THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020 65
a platform, a device, a raft of free ser-
vices. Deresiewicz writes about how the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, which
advocated for both privacy rights and
the free flow of information, was par-
tially founded by people in the tech in-
dustry. What you did on the Internet
mattered less than the fact that you were
there all the time.
The Internet’s monopolization of
leisure and the tech companies’ passive
attitude toward piracy gutted the tra-
ditional culture industry. Publishers,
movie studios, and record labels used
to make investments in artists, some of
whom paid big, many of whom did not.
Often, the former would pay for the
latter. But that level of risk has shifted
back onto the artists. The expectation
that art should be free, Deresiewicz says,
has “left labels, publishers, studios, and
others with fewer resources to invest in
talent—hence not only falling advances,
but also shrinking ‘lists’ (to use the pub-
lishing term), the roster of artists and
works that a company is able to sup-
port.” The effects are felt downstream,
where a middle tier of artists has basi-
cally evaporated.
“I’m an autoworker,” Kim Deal, the
iconic front woman of the Breeders and
founding member of the Pixies, ex-
plained to Deresiewicz. “I’m a steel man.
I’m just another person in the history
of the world where their industry has
become archaic, and it’s gone.”
The big illusory promise of the dig-
ital age, it becomes clear in retrospect,
was that removing a layer of business
meant doing away with the exploit-
ative parts of capitalism. Instead, it cre-
ated the conditions by which compa-
nies like Amazon could dominate the
realm of distribution. In July, Spotify
sent a letter to shareholders suggest-
ing that the days of Top Forty charts
were over: “It’s now the Top 43,000.”
The company offers this as evidence
of its users’ diversifying tastes, which
is an alluring spin on the reality that
more musicians are competing for slices
of a shrinking pie. Deresiewicz revis-
its the writer and entrepreneur Chris
Anderson’s 2004 celebration of the
“long tail” of culture, his theory that
the Internet offered a bright future for
all the niche artists who trailed behind
the blockbusters. The infinite book-
shelf sounds nice until you try to ac-
tually choose something. Artists were
still in a market, only a much more
competitive and relentless one. Ander-
son thought that the blockbuster syn-
drome effectively arose from a scarcity
of shelf space, a problem we had now
solved. In fact, our array of choices
proved paralyzing, and attention con-
solidated around those at the very top.
Today, seventy-seven per cent of music-
industry revenue goes to the top one
per cent of content producers.I
t has been easier for some fields to
adapt to this consolidation than oth-
ers. Musicians now often view it as a
given that they’ll make very little sell-
ing songs; instead, recordings have be-
come promotional tools for touring or
merchandise. For some visual artists,
the patrons of yesterday have been re-
placed by partnerships with savvy brands
or creative agencies. Private founda-
tions, like Ford, continue to support
artists who share their vision of social
justice, quietly shaping the artistic dis-
course in the process.
But the possibility of infinite options
and shrinking attention spans means that
some industries have become more risk-
averse. In film, the dominance of super-
hero movies, which appeal to audiences
across geographic and linguistic barriers,
has made studios less inclined to green-
light romantic comedies. (Streaming out-
lets have stepped in here.) Television is
a robust arena, yet it relies heavily on
“pre-awareness”—reboot-
ing things that people al-
ready know.
There have been many
well-meaning attempts to
create new infrastructures.
In 2009, three creative types
launched Kickstarter, a Web
site that made it easier for
people to crowdfund their
artistic projects. It has fun-
nelled billions of dollars
into the hands of artists and inventors,
functioning as what the Times called
“the people’s N.E.A.” Platforms like
Buy Me a Coffee and Patreon allow
you to support someone on a monthly
basis. But high-profile success stories,
such as the musician Amanda Palmer,
who raised more than a million dollars
on Kickstarter in 2012, rarely offer rep-
licable models for building and sustain-ing a career. Meeting a funding goal is
not the same as securing a living. Most
Kickstarter campaigns fail. According
to a 2017 analysis, only two per cent of
creators on Patreon bring in more than
the federal minimum wage.
Deresiewicz has spent his career as
a sort of Henry Adams figure, passion-
ately invested in learning rather than
in formal education, character rather
than persona. He is the author of a
moving, well-received book on Jane
Austen, and another on the failures of
élite education. Both offer deep en-
gagement with great art as a path to-
ward self-enlightenment. Yet Deresie-
wicz has witnessed the devaluation of
such cultural communion, as well as
the labor associated with it. After pur-
suing a traditional academic career and
teaching English at Yale for a decade,
he became a freelancer in 2008, right
around the time that journalism and
publishing began to feel the true effects
of the Internet.
Perhaps this helps explain his in-
nate suspicion of technological fixes,
and also his resignation to the market’s
unforgiving rhythms. “Art and artists
must be in the market but not of it,”
he writes. “And in that consists a ten-
sion that cannot be resolved; it can only
be endured.” Throughout his book,
Deresiewicz prizes art that is serious
and sophisticated, made by artists con-
cerned with autonomy and not selling
out. He allows that his personal tastes
might appear élitist to some.
The present seems to con-
found him. He insists that
few people who make
music embrace material-
ism, which seems to over-
look the aspirational ten-
sions of a lot of contempo-
rary Black music. Nor does
he entertain the possibility
that the Great American
Novelist is actually pro-
gramming a video game or writing a
television show. (Television, he notes
grudgingly, is one of the few growth
industries for young writers.) Building
an audience nowadays “means being
willing to be personal, even intimate,
with strangers,” he laments. “You sell
your work today by selling your story,
your personality—by selling, in essence,
yourself.” These words are meant to