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Kyle and Nate offer their takes on how everything in culture is a list now, from Netflix to artificial intelligence.
Listicles to Lists
Kyle Chayka: Back in the mid-2010s, during the heyday of BuzzFeed, the site published tons of “listicles.” The genre was synonymous with BuzzFeed, which was synonymous with cheaply produced, easily distributed content that could float out over social networks. Hence articles like “33 Things Every Conference Attendee Knows To Be True” and “23 Songs To Play You To Sleep.” They also functioned as a container for aggregating social media: “29 Hilarious Tweets That Are A Perfect Representation Of Adulting.” (These are all real but I will not do you the disservice of linking them.) A 2010s blogger forced to produce multiple posts a day would every so often turn to the listicle as a crutch. Who can forget The Awl’s Listicles Without Commentary? (JK, I’m too old and the site’s archive is now nigh-inaccessible, but IYKYK.) As the era wore on, entire full-time jobs were devoted to listicle production. Of course, the ecosystem eventually collapsed and the listicle became another artifact of the bygone era, like being famous on Tumblr or knowing which Instagram filter was most popular.
Today, we have prestige lists, the upscale version of the listicle. They are the same format, the same appeal of easily digestible content, yet with a veneer of curation. They are meant to build a kind of canon — something permanently authoritative — but they seem closer to a revived, upmarket listicle. The hottest restaurants in your town according to The Infatuation or Eater heatmaps. The best shows to stream on Netflix right now. The NYT recently recapped its own archive of recipes: “Our 50 Greatest Hits, According to You.” Some recipes are “Icons,” some are “Chart Toppers,” some are “Influencers.” In other words, NYT Cooking has produced so much content that it needs to offer a thematic guide. Not to be outdone, Bon Appetit collected its best 56 recipes since its launch in 1956. Others recap culture as a whole. The Atlantic might have kicked off the list mania in March of 2024 with its list of “The Great American Novels.” This summer, NYT did “The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” (The nice thing about publishing giant lists of stuff you can shop for is you can make money on referral links.)
The function of the list is to guide our attention. We need a tight selection of information on the boundless internet, perhaps more than ever before. The platforms themselves are not helping us very much. The Netflix homepage is a sort of list, sometimes organized by “top” shows or “new releases.” Theoretically, the list of things you could watch on Netflix is infinite, but in practice, the available lists narrow the collection down into comprehensibility. Willy Staley, a great editor at NYT Magazine and always a very appealing and meta commentator on culture, just published a feature worth reading about how Netflix’s narrowed window tends to denature the culture on offer:
“When the foundations of this staggering library were first being laid a decade ago, we could never have imagined the abundance it would eventually contain — and how disoriented we could become in its labyrinthine corridors.”
Algorithmic platforms flatten culture, you might say, in this case through unnavigable excess. We don’t quite know how we discover what we do on Netflix, and viewers tend to consume whatever is in front of them rather than seeking out the niche productions that might actually interest them more: “to scan through [Netflix] is to appreciate how the library’s sheer size has heightened the importance of chance in our consumption habits,” Staley writes.
Traditional media makes lists because platforms don’t, and we need some semblance of cultural map by which to navigate. There are too many lists, but at the same time not enough. I’m afraid that we consume too many of other people’s lists and don’t keep enough of our own. Letterboxd, where people keep thematic lists of films, is cool. And there was once an app start-up in 2015 called The List, founded by BJ Novak lol, where you could make any kind of list you want that I recall featured an early post from Lena Dunham. But better yet you could just write things down on a piece of paper, like the small wooden box on the kitchen counter in my childhood home that contained hand-written index cards with family recipes scratched on them, continually annotated with updates. Talk about a canon.
The List in the Machine
Nate Gallant: Despite my love of kaleidoscopic, maximalist sweaters, we spend a lot of time talking at OT about the rapid appearance and disappearance of a kind of “medium” thing. That is, objects which briefly appear in a space neither particularly radical or excessive, but rather at a particular intersection: affordable, durable, and curious enough in design to make Kyle and I talk a bit differently about what makes it a thing. It is normal, but also remarkable.
