CONCLUSION
IN DEFENSE OF THE COMMONS:
A MANIFESTO FOR SUSTAINABLE CULTURE
It may seem counterintuitive at atime of information overload, viral media, aggregation, and
instant commenting to worry about our cultural supply. But we are at risk of starving in the
midst of plenty. A decade ago few would have thought abook with atitle like In Defenseof
Food was necessary. Food, after all, had never been cheaper or more abundant; what could be
wrong with the picture?A similar shift of perception needs to happen in the cultural realm.
Culture, even if it is immaterial, has material conditions, and free culture, like cheap food,
incurs hidden costs.
One positive step may be something deceptively simple: an effort to raise consciousness
about something we could call sustainable culture. “Culture” and “cultivate” share the same
root, after all: “Coulter,” a cognate of “culture,” means the blade of a plowshare. It is not a
reach to align the production and consumption of culture with the growing appreciation of
skilled workmanship and artisanal goods, of community food systems and ethical economies.
The aims of this movement may be extended and adapted to describe cultural production and
exchange, online and off.
The concept of sustainable culture begins with envisioning a cultural ecology. New and old
media are not separate provinces but part of a hybrid cultural ecosystem that includes the
traditional and digital and composites of the two. Our virtual and physical lives are
intertwined, inseparable, equally “real.” Whether their work is distributed by paper or pixels,
creators never emerge fully formed from the ether. Individuals are buttressed by an array of
plinths and braces, by families and friends, patrons and publics, and institutions that include
universities, foundations, community centers, publishers, distributors, libraries, bookstores,
rock venues, and cinemas, as well as the ad hoc networks that comprise scenes and
subcultures, digital and analog.
We are embedded beings who create work in a social context, toiling shared soil in the hopes
that our labor bears fruit. It is up to all of us whether this soil is enriched or depleted, whether
it nurtures diverse and vital produce or allows predictable crops to take root and run rampant.
The notion of sustainable culture forces us to recognize that the digital has not rendered all
previously existing institutions obsolete. It also challenges us to figure out how to improve
them.
Many structures of the old-media system, however flawed, relieved some of the burdens now
borne solely by individuals. Institutions provide capital, legal protection, leverage, and also
continuity, facilitating the transmission of knowledge and skills from one generation to the
next. At their best, institutions can help support challenging efforts through aprocessthe
musician Damian Kulash calls “risk aggregation.” Though his band OK Go left their record
label and found afollowing online, Kulash still believes labels—though “greedy and
shortsighted”—played acrucial function in the cultural landscape, one we have not figured
out how to replicate or improve upon within the digital realm: like publishing houses,
newspapers, and film studios, they funnel revenues from more successful acts to less
successful ones.
Scale allows institutions to fight the kinds of legal battles investigative journalism requires or
weather a string of losses until the odds finally deliver that blockbuster hit, an arrangement
that looks grossly inefficient from one angle, or almost socialist from another. Labels “invest
in however many young bands a year and most of them fail,” Kulash told an interviewer.
“Those bands go back to their jobs at the local coffee houses without having to be in tens or
hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal debt for having gone for it.” He credits this
process with making his career possible. “If we don’t want to be just a domain of the
independently wealthy and people who can take time off from their jobs for a couple of years
to see what happens, or finance their own world tour while they figure out exactly how to
make the number at the end of the column black, then somebody has to be doing this risk
aggregation.”1
The frame of sustainable culture has other benefits as well. In stark contrast to the emphasis
on newness and nowness of most online platforms, it encourages us to think long term.
Inherent in the concept of sustainability, after all, is the element of duration, of time and also
depth of attention, for both creators and consumers. To escape the cycle of churnalism and
expendable content in favor of sustainable culture, we need to develop supports that allow for
the prolonged immersion and engagement artistic and journalistic endeavors often require,
nurturing projects that are timeless rather than timely.
