Decentralization of entertainment previews trends in scientific research
>>> Quick Picks - March / April 2022
Hello readers! I’m a huge Boston guy now so feel free to ask me for Beantown recommendations (spoiler, my recommendation for everything is Tatte). I’ll be in NYC and MIA in the next month or so; if you’re around, let’s link 🔗🔗
Stuff I’ve been thinking about:
Hollywood as an analogue to the shifting paradigm in scientific/clinical research toward decentralization
Stuff I liked lately:
📈 Icahn: The Restless Billionaire (HBO) - I don’t know how they did it, but Carl Icahn comes off likable AF in this documentary. Greatest reputation buff since Mitt Romney ironing his shirt while wearing it. If anyone knows where to buy that “happiness is cash flow” pillow please please please dm me
📺 DARK (Netflix) - I’m desperate to talk about this show if anybody watches it. It’s so moody and good (must watch with captions)
✏️ Lead exposure in the last century shrank IQ scores of half of Americans - really stunning data
✏️ Scientists Watch a Memory Form in a Living Brain - rainbow fish but make it science
✏️ Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid - probably overly ambitious in scope but this “theory of everything” long form essay is pretty interesting
🔥 diet tucker carlson’s “Ukraine and i go insane” has been living rent free in my brain
RIP Gatekeepers
A consistent theme across history is that new technologies disintermediate incumbent gatekeepers by democratizing access to the tools of creation. The effect is a significant unlock of experimentation and innovation.
Entertainment offers a classic example. I often think about the “Structure of Hollywood” graphic from Ben Thompson’s Stratechery. This graphic as presented understates gatekeeping because there are also gatekeepers who decide who gets to be an actor/screenwriter/director. Additionally, many people never view themselves as potential creators in the first place because they lack access to tools/resources/know-how to get started. An expanded graphic might look like the below (you can trust me, I’m a trained actor, which is to say that I took “Acting I” in college and my professor said I was the Most Improved in the class 😤):
Gatekeepers stall creative progress. An extreme illustration of this is the CCP’s authoritarian control on cultural works, as China expert Dan Wang relates in his annual essay:
While it’s too soon to say that regulatory actions have snuffed out entrepreneurial dynamism in China, it’s easier to see that a decade of continuous tightening has strangled cultural production. I expect that China will grow rich but remain culturally stunted. By my count, the country has produced two cultural works over the last four decades since reform and opening that have proved attractive to the rest of the world: the Three-Body Problem and TikTok. Even these demand qualifications. Three-Body is a work of genius, but it is still a niche product most confined to science-fiction lovers; and TikTok is in part an American product and doesn’t necessarily convey Chinese content. Even if we wave nuances aside, China’s cultural offering to the world has been meager. Never has any economy grown so much while producing so few cultural exports. Contrast that with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, which have made new forms of art, music, movies, and TV shows that the rest of the world loves.
The reason for China’s cultural stunting is simple: the deadening hand of the state has ground down the country’s creative capacity. The tightening has been continuous. Consider that the Three-Body trilogy had been published in Chinese by 2010, which was a completely different era. I think it’s quite impossible to imagine that this work can be published or marketed today. It’s not just the censorship related to direct depictions of the Cultural Revolution. A decade ago, the CEO of Xiaomi went on Weibo to share his thoughts on the book; today, few personalities speak up to say anything except the patriotic or the mundane…
Source: “2021 Letter” by Dan Wang
Experimentation drives progress. Technology has increased cultural experimentation by orders of magnitude via wholesale disintermediation of gatekeepers.
Camera enabled smartphones put high quality production tools in the hands of millions of people; anyone armed with an iPhone can be a creator. Peer-to-peer user generated content sharing platforms - e.g. YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Instagram - provide venues for creators to distribute content “directly” to audiences. Not only can people create and distribute their creations in a more decentralized fashion (with the caveat that this sharing is enabled by generally centralized platforms serving as connective tissue), but importantly - more people are invited into the creative process. I wouldn’t write this blog if Substack didn’t make it so easy.
This new vector of decentralized content is reflected in the growing share of user-generated content consumption vs. professionally produced content (i.e. RIP Quibi, long live TikTok).
This is not to say that all creative content in the future will be peer-to-peer user-generated.
Rather, “studio-grade” content and user-generated content will likely co-exist in parallel. Innovation will occur in parallel. Capital intensive innovation (e.g. advancements in rendering technologies) will still be relegated to the realm of studio-grade content producers with big budgets, while user-generated content creators deliver innovations at the margins via the rapid iteration enabled by their more robust culture of experimentation.
This is an instructive analogue for a similar dynamic taking shape in the realm of healthcare and clinical research. As I’ll write in a forthcoming post, the scope of “who gets to do clinical research” is rapidly expanding thanks to advancements in technology, shifting attitudes around the credibility of institutions and a growing aperture of what healthcare even “is.” The effect is likely to be the emergence of a parallel stream of decentralized innovation (led by patient groups, wellness companies and biohackers) alongside the incumbent scientific establishment (academia + pharma/biotech). More on that later…
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