Big Endings

The past year has felt like a peak in mega-budget world-spanning media
spectacles that command our attention, one outrageous finale after
another. On April 26, 2019, the filmAvengers: Endgame was released in the
United States. Less an original narrative than an accretion of capital,
technology, and celebrity, it had a budget of $356 million.

By July, the movie — the closing of a phase in the vast Marvel Cinematic
Universe — was the highest-grossing movie in the history of Hollywood; it
has so far achieved a global box office of around $2.8 billion. A month later,
on May 19, the final episode of Game of Thronesaired on HBO, the end of
an eight-season run that began in 2011. 19.3 million people watched the
episode, a record for the series. The latest Star Wars film will cap off the
franchise’s third trilogy on December 20 and attract millions more viewers.
But it’s not just the stories that are ending.

Two Concerns
This communal moment of mass culture has occasioned celebration as
well as a bout of anxiety. We’re in the midst of the Streaming Wars, with so
many different media products and platforms competing for our attention —
Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Disney+, AppleTV+, and the still-to-come Peacock
and HBO Max, to name but a few. Journalists and critics are worried that
the huge popularity and sense of universality that Avengers and Game of
Thrones achieved are now disappearing for good. The word often used to
describe these omnipresent mass-entertainment products is “monoculture.”

The Ringer eulogized Game of Thrones as “the very last piece of TV

monoculture” and Vulture “the last show we watch together.” “Monoculture
is dead, or will die with Game of Thrones,” according to Lainey Gossip’s
Elaine Lui. Now, “we watch what we like, and we cluster together with the
people who also watch what we like.” Even the era of extensive recaps was
pronounced over, if not the reign of prestige TV itself. We live in a “time of
cultural fragmentation,” wrote Alex Shephard in the New Republic, arguing
that not even the Nobel Prize for literature has survived as a representation
of monoculture.

Within the monoculture obsession, there are two concerns. The first is that
in the digital streaming era we have lost a perceived ability to connect over
media products as reference points that everyone knows, the way that we
used to discuss the weather or politics, at least in a bygone time before our
realities were split by climate change and Fox News. The fear is that we
exist in a fragmented realm of impenetrable niches and subcultures
enabled by streaming media.

The second concern is that, because of the pressures of social media and
the self-reinforcing biases of recommendation algorithms that drive
streaming, culture is becoming more similar than different. We are worried
that our digital niches cause a degree of homogenization, which the word
monoculture is also used to describe.

“If Twitter controls publishing, we’ll soon enter a dreary monoculture that
admits no book unless it has been prejudged and meets the standards of
the censors,” Jennifer Senior wrote in a New York Times opinion piece
about young-adult literature. Mass media has “been getting more mass,”
wrote Farhad Manjoo, also in the Times, responding to the popularity of Lil
Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” which went from a TikTok meme to one of the
most popular pop songs ever made, at least according to its time on the
charts.

“Despite the barrage of choice, more of us are enjoying more of the same
songs, movies and TV shows,” Manjoo continued. The effect is happening
across different cultural industries: “We’re returning to a media
monoculture,” made up of corporatized, homogenized websites instead of
smaller blogs, Darcie Wilder wrote on the Outline. Martin Scorsese echoed
the complaint when he argued that Marvel movies “aren’t cinema” but
instead bland, market-tested products without artistic integrity.

These two concerns appear in some ways irreconcilable, and yet they
coexist. Is there less monoculture today, or is culture more mass than
ever? Are we siloed within our own preferences or are we unable to escape
the homogenized net-average, consuming all the same things?

The debate over monoculture seems to be less about our inherent desire
for CGI dragons or superheroes than human connection and recognition —
the assuaging of some existential loneliness induced by the internet. With
streaming platforms like Netflix or Spotify, you never really know how many
people are watching, hearing, or following the same things you are, so
you’re never sure which media experiences are shared in common and
which are not. That leaves us consumers feeling adrift.

I. FRAGMENTATION
The Meaning of Monoculture
Monoculture is more a messy symbol than an exact term. The Latin root
“cultura” means cultivation. Monoculture in a scientific sense is an “area of
farm land on which only one crop is grown or one type of animal is kept.”
Much of industrialized farming is monoculture: think vast stretches of corn
or wheat, or the undifferentiated green of a suburban lawn.
Monoculture might be efficient as far as agricultural output, but it’s also
dangerous, decreasing diversity, depleting soil, and using more water than
varied fields. By the early 19th century, “culture” moved from referring to
plants to the cultivation of learning and taste, and by the 20th century it
described the “collective customs and achievements of a people.”

