Astra Taylor, author of The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, explains why she sees the rise of sponsored content as part of a larger economic problem:
[W]hen people aren’t being funded to create work by publishers or labels or whatever, then advertisers end up filling in that gap. Advertisers are happy to see the stuff they’ve branded out there for free, they don’t care about scarcity, they want any message they’re invested in to be shared and to be abundant and to be passed along. One thing that struck me about going to … tech conferences was all the enthusiasm for free culture, and remixing, and social media, but people’s greatest ambition was to be sponsored by Chipotle or something equivalent to that. It was this weird mix of collaborative, utopian claims and this total acquiescence to commercial imperatives. I think that overall, ultimately the impact of advertisers calling the shots is a more cloying, complacent culture.
Evegeny Morozov finds that one of the most important messages in Taylor’s book is that “web-enabled innovations like crowdfunding make for wonderful add-ons to, but very poor substitutes for, existing cultural institutions”:
[W]hat does it mean to democratize culture? To some, it means getting rid of gatekeepers such as the National Endowment for the Arts and replacing them with some kind of direct democracy, in which citizens can simply cast their votes for or against particular films or books. But this is definitely not how Taylor sees it. “Democratizing culture,” she writes, “means choosing, as a society, to invest in work that is not obviously popular or marketable or easy to understand. It means supporting diverse populations to devote themselves to critical, creative work and then elevating their efforts so they can compete on a platform that is anything but equal.”
But Tom Chivers argues that both Taylor and Morozov are a bit too black-and-white in their thinking:
Taylor’s book, it strikes me, is not so much directed against the internet – even though that is the “people’s platform” of her ironic title – but against the free-market purists who are in charge of so much of it. The cheerleaders she quotes regularly suggest that what the public is interested in is exactly the same as what is in the public interest: so long-lens shots of bathing celebrities, or lists of funny pictures of cats, are just as worthy as the best 14,000-word New Yorker investigative feature. The invisible hand of the free market will always create the best of all possible worlds, they say.
Meanwhile, Ann Friedman is eager for solutions:
Yes, some of the best technical minds of our generation are being used to create ad software. But there are also plenty of people who want to use their engineering skills to fix the very social problems Taylor describes. How can we support this type of entrepreneur? After all, I can’t choose a more artist-friendly alternative to Spotify if it doesn’t exist.
I wish [Taylor] had devoted two or three chapters to such possible solutions rather than merely referenced them in her conclusion. The problems she explains in convincing detail are of the looming, complex variety that have vexed activists for generations. If the Internet really does pose new slants on these old problems, as she argues, it must also present new opportunities for remedying them.
Previous Dish on The People’s Platform here.
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