format preferences (video, GIFs, audio, images, text, comments) and prescribed possibilities for integration (payment gateways, manufacturing processes, logistical networks). These qualities influence the types of creation that can take place. YouTube is driven by views—it promotes personalities and performances. Instagram consumes images—it promotes brands and products. Facebook exploits friendships—it sells access to its user base. These companies interface in complex ways with services like Paypal, Kickstarter, Amazon, Patreon, Craigslist, Etsy, and a vast ecosystem of on-demand technologies. The result has been an explosion of new marketplaces and genres of content: disrup- tive brands (rapid-production objects outpacing traditional manufacture), “influencers” (advertiser- individuals selling lifestyle image and talent), and niche products with geographically dispersed audiences (craft revivals, special interest publica- tions, tech accessories). The sheer volume of information avail- able puts a lot of pressure on the speed of communi- cation. Creative content must be understood instan otherwise there is no traction. The paradox of this output is that it must be familiar and uncomplicated but also astonishing and new. To do this, creatives _ often combine well-known, but apparently unrelated, design categories. The more obscure the connec- tion and the more familiar the archetypes, the mot surprising the result. The negative space between — references is the engine forms, such as Facebook or Twitter, the negative Over time. Petrol is burnt. Ice melts, Young People get old. Arguers get bored, Eventually, all potential is exhausted. To stimulate polarization, these plat- Subcultures), but can just as easily invo) isunity (integrating trolls), his is how flatness has come to encom-that were never previously possible. Our experi- ence of flatness is overwhelmingly big, and this has concealed the extent of its distortions until very recently. Now that we understand how differences are explored and exploited by entities such as Cambridge Analytica, we can see that flatness is not powered by sameness, Now that we understand net neutrality has been seriously compromised, we can see the importance of pursuing flatness, Fortunately, awareness prefigures agency. Flatness implies equality. At its origin, the promise of the Internet was a social revolution founded on intersectional equality and universal democracy. Web 2.0 arose in the mid 2000s and hijacked that spirit. But it is unlikely to remain that way very much longer. In the last three years, we have witnessed the beginning of a profound para- digm shift, one that is redefining flatness by exploit- ing its own internal inconsistencies. This shift coincides (perhaps truly coincidentally) with the maturing of the first post-2008 generation. They were not conscious during 9/11. They can barely remember the boom years. They have only known’ austerity, instability, inequality, and exploitation. For those of us who are slightly older, we have been overwhelmed by disillusion, and the memories of failed revolutions: Yes We Can, Occupy, the Arab Spring. This has manifested itself as nihilism, irony, a profound belief in the decline of civilization, even a sense that we've reached a cultural dead-end, But for every B: bay neo-Nazi rally, or jihadi attack, there has een a mirror: a Black Lives Matter, a #MeToo, a #TimesUp, or a March for Our Lives, “se movements have been successful First published as part of the dossier in '32c¢, no. 34 (December 2018).