How Art Lost Its Way In The Streaming Era

Source: Fast Company, Kyle Chayka
Photo: Denise Jans/Unsplash; Rawpixel

Do much of our modern creative work is cheap and ephemeral, wafting through your life without leaving any discernible mark.

In 2021, Martin Scorsese, creator of films both artistically and com­mercially successful, published an essay in Harper’s, a magazine better known for hosting niche literary criticism than acting as a stage for world-famous directors. In the essay, Scorsese recounted his per­sonal appreciation for Fellini, the mid-century Italian director of sprawling, grandiose productions, but he also took the opportunity to decry the state of contemporary cinema. In the era of stream­ing video, films had been flattened into the category of “content,” Scorsese wrote.

Content “became a business term for all moving images: a David Lean movie, a cat video, a Super Bowl commercial, a superhero sequel, a series episode.” Scorsese goes on to describe the architecture of our cultural ecosystem—the content that we consume is being filtered by algorithmic recommendations, which operate based on what we’ve already seen and the subject matter or genre of the content at hand. “Algorithms, by definition, are based on calculations that treat the viewer as a consumer and nothing else,” he wrote. There is only one way to interact with content: Ingest it and like it.

That blanket category of content and the algorithmic prioritiza­tion of familiarity has undermined the medium of film, Scorsese argued: “The cinema has always been much more than content, and it always will be.” What gets lost is the deeper art form of cinema, the medium that changed his life and the lives of so many others, the aesthetic and even moral challenges that come through the silver screen. Watching great movies was not always comfortable; the experience went beyond banal consumption and aspired to inter­rogating social norms and enabling viewers to discover new senses of self.

Scorsese used the example of Fellini’s films as the opposite of digestible content and the pinnacle of filmmaking as art. Fellini’s 1963 film 8½ is the pinnacle of the director’s oeuvre for Scorsese, a fragmentary, self-referential meditation on the life of an artist. Scorsese described the moment the movie debuted: “People argued over it endlessly: The effect was that dramatic. We each had our own interpretation, and we would sit up till all hours talking about the film—every scene, every second. Of course, we never settled on a definite interpretation.” It was so strange and unfamiliar that Scor­sese had to digest it slowly, incorporating its influence into his own later movies.

The paranoia that I hear in Scorsese’s essay is that the art of the twenty-first century no longer holds up to such scrutiny. Instead, it’s cheap and ephemeral, wafting through your life without leaving any discernible mark. (The passion of his writing shows just how much Scorsese was marked by Fellini, an impact that he was still processing six decades later.) That may be because to fit into digital feeds, in order to attract those pernicious likes and further promote itself as much as possible, culture has to be content first and art second—if at all. Scorsese’s complaints can be chalked up to his position as an elder statesman of his medium; some may even find his position retrograde. The world has changed since his youth; he no longer needs to think about what is new, because his reputation and level of access mean he can create whatever he wants. But others shared his sense of ennui and anxiety, echoing Scorsese’s lament that something about algorithmic recommendations has robbed culture of its innate meaning. In an interview with NPR, the producer Barry Diller com­mented, “These streaming services have been making something they call ‘movies.’ They ain’t movies. They are some weird algorith­mic processes that has created things that last 100 minutes or so.”

“Much of culture now has the hollow, vacant feeling of having been made by algorithm,” wrote the critic Dean Kissick, one of the more incisive commentators on contemporary culture, in 2021. “Algo­rithmic” has become a byword for anything that feels too slick, too reductive, or too optimized for attracting attention: a combination of high production values with little concern for fundamental content. I feel that emptiness, too. By the late 2010s and early 2020s, it seemed as though many cultural forms—books, TV shows, mov­ies, music, and visual art—primarily existed to garner ephemeral attention and populate the way that a masterpiece that will be revisited decades hence sticks.