We also need to provide reliable means of preservation. Too often people assume that digital
content will last forever, immateriality and reproducibility encouraging the false impression
that anything uploaded to the cloud is safely stored for posterity. In reality, we lose an
estimated quarter of all working links every seven years and digital files can quickly become
incomprehensible due to the swift churn of technological obsolescence. Sustainable culture
includes building archives that will allow people to explore their cultural heritage for years to
come.2
The concept of sustainability also poses a direct challenge to both the fixation on rapid
growth and quick profits and the fantasy of sidestepping the issue of finance altogether.
Material factors cannot be ignored or wished away.3 Free culture advocates have it right that
excessive copyright regulation can inhibit creativity, and the current copyright regime is in
urgent need of reform. But “free” is not the answer: too many creative endeavors fail due to
lack of investment; countless creative experiments go untried; important investigations never
get off the ground; voices that refuse to peddle or pander go unacknowledged; truth seeking
and beauty making are undervalued, all while mediocre ideas prosper, aided and abetted by
the fertilizers of advertising dollars and manufactured desire.
A vision of sustainability acknowledges the damage incurred by the sole pursuit of wealth
while trying to build an equitable system that can enable the production of socially valuable
goods. The proliferation of crowdfunding Web sites, which allow people to back creative
projects without expectation of financial return, are an encouraging development and a
critical source of support to artists and tinkerers—yet they are no panacea. There are limits to
individual, one-off fund-raising campaigns, which cannot substitute for broader, more stable
support structures.
Finally, a sustainability movement would harness new communications tools to shift the
current conversation from free culture to fair culture. Established fair trade principles, known
to anyone who has purchased coffee with the telltale label, include transparency and
accountability, payment of just prices, nondiscrimination and gender and racial equity, and
respect for the environment.
These principles speak to many of the problems raised in this book: the secretive methods of
many Internet companies, the feudal business model of Web 2.0, the increasingly common
expectation that people work without compensation, the persistence of inequality and
intolerance online, and the disastrous consequences of high-tech manufacturing techniques
and the constant upgrading and disposal of still functional, but no longer fashionable, gadgets
on our natural world.
The shift to sustainable culture is possible, but implementing the necessary changes cannot
fall to individuals and the marketplace alone. The solutions we need require collective,
political action. Not unlike American agriculture businesses, which receive billions in federal
aid while flooding the market with processed food, heedless of the effect on small farmers,
today’s corporate media and technology firms depend on substantial and unacknowledged
public subsidy, putting them at an unfair advantage at all our expense.
Strengthening our cultural commons requires profound changes in policy, animated by the
same spirit as the 1965 congressional resolution that established the National Endowment for
the Arts: “While no government can call a great artist or scholar into existence, it is necessary
and appropriate for the federal government to help create and sustain not only a climate
encouraging freedom of thought, imagination, and inquiry, but also the material conditions
facilitating the release of this creative talent.”
The dominant idea today is that the Internet, by lowering barriers to entry, will do this work
for us, creating a free market in art and ideas and ushering in a “utopia of openness.” A free
and open web will spark innovation and competition and a cultural revolution will result. This
assumption channels political activism to the fight for network neutrality and against
regulation like SOPA (where the interests of the public and of large technology firms are
generally compatible), while explicitly progressive causes that push back against business
interests—battles against consolidation, commercialization, unfair labor practices, and the
lack of diversity—take a backseat.
Yet, as we know, open systems can be starkly inegalitarian and open markets cannot be
counted on to provide everything people want or need, which is why there are many areas we
strive to at least partly shield from capitalism’s excesses, such as scientific research, health,
and education. A laissez-faire system will inevitably underinvest in less profitable cultural
works, no matter how worthy, enriching, or utterly vital they are. No matter how technically
“disruptive” or “revolutionary,” a communications system left to the free market will not
produce the independent, democratic culture we need.
In the language of economists, culture is apublic good. Like asunset we can all enjoy
without its being diminished, asong isn’t used up when people sing it. Moving beyond the
academic definition, culture is also apublic good in the sensethat it benefits all: our lives are
improved by the positive externalities art and ideas produce, our world more beautiful, more
interesting, more ambitious. The word hasother meanings aswell. On the one hand,
something can be public in the senseof being open to all, like apublic meeting. But the word
also means “shared”: something that is public belongs to everyone, like alocal library; it is
funded by the public purse. It is this last meaning—public in the senseof ownership and
funding—that technology commentators too often sideline. We envision acultural commons
accessible to all but shy away from discussing how to make this aspiration areality.
