What Google presented this month was revolutionary, a declaration that the web as we know it is dead, and an operating manual for how the new web will work. More important, it suggests how we all will find — or fail to find — culture over the next decade.
AJ Chronicles: Why Tech Infrastructure is Becoming the Most Important Arts Story of 2026
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 Middleware Manifesto: A Proposal for Rebuilding American Culture
That shift from content value to traffic value is what has destroyed the business model for nearly everything we’re talking about. I’m calling it a manifesto because that’s what it needs to be. Not a lament. Not a white paper, but a declaration of what is needed.
The Disney/OpenAI Deal: How the Creative Landscape is being Rewritten for Us All
Like it or not, Disney’s move is a big step closer to what an AI creative world might look like.
Making the Creative Turn: Is Using AI Cheating?
Throughout the digital age, Big Tech has promised us products that will make us more efficient and save time, which, it is assumed, is always an obvious good. It’s a cliché that tools shape the things we make. And through most of our history, better tools have helped us create better things. But what if this isn’t always true?
Creativity Versus Skills
Art that is primarily skill-based — graphic design, stock music or images, text and marketing, etc — can be created faster and often better than human artists, and at lower cost. This is particularly true for compound art that requires specialized equipment and/or collaboration of specialists. As for art with high creative quotient, humans will not only be essential, but the automation of skills available to them will likely make them better. Maybe much better. And certainly more prolific.
How Digital AI Twins could Transform how We Make Art
The Digital Twin idea is the notion of looking at something — an organization, an eco-system, a city — and measuring and defining it in as many meaningful ways as possible and creating a digital representation in which elements can be changed or manipulated to see how the rest of the model reacts.
Classical Music has Lost a Generation. Blame the Metadata (in part)
Classical music has lost a generation’s worth of music lovers beginning in the late-90s with the rise of file-sharing and Napster. A significant part of the reason might be: metadata. Metadata are the tags that travel with every audio recorded track. For a piece of music or a recording to be found, it needs to […]
When “Vacuum Cleaner for Babies” Beat Taylor Swift: Fixing the Music Streaming Problem
“Content” is a Silicon Valley weasel word that suggests that nothing has any intrinsic worth or quality — every digital byte is equal and interchangeable — until it draws attention as measured and defined by popularity algorithms.
A Framework for Thinking about Disruption of the Arts by AI
What would a strategy for the arts sector be for anticipating artificial intelligence, if consensus seems to be it will change everything?
How Subsidy for Big Tech Wrecked the Arts (and Journalism)
Companies like Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, Spotify, Apple and Google have subsidized what they offer (super-cheap or free content, faster service and better accessibility) to capture audience and attention in ways that have played havoc with culture producers and artists everywhere, whether or not they create on any of these platforms.
Is the Universal Translator Finally Here?
We’re entering a new age of global communication, and universal translators are only the first step. Avatars and synthetics will be as routine as today’s TikTok video filters.
How to Think About How AI will Change the Arts?
At the moment “how to think about it” may be the most important place to start.
Post-COVID Arts Observations: #3. The Future is Hybrid (or Not)
There are plenty of strategic reasons to use hybrid content to further artistic goals that don’t have to be around making money. But ultimately the model, whatever it is, has to make sense.
Make Google Pay for Linking to Content? Hmnnn.
You might think this is just a journalism issue, but one can draw parallels of paying to read stories to paying for music streaming, which has not proven to “pay off” for the vast majority of musicians.