For me, a major signal came from the style of painting that became popular in the art world, with young artists netting huge prices from galleries and auctions. In 2014, the art critic and painter Walter Rob­inson coined the term “zombie formalism” to describe it. Zombie formalism was abstract expressionism shorn of its emotion and gran­deur, with canvases of mushy brushstrokes or cold monochromes from the likes of Oscar Murillo and Jacob Kassay. The critic Jerry Saltz echoed that it was “look-alike art.” Their tendency toward the meaninglessly decorative led the way to a slew of painters depict­ing glossy surrealist scenes, like Emily Mae Smith’s paintings of anthropomorphized broomsticks. (Dean Kissick labeled it “zombie figuration.”)

These were paintings adapted for Instagram, which was also where collectors increasingly tended to discover and buy them (often without seeing the art in person), mediated yet again by algo­rithmic recommendations. They could resell it frictionlessly on the same platforms as easily as resharing a post. In 2014, the infamous appropriation artist Richard Prince shortcut the process and pro­duced a series of “paintings” that were actually printed replicas of found Instagram posts, which sold for prices up to $100,000.

Part of the fear of algorithmically driven art is the obviation of the artist: If viable art can be created or curated by computer, what is the point of the humans producing it? An artist like Mike Winkel­mann, known by his alias Beeple, built up over two million followers on Instagram with his slapdash CGI cartoons, but that success required posting every day and rarely rising above the intellectual level of a thirteen-year-old boy. (Early in the 2021 boom for non­ fungible tokens, Beeple artwork sold at Christie’s for $69 million, both a joke and an entirely serious demonstration of popularity.) It’s easy to worry about your own looming obsolescence as a creator. But consumers are equally affected. In a 2022 essay, Jeremy Larson, an editor at the music magazine Pitchfork, complained that the algorithmic experience of listening to music on Spotify was getting in the way of the music itself. “Even though it has all the music I’ve ever wanted, none of it feels necessarily rewarding, emotional, or personal,” Larson wrote. Though the artists’ intentions may not have changed, “music becomes an advertisement for the streaming service, and the more time and attention you give it, the more it benefits the tech company.” The platform becomes a filter, and sometimes a barrier, for the listener’s relationship to the artist and their work.

And not every artist allows the streaming service to broadcast their music in the first place. Musicians like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell have removed their catalogs from Spotify to protest some of the company’s decisions, including funding podcasts that promulgate political and cultural conspiracy theories. It took years to negotiate digital rights for Aali­yah’s catalog of music; it wasn’t available on Spotify until 2021. The musicians’ absence makes them harder to access and perhaps easier for a Spotify subscriber to forget about—or never discover in the first place—since the service encompasses so much of its users’ listening habits. Its recommendation algorithms would fail to promote Aaliyah, Young, or Mitchell even if a listener might like them because Spotify can’t profit from the listen. It passively limits how we perceive music. Larson described it as “a fabricated reality meant to replace the random contours of life outside the app.”

In an evocative metaphor for our collective algorithmic con­sumption, Larson wrote that “millions of users now sit side by side at the ledge of one great big trough of recorded music for the monthly price of a Chipotle burrito.” It’s a symbolic and literal devaluing of the medium; as low as that subscription price is, Spotify passes on little of it to actual artists. Before the advent of buffet-style streaming services and infinite feeds, the scarcity of a single vinyl record, cassette tape, or CD provided an incentive for a listener to get to know an artist’s work, because otherwise the monetary investment in the music might not feel worth it. The promise of an algorithmic feed is that if the music becomes at all boring or tiresome, you can flip to the next song. That next recommendation will probably stick to the limits of your predetermined taste, and you won’t have paid anything more for it.