The truth is that the public good is increasingly financed by private money. Google Books,
despite the legal troubles that dogged the endeavor, is a prime example of this phenomenon.
While often described as a “universal library” the project is anything but. More accurately, it
was devised with the aim of transforming the library from an institution that collects and
distributes information to the public into one that collects and distributes the public’s
information in service of Google’s core advertising business.4
Google Books is a perfect example of what media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan calls “public
failure,” a situation where private actors perform services for gain that would be better left to
the public sector.5 Vaidhyanathan has proposed something called the Human Knowledge
Project, a government-led effort to create a truly global online library aimed at “satiating
curiosity,” not “facilitating consumption.”
Other countries have instigated modest alternatives: in Norway, citizens can check out newly
released books from the national digital archive; France pledged 750 million euros for the
digitization of the nation’s “cultural patrimony”; the Netherlands has a ten-year plan to
digitize every Dutch book, newspaper, and periodical produced since 1470. There is also the
European Union-sponsored Europeana, a meta aggregator that links the collections of almost
thirty countries.
In the United States, however, the idea of a publicly funded digital repository for our shared
heritage is a pipe dream, a circumstance that has led an intrepid group of librarians,
academics, archivists, and activists to begin the process of slowly trying to build a
noncommercial alternative to Google Books, the Digital Public Library of America, which
went online in 2013. This freely accessible network of resources from libraries, archives,
museums, and universities is looking to foundations for support.6
“Clearly, we should not trust Google to be the custodian of our most precious cultural and
scientific resources,” cautions Vaidhyanathan. “Without firm regulations, a truly competitive
market, or a competing project, we have no recourse in the event of sub-standard
performance or malfeasance by the company.”
This warning applies well beyond books to the majority of online platforms where we spend
our time. They are “public” in a limited sense of the word: they are open spaces, but they are
also private ones, where the rights Americans claim to hold dear—namely, protections for
free speech and privacy—do not apply. When the CEO of Twitter tells users to “think of
Twitter as a global town square,” he elides the fact that we don’t have to click “agree” on a
Terms of Service, a binding contract, before entering an urban plaza. Similarly, Lawrence
Lessig, when expounding on the value of social media sites for the cultural commons, does a
disservice when he quotes one of the founders of the Yahoo!-owned photo-sharing site Flickr
likening the operation to a “land trust” and his colleagues to “custodians.” Flickr is no such
thing, just as Google is not operating a library. They are commercial enterprises designed to
maximize revenue, not defend political expression, preserve our collective heritage, or
facilitate creativity, and the people who work there are private employees, not public
servants.7
The not-for-profit, donor-supported, volunteer-produced Wikipedia is often held up as the
archetypal organization of an information age. Yet Wikipedia is utterly unique among the
world’s most popular Web sites. Average Internet users spend most of their time visiting sites
operated by for-profit companies. Web sites maintained to serve the interests of civil society,
not shareholders, are losing ground.8
While there might be many exciting, small experiments online, there are no large spaces
dedicated to the public good. And while the Internet could have offered an alternative to the
sphere of commodity exchange, private and often monopolistic markets now dominate;
contrary to expectations, digital concentration set in more rapidly than with previous
mediums. The revolutionary nature of technology was simply no match for the underlying
economic imperatives, which have driven new-media companies to amass power and capital
and struggle for market dominance. Consider Twitter. The service has been a powerful tool
for activists around the world but this may change. “It is not difficult to imagine a scenario in
which Twitter will have to sacrifice its values, at least somewhat, on the high altar of the
quarterly earnings report,” as Elias Grol warns in Foreign Policy.9 In theory, Twitter’s
founders could have considered alternative business models. Instead of rushing to debut on
the Stock Exchange they could have chosen to operate as a nonprofit, low-profit, or,
following the example of the popular online crafts marketplace Etsy, a Certified B
Corporation, a relatively new designation that takes social and environment impacts into
account.
