Ep. 5: The Big Picture II: What Did the Internet Do to YOU?
Transcript:
The one thing you can depend on is change.
Sometimes it feels like “classically-trained” performers aren’t supposed to be susceptible to change – some of us were taught that we’re preserving old-school techniques, that we live in this arcane bubble, suspended outside of time, and only exist within this new, 21st century, on our own time, when we aren’t being “classical” performers.
But, of course, that’s not true.
Even if you were to have no social media account, never use Google or watch YouTube, never have a smartphone – and I don’t know anyone like that, including people in their 80s – your wold has changed and is changing, technologically speaking, whether you’re participating directly in that change or not.
And everyone is trying to figure out what that means.
And, because it’s all relatively new, a couple decades ago, Silicon Valley was able to sell us a lie – the lie we were told was that the thing keeping everyone from being an artist was gatekeepers and, thanks to an internet where anyone could upload and consume anything for free, everyone could get around gatekeepers and share their work with audiences directly and so, in a way, everyone could be an artist or, as the lingo went, a “creator”. And some were able to do that, build audiences, and make money off of them – and they were used as an example of this system working. Strangely, though, it had the opposite effect overall – somehow, the internet made fewer individuals able to make a living as artists, in the grand scheme of things.
How could that possibly be?
Well, some of it has to do with the network effect, some with the fact that someone had to make money off of the internet somehow, despite the ideal that uploading and consuming content should be free. I’ll go into that more in this episode, though I’ll primarily sends you to some other sources to delve into that. Mostly, I’m going to try to stay in my lane and just say what I think matters specifically to existing as a classically-trained performer in the 21st century, not just despite of but thanks to the unique challenges we face today – yes, I’m quoting the tagline of this podcast. We’ve arrived.
So, here are two tenets, if you will, of living as a “classically-trained” performing artist in a world that includes the internet:
1) A medium is an instrument – and just like you might write different music to play to the strengths of different instruments, or different roles to play to the personalities of different actors, there’s a way to play the medium of the internet in the way it is best played. And that might mean not playing it all, or sparingly, if it doesn’t suit what you have to offer. Not everything is going to work online – not every artist’s work translates to the online world – and that’s okay. In fact, building something outside of the internet is more useful, right now.
2) The online and offline worlds are one. Despite creating things in the offline world being more important, I think, than putting more content online and even though the offline space works differently than the online space, the truth is they both make up the same world. The offline world has changed because of the existence of the online world: our attention spans, the information we have access to, how we socialise, how we think about time and spend it, and, yes, how the arts are valued. And all that changes how we might exist in, and contribute to, the world as performers, today.
So, as always, I’ll go deeper into those two points – but first I want to talk about irrational ways people spend their money or get monetarily rewarded for their work – because despite the reasons for the internet making it harder rather than easier to make a living as an artist being quite logical, there’s this magical, irrational force underlying economic principles which is equal parts absurd and full of possibility.
One of my favourite whimsical facts, is that it used to be possible to be a professional ornamental hermit.
What’s an ornamental hermit, you ask?
In Victorian England (though there are records of this also in other European countries and other times) it was a bit of a trend to pay an older man to live in your garden pretending to be a solitary philosopher, a wise old man subsiding on bread, water, and thoughts. Sometimes, ornamental hermits’ contracts stipulated that they never speak to anyone, other times they were encouraged to give advice to visitors.
Now look – this was never a ubiquitous form of employment and it was always only something rich people cared to spend money on (though, if you had a garden, you could simply leave out a small table with a book to imply a hermit lived there, which is apparently something thriftier people did).
I’m using ornamental hermits as an example because it’s such memorable and whimsical proof of how the value of human time and work changes based on both technology and culture.
Why couldn’t a professional ornamental hermit exist today?