I get the same feeling that Larson describes when I watch Netflix shows, especially when binging multiple episodes of a series at once. Sure, the shows are enjoyable—so enjoyable that I can’t stop watching them. But I can’t name many Netflix-produced shows that have stuck with me. My personal streaming addiction is to food documentaries. I’ll watch anything within that category: travel shows highlighting street food from different continents or a biopic that follows a Michelin-starred chef with copious B-roll of steaks hitting the grill. Given that few of these productions have charismatic individual hosts—their required presence would make it more difficult to manufacture episodes in high volume—they all blur together in my memory like one long screen saver. These shows are the equivalent of monotonous Instagram posts from tourist destinations­ fodder for empty likes and thoughtless engagement, the endless reproduction of content.

It’s not that such content can’t be artful; the innovation of produc­tions that Netflix acquired like Jiro Dreams of Sushi and the follow­ up series Chef’s Table was to focus on visual beauty above all, with soft-focus cameras trained on food close-ups. They translated the food porn of Instagram photos into television. Yet the artfulness was yoked to the need to be placid, undisruptive, and ambient­, developing the audiovisual equivalent of perfect linen bed sheets. The productions inspire no thoughts, only sensory pleasure. Unlike the curation required in an art-house cinema or an independent video rental store to ensure that each offering stands on its own, the shows didn’t have to provide meaningful one-off experiences; they could simply exist in bulk as a numbing narcotic. Contrast the empty calories of ambient food documentaries with the rise of the Food Network cable channel in the 1990s and 2000s, which prompted the evolution of chef-celebrities and caused a sea change in the culture of home cooking. On streaming services, actual cooking shows are notably absent, as if they might encourage too much physical activity that would take away from time spent looking at a screen. What remains is pure, unproductive, hypnotic entertainment, because the core purpose is simply to have the viewers leave the service on as “active users.”

Netflix has gone so far as to produce replicas of its shows, set in different countries and using different languages. Home for Christmas began as a Norwegian miniseries about a single woman in the rural town of Røros trying to find a boyfriend before the holidays; it was remade almost shot by shot in the Italian I Hate Christmas, set in Chioggia—a cheap way to double your content. Once a formula works, it is repeatable, or scalable, across Netflix’s vast global audience, who end up unknowingly consuming the same material. The replicated show can be served to any possibly interested viewer via algorithmic recommendation.

Earlier in the streaming era, Netflix was infamous for its autoplay feature, which was introduced in its first form in 2016. When a TV episode or movie ended, a timer counted down ten seconds and then another show or film started, either the subsequent episode in the series or an algorithmically recommended alternative. In a 2019 post on the forum Hacker News, one Netflix engineer recalled that the original ten seconds caused “the biggest increase in hours watched”; five was too jarring and fifteen too slow. At the time, autoplay felt like a radical departure. Wasn’t a TV episode simply supposed to stop? On cable, you’d usually have to wait a week for the next episode in a series. But since Netflix most often added entire television seasons at once, the feature all but mandated binge-watching. It also pushed users to coast along algorithmic lines of consumption, perhaps sticking to a given genre, like Jane Austen remakes or action movies featuring aliens, as it recommended one example after another. (Variety is a difficult concept for recommendation algorithms.)

After Netflix played three episodes in a row without the user stopping the autoplay function, or after ninety minutes of contin­uous watching, the app even stopped itself and a fateful message appeared on screen asking, “Are you still watching?” This feature persists today. In part, it was a safeguard against the service remaining on after the user fell asleep in front of the TV. The times that I encountered it, in the dim illumination of the living room at night or emanating from my laptop screen, I felt a tinge of embarrassment. It wasn’t that I was asleep, it was just that I was watching way more TV than I usually did, one episode sliding implacably into the next before I had the willpower to stop it. Binging was something that the platform itself encouraged me to do, and yet the warning message implied that it was negative. By the 2020s, however, autoplay had become the norm via YouTube and TikTok: you would never expect a feed to end. All culture is now content, and the platforms we use to access it encourage us to treat it as interchangeable.