Today, the word monoculture is used to describe a monolithic culture: the

range of artifacts, characters, voices, and stories that a specific
demographic — Americans, for example — find recognizable and relatable.
But the word also evokes a homogenized space, a Monocultural Cinematic
Universe in which everything is bright, vapid, and family-friendly, and any
whimpering of dissent is smoothed over into sameness: monotonous
culture.

What Was the Monoculture?

The monoculture seems to refer to some ill-defined age of universality
made up of everything from Johnny Carson hosting the Tonight Show to
Friends, Seinfeld, and The Office — the 20th-century aegis of white,
middlebrow American entertainment, usually starring white Americans. This
was also the ascendant era of broadcast media in radio, film, and linear
television (the term for cable and network TV that isn’t on-demand).
Industry gatekeepers made top-down decisions about what content would
be made and when it would be shown, resulting in a lack of diversity that is
only now beginning to change.

Monoculture is a Pleasantville image of a lost togetherness that was maybe

just an illusion in the first place, or a byproduct of socioeconomic
hegemony. It wasn’t that everyone wanted to watch primetime Seinfeld, but
that’s what was on, and it became universal by default.

Digital Monoculture
We are in the midst of determining if the kind of monoculture that thrived
during the broadcast era can exist when many forms of media are opt-in:
we can watch whatever we want, when we want. The “digital monoculture”
could refer to the array of popular, recognizable reference points that have
arisen and are accessed through the on-demand internet, whether it’s
Game of Thrones or “Baby Shark.”

The universality that monoculture entails is valuable, because what

everyone already knows is what they are likely to keep consuming —
hence the overwhelming popularity of reboots and sequels. It’s also why
Netflix paid $100 million in 2018 to keep Friends on its platform for another
year (WarnerMedia later outbid Netflix, $85 million a year for five years, to
put the show on HBO Max).

Big-budget productions try to worm material into the now-fragmented

monocultural framework by manufacturing new universal reference points,
as The Mandalorian has with its insta-meme Baby Yoda. Piggybacking on
old monoculture is less risky than starting from scratch. The most
successful example of digital-native monoculture might be Netflix’s
Stranger Things, which merited the iconic public display of billboards in
Times Square (not coincidentally, it’s also a show that references decades
of pop culture).

Businesses turn their own intellectual property into self-reproducing

mini-monocultures because monopolies are easiest to monetize. The
streaming platforms and their various signature franchises form walled
gardens, a metaphor that also recalls the scientific definition of
monoculture: nothing else is allowed to grow there; there is no
cross-pollination. Surely the monoculture isn’t quite dead if Netflix viewers
have consumed a net 500 million hours of Adam Sandler movies.

Watching Together
More than a sheer volume of viewers, what monoculture entails is a feeling.
Linear TV gave us a monocultural feeling because we knew millions, tens
of millions, of other people were watching the same channel as us at the
same time, though we couldn’t see them. While tuned in we felt connected
to the “grid of 200 million,” the social community of American TV watchers
that George W.S. Trow observed in his 1980 essay on television, Within the
Context of No Context. (Social media is our new grid, and its fervent
fandoms in part a response to the desire for more communal experience.)

MORE THAN A SHEER VOLUME OF VIEWERS,

WHAT MONOCULTURE ENTAILS IS A FEELING.
Streaming television lacks much of that feeling because it is on-demand
and because the platforms are pointedly opaque about their metrics for the
sake of protecting their business models. (Nielsen ratings, which publicly
measure linear TV audiences, are only just starting to cover streaming
services.)

The only way of knowing how many other people are consuming the latest
season of Bojack Horseman at the same time you are is to check some
other part of the internet, like searching a show’s hashtag on Twitter. This
kind of asynchronicity is particularly deadly for talk shows, which Netflix has
been struggling to produce. Maybe the format was optimized for linear TV,
sparking watercooler chat that you didn’t have to preface with the
streaming-era refrain, “Are you watching _______?” The answer is rarely
yes.

