Sometimes, you write something, especially within academia, and by the time it comes out, you aren’t sure if it still applies, or that you still believe everything you’d said. Occasionally, though, the opposite happens, and it somehow seems more relevant.
This is the case with the chapter I wrote for the new, just-published book Television Studies in Queer Times, edited by the great Hollis Griffin. My chapter, "Queer Aesthetics in the Streaming Age," sought to ask the question, a bit provocatively, of whether a truly queer aesthetic is even possible in the age of Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and other streaming giants.
Of course, creators of all kinds have been limited or constrained in various ways throughout history due to the commercial nature of the film and television industries — it is always a battle of art and commerce, expression and control. Still, as I found myself coming across more and more smart people writing and talking about the incredible queer content on these platforms, and even visions of what a “QueerOS” (operating system) could look like, I couldn’t help but bristle, at least a bit.
As powerful as some of these series could be, this is also a time when countless queer shows get prematurely canceled, and when we know that many decisions of what does get made are based on data gathered by biased algorithms rather than an actual intent to represent or include. Moreover, as streaming services are inundated by queer content from the mind of industry titans like Ryan Murphy, is there really room for more radical, boundary-pushing, transformative, transgressive aesthetics?
I’m sorry to quote myself, but this is my Substack, so as I write, intending to provoke: “the very structures that organize these platforms are fundamentally incompatible with queerness and will continue to be until these structures have been thoroughly adjusted, or wholly destroyed and rebuilt.” It’s useful, as I always say, to critically look at how these platforms talk about themselves, and an instructive example of this is how Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos changed his tune, in just a few short years, about how the company makes decisions about what they create: In 2015, Sarandos described these decisions as 70% data-based and 30% human judgment, and in 2019 he adjusted to 70–80% “art,” based on human intuition, and 20–30% “science,” based on data. I’d speculate this reflects less a change in policy and more a shift in narrative.
Streaming platforms exist, to this point, to give us what we want, which is always based on what was previously successful, and successful within the limited library of content that they are able to gather data on. More importantly, they function to mitigate risk at every turn, and as Cael M. Keegan has argued, this all leads to what he calls an “aesthetic gentrification,” whereby these films are “sold as windows into the LGBTQ past while they function largely as mirrors reflecting the ‘gentrified minds’ of their own producers, gay and straight alike.”
I won’t spoil the rest of my chapter, though I’m happy to share the PDF if you can’t access the book otherwise, but suffice it to say that I have great skepticism that the mainstream streaming platforms are able to transcend these intrinsic technical limitations, which have artistic and cultural vibrations. To put it crudely, the only interest they have in appealing to queer audiences is to be able to group various mini-demographics into subgenres of recommended content — further abstractions of identities, just like the way Facebook or Google groups users into groups to better target them with appropriate ads.
What gets created for these platforms still has agency, to be sure, but they are nevertheless required to cooperate with the algorithm, and to sacrifice instincts that would contradict it.
All this said, I do come away feeling a bit hopeful. As Noah Tsika writes in his book Pink 2.0: Encoding Queer Cinema on the Internet, if:
the internet makes it hard to parse a profoundly disruptive queerness, then perhaps that’s a good thing—it means that queerness, imagined as a limitless process, hasn’t yet been monetized, that its promises and particularities remain too powerful and too plentiful for extant interfaces and algorithms to assimilate them.
Digital News Is Dead, Long Live Digital News
You may have seen, although hopefully not, that Tucker Carlson is apparently relaunching his show on Twitter. Yes, even though Twitter god Elon was just tweeting last week to recommend that folks stream in 480p on the platform, Tucker and co apparently believe in the platform’s ability to handle their oddly cinematic approach, and Elon’s espoused positioning of Twitter as the world’s last space for free speech. Very cool!
I normally wouldn’t waste any time thinking or writing about this, but I can’t help but place it into the context of the rapidly-dying digital news environment. In recent weeks, we’ve seen Buzzfeed News, Vice, Gawker, MTV News, Paper, and more shutter or go bankrupt, while others, like Vox, have fired many more. Ben Smith, former editor=in-chief at Buzzfeed News, has found the release of his new book on the rise of digital news, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, perfectly timed to tap into its fall, and to get invited by every remaining news outlet to comment.
To NPR, he said, “I think the current moment is the product of both a huge shift away from social media, and a tough economy. But readers and viewers still want to understand the world.” To Here & Now host Peter O’Dowd, he said, “The movement that has actually been best-suited to these tools is this new right-wing populism, where pushing the boundaries, transgresstion, following the traffic wherever it goes.” To Yahoo News, he said, “But I feel good about the future of journalism in the journalism business and the news business in general. If you look at business coverage, or tech coverage, or politics coverage, it’s never been healthier. There’s never been more.”
What Smith seems to ignore on this press tour, of course, is his own role in getting digital news to the point it’s at, reminding me of former tech bros like Tristan Harris who try to rebrand as saviours because they now realize the problems within the system and they claim to have the answers because they were once within it. Moreover, though, it should be obvious that “more” coverage does not automatically equal “healthier,” and there remain gigantic barriers for young writers in particular to find a way into the industry.
As Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day points out, the rise of the creator economy and personalities as media brands (think Emma Chamberlain, Hasan Piker, MrBeast) has certainly helped to offset the role of news on social platforms, and we may see a further move, as discussed in a previous newsletter on the post-platform era of the internet, toward smaller online outlets. Broderick uses the example of Hell’s Gate NYC, a worker-owned local publication, organized using the patron-centric model of subscription, alongside newsletters and other ways of accessing smaller-scale news coverage. I don’t disagree, although it’s difficult to imagine many other cities beyond NYC having the personnel and resources for such an enterprise come together, and people may have trouble adjusting to such a disparate, self-directed news environment. That said, this all fits into the larger narrative about everyone realizing what social platforms are actually for—buying and selling—and deciding to find other ways of doing everything else, and that can only be a good thing.
Ephemera
Sci-fi writer Ted Chiang wrote another great piece for The New Yorker, following his oft-cited article comparing ChatGPT to a “blurry jpeg of the web,” and this time making another canny comparison between generative AI and the consulting firm McKinsey.
At Hyperallergic, Priteegandha Naik writes about the caste bias of tech platforms: “For all intents and purposes, matrimonial apps are evolving to encourage more open communication between potential partners by reducing ‘familial’ barriers. Despite this, the apps prompt one to upload their ‘kundali’ — a birth chart in Hindu astrology that deterministically predicts the individual’s behavior and future based on a variety of elements, including caste. Interestingly, a common feature across all applications is a caste filter that allows your profile to be visible to some castes and invisible to others, ensuring endogamy in the digital age.”
A great episode of the Working People podcast about the Writers’ Guild strike, with guest Sasha Stewart reporting from the picket line. Likewise, a similar episode from Trashfuture, with guest Nick Adams (writer for BoJack Horseman, Tuca & Bertie) on the picket line.
Song Recommendation: “Hyperballad” by Björk, at Coachella 2023
This is my favourite song of all-time, and suddenly I think drones are good, actually.