In 2007, Amazon launched Kindle Direct Publishing, a marketplace for eBooks, which were consumed on its new Kindle e-reader. Over time, KDP became a hub for self-published authors who circumvented the traditional hierarchy of agents, editors, and bookstores by going online, where new books were automatically recommended to readers using the same mechanisms as blouses or blenders in the Amazon store. The content that succeeded on KDP was a departure from what succeeded in the established literary world, too. It was a space for literature-as-content, where subject specificity and word volume far outweighed the opinions of critics. The more books an author produced, the better. According to one estimate, KDP offered over twelve million ebooks in 2022. Amazon wasn’t just controlling e-books; in 2019, its larger digital storefront made up three-quarters of online sales of new books for adults and almost half of all new book sales overall. In other words, much of lit­erature is forced to move through Amazon’s platform to reach consumers, which pressures books into particular forms—high-volume series confined to specific genre categories and released consistently over time in a drip of content—the same way a tweet has to be written to succeed in the Twitter feed.

The Stanford University professor Mark McGurl has studied how modernist literature evolved through the twentieth century, including tracking how the development of fiction MFA programs influenced mid-century novels. Novelists-turned-professors, taking jobs to support their writing practice, tutored their students at institutions like the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, often pushing them toward a style of self-conscious literary realism from a personal perspective. Wendell Berry, Richard Ford, Michael Chabon, Rick Moody, and Tama Janowitz were some of the successes of the MFA-program model. Today, MFA programs still act as gatekeepers, helping pub­lishers identify new talent and ushering novelists into the profes­sionalized industry.

The handpicked nature of such programs, and the insular, handshake nature of the publishing industry, maintain the ability to promote a singular or challenging artist—an act of tastemaking—though they are by nature somewhat elitist. McGurl identified the looming homogeneity of MFA style. But algorithmic gatekeepers can come first. Young writers often find ways to cultivate public presences online even before they enter MFA programs, on Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok. They subject their voices to the force of social media flattening. These pre-prepared personae might even help in competitive grad school applications. At each step of the process, a literary idea is tested for its ability to draw online engagement in a marketplace of attention.

McGurl now sees us entering into an Amazon era of literature, in which the company is an aesthetic as well as a commercial arbiter. It is “offering itself as the new platform of literary life,” McGurl wrote in his 2021 book Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon. The platform’s measure of quality is quantity, the same ruthless metric of engagement as other algorithmic feeds. More purchases, and more pages read, meant that a book was better than its peers. Not only did a book cover have to be designed to be legible on a small screen, but the writing also had to be optimized for page turning, as it were—grabbing the reader’s attention with each successive line. (This is a quality that good writing often has, of course, but not always.)

On one hand, this is a kind of democratization: Anyone can publish a book and give it a chance to be sold through the exact same channels, presented in the same way. There is no obstacle of a store’s book buyer or the curation of a front table; just the math of the algorithm. The hyper-bestselling author Colleen Hoover provides an example of the opportunities. Hoover began by self-publishing her novels, which often fall into romance, thriller, and young-adult categories, on Amazon. The success of her first two led a mainstream publisher, Atria Books, to republish them in 2012, and her novels began to consistently hit bestseller lists. (Hoover stuck with self­ publishing for her third novel, despite other offers.) During the pan­demic, Hoover made eBooks of her backlist free—another strategy to boost digital engagement—and sparked a wave of fans on TikTok, where the nascent book community made tearful testaments to her writing’s impact. Sales of her more than twenty books are estimated above twenty million copies, “more books than James Patterson and John Grisham combined,” as The New York Times reported. The flywheel has accelerated even outside of Hoover’s control: “I read other people’s books, and I’m so envious. I’m thinking, Oh my God, these are so much better, why are mine selling the way they are?” she told the Times in 2022.