Streaming “forces a little bit more evangelism,” investor Hunter Walk told
me. Walk is the co-founder of the venture-capital firm Homebrew, which
invests in digital platforms, and a commentator on new-media consumption
habits. “If you’re watching something early or first, you’re going to be the
carrier of that to your friends.” The feeling digital media induces is, “‘It’s my
job to get them to watch it so we can talk about it,’” he continued. We all
become the programming head of our own virtual TV network, deciding
what gets airtime and what doesn’t.

If monoculture depends on this feeling of watching together, then streaming

makes it more difficult to establish, because we watch different things at
different paces for different reasons. Though widespread popularity is
clearly still possible, there’s a newfound distinction between media’s
content — its subject matter — and its context — the social environment, or
lack thereof, in which we consume it. Certain shows rely on generating a
public discourse while others thrive without it, or find fans only in an online
niche. As Walk put it: “Some things you watch just because your friends are
watching it; some things you watch even if your friends aren’t watching it. I
don’t give a shit what my friends think about Westworld. I need the
sub-Reddit that’s going to unpack the foreshadowing.”

Monoculture is a subjective, shifting frame of reference, not a default

reality. Walk’s points underline how we now create our own communities
around consuming and discussing particular media. On Twitter, I feel like
Succession has fully saturated the discourse and become inescapable, but
elsewhere, linear TV’s This Is Us is the height of popularity.

At its peak after the 2018 Super Bowl, This Is Us had some 27 million
viewers in one day, while Succession only hit one million during its recent
season-two finale. A show about mean rich people isn’t exactly universal,
but it gets talked about more intensely in certain media-dense
environments and thus takes on the aspects of active monoculture, where
This Is Ushas faded in coverage from magazines and entertainment
websites, though many more people watch it.

A Chart of Digital Media Consumption

When we talk about monoculture, it usually includes content that is widely
consumed, and socially consumed. We could arrange various modes of
digital media consumption on a chart, with a horizontal axis of the scale at
which the content was designed to exist (trying to appeal to many people,
or a smaller group?) and a vertical axis of the context in which the content
is consumed (do you actively discuss it with others, or watch it privately?).
We can fill it in with a few linear and streaming TV shows:

In the top-right corner, Social-Mass, is the relevant monoculture, the stuff

that is actively creating its own communities of interest and public
discussion. In the lower-right, Intimate-Mass represents the mundane
monoculture, the productions that are already familiar comforts. The top-left
is the first draft of monoculture, the Social-Niche content that a smaller
demographic of advance tastemakers pore over intensely. The bottom-left
is content consumed predominantly as a personal pleasure, which might
never make it into the public sphere.

Shows and movies (or any cultural products) can move across the
categories over time, and exist on a spectrum of points between them.
Fleabag, for example, had a gradual movement from Intimate-Niche to
Social-Niche to Social-Mass — the hot-priest-meme stage.

Linear TV has an incentive to keep as many viewers as possible from

changing the channel, which confines its content to the right side of the
chart: shows you can’t miss without feeling left out and shows you don’t
mind rewatching if you stumble upon them. The top-right, must-watch
products usually fall to the bottom-right over time. We get bored of them,
though nostalgia maintains some appeal. (Fleabag wrapped up just before
it fully succumbed to its popularity and became tiresome.)

Watching Separately
Digital streaming can better occupy the left side of the chart, supplying
content that we can discuss in small, dispersed communities online or
simply watch by ourselves. (For me, that purpose is filled by the soothing
Japanese reality show Terrace House; I don’t need everyone to like it, and I
know they never will.) Netflix’s never-ending supply of food shows that are
75 percent slow-motion B-roll — Chef’s Table, Taco Chronicles, The Chef
Show, Street Food — demonstrate its commitment to content we barely
have to pay attention to or talk about at all. You could call it ambient
television, the obverse of big-budget monoculture. David Chang’s latest
addition to the Ambient Netflix genre, Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner, is what
you would get if you recorded a celebrity podcast with their mouth full.

