As the guilded age came to a close in the 1900s, railroad barons, industrialists and banking kingpins put money into the arts in order to launder their image and legacies. We see no such thing today. Why is that?
I’m an independent film producer in NYC who has previously acted in Hollywood studio films and sold screenplays. I’m also extremely online. I have found that wealthy techies, in general, have little to zero interest in investing in culture. This has been a source of frustration considering the large percentage of new money that comes from the sector.
I’m not alone in feeling this way: I have a friend who raises money for a non-profit theater in Boston, another who owns an art gallery in Manhattan, and another who recently retired at the LA Opera. All have said not to bother with anyone in tech. This has always bummed me out given that I genuinely believed with all of my heart and soul that the internet was going to usher in a new golden age of art, culture, and entertainment. (Yes, I was naive as a kid in the 00s.)
Art and culture can truly only thrive on patronage, especially in times of deep income inequality. Yet there are no Medicis in 2023. So what’s missing here? Where is the disconnect?
The disconnect is that heads haven’t started rolling yet, I imagine.
I worry that the apathy doesn’t come from a lack of fear of accountability, but a genuine contempt for humanity. The enshittification of the internet we are currently experiencing is deeply anti-human.
I met a wealthy YCombinator guy at a friend’s wedding. He told me he was having Midjourney create a portrait of himself and his wife because “AI art doesn’t have the imperfections of the human touch.” Now, I’m no snob: I specialize in thrillers, crime, horror, and comedy, but I was still genuinely baffled and nauseated by this attitude. Another tech guy I met at a nightclub who runs a Linktree clone told me “Film and TV is over.” But what does that mean? The future is algorithmic UGC and AI generated TikTok videos filtered through his app? How is that guy and his junk product worth 40 million dollars in VC funding but a real movie or TV show is worthless? I don’t get it.
This statement alone deeply offends me; holy shit. What the average techbro would rate as ‘the imperfection of the human touch’ is the performance. I dig generative art for bases to build off of, GANs as ‘a tool in the toolbox rather than the whole entree’; but what the actual fuck is the point of art if there’s no true ‘human’ input? “Anti-human” is probably right overall.
Except when it gives people six fingers and shit lol