Why not resurrect the vision of an advertising-independent search engine that initially
inspired Google’s founders, or launch a cooperatively owned version of iTunes or Netflix
(perhaps modeled on successful institutions such as New Day Films, a documentary
distribution collective that has survived for four decades), or start online associations based
on Community Supported Agriculture (known as CSAs) that allow readers to purchase
advance shares to fund local newsgathering? There are plenty of inventive financial
arrangements that could put sustainability and civic responsibility front and center, yet so far
they mostly go untried.
In the digital realm, who stands for the public interest? The state remains the most powerful
entity that can be employed to advance the cause of sustainable culture. Americans, however,
are deeply skeptical of the government’s involvement in culture and the arts. The exceptions
have been few and far between, including the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the
New Deal and the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, and Public Broadcasting in the 1960s.
With the founding of these institutions, the United States joined the rest of the developed
world in providing state subsidy to creative endeavors. Direct government support of the arts
petered out after the Cold War, during which fear of a Soviet planet prompted a variety of
cultural outreach programs at the behest of the State Department, a concerted effort to
contrast American dynamism to the drab Eastern Bloc. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the
venture capital model has ruled supreme.10
Just as emphatically, technology is regarded as an arena that the government must not touch,
the state said to be too ossified and slow to keep up with Silicon Valley’s rapid pace. The
Internet, in particular, is presented as territory upon which regulation should not encroach.11
The weaknesses and hypocrisies of this libertarian fallacy aside, it is a philosophical
orientation that, by holding up private enterprise and free markets as the primary drivers of
innovation and progress, obscures a profound truth: the computer industry and the Internet
would not exist without massive and ongoing funding from the federal government of the
United States, which invested hundreds of billions of dollars over the course of many years to
create it.
Early on, the government funded the invention of the microprocessor and was its first major
consumer, jump-starting the modern technology industry. Later, the Internet and the World
Wide Web came into being as a consequence of state financing that included military and
scientific funding in the United States and Europe, combining countercultural, academic, and
public service values such as decentralization, openness, and interactivity. From Apple
products to Google’s search engine, from GPS to voice recognition to touch-screens to the
anonymity-enabling software TOR, we have public investment to thank for many of the tools
we use every day, yet the private sector reaps all of the rewards and credit.12
In the standard narrative of techno-triumphalism, all of this history is repressed, as is the
increasingly pro-active role the government played throughout our nation’s communications
history: designing the free-expression-enabling network known as the post office, promoting
newspapers through postal subsidies, instituting a decentralized public broadcasting system,
and, of course, creating the Internet. Nonetheless, pundits insist we are entering a new,
“open” world that has transcended markets and states and made regulation obsolete.
Technology companies, cable providers, and Hollywood are happy to agree, insisting that the
means smaller governments employ to maintain their cultural distinctiveness—production
subsidies, broadcast quotas, spending rules, selective taxes and levies, and national ownership
—are no longer needed because “spectrum scarcity,” long the leading justification for
investment in public media and protectionist cultural policies, does not exist online.13 On the
Internet the “dial is infinite,” to quote Jacob Glick, Google Canada’s policy counsel.14 Yet the
infinite dial means that countries at a disadvantage in terms of population and GDP will find
themselves using Web sites promoted by a handful of big Silicon Valley players and swamped
by ready-made American culture.15
What technology boosters ignore is the fact that the steady erosion of regulation and checks
on corporate power was a major factor in the development of the “old model” they so
vociferously decry. For example, it was the 1996 Telecommunications Act (the “coup de
grace of media deregulation”) that reduced the number of telephone service providers,
unleashed a torrent of mergers and acquisitions that culminated in the ill-fated marriage of
AOL and Time Warner, and opened the way for Clear Channel’s dramatic takeover of
commercial radio. Without intervention, we will find our options similarly diminished in the
digital realm.
There is no such thing as a public Internet: everything flows through private pipes. However,
using the Internet for the consumption of culture or to search for information is nearly as
essential to participating in modern life as having electricity or plumbing in your home (try
going to school or applying for a job without it). Thus a growing chorus of progressive
technologists and critics argues that both the service providers and the most popular platforms
should be regulated as public utilities (indeed, Mark Zuckerberg refers to Facebook as a
“social utility.”)