Maybe it’s not that we have less monoculture today; it’s that we’re more
aware of everything else in the other quadrants of the chart. They appear
as a threat to the old regime, which was accustomed to manufacturing
monoculture quickly and easily through the content monopolies of
broadcast media. Studios, directors, and producers of the past were better
able to dictate our tastes because there were no other convenient options
for on-demand entertainment.
 MAYBE IT’S NOT THAT WE HAVE LESS
MONOCULTURE TODAY; IT’S THAT WE’RE MORE
AWARE OF EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE OTHER
QUADRANTS OF THE CHART.
Martin Scorsese critiqued the Marvel movies’ lack of communal social
context as well as their artistic content: “To be in a packed house in one of
the old theaters watching Rear Window was an extraordinary experience: It
was an event created by the chemistry between the audience and the
picture itself, and it was electrifying.” The director is mourning the IRL
universality that his work — that by no means emerged from a universal
perspective — was able to achieve under the old system. He mourns his
ability to impose his auteurship on massive audiences.

Scorsese complains about the homogenization of “market-researched,

audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified” content. Yet in
terms of representation and access, for people who aren’t Martin Scorsese,
this change feels like a step forward. The range of widely available mass
media no longer represents the vision of only one demographic group. The
retro-monoculture of Goodfellas, or Friends, or Seinfeld, is just one choice
among many. But what do our other choices look like?

II. HOMOGENIZATION
Jazz
Rather than the monoculture dictated by singular auteurs or industry
gatekeepers, we are moving toward a monoculture of the algorithm.
Recommendation algorithms — on Netflix, TikTok, YouTube, or Spotify —
are responsible for much of how we move through the range of on-demand
streaming media, since there’s too much content for any one user to parse
on their own. We can make decisions, but they are largely confined to the
range of options presented to us. The homepage of Netflix, for example,
offers only a window into the platform’s available content, often failing to
recommend what we actually want. We can also opt out of decision-making
altogether and succumb to autoplay.

Spotify in particular demonstrates the effects of algorithmic culture, since

the decision of which song to listen to or whether to interrupt the stream
happens so much more often than a TV show or movie. For example, I
started an album on Spotify by Bill Evans while cooking dinner for friends.
The album continued playing for hours. Except it wasn’t the album; it was a
series of tracks that sound more or less like the album — syncopated
piano, upright bass, brushed drums — weaving between tracks by Evans
and other jazz musicians in a pleasantly monotonous wash. I barely
registered the change until everyone left and I went to my laptop to turn it
off, noticing the playlist that accrued, filled with artists’ names that I
promptly forgot.

The Problem with Automatic Suggestions

The jazz monotony is passive: Since Spotify’s radio function is automated, I
can consume more music without thinking about it. Without anyone thinking
about it, in fact, except the recommendation algorithm making its
calculations and supplying the next song. My own private monoculture
builds up under the heading of Bill Evans-esque jazz, a kind of jazz that the
algorithm delimits for me. We media consumers end up smoothly siloed
into how a recommendation algorithm has predefined a particular genre or
medium, like the Plinko game in Price Is Right: the chip takes a random
path down the board, but ends up in one of just a few slots. The algorithm’s
definition is often wrong, or at least incomplete.

In September 2019, the country music star Martina McBride attempted to

create a country playlist on Spotify. The platform can automatically
recommend songs to add to a playlist; in this case, it suggested 14 pages
of songs by male country artists before it came up with a single woman.
McBride was shocked, posting on Instagram: “Is it lazy? Is it
discriminatory? Is it tone deaf? Is it out of touch?”

Jada Watson, a professor at the University of Ottawa who studies country

radio airplay, tried the same experiment and took 12 refreshes to get a
woman. Even though, for research purposes, Watson only uses Spotify to
listen to women musicians, she found that: “Within the first 200 songs (19
refreshes), only 6 songs (3%) by women and 5 (3%) by male-female
ensembles were included (all emerging after 121 songs by male artists).”
121 songs! Shouldn’t a well-trained algorithm know her obvious
preferences?

Contrary to our expectations of personalization, Spotify’s

playlist-recommendation function only takes into account the title of the
playlist, not the habits of the individual user. According to the algorithm,
country = men, an equation that not even a playlist titled “Country Music By
Musicians With Vaginas” could shake. Spotify had created its own
homogenous definition of the genre, a “very narrow perspective of what
country music means,” as Watson told me.

