Art Is Dead. Long Live Engagement.

Why Pop Culture is Created for the Machine

Joan Westenberg

4 min read

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2 days ago

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Press enter or click to view image in full sizePhoto by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

Sometime around 2010, pop culture changed.

The content we consumed — music, movies, television, even the way we interacted on social media — reoriented.

How?

It was no longer primarily designed for human audiences to enjoy.

Instead, it was crafted for machines to distribute. What rose to the surface became anything that algorithms could most effectively push through feeds, autoplay systems, and recommendation engines. If you wanted your work to be seen, you had to court the machine.

The objects of our cultural consumption are increasingly optimized artifacts, manufactured with the distribution system in mind. If Shakespeare once wrote for the pit and the gallery, today’s creators write for the opaque metrics of Spotify’s skip rate and TikTok’s retention curves.

And I’m not convinced this is a Good Thing ™️

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