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Astra Taylor is a documentary filmmaker who has described her work as the “steamed broccoli” in our cultural diet. Her last film, “Examined Life,” depicted philosophers walking around and talking about their ideas. She’s 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,” Taylor writes. “Free culture, like cheap food, incurs hidden costs.” Instead of serving as the great equalizer, the web has created an abhorrent cultural feudalism. The creative masses connect, create and labor, while Google, Facebook and Amazon collect the cash.
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 régime 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 paychecks, 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 Beyoncé, 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 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.
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).
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. O.K., 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. You might say virality is the promise that keeps the proletariat toiling in the cultural factories, instead of revolting and asking for something better.
“The People’s Platform” has the flavor of a “Roger & Me” for the American cultural industries, and it will resonate with those in the creative classes who have seen their lives made harder by the web: writers of serious nonfiction, musicians, playwrights, novelists and investigative journalists. Combined, these make for a highly sympathetic class. But to the extent that Taylor condemns the web as generally bad for culture, the narrative is not free of complications. For one thing, her critique is far weaker for the part-timers, hobbyists and amateurs who use the web: 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 same), are really just categories unto themselves. The uncomfortable fact that 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. 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. Netflix and YouTube are a bonanza for lovers of obscure television and film. And while many in publishing hate Amazon with a passion once reserved for television, no one can deny that readers can nowadays buy more books for less. A full accounting cannot ignore just how accessible culture has become.
Leaving aside these complications, 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.
The tech industry might be tempted to dismiss Taylor’s arguments as merely a version of typewriter manufacturers’ complaints circa 1984, but that would be a mistake. “The People’s Platform” should be taken as a challenge by the new media that have long claimed to be improving on the old order. Can they prove they are capable of supporting a sustainable cultural ecosystem, in a way that goes beyond just hosting parties at the Sundance Film *Festival?
We see some of this in the tech firms that have begun to pay for original content, as with Netflix’s investments in projects like “Orange Is the New Black.” It’s also worth pointing out that the support of culture is actually pretty cheap. Consider the nonprofit ProPublica, which employs investigative journalists, and has already won two Pulitzers, all on a budget of just over $10 million a year. That kind of money is a rounding error for much of Silicon Valley, where losing billions on bad acquisitions is routinely defended as “strategic.” If Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon truly believe they’re better than the old guard, let’s see it.
THE PEOPLE’S PLATFORM Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
By Astra Taylor 276 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $27.
In Electric Objects’ pop-up showroom in Manhattan, party guests viewed digital artwork on the company’s screen devices.Credit Tina Fineberg for The New York Times Jake Levine, an entrepreneur in New York, likes the kind of art that tends to be popular on the Internet — cleverly Photoshopped pictures, and animated images like GIFs — and wanted a way to get it off his computer and onto a wall, alongside more traditional works like photographs and paintings. But how do you hang pixels on a wall? He considered his options. Yes, digital picture frames were inexpensive and widely available, but they tended to be small and unsophisticated. And it seemed wasteful to hang a tablet or an expensive monitor on a wall — where it would be tempting to use the device for web browsing or watching movies instead of enjoying a piece of art.
Eventually, he put together a digital canvas by using an inexpensive monitor and a computer called a Raspberry Pi. The display was controlled by a simple web app that allowed him to select images online and to change them instantly, with a click.
It was promising enough that Mr. Levine decided to quit his job as the general manager of Digg, a news site, and to focus on building these screens full time.
Jake Levine, center, wants to cultivate networks of artists who create works exclusively for the screens.Credit Tina Fineberg for The New York Times Mr. Levine named his company Electric Objects and raised $1.7 million through a seed round of venture financing in April to rent an office and hire employees. To generate feedback, he also used the money to build and send out a hundred prototypes to other entrepreneurs and artists. He plans to sell a polished version of his prototype for $299 later this year.
The first time I heard about the company, I wasn’t sure that the concept had broader market appeal, largely because I’m not convinced that people would want more screen devices in their homes. As someone who owns a tablet, a smartphone and a laptop, I definitely didn’t. I have even resisted buying a television. But after seeing a prototype, I was impressed by the simplicity of the machine. And if people are willing to buy stand-alone gadgets to play music, monitor their health and help manage their homes, why not purchase one for culture and art?
Mr. Levine isn’t the only entrepreneur who sees a market here. Several competitors, including Instacube and FRM, are working on similar approaches to digital installations for the home.
Yugo Nakamura, co-founder and creative director of FRM, based in Tokyo, said he saw his digital frame as a service for creators and fans of visual culture.
“If we look to the future, screens will be seen as a dominant medium like the canvas was for centuries,” he said in an email. “It’s what we create with these tools that will be remembered most.”
He said people would be drawn to the art that the screen fosters, and not only to the device itself. The hardware is secondary to the art. “I’m not sure if our experiment will ‘rule the future’ so to speak, but the timing seems right,” he said.
Both Mr. Levine and Mr. Nakamura plan to cultivate networks of artists who create works exclusively for the screens, which people could buy through an online store. The larger goal is not simply to reproduce famous photos and paintings, but to support a growing community of artists who create computer animations and images.
“The reason people aren’t paying for digital art is because the experience doesn’t feel viable,” Mr. Levine said. “It mostly feels like taking the offline art world and porting it online.”
“If we look to the future, screens will be seen as a dominant medium like the canvas was for centuries,” said Yugo Nakamura, co-founder and creative director of FRM.Credit
Zoë Salditch, a curator who has experience working with experimental and new-media artists, is developing the network of artists at Electric Objects. She said that using screens to display interactive or digital art was quite common in the art world, but not yet among consumers.
“You see this kind of device in a hacked version in galleries all the time,” she said. But it can be difficult and expensive for art aficionados who don’t have a hardware and software background to recreate it.
“This device makes it an all-in-one,” and available at a much lower price, she said.
Ms. Salditch is working on building an “artists in residence” program through the company that supplies a stipend and a prototype of the screen to a number of digital artists, to encourage them to create pieces designed specifically for the device.
Robin Sloan, author of a futuristic novel called “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore,” has been playing around with an Electric Objects prototype. He says that these kinds of devices play to our current cultural fascination with image creation and sharing on sites like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr, but in a much more meaningful way
“The whole social Internet is built on images,” he said. “And there’s no denying that all of these systems seem to want us to consume more images, faster, all the time. Which ends up being kind of gross, I think.”
The Electric Objects device has some social features, like allowing people to see what their friends have displayed in their homes and to choose to display the same images. But it won’t allow checking email, for example.
For Mr. Sloan, who has also worked at media companies like Twitter and Current TV, the screen’s minimalist nature is what makes it so appealing: It allows only one image to be shown at a time.
“It actually insists upon a slower, more thoughtful pace” of cultural consumption, he said.
That’s exactly the kind of retro-futuristic experience that Mr. Levine hopes people will be willing to pay for.
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