Don’t get me wrong. Freedom is great. Power to the people. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to write a scathing op-ed about what of it makes me weary (thanks, Ancient Greece, birthplace of modern democracy). Trust me, as both a consumer and producer of content, I fully acknowledge the irony.
Dispersing legislative and judicial authority prevents a single entity or individual from abusing their position—which is generally the direction you’d want to head as a civilisation. It’s this civic participation that promotes accountability, but what happens when the opportunity to participate is too freely available? And active participants are only composed of select personalities that are naturally inclined to, well, participate?
Let me steer away from the notion of government and focus on culture. The Internet was obviously the great usher of an equitable albeit virtual society. With effectively no one owning or governing it, in the words of Berkeley astronomer Clifford Stoll, “It’s the closest thing to true anarchy that ever existed.”
Anyone with access could contribute as much as they could partake. From requiring expensive equipment, experience and connections to make and market an album or a movie, to the ability to do so without all that save a smartphone, dramatically levelled the playing field (resulting in stats like the one about lifetimes worth of hours needed to watch all existing videos on YouTube alone).
It would be beyond ungrateful to lament about the extremely wide spectrum of choice. We will never run out of things to watch when we train the machine to automatically feed us with at least four more you might like this.
Talk to anyone from the days of yore (specifically, before digital TV), and you’ll find most of them are able to bond over what was on screen at prime time. Author of The Nineties called it “the last era that held to the idea of an objective, hegemonic mainstream before everything began to fracture” in his exposition on the defining decade.
It may not be direct causation but is it possible one factor pushing an all-time high divisive climate of opinions and temperaments is the fact that we remain chowing down only what appeals to us, made by people who already share the same perspectives as us?
Our last major shared experience was probably COVID. And maybe Tiger King. Now, at the seeming height of streaming, enter Sora. OpenAI’s next big thing since ChatGPT constructs realistic videos from text prompts at a standard that is frightening. It’s great that tools to create are available for anyone to express their ideas (maybe not so much for graduates who spent years earning qualifications to use earlier versions of said tools, but c’est la vie).
It means more diversity, representation, and recognition. However, at this zenith of infotainment free-for-all, opening ourselves to alternative viewpoints is definitely going to take a little more conscious diligence than sitting back to let an algorithm decide what to watch.
