INNOVATION OPINION: Labor and Entertainment are collapsing as Platforms Betray Their Promise to Consumer || Leif Weatherby in Daily Beast
We’ve heard about the“network effect”of platforms for years. Once you get north of 100 million users, others come on because people are already there. Winners win. Internet scholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger has added a“feedback effect”to the network effect.
Larger platforms don’t just have more users, he points out: they have more data. Far more data.
This makes their algorithms better, because they learn more from more robust data.
The product refines itself.
But this only works if the actual goal is to produce a better product in the first place.
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/Netflix
Listen to article7 minutes
"I was unsettled. My wife and I had just finished dragging ourselves through seven seasons of the lowbrow legal dramedy known as Suits, giving up on it around the time that Megan Markle’s character leaves. What shocked me wasn’t the show per se—but an article I read about it afterwards, which details the unexpected return to prominence of the four-year-old show.
I realized that we were taking part in a mass-culture phenomenon without knowing it. Even though we had been scanning for something to watch—having recently cycled through other trashy classics like House and Shameless—it never occurred to me when we clicked on that first episode of Suits that 1.5 millions others were doing the same thing.
We had fallen into a streamhole.
The "personalization" that platforms claimed to offer us is dying. Platforms like Amazon, Uber, and Netflix all took something that was more or less working—bookstores, taxis, and cable—and promised us something better. It worked, for a while. We still get cheap books (and other items), rides, and TV from these sites.
However, the promise of platform production is personalization—they know what products you might like, what shows you want to watch, who you want to date.
When the bottom comes out from that model, though, because its financing is unsustainable and its labor is rebelling, the fancy algorithms stop mattering as much. Then the options get fewer, the costs go up, the jobs get worse.
AI-generated content suits this two-screen solution perfectly. It also collapses work and entertainment. With TV so bad it’s not distracting on the second screen, you can keep sending emails and tending to Twitter while you “watch.”
This situation was predicted by the philosophers Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who proclaimed that “entertainment is the prolongation of work” in capitalism.
As personalization flattens out and the platform’s model stalls, we’re getting a type of entertainment that just prolongs the work day.
Great TV makes for important conversation. Successionfelt urgent, as did Mad Men. I haven’t had a single meaningful conversation aboutSuits, and I’m not sure I want to try.
As platforms descend to earth, we're all going to be stuck with shittier versions of the stuff they promised to improve.
When it's not personalized, a streamhole is just mass culture all over again, with fewer options and no critical conversation to take away from it.
Amazon is becoming just an online convenience store,
Uber is less reliable and more expensive than taxis once were, and streaming is becoming... cable.
What once promised to be an Eden of "content" has hit a wall.
So-called “platform capitalism” might end up being more boring—and economically worse—than it was before the Internet.
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