most friday nights in the early 2000s, i'd make the pilgrimage to blockbuster with a singular mission: find the movie of the week. the one everyone was talking about (or soon would soon be), the one that might already be gone. i'd walk those aisles with the focused intensity of a hunter, scanning the new releases wall for that telltale gap between the shelf and the cover art where the title should be. then came the moment of truth: pulling back the plastic case, hoping against hope to find a copy still sitting there.
it was roulette, pure and simple. when you won, you won the right to be the evening's curator, the person who'd gathered the select few in your living room around something worth their friday night. your taste was on display.
we've optimized that friction away, and in doing so, we've broken something fundamental about how culture works.
in the blockbuster era, commitment was built into the system. you invested time driving there, money on the rental, and social capital in your choice. that investment made you a more generous audience member. you'd give a slow-burn movie twenty minutes to find its footing because you'd already committed. the movie had to earn its keep, and you had to give it a real chance.
now the cost of moving on approaches zero. content optimizes for the hook rather than the payoff. abundant choice has made us less committed to any single choice, which in turn makes creators less committed to making anything worth committing to. the feedback loop runs both ways: impatient audiences get impatient content, which creates more impatient audiences.
the same dynamic played out in music with even more dramatic results. i grew up watching trl, where the top ten countdown forced impossible bedfellows to share the same cultural moment. britney spears to eminem to limp bizkit to sisqo. that forced collision created a shared musical vocabulary that cut across genres.
those countdown slots were scarce and precious. artists had to make something that could hold its own next to completely different genres. limp bizkit needed to work for the rap fans, the rock fans, and the kids who just watched because it was appointment television. marcy playground's literary alt-rock earned its place next to chart-toppers because it was undeniably something. weird enough to stand out, crafted enough to deserve the spotlight.
the constraint pushed creativity. when you had to break through to everyone, artists made bolder, more distinctive choices. they had to be both accessible and memorable, which turns out to be one of the hardest things to pull off in art.
we've traded the tyranny of gatekeepers for the tyranny of the algorithm, and somehow ended up with less diversity in our actual consumption despite having access to everything. perfect personalization has made our listening habits more predictable, not more adventurous.
the economics amplify this narrowing. when artists make fractions of pennies per stream, they can't afford to take big creative risks. they need millions of plays just to pay rent, so they optimize for algorithmic safety rather than artistic breakthrough. the old model concentrated rewards at the top, which was unfair but allowed for bigger creative swings because the payoff for breaking through was substantial.
we've democratized access and destroyed the barriers that kept people from finding what they wanted. we've also lost the sense that culture is a shared project we're all participating in. it has become individual entertainment we consume in isolation.
when you had to gather people around the one copy of the movie, when everyone had to negotiate what to watch together, culture was something we built through shared experience and collective argument. the constraints forced us into the same conversations, the same discoveries, the same moments of unexpected connection across different tastes.
now we have perfect individual curation and fewer shared cultural experiences. we've solved the problem of access and created the problem of atomized taste. with atomized taste comes atomized conversation, and with atomized conversation, culture becomes less a binding force and more a series of parallel monologues.
the blockbuster was a hub for cultural friction. the kind of productive friction that made choosing matter, made sharing necessary, and made breaking through meaningful. we've optimized all of that away, and i am still figuring out what we've lost in the process.