Countdown to apostasy
In a recent newsletter, media business consultant Ted Gioia wondered what happened to the "long tail," an idea first popularized in this chart-heavy 2004 Wired piece by Chris Anderson that argued that niche content was going to thrive and the idea of a mainstream would become moribund. Because of internet content delivery, "the future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream," Anderson claimed. The infinite shelf space of the internet would allow the idiosyncratic tastes of individuals come to the fore. But there is a strong stench of wishful thinking in passages like this one:
For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching—a market response to inefficient distribution.
As Gioia argues, the long tail thesis was always a "fairy tale" that "creative people" wanted to believe because it seemed to suggest more sustainable careers for artists following their muse to the delight of the"1,000 true fans" sufficient to support them — another Wired editor delusion. But we are obviously still "subjected" to blockbusters and Top 40 music and all the other economic prerogatives of the culture industry. Capitalism still means the massification of taste in the pursuit of monopoly and valuable intellectual property; it has not evolved to generate a decentralized economy of small producers, or the sort of consumer subjects who are singularly creative in their expectations and cultural demands.
If anything, internet content delivery has made for direct algorithmic coercion of consumer tastes to meet the attention quotas of advertisers. Streaming services work strenuously to shape customers' disposition toward consuming if not specific tastes, making them more passive in their consumption, more willing to go along with what is trending and what is being surfaced on landing pages and home screens. It's no accident that searching these sites for something to watch is often an arduous and fruitless chore, inducing a learned helplessness and a pre-emptive predilection to surrender to the feed.
Left to their own devices, consumers were supposed to want the long tail by virtue of the individualism that capitalism uses an alibi. From Wired's ideologically blinkered perspective, people come by their niche tastes naturally, the same way snowflakes come by their unique shapes. But "individualism" is itself a niche taste when it comes to cultural consumption. Many people like the collective experience of enjoying something with others, with participating in something current and popular, as any number of TikTok challenges and trends demonstrates. They appear to prefer straightforward choices of what's already prominent to the labor of building their own taste profile from scratch — work that tech and media companies would have been happy to exploit (via "prosumerism" etc.) until it became clear that allowing consumers to express themselves is far less valuable than the opportunity to try to manipulate them. Why would companies expend the effort to teach "the masses" to enjoy being idiosyncratic against the grain of capitalist society and their own business models, which profit from scale and efficiency?
At the same time, people are not naturally lazy in their tastes any more than they are naturally "creative". Gioia cites Rene Girard's quasi-biologistic idea of "mimetic desire" and a business-school truism known as the "80/20 rule" ("80% of sales came from 20% of the products") as explanations for mass behavior, but these explanations seem to subtract the very socioeconomic factors that make any of this worth considering. If mass behavior is hardwired into human beings, then consumer capitalism takes on an air of inevitability, as does the development of technology specifically to maximally exploit this "human nature." But that should be flipped: Capitalism develops technology to produce certain kinds of human behavior that make it sustainable and to make that behavior seem as though it is "natural."
For Gioia, the "long tail" economy was never economically realistic but still stands as an unmet ethical imperative, as if consumers owed it to artists to become more interested in obscurity. We need to support niche artists out of "our generosity, philanthropy, and commitment to our core values," presumably because "they" (the culture industry and its duped masses) won't. Apparently, fusing one's personality with the content they consume is a "core value" rather than the essence of the problem with capitalist culture. Gioia tends to write about "counterculture" as if it were a desirable end in itself and not the depoliticization of resistance into a dependent aesthetic pose. But in the idea of a morally or aesthetically superior counterculture is the consignment of most people to an inferior mainstream against whom the aesthetes can define themselves.
"Rooting" for long tail fantasy, as Gioia does, reminds me of the claim that shopping at "mom-and-pop" stores is a more ethical kind of consumerism than going to big-box stores, as if we should root for the petit bourgeoisie as the only viable alternative. It imagines a world in which artists are obliged to operate as small businesses, as if this makes for more genuine expression that would capture more of the spectrum of human possibility instead of turning all art into Etsy.