AJ Chronicles: Why Tech Infrastructure is the Most Important Arts Story of the Year

Editor’s Note: These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. To see all the stories on which these essays are drawn from, subscribe to ArtsJournal’s free daily and weekly newsletters. This week we collected 112 stories. Here’s what I learned:

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What does it actually take for culture to reach an audience? A musician records a track, but then it has to travel through streaming platforms, distribution systems, search algorithms, and ticketing infrastructure to reach a listener who can afford to pay for it. A theatre company mounts a production and then has to reach potential audiences through social platforms whose design it doesn’t control, on devices it doesn’t own, via ticketing systems that extract fees it has no power to negotiate. A literary magazine publishes a writer and then has to survive in an attention economy whose rules were written for someone else’s profit entirely.

The infrastructure carrying culture to audiences — legal, technical, financial, corporate — was not built for the creative sector. It was built by and for technology companies, telecommunications firms, and entertainment conglomerates. The decisions about how all this works — and more important — how it will work in the future, are made in boardrooms and courtrooms where arts organizations are not present. So maybe none of the following stories at first seems like an “arts” story. And yet, the ripples of these legal and business stories this week will influence shape the arts ecosystem for years to come. So yes, they’re very much important arts stories.

Story No. 1. The “Dumb Pipe”: The Supreme Court ruled unanimously this week that internet provider Cox Communications can’t be held liable for music piracy by its users. In other words, the pipe isn’t responsible for what flows through it. That sounds like a win for open internet principles — and in some ways it is — but what it actually says is that infrastructure that profits from the distribution of creative work bears none of the cost or liability when that work is stolen. Someone makes music. Someone takes it. Cox gets to profit from the traffic either way. For a traditional arts organization, this means the “Digital Commons” has been confirmed as a place where we are expected to provide content for free, while the ISP charges the admission fee via the monthly subscription. If the pipe isn’t responsible for policing theft, the entire financial burden of protecting intellectual property shifts to the artist—a cost most independent creators simply cannot afford. There are good reasons why platform liability works this way; the telephone company isn’t liable for criminal conversations conducted over its network. And should networks really be policing content? Remember all those stories about Instagram removing pictures of classic art because… nudity? But read on…

Story No. 2. When “Engagement” Becomes a Liability. A California jury found Meta and YouTube liable for designing addictive products that harmed a young user; a New Mexico jury hit Meta for $375 million more. The legal theory — suing over platform design rather than platform content — routes around Section 230, the law that has shielded platforms from liability since 1996. As a detailed Techdirt analysis argues, the problem isn’t the verdict against Meta. It’s that the theory doesn’t stay confined to companies you don’t like. If every design decision about how to present content is now potential product liability, the cost of fighting those suits will drive smaller platforms out of existence, leaving only the giants who can absorb the litigation. These judgments also shift the legal focus from user-generated content (protected by Section 230) to product design, effectively creating a “product liability” for the internet. Critics argue this will make the web worse by forcing platforms to dismantle engaging features—like personalized feeds and notifications—to avoid “addiction” lawsuits and leading to a less functional user experience. Bottom line: while this looks like a victory for users over Facebook, it actually could further consolidate control of the internet in the mega-platforms. And BTW — “addictive”? What kind of squishy standard is that? Who determines what’s addictive versus merely appealing design? If every design choice is a potential “product liability,” platforms will naturally pivot toward the “safe,” the bland, and the non-litigious.

Story No. 3. The Sora Pivot: Even Disney is a Tenant. Then there’s Sora. OpenAI shut down its AI video app this week — which was costing an estimated $15 million a day in compute costs to run while having generated only a total of $2.1 million in lifetime revenue. The service was facing deepfake liability from celebrity estates and copyright complaints from rights holders all while preparing for an anticipated IPO this year that requires cleaning up loss-making “side quests,” as an OpenAI product manager called them. The $1 billion strategic investment Disney announced in December — which I argued at the time was a signal that IP is now currency to buy influence inside infrastructure rather than a shield against it — never actually closed. No money had changed hands. With rival AI scaler Anthropic surging, OpenAI is now pivoting hard toward enterprise software and coding tools, and away from consumer entertainment. So the lesson isn’t that Sora failed, it’s that even the 800-pound gorilla of the creative world has no leverage. If Disney, with its incomparable vault of IP, can’t stop a platform from changing course, what hope does a regional ballet or a museum have? We are the tenants and the tech firms are the landlords. The landlords just decided to stop maintaining the theater to build a data center instead.

