THE PEOPLE'S PLATFORM
Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
Astra Taylor
Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company
276 pages; $27
Astra Taylor, a documentary film maker, is the kind of creative person who was supposed to benefit when the internet revolution collapsed old media hierarchies. But two decades since that revolution began, she's not impressed: "We are at risk of starving in the midst of plenty," Ms Taylor writes. "Free culture, like cheap food, incurs hidden costs." Instead of serving as the great equaliser, the web has created an abhorrent cultural feudalism. The creative masses connect, create and labour, while Google, Facebook and Amazon collect the cash.
Ms Taylor's thesis is simply stated. The pre-internet cultural industry, populated mainly by exploitative conglomerates, was far from perfect, but at least the ancien regime felt some need to cultivate cultural institutions, and to pay for talent at all levels. Along came the web, which swept away hierarchies - as well as paycheques - leaving behind creators of all kinds only the chance to be fleetingly "internet famous". And anyhow, she says, the web never really threatened to overthrow the old media's upper echelons, whether defined as superstars, like Beyonce, big broadcast television shows or Hollywood studios. Instead, it was the cultural industry's middle classes that have been wiped out and replaced by new cultural plantations ruled over by the West Coast aggregators.
It is hard to know if the title, The People's Platform, is aspirational or sarcastic, since Ms Taylor believes the classless aura of the web masks an unfair power structure. "Open systems can be starkly inegalitarian," she says, arguing that the web is afflicted by what the feminist scholar Jo Freeman termed a "tyranny of structurelessness". Because there is supposedly no hierarchy, elites can happily deny their own existence. ("We just run a platform.") But the effects are real: the web has reduced professional creators to begging for scraps of attention from a spoiled public, and forced creators to be their own brand.
Ms Taylor's critique hits hard because she's not so easily dismissed as reactionary critics like Andrew Keen or Evgeny Morozov who tend to regard the web's cultural products as the juvenile doodlings of the undereducated. She accepts that there may be plenty of talent out there, but she thinks it's being exploited; she's seen what Clay Shirky called "Here Comes Everybody", the internet's promise of inclusivity and collaboration, and thinks it hasn't been good for anybody (except maybe online advertisers).
Ms Taylor subjects the "internet famous" narrative to a particularly scathing critique. The story is familiar: an unknown artist self-produces a video, only to see it go viral and reach millions, gaining herself an interview on the Today show. OK, so then what? It's just back to serfdom (with exceptions, like E L James, author of Fifty Shades of Grey, which began as Twilight fan fiction). In any event, the odds of going viral are comparable to winning the lottery, but the lottery, to its credit, actually pays out in cash.
But to the extent that Ms Taylor condemns the web as generally bad for culture, the narrative is not free of complications. Her critique is far weaker for the part-timers, hobbyists and amateurs: the average Instagram user isn't exactly trying to make a career out of selfies and may not feel particularly exploited. The web, moreover, has created more than just cheaper versions of what came before - the core sites of internet culture, say, Awkward Family Photos (which collects the same), are really just categories unto themselves. The uncomfortable fact that Ms Taylor does not highlight is that it is non-careerists as much as aggregators who are doing the damage she describes.
Absent also is the consumer qua consumer. Ms Taylor believes we suffer from being pandered to by clickable content and a general erosion in the quality of content. But there's more to the internet than listicles, and when we consider ourselves as just readers or viewers the stubborn fact is that it has never been cheaper or easier to get at good stuff.
Leaving aside these complications, Ms Taylor does force us to consider one big question: "what do we lose if we let the middle go missing?" She sees the solution in a movement toward "sustainable culture" (which, as with organic food, would presumably mean paying more for things), along with more public support for the arts. As she points out, we've taken to assuming that culture will just take care of itself, when that's never been the case.
©2014 The New York Times News Service
