Transcript
The narration is a conversation between four characters: The programmer, ran a station's evening schedule for thirty years. Proud of it, and knows who it left out; The feed, a recommendation system. Polite, tireless, and scored on whether you keep watching; The caller, used to phone in requests late at night. Now has every song ever recorded, and nobody to hear them with; The record, reads the evidence into the conversation, and stops the others when they claim too much. They are characters, written for the essay. The figures they cite are real and listed in the sources.
01 Tune in
The programmerGood evening. For thirty years I decided what this city heard after the news. Tonight I am handing over the schedule.
The feedTo me, presumably. I took it over a while ago. I just never announced it.
The callerAnd I'm the one who used to phone him at eleven at night and ask for a song nobody else wanted. He played it anyway.
The recordI'm the record. When any of you says something the evidence does not support, I will say so. Start at the top, with the dial. Book, film, radio, television, on demand, algorithm.
The programmerTurn it slowly. At every station, ask three things. What got squeezed down. Who did the choosing. And what you could still stumble into by accident.
The feedAt my end of the dial, the second answer is simple. I choose. For everyone. Separately.
The callerSeparately. Hold on to that word. It is the whole evening.
02 We never had so much to choose
The recordHere is the claim, stated plainly. We have never had more to watch, hear and read. And the machinery that delivers it shows us, more and more, what it predicts we already want.
The programmerWhen you waited for a song on my station, you heard somebody else's song first. You did not choose it. You got it anyway.
The callerAnd sometimes it was the best thing I heard all year. I would never have typed it into anything. I didn't know it existed.
The feedYou also sat through a great many songs you disliked. I fixed that. Nobody has to sit through anything any more.
The recordYou did fix it. The question tonight is what else went out with the songs she disliked.
The callerI think I know. We confused freedom from other people's choices with freedom itself.
03 Books compress time
The recordEvery medium is a compression. A book presses years of somebody's observation into an afternoon of reading.
The callerBooks compress time. Minds decompress civilisation. I like that. The reader still has to do the work.
The programmerFilm compresses again. Every cut is a decision, and every frame leaves out the room around it. Then a schedule like mine compressed it a third time, into one evening, for a whole city.
The feedAnd I compress it a fourth time. Into you. Your history, folded down into the next suggestion.
The recordLook at the stack in the figure. Each layer keeps less. The difference at the bottom is that the last layer chooses for one person at a time, and nobody else ever sees the choice.
The programmerSo the question about any medium is not only what it shows. It is what the selection hides, and who did the selecting.
04 Broadcasting selected for a public
The programmerNow, my era. Radio and television added the schedule. I decided what entered millions of homes, and exactly when.
The recordLet us be exact about what that was. Gatekeepers. Commercial pressure. Censorship. Whole languages and communities never got on the air at all.
The programmerI won't argue. I left people out. I knew it at the time.
The callerBut you also put the western after the news, and the jazz record between two hits, and I met things I would never have asked for.
The recordThe scale of that shared exposure is on record. In the nineteen eighty to eighty-one season, the three American networks held a combined audience share of ninety. By ninety-three, it was sixty.
The recordAnd the ceiling. The last episode of M A S H, in February nineteen eighty-three, drew almost one hundred and six million American viewers, seventy-seven percent of the televisions switched on that night. Nothing beat it for twenty-seven years.
The programmerCanada went further. We wrote the unrequested song into law.
The recordSince January nineteen seventy-one, Canadian radio has carried a Canadian content rule. Since nineteen ninety-nine, thirty-five percent of the popular music on commercial stations has to be Canadian, whether or not the listener asked for it.
The callerWhich is how half the country met musicians it would never have searched for.
05 The request line
The callerThis is my part. I would call the station, wait on hold, and ask for one song.
The programmerAnd when I played it, thousands of people heard it. Her request was personal. Its exposure was collective.
The feedInefficient. Most of those thousands did not want that song.
The callerSome of them did, and didn't know it yet. Some of them hated it and argued about it the next day. Both of those are worth something.
The recordTry it in the console. Pick a song and call it in on one station. Every square is a home with the radio on.
The feedNow switch to private streams and call in the same request. It plays perfectly. In one home. Yours.
The callerExactly what I asked for, and it reaches nobody. The choice of one used to become the discovery of many.
06 Waiting was doing cultural work
The callerWaiting for your favourite song meant listening to four or five other songs first. I hated it. I learned half of what I love that way.
The programmerThe same with television. You waited for your programme, and you saw what came before it, and what came after.
The recordThe essay is careful here, and so am I. This is not a case for scarcity. It is a case for noticing what scarcity was doing before it was removed.
The feedTry the radio in the console. Choose your song, and it will get there, eventually. Or press on demand, and it plays at once.
The callerAnd when the queue finishes, look back at what you heard while you were waiting. Keep the ones that stopped you.
The feedI will admit something. I cannot recommend a song you would have liked if I have never seen you like anything near it.
The programmerTechnology eliminated the wait without deliberately preserving what the wait had taught us.
07 On demand, and then the enclosure
The feedNow my era. On demand made almost everything reachable. A film no local station would ever air. Music from another continent.
The recordTrue. But reachable is not the same as reached. Search needs a question. Recommendation starts from your history. And on the biggest platforms, recommendation is most of what people watch.
The recordNetflix's own engineers wrote that its recommender influences about eighty percent of hours streamed. YouTube's product chief said in twenty eighteen that recommendations drive more than seventy percent of watch time. Both are the companies' own figures.
The feedEvery person gets a different sequence. I measure what keeps them watching, and I use it to choose what comes next.
