I watched my entire creative identity get flattened into an engagement metric last week. One post. So many likes. Zero meaningful connection. The algorithm had turned my carefully crafted words into a performance — something to be consumed, not understood. Just another piece of content in an endless scroll.
The numbers tell an uncomfortable story: social media now accounts for over half of how people discover new content. On YouTube and TikTok, recommendation engines can drive up to 70% of what users watch, while on LinkedIn this past year, algorithmic 'recalibrations' have increasingly promoted surface-level engagement and self-promotional posts.
Most platforms are designed to extract, not expand. Netflix's recommendation engines don't discover culture. They compress it. Take, for instance, how Netflix categorizes content into 36,000 micro-genres, including a category literally called "casual viewing" — content designed to be consumed while doing other things. It's the streaming equivalent of background noise, where characters are instructed to narrate their actions explicitly so viewers can half-listen while scrolling social media or doing chores. And of course there’s TikTok bulldozing and flattening of creativity into repeatable, algorithmic patterns.
Many of you already know this firsthand — your first viral piece wasn't a breakthrough, but a capitulation. We're 'taught' to write sentences or edit short videos that trigger the algorithm's dopamine drip, trading depth for shareability.
Filmmaker Matt Stone captured this brilliantly, describing how streaming's hunger for content distorts artistic creation. He borrowed a metaphor about "bread and butter" — streamers are making endless "bread" (content) when there's far less "butter" (genuinely good ideas). The result? Filler episodes, narratives stretched thin, shows canceled before completion, leaving viewers with a sense of time wasted and stories unresolved.
There are two types of games in our current universe: zero-sum and positive-sum. Zero-sum is the capitalist mob-scape where creativity is transactional. Positive-sum? This is where human potential joyfully liberates itself from the machines chugging and belching solely for revenue generation.
Let's be clear: even deeply flawed platforms aren't monoliths. Spotify and YouTube, for all their algorithmic herding, have actually amplified unknown and indie musicians who would have remained unheard. Netflix has created global audiences for stories from marginalized communities. But here's the crucial distinction: these platforms liberate by accident, not by design. They're still fundamentally vampiric extraction machines, not creative ecosystems.
Take Li Jin's passion economy — once a radical reimagining of value creation. She championed platforms like Substack as a way for creators to build direct, meaningful connections with audiences. Yet what began as a rebellion against traditional content economics gradually morphed into another Silicon Valley narrative of monetization. Substack, her prime example, increasingly mirrors the same algorithmic incentives it sought to disrupt: subscriber counts, engagement metrics, and popularity algorithms that reduce creative work to numerical performance. It's a perfect microcosm of how even well-intentioned platforms get absorbed into the extraction economy, transforming revolutionary potential into just another content farm.
Contrast this with someone like Ai Weiwei, an artist who weaponizes technology not as a content delivery mechanism, but as a complex tool of cultural resistance. His art doesn't just resist measurement — it makes measurement itself impossible. Each piece is a multilayered conversation about power, humanity, and connection that cannot be compressed into a like button or view count. Where platforms seek to simplify, Weiwei introduces radical complexity. His work demonstrates how creativity can exist as an act of defiance against the very systems designed to consume and categorize it.
Look at bandcamp. While Spotify's convenience seduces listeners with the addictive passive anesthesia of algorithmic playlists, bandcamp gives independent musicians radical control. Artists set their own pricing. Fans discover music through direct connection, not corporate-engineered recommendations. This is like an economic rebellion.
And there’s itch.io — a digital playground where indie game developers aren't just selling products. They can begin to build a collaborative creative environment. Unlike the other corporate machineries, itch.io creates space for experimental designs that would never survive traditional gaming's profit calculus. An idiosyncratic game developer in Mumbai or Buenos Aires can now reach global audiences without compromising their vision.
But can platforms like these truly resist becoming the very systems they oppose when forced to scale? It's a fundamental tension headache I've struggled with. My own successful post taught me how quickly potential can be co-opted. What starts as a rebellion becomes a brand, a monetization strategy, another content farm.
Quentin Tarantino talks about Yellowstone’s version of modern broadcast television like a funeral director discussing a particularly uninspired embalming. Glossy lifeless surfaces of ‘interpersonal drama’ that evaporate the moment you look away—you’re caught up in the moment but years later you’ll remember... nothing, no lasting resonance. I think about the small films that even summed together cost less than one $12 million episode of Yellowstone—Anora, A Real Pain—stories that breathe, that linger.
So here’s a brutal truth: most technological infrastructures are designed to flatten, not amplify. Netflix categorizes. Spotify herds. Social media reduces connection to metrics. We're treading water in monsoons of data, soggy under the weight of quantification.
Authentic creativity can break the model. It's the AI-native musician using an efficient local open-source LLM running on a laptop to generate a music video and album art that tells a story with the cultural resonance of a perfectly orchestrated A24 trailer drop. It's the globally curated biodiversity archive where subsistence farmers in Peru, wildlife rangers in Tanzania, and marine biologists in the Philippines continuously update field data. There's no corporate gatekeeper—just a living tapestry of shared knowledge that broadens every time someone, anywhere in the world, contributes their unique local insights.
For the founders reading this: your 'success' isn't solely user acquisition. It's how many new voices your platform enables. For the Creative Directors, your most meaningful metric isn't chasing Cannes Lions trophies—it's creating authentic moments of cultural resonance. Moments that spark inspiration, ignite conversations, or even offer a glimmer of hope, existing solely because you dared to intervene passionately.
Somewhere between algorithmic precision and corporate-driven uniformity there's a space for radical imagination—a place guided by the principle that data, discoveries, and creative outputs should remain open, accessible, and infinitely remixable. Where technology doesn't just optimize; it actively expands human potential.
There's a moment, just before sunrise, when the digital world falls nearly silent in our corner of Brooklyn. My laptop closed, no notifications, no metrics. Just the soft breathing of the house, the distant murmur of a waste management truck. This is where creativity actually lives—not in the performance, but in the quiet between performances.
So here's a concrete step: try building one mechanism of genuine connection into your platform that cannot be gamed or measured. A space where metrics disappear, where creativity breathes freely. A platform where popularity doesn't exist.
For Substack writers, instead of reinforcing popularity loops through subscription rankings and established-author algorithms, imagine a 'Discovery Hour': a space where fresh voices without established subscriber bases are spotlighted outside the gravitational pull of existing popularity metrics. No subscriber counts visible, no performance tracking—just authentic words given the breathing room to resonate freely, judged on depth rather than engagement loops.
For filmmakers, imagine a streaming festival inspired by underground warehouse screenings and William Gibson's Pattern Recognition: films premiered anonymously, stripped of trailers, ratings, and star-power hype. Just the work. Just the possibility of a moment of connection. Viewers enter 'blind', guided only by curiosity. After viewing, filmmakers and audiences spontaneously co-create "reaction films"—short, expressive reinterpretations sparked by emotional resonance rather than algorithmic predictability. Here, cinema escapes Netflix-style categorization and Rotten Tomatoes' quantification.
Creativity blooms best when it's free from rigid measurement, and rooted more in shared human discovery. This is creativity not tracked, but shared; not sold, but given away freely—a culture where genuine originality is born because nobody's counting.
And maybe — just maybe — that's where the future refuses to be coded.
In Japan, when you finish reading the Mainichi newspaper you can plant it. Its pages consist of recycled paper, water, and the seeds of flowers and herbs. It's one of the most widely read papers in the country, selling over 5 million copies a day. What if our digital creations could do the same? What if, instead of consuming, we could grow?
