🟧 Temporal realness is the hottest commodity
We’re living in the era of live culture.
An essay on the flight of digital media toward cable television and the turning cultural tide toward the personal, the finite, the IRL. The best restaurant is the one you don’t post.
Kyle Chayka: TBPN (Technology Business Programming Network) is a livestreamed, daily video show broadcast by two tech bros who dress for the camera in crisp shirts and jackets. They commentate on the day’s tech gossip like a cable news show or a sports panel, which they essentially are making, but one broadcast over YouTube and X instead of traditional television. It reaches an insider-internet audience and is beloved of tastemakers like Emily Sundberg and Taylor Lorenz. The other day, the tech publication The Information launched TITV, a livestreamed, daily video show about the tech industry. They just had Mark Zuckerberg do a live interview about AI. TBPN fans called out TITV as a copycat, but no one owns a format in media, and anyway, everyone is just copying cable. As Ben Smith posted on X about Fox News licensing a podcast, “It's all becoming TV …”
I don’t think it’s just about TV. The media industry’s flight to audio, video, livestream, conference is about a larger movement toward real-time, highly textured, human person-driven interaction. We consumers are suddenly awash in voices and faces chattering at us, each trying to win a slightly larger slice of our dwindling trust as the rest of the information ecosystem is flooded out by AI slop and NSFW chatbots sponsored by Elon Musk. The creator era is an anxious response to the bland automation of writing and the enshittification of search and the rest of the internet. The only way we can reliably feel (if not wholly know) that something is human made is if we see it coming out of a human body, ideally one that we know physically exists. Smith calls his company Semafor’s conference and talk-hosting business “live journalism.” (Maybe not his coinage but the most active current usage.) The media consultant Brian Morrissey, recapping a podcast interview in his Rebooting newsletter, observed that live-ness is marketable:
Brands are turning back to IRL experiences. ABM thinks we’re in the early stages of a return to real-world moments. Not mass events, but the kinds of physical experiences that actually stick with people. That could be a smart creator dinner, a useful activation at a festival, or just something that connects to a moment in people’s lives.
We’re in the wider era of Live Culture, in which we desperately want to know, to be reassured, that what’s in front of us is real. This urge might be semi-subconscious, a drift toward the real-time (or the appearance of such) and a slow dismissal of the pre-made. Livestreamed video is hard to fake, and a live interview is, on some baseline level, authentic. The spoken language of a three-hour podcast episode is messy, meandering, and often internally inconsistent, but it has the tinge of realness that written text doesn’t. (Hence the parasocial stickiness of Donald Trump going on Theo Von.) A personal testimonial on front-facing camera is more authentically Live than a It Happened to Me personal essay. There’s a reason the NYT is putting all of its star journalists on video. (My employer, The New Yorker, is producing video podcasts clips of its very fun culture podcast Critics At Large.)
Live Culture isn’t just media, though. It’s everything. Anna Kornbluh identified “immediacy” as the house style of late capitalism in her 2024 book of the same title. “Immediacy rules art as well as economics, politics as much as intimacy,” Kornbluh wrote. Immediacy has an “insistence that mediation recede,” in other words, that things are as direct as possible. When I think about which forms of cultural are most valuable in this particular moment, they are often about unmediated experience, live-ness. It’s the arena concert, a multi-sensory spectacle, quasi-spiritual experience of Sabrina Carpenter with different dance moves at each performance (and Taylor Swift and Beyoncé and Phish, lol, before her). It’s the buzzy restaurant, a room where you can either be there or not be there, there is no ambiguity to getting handed a martini. What’s more, it’s the restaurant table, surrounded by your high-clout friends, having a conversation that only you can hear. It’s the vacation destination, an obscure bastide or finca or hot spring glimpsed in the corner of Instagram posts.
These things are the opposite of scalable and replicable. Live culture is finite. It exists in the moment and then it’s gone, except perhaps for the artifacts of digital content it leaves behind, spun off into TikTok, relied on to advertise what already happened and convey the aura of realness, building hype for next time. (Substack held a reading at a Manhattan bathhouse, in the pool.) We bounce between the desire for privacy and the temptation of total visibility, secrecy for the insiders and exposure for the normies. You have to hide from the looming omniscient AI. Of course, we could just do something and shut up about it, host a hidden rave, install your paintings in the woods, send an email to yourself. But then no one would know about it, and culture requires a public. Am I trying to coin something here? No, I am not a trend forecasting agency. I am just making notes in real time, responding to the moment, trying to test the wind. Because that’s all there seems to be these days.
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I find it interesting how both 1-minute TikTok videos and 3h+ live streams can simultaneously be the norm for how people consume media today.
I like this. I think there’s more there. Temporal Realness feels prescient in the same way Airspace did when I first read that piece in 2016. Ties into Kyla Scanlon's piece on friction as commodity too. You might not be a trend forecasting agency but I’ve worked with them for ten years 🙃 they'll be using this.