MK

Here we see a really pivotal moment of change, when art must become something that does not make people uncomfortable, so that they will spend money. The kind of person who is expected to consume art is transformed in the mind of the producer. The people who might very possibly love being expanded by what they see are never given the chance.

A democratic cultural politics would be developmentalist — oriented to learning, growth and discovery — rather than presentist. 

It’s that these reactions are so normalized online that they’re almost boring.

The means of circulation are algorithmic, and they are not subject to democratic accountability or control. Hyperconnectivity has in fact further concentrated power over the means of circulation in the hands of the giant platforms that design and control the architectures of visibility.

For one, social-media operators discovered that the more emotionally charged the content, the better it spread across its users’ networks.

It’s a genre of content I like to call “Type of Guy” syndrome, where people on the internet create a mostly fictional straw man to represent a certain kind of person they dislike and then project it onto the one in front of them.

Moreover, as the critic Rob Horning has argued with respect to TikTok, algorithms do not simply discern what we want and serve it to us; they train us to want what they can serve us. Successful platforms do not just discover what consumers want — they produce the consumers and the forms of consumer desire that they need.