Technology users are increasingly aware of how biased algorithms can be,
but as the rampant sharing of Spotify end-of-year recaps shows, we still
have a general expectation that algorithmic recommendations at least
reflect our own taste. Yet the country-music playlist problem demonstrates
how individualization fails, or is more about marketing than actual
technology.

We all get driven toward the same things. “You expect it to be an equal
playing field or a space where you have a greater variety of choice, but it
actually looked like any old country radio playlist,” Watson said. This both
immediately decreases diversity and operates at the level of perception: If
we think we are getting relatively unbiased, data-backed recommendations,
then we’re even more likely to absorb the way an algorithm defines a genre
and accept it as all that exists.

Addendum: A Holistic Index of Taste

Every recommendation algorithm is different, and some are better or more complex
than others. The veteran music app Pandora now indexes podcasts as well as
songs; the two data-sets are also cross-referenced, so your podcast-listening data
can be applied to your music recommendations in order to improve them.

Oscar Celma, Pandora’s head of research, told me about these “cross-domain

recommendations.” People who listen to “The Bible: Son of God” podcast also listen
to Casting Crowns and Chris Tomlin. People who like true crime podcasts listen to
Five Finger Death Punch and Post Malone. People who listen to “Fresh Air” like
Norah Jones and Van Morrison (duh). “Six Minutes,” a podcast for children,
correlates with Kidz Bop and Taylor Swift. Amazon also benefits from this kind of
holistic data set: The more it knows about what you buy, the better it knows which TV
shows you’re likely to watch on its streaming service, applying one marketplace to
the other and forming a more perfect recommendation algorithm.
Data Drives Sameness
Watson described how the country radio charts, like Billboard’s Hot Country
Songs list, which includes streaming, “have become incredibly
homogenous, not just in gender but with songs that stay number one the
entire year.” She sees the homogenization of music as being caused by
data — a consequence of the fact that streaming, radio, and record
companies can access more information about their listeners than ever,
faster than ever.

“Now that everything’s digital, we have data every minute of every hour of
every day,” Watson said. “In the past it was very manual, reported over
phone or paper — that’s really slow.” On the broadcaster side, the data
motivate snap business judgments: “If a particular style is really driving
ratings of your service up, whether radio or streaming, you’ll want to
continue to play that kind of artist, based on fear of loss of ratings.” On the
label side, the data create an excuse for homogenization. “If artist X is
doing really well with a particular style, or a particular production value,
then a label might do the same thing with artist Y,” explained Watson.

These are not new strategies, of course; culture is always driven toward
copycatting by money and the hope of a larger audience. But the difference
is how fast the iterative loop happens, and how algorithmic
recommendations intensify the effect across cultural areas: music,
television, interior design, or even plastic surgery.

We thought the long tail of the internet would bring diversity; instead we got
sameness and the perpetuation of the oldest biases, like gender
discrimination. The best indicator of what gets recommended is what’s
already popular, according to the investor Matthew Ball, a former head of
strategy at Amazon Studios. “Netflix isn’t really trying to pick individual
items from obscurity and get you to watch it,” Ball said. “The feedback
mechanisms are reiterating a certain homogeneity of consumption.”

An Updated Definition of Monoculture for 2020

Instead of discrete, brand-name cultural artifacts, monoculture is now
culture that appears increasingly similar to itself wherever you find it. It
exists in the global morass of Marvel movies designed to sell equally well in
China and the United States; the style of K-Pop, in music and performance,
spreading outside of Korea; or the profusion of recognizably minimalist
indie cafes from Australia to everywhere else. These are all forms of
monoculture that don’t rely on an enforced, top-down sameness, but create
sameness from the bottom up. Maybe the post-internet monoculture is now
made up of what is aesthetically recognizable even if it is not familiar — we
quickly feel we understand it even if we don’t know the name of the specific
actor, musician, show, or director.

INSTEAD OF DISCRETE, BRAND-NAME

CULTURAL ARTIFACTS, MONOCULTURE IS NOW
CULTURE THAT APPEARS INCREASINGLY
SIMILAR TO ITSELF WHEREVER YOU FIND IT.
A monocultural product reinforces our established range of taste-signifiers
rather than challenging them or adding something new. Is it better to
choose between a few things that everyone knows, or between 100 things
that share a fundamental similarity, algorithmically sorted into a
you-may-also-like category? The latter may not be that much more
authentic, original, or diverse than the former. In fact, it often feels
oppressive, as if there isn’t much of a choice at all. By the metric of
similarity, we have more monoculture than ever.