Well, I think there are two reasons, one technological, one having to do with values. The obvious reason is that we have all sorts of entertainment technologies today, which make ornamental hermits – and fairy-grottos populated by paid performers, which were a thing people paid for back then as well – a bit obsolete. The less obvious reason is to do with changing values, or morals: I think anyone, no matter how rich, would be embarrassed to pay a human being to live on their property and play a character. It would be considered inhumane and degrading – it would be considered more respectful to simply look away as that same person lives unhoused, for example. So, the obsoleteness of ornamental hermits is, I think, an example of how people’s spending decisions change because of technology (i.e. machines doing what humans had to do previously) and what we might only call, changing mores, or culture, or values.
Value and values are two different things but they are both partially magical rather than totally logical.
Let’s give some more examples of that.
Why are diamonds expensive? It’s not because they’re particularly useful – they’re considered pretty, and the really pretty ones are somewhat rare, though overall diamonds aren’t that rare. But their price tag has as much to do with commercial campaigns and artificial scarcity as anything we might call objective usefulness or what I would call objective value. The most expensive diamonds are priced based on the the prestige of the brand name rather than just the quality of the diamond itself. And of course this goes for clothes, cars, and also fine arts.
A sillier example is the fact that NFTs -non-fungible tokens, digital images which often take the form of repetitive, 8-bit pictures with no artistic value or any use at all – go for millions while the well-thought-out video essay or skilfully-written song floats around the internet for free.
Or how about this: How come being a primary school teacher or a nurse – that is, working in various types of care work – is not one of the best paid jobs out there? Are these not skilled, difficult, and extremely necessary jobs? How come, at the same time, the most astronomically-successful people in our society are those who are able to rig systems in order to enrich themselves at the expense of others? How is that based on objective value?
Clearly value is to some extent a collectively-agreed-upon dream, mitigated by human-made systems which are passed off as some kind of natural order.
I say all this as a preface to saying that in the cold, hard natural order of the particular value system most of us live in, performing artists do not have a lot of value.
Why?
Well, I actually posed a version of that question to William Deresiewitz, author of the 2020 book Death of the Artist: How Creators Struggle to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech, when I interviewed him for the former iteration of this podcast, and his answer was quite simple: What artists (including performers) do is particularly digitalizable.
You see, the internet was build on this ideal – the ideal that ideas, which is to say intellectual property, should be freely accessible and free to share. This is actually a rather beautiful idea. I understand why that was something the founders, as I call them, of the internet as we know it cared about. That said – I do not think it could have been mere unbridled idealism that caused them to actually see this idea through, without thinking of the consequences. What’s worse, at some point, someone did invent a way to make money off of “free” content: by selling attention and data about user behaviour, turning the internet into what’s been described as a Skinner box, after a contraption used to study animal behaviour and experiment with operant conditioning.
Another problem is the network effect: put simply, that’s when a thing’s value goes up the more people use that thing. An easy example is phones: if one person has a phone, it’s not good for much. If two people have a phone, it’s a little bit useful. Every new user of phones makes the value of having a phone go up exponentially, right? The network effect is the holy grail of consolidating power over a resource. The network effect is responsible for the fact that a few big companies own the most popular online sites – so that the internet is actually incredibly centralised and successful online companies, like Google or Meta, have an incredible amount of power.
Why does that affect artists so much?
Well, the people who seized control of the internet early on decided for us that what we do should be free when online. Online attention then become one of the most powerful resources, and what happens online now appears to people almost more important than ordinary, “irl”. The ways for artists in general, and certainly performers in particular, to make money off of what they do even off the internet shrank as the internet drained more and more attention from the “real world.” It was never easy to make a living as an artist – but the internet did make it harder.
That said – some of this shift has been happening for a while, even before the internet. The moment recordings could be sold, the ground shrunk under the feet of musicians. The moment cinema took off, things got harder for performers of all types. But even way before that, with the invention of the printing press, storytellers everywhere were, literally or figuratively, pushed out of business. So, the recent AI-replacing-artists scare is really just a scare about something that has been happening for a while being supercharged.