This has more often than not been some kind of staple in our daily lives: uniform-ish pieces of clothing, coffee, and whatever means we can use to get visual and printed media these days. Call this an offshoot of both Kyle and my first conversations about mid-20th century architecture, or our shared though by no means unique love of the moka pot. Something like a minor study in design affordance for an age of consumption, since, very simply, we almost always have to buy things to experience their potentially unique intersection of aesthetic qualities and use value. Consumerism is the default mode of existence these days. Delineating this sort of thing is an admittedly impressionistic and deeply subjective task, and usually in the context of a product, tends to hover around a fairly consistent price point of somewhere between $40 and $150 dollars. Your fun but small ceramics; the best value and design for pants you can still get at a mall; vintage sweaters or cords; and various cultural subscription services.
The labor of ending up at this relatively consistent pattern has offered, I think, some interesting lessons in the work of “post-algorithmic” culture. Our attempt to search for and present these things involves sifting through the uncontrollable, heinous spigot of algorithmically generated garbage–the “slop,” to borrow from Kyle’s most recent New Yorker column. Goods, media, and platforms to consume them which spew content shaped not exclusively but largely by the reproduction of means (averages) — which the artist Hito Steryl reminds us is the fundamental logic of algorithmic output, whether ostensibly curatorial (say, Youtube/TikTok) or AI-generated. That is, some pattern or thing which seems new, but is actually just the averaged output of a set of data points. Slop is the result of trawling with digital nets and averaging for some outcome of engagement, not the interpretation and judging of quality.
I am not entirely sure why, but at the level of what is fed to us for consumption online, this generally produces two different kinds of “means”: a piece of content that’s a little too faux-universal in your corner of the internet, or something that produces a kind of strange horror. Instant acceptance or revulsion, of a kind that keeps you clicking–that is, identification or disidentification. The same Lululemon crossbody that everyone somehow immediately has everywhere, all at once, but only everyone of a certain cross-section of identities (in this case, trendy Gen-Z and millennial women, and increasingly men). Or the ubiquitous t-shirt in the corner of your Instagram feed that says something like “I’m a North Carolinian and my daughter is a Saggitarius and I have seven log cabins and if you have a problem with that then fuck you.” Too intelligible and unintelligible at the same time. Cultural objects that are instantly overexposed and thus dead on arrival, or that never have and will never make sense.
The result is an unsatisfying combination of everything that is in a particular data set appealing enough to some identifiably large set of people but not specific enough to be interesting on its own. The question I am given to ask, though, is not how to get AI to organize and output the media of consumption better for the users of whatever large aggregation website. The issue is that the bad list is already within the machine. AI feeds off a mass of unchecked, largely stolen data mined for instantly utilized metadata. Proprietary dumps of generated content. Imperfect, secretively organized, composed largely of the internet’s toxic runoff, but not delimited by any rationale other than the hunger for more, both in input and output. Algorithms and AI, in this case, are little more than the sum of their lists, the linearly sorted trove of data. Nothing is transformed, there is nothing new, nothing breaches the horizon of expectation.
In this sense, we could envision another sort of Turing test, though not necessarily for taste or curation per se, but just in AI’s ability (or more likely, inability) to offer a judgment on what makes a thing interesting — that is, somehow beyond our expectations, offering something new in something familiar, tantalizing us with some concept of how to make sense of it within our experience, which is far from a list, whether positive or negative. More than the conversations of AI creating visual or discursive art, which its infinite recombinative possibilities will make sort of inevitable, I also worry about how hard it has become to tell the good lists from the bad, or even find them among the slop.
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If you’re a new subscriber, look back through the archives for our greatest hits. We send out short newsletters on taste, authenticity, and recommendation culture every Tuesday and Thursday (plus some extras).
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A catalogue of authenticity
Umberto Eco curated an exhibition on the topic of lists & I‘ve been hunting for a reasonably priced copy of the catalog for a while. Here’s an interview about it, with the banger quote being, „We like lists because we don’t want to die.“
https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/spiegel-interview-with-umberto-eco-we-like-lists-because-we-don-t-want-to-die-a-659577.html?sara_ref=re-so-app-sh
A list of lists—how meta! Seriously, AI and algorithms routinely misinterpret my interests because I write federal résumés for a living. I’m forever getting sent ads for colleges across the country because the federal template requires a city and state for each institution of higher learning and for military training programs because I need to include veterans’ ranks and decorations for them to get preference in the job search. It’s not myself I’m searching for; it’s SGT John Smith or CPT Mary Jones! I guess that’s why it’s called *artificial* intelligence…