The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age. Astra Taylor
end—continues despite technological innovation, stubbornly withstanding the demand for immediate production in an economy preoccupied with speed and cost cutting. We should hardly be surprised: aesthetic and communicative impulses are, by their very nature, indifferent to such priorities. A vase isn’t any more useful for being elaborately glazed. Likewise, a film is not necessarily any more informative for its demanding production qualities. We can’t reduce the contents of a novel to a summary of the plot, nor whittle down philosophical insight to a sound bite without something profound being lost along the way.
Cultural work, which is enhanced by the unpredictability of the human touch and the irregular rhythms of the imagination and intelligence, defies conventional measures of efficiency. Other trades were long ago deprived of this breathing room, the singular skill of the craftsperson automated away by the assembly line, much as the modern movement in architecture, to take one of many possible examples, has cut back on hand-finished flourishes in favor of standardized parts and designs.
For better or worse, machines continue to encroach on once protected territory. Consider the innovations aimed to optimize intrinsically creative processes—software engineered to translate texts, monitor the emotional tone of e-mails, perform research, recommend movies and books, “to make everything that’s implicit in a writer’s skill set explicit to a machine,” as an executive of one start-up describes its effort.3 Algorithms designed to analyze and intensify the catchiness of songs are being used to help craft and identify potential Top 40 hits. These inventions, when coupled with steadily eroding economic support for arts and culture, underscore the fact that no human activity is immune to the relentless pressure to enlist technology to the cause of efficiency and increased productivity.4
The problem isn’t with technology or efficiency, per se. Efficiency can be a remarkable thing, as in nature where nothing is wasted, including waste itself, which nurtures soil and plant and animal life. But the kind of efficiency to which techno-evangelists aspire emphasizes standardization, simplification, and speed, not diversity, complexity, and interdependence. And efficiency often masquerades as a technically neutral concept when it is in fact politically charged.
Instead of connoting the best use of scarce resources to attain a valued end, efficiency has become a code word promoting markets and competition over the public sphere, and profitability above all.5 Music, author and engineer Christopher Steiner predicts in Automate This, will become more homogenized as executives increasingly employ bots to hunt for irresistible hooks. “Algorithms may bring us new artists, but because they build their judgment on what was popular in the past, we will likely end up with some of the same kind of forgettable pop we already have.”6
There’s no denying the benefits the arts have reaped from technological innovation. Writing is a technology par excellence, one that initially aroused deep distrust and suspicion. Likewise, the book is a tool so finely honed to suit human need that we mistake it for something eternal and immutable.7 Every musical instrument—from the acoustic guitar to the timpani to synthesizers—is a contrived contraption. Without advances in chemistry and optics we would have no photography; without turntables, no hip-hop. I owe my career as a documentarian to the advent of digital video. New inventions make unimaginable art possible. No doubt, with emerging technologies, we stand on the brink of expressive forms still inconceivable.
Nonetheless, the arts do not benefit from technological advancement in the way other industries do: a half century ago it took pretty much the same amount of time and labor to compose a novel, produce a play, or conduct an orchestra as it takes today. Even with the aid of a computer and access to digital archives, the task of researching and constructing, say, a historical narrative remains obstinately demanding. For filmmakers the costs of travel, payments to crew, and money to support time in the field and the editing room persist despite myriad helpful innovations. Technology may enable new expressive forms and distribution may be cheaper than in the past, but the process of making things remains, in many fundamental respects, unchanged. The arts, to use the language of cultural economics, depend on a type of labor input that cannot be replaced by new technologies and capital.
In the mid-sixties, two Princeton economists, William Baumol and William Bowen, made the groundbreaking argument that economic growth actually creates a “cost disease” where labor-intensive creative productions are concerned, the relative cost of the arts increasing in comparison to other manufactured goods. Baumol and Bowen’s analysis focused specifically on live performance, but their basic insight is applicable to any practice that demands human ingenuity and effort that cannot be made more efficient or eliminated through technological innovation. (Explaining Baumol and Bowen’s dilemma in the New Yorker, James Surowiecki notes that there are, in effect, two economies in existence, one that is becoming more productive while the other isn’t. In the first camp, we have the economy of computer manufacturing, carmakers, and Walmart bargains; in the second, the economy of undergraduate colleges, hair salons, auto repair, and the arts. “Cost disease isn’t anyone’s fault … It’s just endemic to businesses that are labor-intensive,” Surowiecki explains.)8
To put it in the jargon proper to the economic analysis, the arts suffer from a “productivity lag,” where productivity is defined as physical output per work hour. Baumol and Bowen’s famous example is a string quartet: today it takes the same number of people the same amount of time to perform a composition by Mozart as it did in the 1800s, a fact that yields an exasperating flat line next to the skyward surge of something like computer manufacturing, which has seen productivity increases of 60 percent per year. “That the tendency for costs to rise and for prices to lag behind is neither a matter of bad luck nor mismanagement,” Baumol and Bowen explain in their seminal study. “Rather, it is an inescapable result of the technology of live performance, which will continue to contribute to the widening of the income gaps of the performing organizations.”
Analyzing the predicament faced by the labor-intensive arts, they hypothesized two cures to the cost disease. The first remedy was social subsidy, and in fact their work played an important role in energizing the push for increased funding for cultural institutions in the United States. The second cure was tied to a more general economic prediction, one infused with the optimism of the era. It may be the unfortunate fate of the arts to stagnate in terms of productivity growth, Baumol and Bowen maintained, but increased productivity in other sectors would help buoy creators. In their view, rising wages and—more important—an increase in free time would give the American people ample opportunities to create and enjoy art.9
In a digital age, however, art and culture face a core contradiction, since copies can be made with the push of a button. Like the live performances Baumol and Bowen discuss, most creative endeavors have high fixed costs. While the hundredth or thousandth or millionth digital copy of Poitras’s first documentary, My Country, My Country, about a Sunni family trying to survive in war-torn Iraq, costs virtually nothing, the first copy cost her nearly four hundred thousand dollars.
When copies can be made and distributed across the globe in an instant, the logic of supply and demand pushes the price down to nothing. Yet when human imagination and exertion are essential to the creative process, the cost of cultural production only rises. It’s a paradox that cannot be wished away. Baumol and Bowen identified “an ever-increasing gap” between the operating costs of labor-intensive creative products and their earned income. In a digital economy, this gap becomes a yawning cavern.
To new-media utopians, monetary concerns are irrelevant. In recent years a bevy of popular technologists, scholars, and commentators have united to paint an appealing picture of a future where the cultural field, from entertainment to academia, is remade as a result of digital technologies that allow individuals to create and collaborate at no cost. Before the Internet, the story goes, people needed to be part of a massive bureaucracy and have a big budget to do something like make a movie. Now anyone with a mobile phone can shoot a video and upload it to a global distribution platform. Before the Internet, a small number of specialists were hired to compose an encyclopedia. Now volunteers scattered across the globe can create one more comprehensive than any the world has ever known. And so on.
An amateur paradise is upon us, a place where people are able to participate in cultural production for