This is one example of the kind of media policy we need. There are other possibilities worth
considering. To prevent what may be the next wave of consolidation, Tim Wu, coiner of the
term “Net neutrality,” argues that a “Separations Principle” is necessary, erecting a firewall
between firms that transport and create information. Wu is worried about the potential
vertical integration of companies like Verizon and Google or AT&T and Facebook into
“information empires,” but his principle would also have more immediate effects. Apple, for
example, would not be able to sell or stream music or movies at a loss to buoy the sale of
hardware; Amazon would be prevented from pursuing its ambition of controlling the book
market (a scenario in which most volumes are either published by or self-published through
the company and tethered to the Kindle platform); and Google would be forbidden to
promote its own products above competitors’ in search results.
Given the reality of digital convergence—the fact that once distinct channels of telephony,
television, radio, film, and print media have merged—a movement for sustainable culture
must concern itself with every layer of our communications infrastructure, from the creative
works distributed online to the Web sites we visit to the mud and wires that make our
connections possible. Reform might begin with the phone, cable, and Internet providers who
hook up our homes and mobile devices and have carved the United States into
noncompetitive fiefdoms, enabling them to extract enormous rewards from what are
essentially natural monopolies. As a result, cable incumbents enjoy up to 95 percent profit
margins on broadband service.
A proposal to nationalize these service providers would be a hard sell, but at minimum such
powerful private actors should be subject to strong common carriage obligations. Network
infrastructure expert Andrew Blum has pointed to the local food movement as a potential
model. “We’re all consuming the Internet equivalent of iceberg lettuce,” he says. In a handful
of successful cases municipalities have begun to offer fast and affordable fiber broadband to
residents. But these alternatives won’t be won without a fight. Cable and telecom companies
have fought tooth and nail against these community broadband initiatives, spending over
$300,000 to derail a referendum on the issue in a single town. Millions more have been spent
lobbying to effectively block cities from providing high-speed access, with legislation passed
in nineteen states.16
At present, the United States occupies the worst of both media worlds, lacking either a
competitive market or meaningful government investment or oversight.17 Though it’s
contrary to conventional widsom, government intervention is sometimes the only way to
ensure competition. When left to their own devices, wired and wireless Internet service
providers stifle innovation.
One might assume such profitable companies would eagerly upgrade their facilities and
replace cable wires with optical fiber to satisfy customers’ appetite for high-speed data
transmission, but this is not the case. Wall Street would punish them for the substantial capital
expenditures required, and with no pressure from rivals, stock prices and dividends take
precedent over people’s needs. (This dynamic explains why the digital divide has not been
bridged; private investment markets would rather cherry-pick districts packed with well-to-do
customers than invest in broadband infrastructure to serve poor and sparsely populated
regions.)
Something similar holds true in the field of journalism, where government occasionally plays
a positive role, for example through Federal Communications Commission requirements that
broadcasters serve the public interest in return for using the public spectrum. These rules have
been eroded since the Reagan era, but the bottom line is that educational programming and
costly news departments, which often scrutinize the actions of the state, were established and
maintained only at government behest, not because of market ingenuity.
More robust public support for the fourth estate would produce even greater freedom and
diversity. In direct contradiction of stereotypes about the chilling effects of “state-controlled
media,” countries enjoying such support are home to an unimpeded and vibrant press.
Norway’s generous government subsidies have yielded the highest number of newspaper
readers per capita and the country has repeatedly ranked as the number one democracy by the
Economist, hardly a bastion of left-wing thinking.
There’s evidence that Americans would appreciate a similar approach, for they display
surprising devotion to the limited public broadcasting options available: public radio’s
audience has more than doubled since the late 1990s, and viewers have deemed PBS the
“most trusted source of news and public affairs” among broadcast and cable sources. Polls
show that money spent on public broadcasting is believed to be well spent, which sets it apart
from most other expenditures.18 The irony is that public broadcasting in the United States
decreasingly qualifies as such. Regular fund-raising drives are designed to compensate for the
minimal direct federal funding granted to PBS and NPR for operations (indirectly, federal
funds make up about 15 percent of PBS’s annual budget and a mere 2 percent of NPR’s).