Story No. 4. The Silent Box Office Manager: So this is what it looks like to fight back and try to at least try to shape the infrastructure. The Canadian province of Manitoba is moving to ban algorithmic variable pricing — the practice of charging different prices to different customers based on behavioral profiling. It’s a retail story, sure. But variable algorithmic pricing is already embedding into ticketing, where it quietly determines who can afford to attend. Once firms get customers used to being sorted and priced differently, the Walrus notes, the practice starts to feel inevitable. But it isn’t. It is a choice, and right now, governments are beginning to decide whether to let that choice stand. Arts organizations have spent the last decade focused on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). But if your ticketing platform uses “predictive modeling” to hike prices for “high-intent” users, it may be undoing your equity work behind your back. The algorithm is a box office manager who doesn’t care about your mission; it only cares about “optimum yield.”

Patreon CEO Jack Conte charged this week that AI companies’ claims of fair use against individual creators while signing multimillion-dollar licensing deals with Disney, Condé Nast, Universal Music is a double standard. Two sets of rules are in play — one for institutions with the leverage to negotiate, and one for everyone else. That asymmetry runs through all four decisions this week. Cox, the platforms, OpenAI, the ticket pricing systems: in every case, the rules are being set by entities with interests that are not aligned with the creative sector and favor those who control the infrastructure. If this sounds familiar, it’s what happened 25 years ago as rules for the new world wide web were being negotiated.

And this is not an unusual week. It was only a couple of weeks ago that the Paramount/Warner deal and the Live Nation/Ticketmaster settlement further eroded the competitive landscape of the infrastructure that gets creative work to a public. Infrastructure decisions made for commercial entertainment shape what’s possible for nonprofit and independent culture. What’s striking this week is how many such decisions arrived at once, each from a different direction, and each hugely consequential.

Arts leaders have to spend enormous energy on programming, fundraising, audience development, board relations. But what about the infrastructure questions that will ultimately determine whether there’s an audience to develop at all? That’s not a criticism, it’s an observation about where the sector’s attention has historically been trained. But I’d argue there’s a Gold Rush forming right now at the dawn of the AI era for who will control our culture going forward, and unless we want to repeat the mistakes of the Digital Transition 25 years ago, we need to pay attention. We cannot afford to be the “content” in someone else’s “infrastructure” any longer.

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Also Worth Your Attention

New Commercial Infrastructure for Dance. The International Dance League launches this spring — arena competitions, team contracts, and what being called “the MMA of dance.” The dance community seems to be reacting with equal parts excitement and wariness. Dance has historically had almost no commercial infrastructure: no leagues, few broadcast deals, no franchise model. Dancing with the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance were influential when they launched and brought many to dance. But new infrastructure means new money, new audiences, new visibility. It also means new dependencies, new definitions of what the work is for, and new power structures that creators don’t control. The history of every art form that has successfully commercialized — jazz, hip-hop, figure skating — includes both expansion and a shifting of creative control. Another infrastructure story.

The LRB’s Counter-Intuitive Survival Strategy to Literary Profitability. The London Review of Books has lost circulation since the pandemic — down from 91,000 copies to around 78,000. But it’s also grown its revenue at 6.8 percent annually. How’d that happen? The strategy: charge more per reader, refuse to discount for scale, invest in the reader relationship rather than the reach metric. It’s the opposite of the platform logic that dominates traditional publishing. It’s also the opposite of the infrastructure dependency trap. An organization that survives on deep loyalty from a smaller audience is less exposed to platform volatility, algorithmic change, and the whims of distribution systems it doesn’t control. It’s likely not a scalable model for everyone, but for the kinds of institutions the arts world actually runs on — deeply specific, community-rooted, and impossible to fully replicate — it might be more relevant than it looks.

Editor’s Note: These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. To see all the stories on which these essays are drawn from, subscribe to ArtsJournal’s free daily and weekly newsletters. To support our work, sign up at Patreon or subscribe to our Substack newsletter.