On the other hand, the requirement of mass engagement is a departure from the history of literature, in which the opinions of editors and academics have mattered far more than how many copies of a book initially sells. The literary canon, McGurl wrote, is “a thing Amazon has no particular relation to at all except as a list of books that students tend to purchase.” As filtered by the platform, “all fiction is genre fiction,” he wrote, whether an experimental novel that took a decade to write or the fifth volume in an endless series of erotica eBooks. McGurl identified certain genres that found a successful home in Amazon’s KDP marketplace. Romance books played well, including niche subgenres like “alpha billionaire romance,” Fifty Shades of Grey being the most famous example, and “threesome MMF military.” (It’s not a coincidence the genre names themselves resemble search-engine optimization language.) Epics were another hit, including sprawling fantasy series.

At its most observable, the phenomenon of Amazon Literature is confined to a relatively small space: the digital storefront and the Kindle reader. Both are relegated to specific situations and might be particularly amenable to activities like reading guilty pleasures—on Kindle, no one can see the title of the book you’re reading. It’s easy enough to avoid the algorithmic influence and go to a physical book­ store, where a clerk might make a personal recommendation. Yet McGurl also linked the consumption habits that Amazon condi­tioned readers into with the rise of high-literary genres like 2010s autofiction—echelons of the publishing industry that were not seen as so algorithmic nor market-driven.

Autofiction is a genre “centering on a barely fictionalized writer­ protagonist,” McGurl wrote. Though it originated in France in the 1970s, coined by the theorist Serge Doubrosky, it came into vogue more recently with the success of novelists including Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, and Karl Ove Knausgaard. Their work is connected by a close but ambiguous relationship between author and narrator: Is the “I” of Cusk’s Outline trilogy of novels begin­ning in 2014 really Cusk herself, like a memoir, or are the narrator and the events within pure fiction? The appeal comes from the voyeuristic tension of guessing which is which. Of course, readers are intimately familiar with this dynamic from social media, where other people present their lives and selves with varying degrees of truthfulness, whether in tweets or photos. Autofiction is a bit like an influencer’s Instagram account: fragmented, non-narrative, and often deceptive.

Per McGurl’s analysis, both Karl Ove Knausgaard and Rachel Cusk’s autofiction novels came in series, offering readers a high volume of content, and presented a vicarious, almost consumerist view of the life of a successful writer. At times the books shade into a form of wish fulfillment, at least for their cultural-elite target audience. One buys the book as if one is buying the lifestyle of far-flung residencies and author panels, reading it as if watching a reality TV show. “I need the next volume like crack,” Zadie Smith once wrote of My Struggle, the same thing you might say of a season of Real Housewives. I think Cusk and Knausgaard are two of the more interesting novelists of the twenty-first century, but I might unwittingly overlook the degree to which the seemingly avant-garde literary style masks their books’ much more banal and mainstream content. Upon a recent reread, I was reminded of just how much of Cusk’s Transit, the second in her Outline trilogy, consists of anecdotes about salon haircuts and home renovation. Is Cusk radically overhauling my relationship to narrative, or do I just wish I had a London flat to rebuild in a desirable neighborhood?

The point here is not that Knausgaard was paying attention to Instagram likes when he wrote about his youth in rural Norway. It’s that algorithms have shaped the overall cultural landscape, condi­tioning our tastes. Everything exists within the algorithmic context of passive, frictionless consumption. No matter that a book or other piece of content seems to exist outside of the algorithmic ecosystem; it is still informed by the dominant aesthetics and trends that algorithmic feeds have given rise to. The end point of algorithmic culture is a constant flow of similar-yet-different content, varied enough so as not to be utterly boring but never disruptive enough to be alienating. Reaching toward an ambitious artistic ideal may have faded in favor of refinement toward the goal of likes and engagement above all.

Many popular cultural forms in the early twenty-first century seem to have been reduced to either narcotic mood enhancements or simplistic puzzles left for the viewer to solve and then move on to the next. This extends to even our largest productions. A film like the 2019 Avengers: Endgame was supposed to provide a capstone to many years of Marvel superhero films, the way that the original Star Wars ending once occupied the public imagination. Across its three­ hour run time, much longer than the usual blockbuster, Endgame prioritized special effects and checking the boxes of fan trivia—you can spot your favorite superhero as they all return to fight the villain for the last time—over satisfying storytelling. Marvel devotees may have been pleased—fan service is the term of art for content that overtly caters to hardcore fans’ desires—but the end result is close to meaningless in terms of emotional impact or creative expression.