The rule is: The moment you can reproduce something – or make something – through technology, the people who control the technology gain enormous power, and those whose work can be reproduced or replaced by said technology lose it.
I’ll give an example I found interesting from Jaron Lanier’s Who Own the Future: In Classical Greece it used to be servants alone who played musical instruments, as it was considered an odious and difficult task but someone had to do it because music is necessary. Aristotle speculated about what would happen if machines could replace humans as players of musical instruments. He said: “if the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.” In a sense, we live in a time when that has come true. Jaron Lanier wonders: “If we could show Aristotle the technology of our times, I wonder what he would make of the problem of unemployment. Would he take Marx’s position that better machines create the obligation (to be carried out by political bodies) to provide care and dignity to people who no longer need to work? Or would Aristotle say “Kick the unneeded ones out of town. The polis is only for the people who own the machines or do what machines still cannot do.” Would he stand by idly as Athens was eventually depopulated?” (p. 22). I really recommend Lanier’s Who Own the Future for understanding the moral conundrums technology poses as well as the particular system (or collective dream) installed by Silicon Valley to control the internet. Crucially, Lanier proposes how the internet might be conceived of differently, in order to make it fruitful for more people instead of continuing under the over-consolidated Skinner box version of the internet we’ve grown used to.
Now, Jaron Lanier is able to talk about how to re-think the internet because he was there when it started. He has real insight into how computation works. I’m going to try to stay in my lane and only talk about what I think this means for someone who is trained primarily in the arts and has no hope of directly changing this situation.
What do you do then?
Well, essentially, I propose understanding the online world as an instrument unsuited for the arts and therefore focusing on creating things in the “real world” – while also carefully observing how your audiences might experience the world differently because of the presence of the internet.
That’s it. That’s all you can do. Besides becoming an activist for a more economically equitable internet – but that won’t leave a lot of room to actually make art or perform and it also won’t solve the whole issue – because the network effect would still be in place to a more extreme degree online than in the “real world”. The network effect also pertains to the success of individual artists – but in the “real world” it is mitigated by space and time, whereas on the internet it isn’t. In other words, instead of only competing with people in your area, you have to compete with people around the world. Instead of being limited by how many gigs you can actually play in a week, there is no limit to how much time people can spend “consuming” what you do, once its recorded. Fame – no matter how small – is basically the result of a network effect. A certain number of people like you for your work, but many, many more join in simply because others like your work, because you or your work become something they can share with others. This is all well and good – but the snowball is unmitigated online by time and space and leads to greater and greater consolidation of attention at the expense of most “creators.”
We know the numbers on this. On YouTube, only 10 percent of channels have over 1000 subscribes – and if you know anything about YouTube you know that 1000 subscribes is absolutely nothing, it’s pretty much not monetizable in any way. Some 0.7 percent of channels have 100 000 or more subscribers – which is also not much to write home about, in the grand scheme of internet popularity. About a tenth of a percent of channels have over a million subscribers – and even though the number of such channels is growing, the issue is that the number of subscribers you need to make an impact is also growing. Granted, subscribers – or followers – are not perhaps the best metric, anymore – as Jack Conte, founder of Patreon, laments in his talk “Death of the Follower”. I’m using YouTube as an example but really it pertains to any online platform. The number of people who can actually build a monetizable audience online is minuscule. Now, Lanier argues that it would be good to at least distribute the money more evenly – you would still have great disparities between winners and losers, that way, because, online, the network effect would still be unmitigated by space and time but it would at least mean that instead of creators who have 100 000 subscribers maybe making some extra cash and the people who had around 1000 making absolutely nothing – the former might make something like a living and the latter might make some extra cash. Whereas the system in place now basically keeps most of the money creators “make” online in the hands of very, very few, primarily the platforms themselves.
