Welcome to the 1% Culture

(It’s About to Get Much Worse)

In the past decade much hand-wringing has been done about economic inequality, with the proverbial 1% as a designated pariah. Much less has been said about an uncanny parallel happening in Western culture. For we are truly living in a world where a bunch of top performers in any cultural discipline rake in an unprecedented share of profits. Call it the 1% culture.

We all intuitively know what the 1% culture means. No person today, unless they’ve lived on the desert island for the past twenty years, does not know who Kim Kardashian or Rihanna or Beyonce is. The streetwear world – and by extension every other fashion brand (and, lately, mass food brand) – is on a collab merry-go-round with the same handful of rappers and Kanye-approved artists (KAWS, Takashi Murakami, Daniel Arsham). All the top-tier rappers have had each other on their songs at some point. Larry Gagosian’s gallery can put on shows that are more powerful than those of many museums, like the one it did on Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud in London last year. This year, of the hundreds of film releases in the United State, the top five took in 25% of all box office revenue. Taylor Swift’s live tour this year earned $1.4b in ticket sales (on top of another $230m brought in by its film version) – no tour before this one topped one billion. The result is the terrible homogenization and blanding of culture, which inevitably leads to its impoverishment.

The 1% culture is obviously not a new phenomenon. There were never that many famous actors or musicians or artists to begin with. It’s not like we had more variety in the age of broadcast TV when a handful of stations ruled the airwaves than we do in the age of streaming. But there were also many fewer non-famous ones. To balance out the pop schlock we also used to have counter-cultural and subcultural movements, which have been destroyed by the homogenizing effect of the Internet. This is deeply ironic, because the Internet age promised us the “long tail” renaissance of self-made cultural creators of infinite variety. Instead we got the most consolidated top-tier of entertainment in human history. And with the rise of A.I., another harbinger of democratization of culture, things are about to get much worse, not better.

How did this happen? Here it helps to see how fame works. In order for someone to become famous, one needs the means of disseminating information, so stars can recruit new fans. The first Western cultural celebrities were writers, who became famous because of the invention of the printing press, which allowed infinitely more books to be produced than before. Then came the singers with the invention of the gramophone and the actors with the invention of the moving image. Painters were never that famous until the rise of the museums, the most awkward system of disseminating information because it does not involve making copies of existing work. Neither were athletes, until David Beckham showed them how to cunningly manipulate mass media. One research firm tried to find someone who doesn’t know who David Beckham is, and they did find one, a cattle-herder in Chad.

In this light it seems much less counterintuitive that along with the explosion of the long tail, which did happen, the Internet turbocharged the fame level of the 1%. Today, Taylor Swift does not only make an appearance on CDs and the radio, but is streamed and beamed into many more households via Spotify and YouTube, which are much more ubiquitous. Meanwhile, vinyl, that traditional refuge of counter-culture, has been overrun by pop stars. Taylor Swift and Harry Styles dominate the vinyl charts, muscling everyone else out, because, unlike streaming, vinyl is a limited physical resource. The current capacity of the vinyl industry is 1.6 million discs a year, while the estimated demand is for 4 million discs. Guess who gets to go in front of the line.

Source: the Economist

Things look equally grim elsewhere. This month saw the publication of two books decrying the end of prestige TV, lamenting that the cable networks and streaming services, who used to put out edgy anti-hero stuff like the Wire and Breaking Bad, are now gravitating back into the orbit of mass-satisfying blandness. Amazon TV puts out the worst shows, according to the critics, but commands an outsize influence by ensnaring the millions of Amazon Prime viewers. As Jeff Bezos once quipped, “Every Golden Globe we win lets us sell more shoes.” Sequels and prequels, like Amazon’s terrible “Rings of Power” and HBO’s slightly less terrible “House of the Dragon” abound. The formulaic Hollywood fair is not even worth discussing, except the fact that this is all driven by the economics of culture – according to one study cited in the Economist, “since 1980 the average movie sequel has made 4.2 its budget at the box office, while the equivalent figure for the original works is 2.8.” Good business sense dictates risk-averse behavior.

No wonder then that A.I., which promises even more democratization of cultural production and dissemination than Autotune and the social media, is actually most likely to make the 1% culture even more pervasive, because what it turns into a winding country road for the 99% of cultural producers, it transforms into an autobahn without the speed limit for the 1%. Consider just this example; last year, the popular Swedish disco band ABBA put on a show called Voyage in London. Only instead of playing live, what you get is a concert by their A.I. enabled avatars. Who the hell would want to see that, you ask? Instead of a limited show run that exhausts human energy, the “band” has been “playing,” for over a year, pulling in $2m a week while doing absolutely nothing. They even built a stadium for it, and the managers are now in negotiation with cities in the US and Australia, to take “the tour” global. You can only imagine that every other cultural 1%er is licking their chops. And you can do this in the age of A.I., and much, much more, but only if you are already very famous. And the new, A.I.-enabled competition will also come from the dead stars. It’s no wonder that venture capitalist firms have been buying music catalogs of the aging and the deceased musicians. What will stop someone from recreating a Michael Jackson concert, complete with new songs created by A.I. in his voice and likeness?

So, buckle up for the continuous stratification of culture, where the 1% rip most of the benefits while the rest plod along at best, or become the cultural proletariat at worst.