A Year in Reading: The Dark Side of Progress
December 10, 2024 at 01:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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Living through cultural shifts is an odd experience. You may know at some level that all things are transitory, but you rarely think how “all things” includes the constants and variables of day-to-day life. Then you look back at all the pieces you read and recommended over the past year and realize you’re not just in the middle of one cultural shift—you’re in the middle of many cultural shifts. And they all boil down to the fact that technology and money are rewriting our cultural bedrock.
I know, I know. Duh. But the breadth is still surprising. Name me an area of human experience that feels stable, and I’ll show you a stellar piece of journalism from this year that proves otherwise. TV, movies, and other screen-based storytelling? Even putting aside the fact that writers, directors, and actors all went on strike at the same time in 2023, the entertainment industry has still gotten itself into a bit of an existential pickle. Apparently, that’s what happens when the widespread deregulation of 30 years ago meets cheap money and private-equity investors. Daniel Bessner’s “The Life and Death of Hollywood” in Harper’s outlines the conundrum expertly enough to make you realize that superhero fatigue and sequelitis are but symptoms of the larger disease. To pull an analogy from the seemingly doomed world of prestige TV: Creative work used to feel like Mad Men; now it feels a lot like Severance. Screenplays as macrodata refinement.
Music isn’t faring much better. Yes, 2024 has seen some incredible work from incredible artists, but the economics of creativity make much less sense in the Spotify era than they did even a decade ago. For The New York Times Magazine, Brett Martin profiles Matt Farley, a man living in Massachusetts who has recorded and released more than 24,000 songs—as many as 50 a day. His manic pace provides him with a comfortable living, but it also embodies how difficult it is for any artist to break through, not just the ones who perform two-minute ditties about poop and birthdays. Certainly, there are few creators working today in any medium, Martin writes of Farley, who would not recognize the anxiety he embodies: that their work now lives or dies by the vagaries of opaque algorithms serving a bottomless menu of options to an increasingly distracted public. And that if they don’t bow to the demands of these new realities, their work—and by extension, they—will simply disappear.
At least sex is still an honest transaction, right? Not so fast. OnlyFans may have shifted the power dynamics around the porn industry and given control to the people in front of the camera, but it’s also commercialized an illusion of intimacy that’s impossible to support at scale. This has led to a new cottage industry: people who chat with OnlyFans patrons as the creator, juggling multiple conversations and upselling (on said creator’s behalf) all the while. Invariably, these people are based in the Global South and paid meagerly to engage in what amounts to professional catfishing. Brendan Koerner joins their ranks for a Wired story and delivers a sobering look at the decentralized future of the call center. Once again, the promise of ease—of abundance, of always-on-ness, and of connection itself—masks a support apparatus that’s deeply unwell. The iceberg is rotten, folks.
Even when you peel away art and commerce, information itself is in a state of flux. For years, we’ve found what we’re looking for online by allowing bots called web crawlers to worm their way through the internet, reading the metadata and content of various sites so that search engines could spit them back to us. Importantly, though, this worked on the honor system: All sites have a tiny file called robots.txt, and bots would avoid sites whose robots.txt files waved them off. Now, as David Pierce explains in his thought-provoking Verge story “The Text File That Runs the Internet,” the explosive growth of AI is putting that honor system to the test—and demonstrating just how under siege the open web is. For one, AI crawlers have been trawling sites since long before people got hip to the idea that their content is being used to train AI, not necessarily to make their site discoverable to other people. For another, crawlers aren’t obligated to obey what a robots.txt file requests. There are some legit (or morally agreeable) reasons to ignore a “disallow” request—like archiving—but by and large, that’s not what’s happening. (Speaking of archiving, Niall Firth’s “The Race to Save Our Online Lives From a Digital Dark Age” in MIT Technology Review gives you even more reason to worry about the precarity of the internet as we know it.) Pierce’s piece demonstrates how site owners are caught between a rock and a hard place: Even if AI startups are crawling the internet solely to enrich their own products, disallowing the bots may doom a site to obscurity.
If all of this makes you think about the role tech giants have played in our current landscape—nurturing engagement through emotional manipulation, creating untenable content-moderation issues, algorithmically sanding away the kind of art that doesn’t appeal to the most people possible—you’re not alone. It’s stories like these that help connect the dots. No surprise, then, that elements of the tech industry are demonizing journalists and fighting to tell their story their way. In the Business Insider feature “Inside the Broletariat Revolution,” Zoë Bernard chronicles a media movement, run and read by wealthy venture capitalists and other techno-optimists, that is defiantly tribalistic in its approach. If the term “broletariat” doesn’t put you off your lunch, it’s a sobering read that lays bare how technological progress has been recast as an ideological battle: “While it’s tempting to cast the pro-tech media as PR with some razzle-dazzle,” Bernard writes, “there’s another side to its agenda: to call out the enemies of tech—namely regulation, wokeism, legacy media, and, increasingly, liberal politicians.”
Still, optimism lurks deep within these stories, somewhere between the words. We create because we’re driven to, even if an AI can approximate some version of our life’s work in a single day. Because it makes us feel. We try to archive the internet because we believe that future generations will be here to benefit from it. Even if collective self-governance on the internet feels outmoded, perhaps impossible, we fight for the open web. We adapt to new parameters dictated by technology (and greed) because the alternative is being washed away. So there’s hope. And if these pieces make you angry, that’s a good thing; sometimes it’s only when we’re angry that we begin to fight for change. —PR
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from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/12/10/a-year-in-reading-the-dark-side-of-progress/
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