Streambait and Spotify-core

Each digital platform is its own monoculture, with a homogenized style
optimized for the structure of the platform and the algorithms that serve its
recommendations. There are monocultures of Tumblr, Instagram, YouTube,
TikTok, and Twitter (see all the “RT this with the worst thing you ever ate for
breakfast” tweets). The sameness creates an aura of communal
recognizability. The writer Liz Pelly coined the term “streambait” in a 2018
essay to refer to “this idea of creating music that people will stream and
continue to stream, similar to the concept of clickbait,” she told me in an
interview.

A related label is “Spotify-core,” used by the New York Times journalist Jon
Caramanica to describe a song by the virtual Instagram influencer Miquela.
Miquela’s 2017 track “Not Mine” is characteristic of the style as it now
stands: soft vocals, an airy backbeat like the echoes from a club, and slight
acoustic touches. Pleasant, ignorable, and instantly forgettable — not great
but not the kind of thing that would make you pause the stream.

Streambait’s stars range from pop favorites — Billie Eilish and Lana del
Rey — to more indie streaming grist like Big Thief, Clairo, and Cuco, who
have all made it to mainstream attention via the internet. Spotify’s
narcotized Chill Hits playlist, with over 5.1 million followers, is the genre’s
breeding ground.

Like airplay on a major radio station, when a song hits a big playlist, it gets
popular, promotes the musician to new listeners, and makes money.
“Labels have been incentivized to either make music that fits on playlists or
prioritize music that works on these playlists,” Pelly said — adapting to the
Spotify monoculture like a goldfish to a pond. Optimization comes at the
expense of originality. According to Pelly, streambait “is similar to the way
that clickbait has a negative impact on journalism, when editorial decisions
are made based on what is popular.”

“There’s a negative impact on art when such a high value is placed on what
is popular,” she said. “Popularity is not a good metric for deciding the value
of art.”

Is What Is Popular Necessarily Good?

Relying on algorithms to dictate our culture means evaluating things on the
basis of popularity, engagement, scale, and speed. Yet we already know
that what is popular is not necessarily good, and what is good is not
necessarily popular. On top of that, the data provided by Netflix and Spotify
are biased, shaped by their proprietary algorithms, which are black boxes,
not transparent and precise evaluations of human taste. With social and
streaming media, there might be more ways around the gatekeepers of the
past. But algorithms are the new gatekeepers. Their parameters are still set
by a small group: not Hollywood producers, but white, male engineers and
data scientists.

RELYING ON ALGORITHMS TO DICTATE OUR

CULTURE MEANS EVALUATING THINGS ON THE
BASIS OF POPULARITY, ENGAGEMENT, SCALE,
AND SPEED.
What gets surfaced is still a small subset of what exists, and it doesn’t get
surfaced in a democratic or transparent way, as Galaxie 500’s Damon
Krukowski discovered looking at his band’s Spotify account. Their volume
of plays from “Spotify algorithmic playlists” has been slowly declining, but
the platform gives no reason or explanation for the change. “Which leaves
us, too, a passive participant in all this,” Krukowski wrote. Passivity is not a
good quality for making or consuming art.

Mono-Monoculture
The critics giving Avengers and Game of Thrones the epitaph of Last
Universal Content are wrong: Today’s form of monoculture is both larger in
scale and less human, more mechanically automated, than ever before.
Culture is now Big Data. Just what we have lost in the transition from
human to machine tastemakers is still bearing out.

There seems to be more opportunity for diversity (anything can theoretically

go viral) and yet the cultural artifacts that do become mainstream appear
relentlessly optimized for the digital platforms of the attention economy.
Take “Old Town Road,” for example. It’s a song by the creator of a popular
Twitter account that was primed to spread on TikTok, then embraced as a
meme, and then made even more famous by a preexisting country-music
celebrity. The song itself is fine, but the most interesting thing about it is
how it’s a product of the structures that now govern our digital culture.