Our per capita spending for public media currently stands at about $1.63 a citizen a year,
while Finland and Denmark spend seventy and eighty times that amount. This lack of direct
government sponsorship opens a widening space for corporate underwriting, despite the
compromising and sometimes overtly censoring effects of this strategy.19 (Canada,
unfortunately, may be following in its southern neighbor’s footsteps, with CBC’s Radio Two
carrying advertising after a four-decade ban in response to budget cuts instituted by the
conservative administration.) The obvious solution of building on the success of these
enterprises and expanding government subsidy for a more expansive public media goes
unconsidered because of widespread and deeply held misconceptions.
We must find ways to adapt and extend tried and true policies while taking the unique
architecture of twenty-first-century communications technologies into account. The historic
conception of public broadcasting is insufficient for twenty-first-century communications
technology. Public media policy will need to address infrastructure and information, conduit
and content, thus spanning a broad array of issues including Net neutrality, antitrust, user
privacy, copyright reform, software production, the development of new platforms for
engagement and discovery, and subsidy and promotion of cultural products, whether they are
classically crafted novels or avant-garde apps.
While some have suggested that crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter can replace government
agencies to do much of this work, such a view is shortsighted. Crowdfunding allows
individual creators to raise money from their contacts, which gives well-known and often
well-resourced individuals a significant advantage. In contrast, a government agency must
concern itself with the larger public good, paying special attention to underserved geographic
regions and communities (taxation, in a sense, is a form of crowdfunding, but with far wider
obligations).20
Public agencies, in other words, have to consider the whole cultural ecology. Thus other
countries not only fund individual creators but assist independent institutions including
community centers, cinemas, and booksellers. France’s loi Lang, for example, prevents the
discounting of books in order to protect small shops from being forced out of business by
supermarkets, chains, and Amazon, acknowledging their proven role in encouraging diverse
reading habits and nurturing literary culture. Most discussions about the Internet’s effect on
art and culture do not account for the heterogeneity that brick-and-mortar institutions foster.21
Nonetheless, a skeptic may still insist that these proposals for supporting sustainable culture
are too costly to seriously consider.22 But the money for such an undertaking exists, indeed it
is already being spent, but with great inefficiency. We pay a small fortune for the devices and
connections required to use the Internet (global spending on consumer electronics surpassed
$1 trillion in 2012, despite the recession).23 We also pay dearly for the services and culture
we consume online through the opaque, private tax referred to as advertising (and we also
pay with our privacy).
The over $700 billion spent annually on advertising could be subject to a transparent public
tax and put to good use. Additional funding streams exist to be tapped. In 2009 the Associated
Press revealed that the U.S. Army spent $4.7 billion and employed nearly thirty thousand
people to do public relations, an unaccountable form of taxpayer-financed media. A small
fraction of these assets could be appropriated and applied to beef up our paltry public
broadcasting budget.
Other options would be to demand that radio and television broadcasters pay the market rate
for spectrum licenses or make technology companies help foot the bill for the content they
depend on for survival. The most straightforward method may be to force leading technology
firms to pay their taxes, which they have been diligently dodging through cunning accounting
schemes, loopholes, and shelters. These machinations have allowed Google to effectively pay
an overseas tax rate of as little as 2.4 percent, Apple to shield approximately $74 billion from
the Internal Revenue Service between 2009 and 2012, and Amazon to spend years refusing to
collect sales tax, starving states of revenue (Jeff Bezos is said to have considered establishing
Amazon on an Indian reservation to avoid paying taxes).25
A portion of these funds could be earmarked to underwrite and promote art, culture, and
journalism. The fruits of such investment could be made widely available, free of copyright
restrictions, much the way a dedicated community of academics working under the banner of
“open access” is making publicly funded research readily available to anyone who wants to
learn regardless of income or institutional affiliation.
