The world is composed of experiences. This is not a statement of ideal, but an ecological inevitability. That which is experienced is perpetuated, and passed on. Media, marketing, culture, can all be tracked and modeled as a genealogy. I was originally an ecologist, and the perspective of ecological models I cultivated is endlessly applicable to all things in the world. There are certain shelling points that, given enough time to adapt and optimize, marketing will fall into. Niches that once filled, change the shape of the landscape and open or close new niches. Competition, while through the proxy of competing interests or companies or corporations, is really between ideas. Ideas converging and pushing out the inefficient organisms until only the most fit for their niche remains.
Many of the odd and unintuitive quirks of biology then, remain in abstracted social systems. It is not the best advertisement that succeeds. Not the most moral, or evocative or funny or “true”. It's not even the one that makes the most money. Just like life, the strategies that survive are the ones that most successfully reproduce themselves.
Humans have done alright for ourselves, but it’s the ants and the worms that really sit atop the throne of biology. The most successful animals. If we get our act together and get into space, we might be vindicated in a few billion years when the sun explodes, but for now, we bow to the bug.
So, to tell what media will reign, you look at the factors that allow it to reproduce, and the environment it exists in. Making money is only one part of that equation. Production cost is another key one.
I recently discovered a phenomenon on YouTube. An animated video of a marble race, like those little tracks you used to make as a kid, just a few colored circles spinning and bouncing down a track. It had millions of views. The channel making it had hundreds of videos. It was a whole community. Dozens and dozens of varieties. I did some napkin math, the number of channels, the number of views and videos. Hundreds of thousands of dollars flow through here, maybe millions. The content was simple and mass produced. A single program ran over and over, it could be dozens of videos before the track was changed or a new element appeared.
I found it fascinating. There was no narrative drawing people back, there was no idea being developed or issue resolved. It was almost like a sensory video, just raw stimulus. And it was wildly successful.
Again and again I find that to be successful as a source of media, quality is far far less important than presence. To be successful as a steamer, the most important thing is to stream. To grow a YouTube channel you have to be putting out videos regularly. Your content must reproduce, and you are a vehicle of its reproduction. If you make it, if you keep making it, eventually you will succeed.
The void at the heart of our world of media compels the existence of content, but perhaps surprisingly, not the creation of it. The reproduction of this abstract content does not require its proliferation or variation. It's not just bugs out there, but all the clonal bacteria, the algae blooming out in the oceans. The amoebas that split themselves in two. Even the bug bows to this primal form of life.
Media comes in all forms. It's the ads on the TV sure, but it's also the morning news. It's the shows on Netflix. It's the engagement algorithm of a gacha game. It's the twitter posts your friends make. Memes outcompete ads every day, but they fill a different niche. They cannot displace ads on their own.
Let's loop back for a moment and look at the massively popular anime industry in Japan, or rather, its constituent industries. Even as the production industry seems to be in freefall, the distribution industry is at a record high. The margins are pulled upwards and the burden passed down to the creators. One industry optimizing its exploitation of another. This is a predator hunting its prey to extinction.
Its not a localized phenomenon either. Hollywood is experiencing a similar phenomenon as media paradigms change from TV shows and movies to streaming. Its unsustainable.
The market, just as a life, does not care about the “quality” of its members. You can be starving, miserable, sick and depressed. So long as you reproduce, you're another success story. This continues up to the point you all go extinct. “Art” is a shrinking niche. Art is unpredictable. Volatile. Rather a dozen mildly successful filler shows that you can rely on. If it's predictable it can scale. Art does not scale the same way. On flat terrain, art cannot compete. Art is not a winning strategy.
The world demands content, not art. The machine god has no pulse.
The success of a piece of content is determined by its strategies, but what determines what the winning strategies are? Where do these shelling points actually settle? The substrate an abstract idea lives on is you.
All of us, together, are the environment these organisms navigate. Cultural boundaries are their mountain ranges or deserts, and each cultural landscape is its own biome. The laws we pass, the concert halls and community centers we build and meet at, they all cast a shadow into this abstract realm. Ideas live everywhere, from subway cars to highway billboards, to the shelves of a bookshop, to your own friend group. Everything we do or make shapes the environment these ideas live within.
This isn't a rallying cry. You aren't going to strongarm the market with adherence to personal taste. For most of us, our shadows can't move the mountains of this realm. This is an act of mercy.
What you see is up to you. What you experience is up to you. The land you cultivate yourself into determines what ideas will live within you.
There's a curious phenomenon on my twitter feed. There's these little tabs at the top with labels like “following” and “for you”. The posts under these tabs are wildly different. That's because I have much more control over one than the other.
It didn't always used to be that way. My current twitter feed is a cavalcade of homemade art, animations, amateur photography, and little creative stories strung together with a few dozen beautiful little interactions sprinkled throughout it. It took a lot of pruning to cultivate this garden. It took a lot of intention and deliberation. I sought out seeds. I’ve plucked out weeds. I’ve become very very liberal with the block and the mute button, not out of vindictiveness for my fellow tweeters, but as a craftsman that comes to know their tools. The “turn off retweets”, the “mute” even the humble like or retweet on a single tweet is a perceptible force on the algorithm that you can notice if you pay attention. In time, even deserts can turn green.
I do not approach twitter as a public forum to shout my ideas. I approach it as a canvas.
Despite the intractable pull of market incentives, good content still exists. That's because people choose to make it. People choose to do that work, to be *unoptimized* for the sake of what they care about. It's the only thing keeping most of the animation industry afloat. You are not the machine god, you are alive. You have a choice. You can sit down and draw a picture, and you don't have to optimize for your incentives at all. The incentives optimize to you. You can just draw.
You are a raw patch of soil. As long as we make room for it, good things will grow. So the point of this entire piece; I'm asking you to be a gardener.