Instead of worrying about the loss of monoculture, I’m more concerned that
there isn’t enough room for products or projects (or even places) that are
not memes, that aren’t pre-optimized for sharing or scaling. In the end I fall
more on Scorsese’s side of the argument, though I wouldn’t wish for any
more Scorsese: The non-homogenized alternatives to the mainstream
become harder and harder to find. As we grow more accustomed to the
algorithmic monoculture, allowing it to occupy our senses, we might lose
our understanding of, or our taste for, anything else.

Lofi Monocultural Beats to Exist to

If you want a vision of the future of culture, imagine an infinite playlist of lofi
hip hop radio - beats to study/relax to, in all media — forever. Picture the
ambient-music YouTube channel’s aesthetic applied to everything else:
anodyne, blameless, meaningless, boring, designed only to occupy time.
Form will outweigh content’s authorship, originality, or artistry. The future
will be to the present as TikTok is to prestige television.

Human™ Culture
Digital-platform companies seem to be realizing that they need to move
away from totally automatic recommendations, or at least appear to do so.
They are turning to human “curators” as a way to break from algorithmic
sameness and demonstrate that there’s still a personal (that is to say
monocultural) connection when consuming digital content. They are
deploying humanity as branding.
Earlier this year, Netflix began testing playlists curated by “experts on the
company’s creative teams” with themes like “Artful Adventures” and “Critics
Love These Shows.” Facebook is hiring curators — “seasoned journalists”
— for its News Tab in order to fight misinformation. You shouldn’t let
“computers decide what you want,” the CEO of Disney Bob Iger said during
a Wall Street Journal technology conference. HBO’s latest advertising
campaign is titled “Recommended by Humans,” featuring human fans
explaining why they like the human HBO shows that they have watched
with their human eyes. Preference appears to be shifting away from the
algorithmic, similar to how consumers might prize handmade goods over
mass-manufactured ones.

These are attempts to reassure us that our culture is not yet fully robotic,
that it is still meaningful. In the end, we shouldn’t just want to consume
things that are fully engineered to attract our attention, which gets
converted into money. We should actively seek out elements of messiness
and magic, serendipity that pure data can’t provide. As HBO’s head of
programming Casey Bloys told the Los Angeles Times: “Our shows will
never exist just to exist; they all have something to say about the world.”

Bloys gave the example of Succession: The show was motivated by his
own personal desire to see a resonant story about family, not some
abstract, algorithmic calculation. He made the decision not to hire
established celebrity actors for the show, which would mathematically
increase its chances of attention, but to start from scratch with
lesser-known talent: “At HBO, we make our own stars,” Bloys said.

The result is a successful example of human taste, something that we

didn’t quite recognize and didn’t yet know we wanted (the opposite of how
Netflix claimed in 2013 that it made House of Cards because of Big Data).
Succession was an unhomogenized surprise that could be on its way to
becoming new monoculture.

The Value of Surprise

Art’s deepest impact comes when it is least expected. In contrast,
algorithmic recommendations lead us down a path of pleasant monotony: a
looming monoculture of the similar. To resist it, we should embrace
obscurity, difficulty, diversity, and strangeness as just as important as
recognizability or universality.

These are the qualities that need most to be preserved against the
frictionless consumption pushed by our automated feeds. Otherwise, any
new, surprising content that enters the machine of digital monoculture will
quickly have its innovative quirks stripped and copied, scaled up and
repeated until they become cliches. They will be incorporated into a
constantly updated global homogeneity that possesses the sheen of
familiarity but no substance beyond style.
III. RESISTING THE MONOCULTURE
Introspection
Reading the author Caleb Crain’s recent novel Overthrow, I was particularly
struck by a single line: “It’s like there’s a sumptuary law against
introspection,” the character Elspeth pronounces after getting badmouthed
on the internet. (Sumptuary laws are rules governing consumption, often
limiting what lower classes can buy or wear.) Elspeth considers how
thinking too much, or being too self-aware, might be cast as an excessive,
illegal luxury.

Overthrow is, in part, about the uncanniness of post-internet life, when you
are never sure when you’re being surveilled and what some distant server
might know about you, or which thoughts or desires could be subconscious
digital implants rather than your own. The novel’s protagonists resist the
numbing effects of automated surveillance capitalism through their
participation in an Occupy-esque protest, deploying Tarot cards and
(perhaps) gentle mind-reading powers to resist the invasive specter of
technology.