The fact is that, as with the research and development of technology, the state is already
present. The industries discussed in the book hardly operate in a free market. Our public
airwaves, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, are handed over without charge to radio and
television broadcasters, or auctioned off to the highest bidding phone companies, all for
private profit. Much of the infrastructure cable and telecommunications providers depend on
was subsidized by taxpayers, who are stuck with patchier, inferior, and more expensive
service than citizens of other countries (meanwhile Comcast has increased its lobbying
budget from $570,000 in 2001 to $19.6 million in 2011 in order to maintain this cushy
arrangement).
Media conglomerates receive tax write-offs for the costs of marketing their wares. Lucrative
copyrights are indefinitely extended and dubious patents protected to appease entertainment
and technology executives, these government-granted monopolies funneling massive fortunes
into corporate coffers.25 Public subsidies abound, though one would be hard pressed to say
they are in the public’s interest.
In the cultural realm we are told that the Internet and amedley of ever-evolving devices and
services will automatically and effortlessly improve our media system. That sounds
wonderful, but we need to identify what, precisely, was broken about the old arrangement so
those problems don’t carry over. We also need to reflect on where we are heading. What does
it mean to “democratize culture”?
Too often technology gurus talk about democratizing culture as though the meaning of the
phrase was self-evident. Everyone has a chance of making it online, they insist, pointing to
individuals who use social media to pull away from the pack or dropouts who founded
billion-dollar businesses in their basements. While it sounds empowering, the presence of a
small number of superstars is actually detrimental to democracy, not emblematic of it. Instead
of facilitating the fame and fabulous wealth of a lucky few, democratizing culture involves
mitigating against the winner-take-all effects of digital networks and finding ways to bolster
the missing middle.
A more democratic culture means supporting creative work not because it is viral but because
it is important, focusing on serving needs as well as desires, and making sure marginalized
people are given not just a chance to speak but to be heard. A more democratic culture is one
where previously excluded populations are given the material means to fully engage. To
create a culture that is more diverse and inclusive, we have to pioneer ways of addressing
discrimination and bias head-on, despite the difficulties of applying traditional methods of
mitigating prejudice to digital networks. We have to shape our tools of discovery, the
recommendation engines and personalization filters, so they do more than reinforce our prior
choices and private bubbles. Finally, if we want a culture that is more resistant to the shortterm
expectations of corporate shareholders and the whims of marketers, we have to invest in
noncommercial enterprises.
There is no shortage of good ideas. By not experimenting, we court disillusionment. The
Internet was supposed to be free and ubiquitous, but a cable cartel would rather rake in profits
than provide universal service. It was supposed to enable small producers, but instead it has
given rise to some of the most mammoth corporations of all time. It was supposed to create a
decentralized media system, but the shift to cloud computing has recentralized
communications in unprecedented ways. It was supposed to make our culture more open, but
the companies that dominate the technology industry are shockingly opaque. It was supposed
to liberate users but instead facilitated all-invasive corporate and government surveillance.
Instead of eliminating middlemen and enabling peer-to-peer relationships, it has empowered
an influential and practically omnipresent crop of mediators. Instead of making our
relationships horizontal and bringing prosperity to all, the gap between the most popular and
the practically invisible, the haves and have-nots, has grown. Instead of unshackling
individuals from the grip of high-priced spectacles, it has helped entertainment firms
dominate global audiences. Instead of decommodifying art and culture, every communication
has become an advertising opportunity.
The utopian undercurrents that suffused these erroneous predictions are not the problem. The
problem is that we have not confronted the obstacles that have impeded them, particularly the
economic ones. A more open, egalitarian, participatory, and sustainable culture is profoundly
worth championing, but technology alone cannot bring it into being. Left to race along its
current course, the new order will come increasingly to resemble the old, and may end up
worse in many ways. But the future has not been decided.
Our communications system is at a crossroads, one way leading to an increasingly
corporatized and commercialized world where we are treated as targeted consumers, the other
to a true cultural commons where we are nurtured as citizens and creators. To create a media
environment where democracy can thrive, we need to devise progressive policy that takes
into account the entire context in which art, journalism, and information are created,
distributed, discovered, and preserved, online and off. We need strategies and policies for an
age of abundance, not scarcity, and to invent new ways of sustaining and managing the
Internet to put people before profit. Only then will a revolution worth cheering be upon us.