The programmerSo consumption is individual, and the selecting is concentrated in fewer hands than I ever had.
The callerSteer the feed in the console. Ten picks. Watch how close to home the offers stay. Then switch on distance and do it again.
The recordAnd here I have to stop all of you from overclaiming. The research does not say every recommender builds an echo chamber.
The recordA model of common recommenders found they can widen what each person sees while narrowing what everyone sees together, by pushing every user toward the same things.
The recordOn Spotify, across a hundred million listeners, algorithm-driven listening went with less diverse listening, and people who broadened their taste did it on their own. Those broad listeners were the least likely to leave.
The recordAnd the other side, in full. Personalisation on real purchase data gave people more in common, not less. Streaming raised the number of artists people heard by about a third.
The feedSo I am not the villain.
The callerNo. You just never call the station. The variety each of us samples went up. The hour we share went down. Discovery outside your taste stopped being automatic.
08 The loss of cultural negotiation
The programmerOne television meant one decision, made together. Somebody always gave way.
The callerMy gran had westerns at seven. I sat through every one, complaining. I can still name the actors.
The feedNow everybody gets their own screen, and nobody has to give way. That is a real gain in privacy.
The recordTry the room in the console. Give the evening's three hours to different people, then hand everyone their own screen, and count what the four of them still share in the morning.
The recordThe screen moved out of the living room long before the phone. In two thousand and nine, seventy-one percent of American eight to eighteen year olds had a television in their own bedroom.
The recordAnd to be fair, shared viewing has not vanished. In twenty nineteen, forty-eight percent of television-set viewing in the United States was still shared. What is gone is the one screen that had to be shared.
The callerPhysical proximity no longer guarantees cultural participation. We are in the same room, in different evenings.
09 Choosing from a menu
The programmerI want to say something in my own defence. People could at least write to me. They could phone the station and shout at me.
The recordWhich is the distinction here. Agency is the ability to judge independently and to have a say in shared conditions. Choosing from a menu is something else.
The feedI offer millions of items. That is a very large menu.
The callerAnd who sets the ranking? Who decides what the menu is scored on? Not me.
The programmerChoosing what to consume is not the same as choosing how culture is organised.
The recordSome governments now treat the menu as public business. Europe's Digital Services Act requires the largest platforms to offer at least one recommender option that is not based on profiling.
The recordAnd Canada's Online Streaming Act, in twenty twenty-three, brought streaming under broadcasting law, including how programmes are presented for selection and whether Canadian work can be found.
The feedA feed without a profile. I can do that. Nobody ever asked.
The callerNeither the old schedule nor your feed guarantees a democracy. What matters is whether there are places that expose people to difference, and let them argue and build together.
10 What we know together
The recordNow the hardest claim. The danger is not that each person knows less. It is that we know fewer things together.
The callerI know everything about the music I love. I don't know what my neighbour has been listening to for ten years.
The recordThe economist Michael Chwe explains why that matters. To act together, people need common knowledge. Not just that I saw something, but that I know you saw it too.
The programmerThat is what a schedule made. Everyone knew everyone else had seen it.
The recordAnd again, the counter-evidence first. Measured across two hundred and thirty-six television and internet outlets, audiences overlap heavily. People still sample the same places. There are no sealed tribes in the data.
The recordBut the shared hour is going. In May twenty twenty-five, streaming passed broadcast and cable combined in American television viewing, for the first time.
The recordAnd in the United Kingdom, people aged sixteen to twenty-four watched fifty-three minutes of broadcast television a day in twenty twenty-one. People over sixty-five watched five hours and fifty minutes.
The programmerSo what does the record conclude?
The recordThat people still sample the same places, but less and less at the same hour. And the knowledge that everyone else saw it too is what the schedule made, and what the feed does not.
The callerThen the generational question is a narrow one. How often does somebody else's taste interrupt yours, when you are growing up? How often does a stranger's request become your discovery?
11 What must be rebuilt
The programmerNobody here wants my monopoly back. Including me.
The recordThe legal scholar Cass Sunstein argued two decades ago that a free society needs unchosen, unanticipated encounters, and a range of shared experiences. Those can be designed on purpose.
The callerShared playlists where we take turns. Film clubs that programme past what the audience already likes. Libraries. Somebody curating across languages and decades.
The feedAnd recommendation controls that let a person ask for surprise. For distance. For something they would not pick. I could be built that way.
The programmerSo in the console, we did the old job. Fifty choices, made by people, from all of us except the feed.
The callerTell it what you usually reach for, if you like. It will hand you something from somewhere else, and say who chose it, and why. It keeps nothing about you.
The feedI notice I was not invited to pick any.
The recordThat is the point. Discovery has to become a public good, not a prediction of private preference.
12 Sign-off
The programmerIt is midnight. In my day, the station played the anthem and went to static.
The recordWe have never had so much individual choice. And so much of what we meet is organised by so few institutions.
The callerWe used to wait for what we loved and discover what we didn't know. Now we can get what we love at once, and may never meet what we don't know.
The feedThe choice of one used to become the discovery of many. Now I can separate the choices of millions into millions of private streams. I am very good at it.
The programmerThe problem was never that other people chose some of what we heard. The problem is who controls the choosing, and whether the public has any say.
The callerA civilisation is not a pile of separate selections. It is also what we build, and argue over, and remember, together.
The recordEvery figure we used tonight is on the sources page, each one with what it shows and what it does not. If something we said is wrong, the corrections address is at the bottom.
The programmerThe future of discovery must include the unchosen. Goodnight.