THE ALGORITHM IS A REPLACEMENT FOR OUR

INTERNAL MONOLOGUES AND OUR
JUDGEMENTS ABOUT WHAT WE WANT TO
CONSUME.
I called Crain to talk about what he meant by this antipathy of introspection.
“We’re in this moment where just being alone and by yourself and having
your own thoughts that maybe you don’t share is almost frowned upon,” he
said. There is a pressure to make every statement as unambiguous as
possible: to be a huge fan of the new thing. The monoculture actually
dominates public discourse, an effect intensified by the media industry’s
decline and the lack of opportunities for well-paid criticism, according to
Crain: “Unless you’re weighing in on the big cultural product of the moment,
who cares what you think?”

The algorithm is a replacement for our internal monologues and our

judgements about what we want to consume. Streaming’s passivity is
different from linear TV, but in the end, it’s still passive. In a 2017 interview,
the author, critic, and former Twitter celebrity Teju Cole likewise described
social media as “a monster that feeds on noise” that “could not allow for a
kind of distance, silence, refocusing of energies.” In a recent essay, Zadie
Smith critiqued the “digital maw” that digests our language and spits it back
at us, warped and commodified. For Smith, the excess of data forms a
“shadow text” that replaces human culture with its uncanny facsimile.

Under these conditions, pursuing obscurity instead of attempting to

participate in the monoculture becomes a defense mechanism and a
survival strategy.

“I personally like the idea of hiding out, finding your own rabbit hole. I think I
believe in making yourself irrelevant as an almost spiritual quest,” Crain
told me. “Every time you open a book that nobody has recommended, you
hope that you’ll find that secret voice that you needed to hear, that nobody
could have told you was there.”

The magic is still in what the algorithm can’t surface, what data doesn’t
touch — the introspective space in which you can develop your own
opinions in private before making them public commodities and measuring
them against the mainstream. Because once something enters the cycle of
digital monoculture, its essence will, inevitably, be lost. So enjoy it while
you can.

Bathroom Rembrandt
The desire for monoculture is understandable, though its disappearance is
more perception than reality. Art is communal. We want to connect with
other people over experiences that we share in common. But just as
important is being alone, having a unique encounter — not seamlessly
recommended or autoplayed — with something that another person
created, and then gauging your deepest emotional response. The internet
makes this more difficult, even as it makes sharing (or superficially liking)
things easier and faster.

I often think of something the New Yorker’s longtime art critic Peter
Schjeldahl said in a 2007 interview, a kind of manifesto for his criticism:
“Give me a Rembrandt in a subway station toilet and a flashlight and I’m
happy.” I take this to mean that the delivery mechanism of culture doesn’t
have to be slick and seamless, nor does the way we consume it. The
masterpiece doesn’t have to be shown off in a white-walled gallery and the
viewer handed an espresso in a porcelain cup. It is worth a struggle to
access, Schjeldahl argued; perhaps the struggle, the precarious intimacy of
the experience, makes worthwhile art shine even more.

Rembrandt died in 1669, impoverished, in obscurity. And yet it is his late

work, the deeply luminous portraits with scumbled brushstrokes, completely
unpopular with his contemporaries, that strikes us most today. It took
centuries for the paintings to become mainstream. The process was neither
fast nor convenient, though it may now seem like a foregone conclusion.

Digital media, by contrast, prioritizes immediate engagement over the slow

blooming of art. I get the sense that today’s algorithms would prioritize
Deep Dream patterns — a memetic style without content — over late
Rembrandt. The danger of prioritizing the monoculture is that we might not
get as many Rembrandts in the future.

Watching Separately, Together

Instead of taking the place of linear television’s monoculture, the
streaming-media internet can, at its best, be more like a digital
permaculture: an ecosystem of smaller platforms and bigger; smaller
projects and bigger; and artists both famous and not, all sustaining each
other. The anxiety comes more from the ways that we find and share the
things that we’re interested in.

At a moment when culture is indeed more “mass” than ever, accepting the
freedom of going outside of what’s already popular can be scary. But if we
don’t take the risk, the other option is boredom, the boredom of having too
much content and none of it interesting enough.