![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Screenshot_30-5-2026_224338_io.google-e1780206258840.jpeg?ssl=1\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nI bet you didn’t watch Google I\/O last week,<\/a> and why would you? It’s a tech-industry product announcement. But it’s significant because the company is so integrated into the way the internet works that the event is a de facto guide to where the web is going and how we’ll use it. 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 \u2014 or fail to find \u2014 culture over the next decade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Twenty years ago, tech platforms inserted themselves between artist and audience and quietly rewrote the rules of the relationship. Discovery became algorithmic. This shifted cultural value from the culture itself to the traffic or attention that culture generated, flattening the value of “content” so that provocative or incendiary or nostalgic beats anything else. The connective tissue between makers and communities \u2014 the critics, the curators, the alt-weeklies, the record stores, the civic institutions that brokered between artists and audiences \u2014 got bypassed. The platforms didn\u2019t replace that contextual value, they monetized its absence. And it has undermined and sabotaged traditional culture models ever since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The middleware that connected artists to the public was extracted, not replaced. Over the past year, that extraction has accelerated sharply. Google’s AI Overviews have eaten the search-referrals that kept the economy of the open web viable. Chartbeat data shows global publisher traffic from Google down by roughly a third. Google traffic to small publishers is down 60 percent. When an Overview appears, the click-through rate on the top-ranked result collapses. About 58 percent of searches now end in zero clicks. The chatbot referrals supposedly replacing them account for less than 1 percent of publisher page views.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why does this matter to an arts organization? Because the same pipeline is what\u2019s made you visible. It displays your listing, your review, your interview, your season announcement, your ticket processor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Media observer Matt Pearce wrote a piece at NiemanLab this week that frames the essential shift. Pearce’s essay \u2014 You couldn’t create a more anti-news internet if you tried<\/a><\/em> \u2014 suggests something that arts people will recognize immediately. The platforms drove the cost of producing content to zero, the cost of encountering it to near-zero, and in doing so drove the cognitive<\/em> cost \u2014 the work of figuring out what’s worth your attention \u2014 through the roof. The critics and curators and editors the lords of the early internet derided as gatekeepers weren’t blocking access. They were doing cognitive labor on the audience’s behalf. Strip them out and you don’t get a freer, more-informed public. You get one in which every individual is asked to do the filtering and sorting work institutions used to do, at a scale no individual can manage. Pearce calls it a cognitive tax. Harmon Siegel makes the parallel case for visual art in Artforum<\/a><\/em> this month. What the platforms stripped out of culture wasn’t gatekeeping. It was meaning-making. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So this is the context for what Google announced at I\/O. Not better search. A replacement <\/em>for searching. The product names matter less than the function: a 24\/7 personal AI agent that lives in the cloud and “takes action on your behalf”; a universal shopping cart that follows you across Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Gemini and decides when you should buy; intelligent eyewear shipping this fall to narrate the physical world into your ear. Together they pose a single proposition: We want to insert an agent between you and everything around you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the middleware Google helped dismantle coming back but as a single proprietary intelligence layer owned by the company that profited from demolishing it in the first place. What the new layer mediates is no longer just retrieval, it determines truth, decision, culture, and preference. The agent decides what’s worth paying attention to, what to buy, and what’s true about the world. Discovery on your own terms doesn’t just get harder, it moves inside a black box optimized for values you can’t see and didn’t set.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Few of us will escape. The part of the web your agent is reading is no longer mostly human. Imperva’s 2026 Bad Bot Report \u2014 Bots in the Agentic Age<\/a><\/em> \u2014 finds automated traffic now accounts for 53% of all web traffic. Human activity is 47% and falling fast. Bots scrape, summarize, rank, and answer for one another and the human reader is incidental.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This month a study reported that AI has passed the Turing Test<\/a>. Synthetic content is already culturally generative: Florida now has a web of AI-produced “news” sites<\/a> competing with real journalists; Alberta’s separatist movement is being fueled by AI-generated anthems and videos<\/a> that look and sound like grassroots culture. The Point<\/em> observed this month<\/a> that BookTok sells enormous numbers of books and produces almost no real criticism or context. That is exactly what the platforms engineered: discovery without meaning-making. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For an arts organization trying to be found, this is becoming the new logic. Most of the traffic touching your website isn’t a person. The few people who do find you got there through someone else’s algorithm, and soon, someone else’s agent. The incentives, the exchange of value, and what even counts as being found<\/em> have all shifted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But it isn’t only discovery that’s at stake. It’s relationship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For two centuries our culture worked because audiences had direct, repeated, locally-mediated contact with the people and institutions that made it. You knew your bookstore. You read your critic. You went to your hall. The first two decades of platform algorithms frayed those connections. The next decade, the one Google has now announced, proposes to replace them altogether. The agent meets the institution on your behalf. The agent decides what you should care about. The agent narrates the world into your ear. Your community’s contact with culture becomes contact with a proprietary interface that owns the relationship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So how should artists think about this? The reflexive argument that “AI is coming for the arts” is unproductive and, in its current form, unwinnable. The argument worth making is a more systemic one (and hence more difficult to act on). The infrastructure Big Tech is building to replace the destructive layer it already inserted between artist and audience is built on values that are corrosive to traditional culture. The AI those companies are using was trained on the collective labor of humanity \u2014 writers, musicians, scholars, photographers, and the institutions whose work was taken without consent. Whatever else AI is, it isn’t theirs to own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But AI isn’t a magic box. It is designed. It is shaped by the values of the companies that make it. If we don’t insist on a different design, one that preserves, or\u2014dream big\u2014enhances the relationship between audiences and the institutions that make culture in their communities, Google and its peers will decide for all of us what culture we can find. And so it becomes the definer what we can trust. Ultimately it decides whether what happens on a stage or in a gallery in your city is something a human being can still locate at all. Already, if your art lives outside what the algorithms optimize for, you\u2019re effectively invisible online.<\/p>\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n A few months ago, I wrote about a scenario in which this kind of agentic future<\/a> could be a powerful new way for artists and arts organizations to cultivate new relationships with their communities. I still believe that. But this month’s Google I\/O makes it clear that the window is closing fast for control of who finds what and how online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n The excellence-vs-inclusion pendulum is swinging back, fast.<\/strong> Arts Council England’s retreat from DEI and reversion to “excellence”<\/a> is the most visible example but not the only one. Heinz Endowments are dropping grants to individual artists. The Doris Duke Foundation is explicitly funding “resilient models for the future as well as legacy models”<\/a>. Florida’s legislature is letting the Secretary of State rank arts groups<\/a> ahead of the state arts council’s own list. These aren’t the same policies, but they all reflect a discomfort with the past decade’s funding philosophies and a search for criteria more fitted to the current political weather. The map of what excellence can be is bigger than this swing in priorities \u2014 but the swing is going to define which institutions get funded for the next half-decade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Spotify’s AI defense tells you where the platforms are headed.<\/strong> Spotify’s CEO arguing that the company’s AI music tools offer users and creators “a better alternative to piracy and unregulated AI slop”<\/a> is the new platform position. We’ll make the AI ourselves, on our terms, and frame it as protection. YouTube auto-labeling AI video<\/a> is the strategy from the other direction. The platforms are no longer asking whether they should host synthetic content \u2014 they’re competing to be the trusted custodian of it. That changes the terms of every conversation rights-holders and creators are about to have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Editor\u2019s Note:<\/strong>\u00a0These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world.\u00a0Want to support our work? Subscribe to\u00a0ArtsJournal\u2019s free newsletters<\/a>. Or better yet, support us with a\u00a0premium ArtsJournal subscription<\/a>\u00a0at $5\/week or $52\/year. Much appreciated.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 \u2014 or fail to find \u2014 culture over the next decade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3500,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-tech","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Screenshot_30-5-2026_224338_io.google-e1780206258840.jpeg?fit=600%2C437&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4ePZm-Up","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":560,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/2015\/01\/culture-crashing-is-the-internet-killing-our-creative-class.html","url_meta":{"origin":3497,"position":0},"title":"Culture-crashing – Is The Internet Killing Our Creative Class?","author":"Douglas McLennan","date":"January 16, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Scott Timberg, an arts journalist and author of the CultureCrash blog on ArtsJournal, has a new book out called... Culture Crash. It's Scott's attempt to look at how the digital revolution has impacted artists. The tagline of the book - \"The Killing of the Creative Class\" - gives you an\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "arts & tech"","block_context":{"text":"arts & tech","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/category\/arts-tech"},"img":{"alt_text":"jpeg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/jpeg-180x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2771,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/2024\/03\/how-subsidy-for-big-tech-wrecked-the-arts-and-journalism.html","url_meta":{"origin":3497,"position":1},"title":"How