Rather than encouraging original artistic achievement, algorithmic feeds create the need for content that exists to generate more content: films that provide ready-made GIFs of climactic scenes to share on Twitter or TikTok and quippy lines that will inspire memes to serve as marketing. The need for engagement can encourage a capitulation to fanservice, or at least an attempt to do so. The original Game of Thrones TV series fell prey to the same problem when it ended in 2019. Twenty million people watched the finale—one of the most-watched TV episodes ever. And yet it left many viewers cold. After many seasons of carefully developed character arcs, the final episodes seemed to throw established personalities out the window as Daenerys Targaryen turned evil and murderous. The royal maneuvering that the show recounted devolved into fantastical battles and dragons burning down CGI cities, spectacle surpassing plot. It may have looked good in clips shared on Twitter but it was nonsensical to watch. It’s telling that the showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss had to plot the finale themselves, since the novelist George R. R. Martin didn’t finish the book series in time—perhaps another triumph of digital streaming over literature. Lacking an internal vision, they chased what might play well online and provided tidy answers to the sprawling puzzle. Optimization didn’t work for a narrative so individual as Martin’s; despite the great expense that went into it, the final season became ephemeral content and faded out of viewers’ minds seemingly overnight.

The first three novels by the Irish author Sally Rooney, currently upheld as a peak of Western millennial fiction, are a trilogy of romances that dramatize coming-of-age in moody Irish and continental European landscapes. They are atmospheric books, absorbing in their wealth of local detail and soothingly written in Rooney’s simple, elegant, and yet somewhat cold prose. The novels witness their characters falling into and out of love, love that happens best in rare moments when it pierces the narcissism of the young self. They also heavily feature instant-message and email transcripts, the native communication medium of Rooney’s characters. Reflecting our digital social lives so accurately is a strength of her novels. Alongside their vicarious entertainment value, they depict various social problems that became tentpoles of Twitter discourse when the books debuted, with pundits taking various sides of the topic at hand in their think pieces (in fact, Rooney was a debate-club star as a student herself). In Conversations with Friends, it was polyamory and self-harm. In Normal People, it was masochistic sexuality. In Beautiful World, Where Are You, it was economic class differences and literary fame itself, moving toward autofiction.

All three novels inspired debate over how physically attractive the characters were or should be, a fact that has to do with Rooney’s gendered position as a female novelist but also the stories’ funda­mental basis in aesthetic pleasure: beauty often drives the narrative. Rooney’s first two novels have also been transformed into literal streaming content in two television series co-produced by the BBC. The 2020 TV iteration of Normal People might be best interpreted as a series of softcore-pornographic GIF sets that would have been extremely popular on Tumblr had the platform not banned adult material in 2018. Rooney was on Twitter herself, as many millennial literati were, and was accustomed to the flow of discourse. She left the platform after she became too much of a public figure; she didn’t want so many followers.

Still, her novels are inextricable from their parallel existence online. The cultural ecosystem of our “Filterworld” puts the cart before the horse: The needs of promotion and marketing supersede the object that is meant to be promoted. Not only does culture have to be designed to generate external content to serve as marketing on digital platforms; the platforms also profit from the increased engagement driven by new content. It can be seen as either a symbiotic relationship or a vicious cycle, reinforcing the need to cater to the aesthetic requirements of the platform.

Optimizing for this equation—second-guessing a creative process in advance—is much easier than finding an alternative to it. At this point, many pieces of contemporary culture have come to resemble or glorify the social platforms themselves—all the better to be distributed through them.

Excerpted from Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka. Published by Doubleday. Copyright © 2024 by Kyle Chayka. All rights reserved.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91008765/how-art-lost-its-way-in-the-streaming-era