The Network effect is not the only reason I think it’s not a good idea for artists to try to put their work online or focus much on the online world – it’s also the fact that “the medium is the message”, as Marshall McLuhan said, and the medium of the internet, as it exists today, is one that is not really favourable to the kinds of things we associate with the arts. I guess the problem is that there’s an arms race for attention and this has created a feedback loop between user and online content which has increasingly directed creators towards self-help, education/edutainment, short skits, and culture wars to name the big ones. The way I would say it, it’s made everything aimed at manipulation rather than communication, like advertising. People who want to have nuanced conversations, or make things that are meant to be given time to understand and appreciate simply will not survive in that Skinner box environment.
And, unfortunately, the kind of fickleness and dopamine thirst the online world encourages doesn’t stay online. It changes even offline audiences. Claire Bishop in her recent (2024) book Disordered Attention: How We Look At Art and Performance Today argues that “…this perpetual oscillation between here and elsewhere, consuming and commenting, is central to how we look at art and performance today.” (p. 16) She describes how this has shaped the way artists – both in performance and visual arts – use time, how they anticipate online conversations about their work and create works which work with our disordered attention rather than against it.
But this is where the question of how to go forward needs to kind of remain a question – and the reason I envisioned this podcast as starting conversations, rather than prescribing anything, is because there need to be many artists working, in their own unique ways, on the question of how to create meaningful, relevant work in the 21st century, outside of the internet and outside of the over-crowded and perhaps somewhat out-of-touch world of “high-art” institutions.
I created this podcast because, despite everything I’ve said, I do think the internet is good for something. While I don’t think the internet is the right place to share art and performance, I do think it’s good for sharing information, under some circumstances. Podcasts in particular allow longer-form content which can be listened to while people go about their busy lives. So, by publishing Classically (Un)Trained I am trying to use the internet in the way that leverages what’s good about it while trying to mitigate what makes it bad. I also don’t think the internet, as it exists today, is a place for socialising or forming real connections with others – what it can do is allow people to exchange information without the barrier of space and time so it can pool the insights of a greater number of people and allow us to understand ourselves within a broader context. That’s the good version of the internet – and I hope to leverage that in both the podcast and the online forum or think tank I hope to create (you can read more about that on the website.)
Technological change has been more rapid in the last 150 years or so than perhaps ever before, that we know of – and consistently technology has thrown the value of the human being into question. But I want to go back to ornamental hermits – which is to say, that strange collective dream that makes people pay someone to adorn their garden as a fictional character – the same irrationality that inspires people to pay huge sums of money for useless shiny rocks or silly pixelated images. In a way, even as the “free content” system we are living under has objectively lowered the value of every individual artist, we should also be heartened to see that we humans find enormous value in impractical, rare, and costly things – which should give us hope when it come to the value of us, as artists and performers, in a world where machines can replicate us. If value is a collective dream we may yet have a comeback.
In the next and final episode before the break we’ll go back to the value of the performer – but now we’ll ask, “what is a performer anyway: a product or a service provider or both?” And how would a product be valued differently from a service provider? And which one are you? And which one is it better to be?
As always, let me know your thoughts about the questions in this episode. How have you found your life influenced or changed by technology? How have you chosen to deal with it? You can find the contact form in the show notes.
Footnotes & Sources:
William Deresiewics’s The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech (2020)
Jaron Lanier: Who Owns the Future? (2013)
Jack Conte’s talk “Death of the Follower & the Future of Creativity on the Web” (2024)
Claire Bishop’s Disordered Attention: How We Look At Art And Performance Today (2024)
While I don’t cite it directly, this episode is partially informed by David Graeber’s Towards and Anthropological Theory of Value (2001)
Oh, and I don’t remember where I first heard of ornamental hermits but there is a Wikipedia page on them. I should make a slight amendment here and say that ornamental hermits weren’t always “paid” in the traditional sense, the way I keep saying, but often worked for food and shelter. That in and of itself is interesting though – today, food and shelter are not considered real payment and it would be considered unethical to try to pay someone that way. That’s another example of a change in values.