Subsidy for Big Tech Wrecked the Arts (and Journalism)","author":"Douglas McLennan","date":"March 5, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"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.","rel":"","context":"In "arts & tech"","block_context":{"text":"arts & tech","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/category\/arts-tech"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/seo-441400_1280-1.jpg?fit=1000%2C666&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/seo-441400_1280-1.jpg?fit=1000%2C666&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/seo-441400_1280-1.jpg?fit=1000%2C666&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/seo-441400_1280-1.jpg?fit=1000%2C666&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":2147,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/2018\/10\/what-if-disruption-was-just-a-tech-con-game.html","url_meta":{"origin":3497,"position":2},"title":"What If Disruption Was Just A Tech Con Game?","author":"Douglas McLennan","date":"October 23, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"The tide has turned on the tech revolution. Over the past year the breathless articles that used to accompany new tech innovations have dried up, replaced with dystopian concerns about the Dark Web, privacy, hacking, fake news, and the deadening and manipulative effects of social media addiction. Tech was going\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "arts & tech"","block_context":{"text":"arts & tech","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/category\/arts-tech"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/building-1647925_1280.jpg?fit=1200%2C675&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/building-1647925_1280.jpg?fit=1200%2C675&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/building-1647925_1280.jpg?fit=1200%2C675&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/building-1647925_1280.jpg?fit=1200%2C675&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/building-1647925_1280.jpg?fit=1200%2C675&ssl=1&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":2650,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/2023\/07\/inflection-point-a-crisis-in-paying-for-culture.html","url_meta":{"origin":3497,"position":3},"title":"Inflection Point? A Crisis in Paying for Culture in the Age of Abundance","author":"Douglas McLennan","date":"July 23, 2023","format":false,"excerpt":"Our consumption of culture has never been higher. So why are culture producers melting down?","rel":"","context":"In "arts and business"","block_context":{"text":"arts and business","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/category\/arts-and-business"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/lego-g28bd3326a_1280.jpg?fit=1200%2C675&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/lego-g28bd3326a_1280.jpg?fit=1200%2C675&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/lego-g28bd3326a_1280.jpg?fit=1200%2C675&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/lego-g28bd3326a_1280.jpg?fit=1200%2C675&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/lego-g28bd3326a_1280.jpg?fit=1200%2C675&ssl=1&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":820,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/2016\/03\/the-five-most-interesting-stories-we-collected-on-artsjournal-this-week-03-20-16.html","url_meta":{"origin":3497,"position":4},"title":"The Five Most-Interesting Stories We Collected On ArtsJournal This Week 03.20.16","author":"Douglas McLennan","date":"March 20, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"My picks for the five most interesting stories we gathered this week. The Arts' Existential Challenge Arts organizations, along with every business sector trying to cope with sweeping changes wrought by the internet, are struggling with how to reinvent for the future while not alienating its past or present. \"What's\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Weekly AJ Top Stories"","block_context":{"text":"Weekly AJ Top Stories","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/category\/weekly-aj-top-stories"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/17COTTER1-articleLarge.jpg?fit=600%2C374&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/17COTTER1-articleLarge.jpg?fit=600%2C374&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/17COTTER1-articleLarge.jpg?fit=600%2C374&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":937,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/2016\/08\/are-we-building-artistic-leadership.html","url_meta":{"origin":3497,"position":5},"title":"Are We Building Artistic Leadership?","author":"Douglas McLennan","date":"August 3, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Are the arts about selling tickets to shows or about art? Of course performances and exhibitions don't happen if they don't have money to be produced, but - as evidenced at an arts marketing conference where I recently spoke - the business of selling tickets seems often to determine the\u00a0measure\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "changing culture"","block_context":{"text":"changing culture","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/category\/changing-culture"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/Melbourne_buskers.jpg?fit=900%2C438&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/Melbourne_buskers.jpg?fit=900%2C438&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/Melbourne_buskers.jpg?fit=900%2C438&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/Melbourne_buskers.jpg?fit=900%2C438&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3497"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3502,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3497\/revisions\/3502"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nAlso Worth Your Attention<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n