#740: The gamification of culture

Plus "algorithm movies" and historical nostalgia

I spent too much time researching and writing this week’s edition and have run out of time to dream up clever CTAs. Perhaps this is a good time to remind you that I compile this newsletter by trawling hundreds of RSS feeds manually — inefficiently! — every single day. If you’d like to continue to see more good links (... and fewer bad subscription nudges?!) please consider becoming a paid supporter. Every subscription makes a difference.

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Open Polymarket on any given afternoon and you’ll be greeted by a grab bag of niche concerns: football rivalries, crypto prices, U.S. fiscal policy — the domains of over-confident, over-resourced male nerds. Polymarket and its rivals in the prediction market space let bettors place wagers on future real-world events, from elections and sports to the outcomes of wars. In other words, Taylor Swift’s recent popularity on the Polymarket charts represents something of an aberration.

But there’s money to be made in Swiftian wagers, so of course speculators have piled on. As of this writing, there are over half a million dollars in Swift/Kelce wedding bets on Polymarket alone; earlier this week, one anonymous user bet aggressively that the couple would soon get engaged — and netted roughly $3,000.¹

Part of this, one suspects, is just the Swiftian spectacle of it all. (I called Swift and Kelce the last vestige of our shared monoculture just a couple weeks ago.) But more of it, I would argue, is the gradual gamification — and gamblification — of the entire culture. Sports betting has exploded since dozens of states legalized it in the past five years. Polymarket has flourished in the U.S., despite being barred from operating here. Now, the logic of finance has come for movies, music and celebrity news: Culture markets “have grown immensely this year,” a spokesperson for Polymarket rival Kalshi told the Washington Post. (Incidentally, you can currently wager on Kalshi whether Jeff Bezos will sell the paper this year or not.)

Maybe this represents the democratization of these markets; the writer and crypto “cool girl” Natasha Hopkins argued as much last week. In a recent bulletin, the brand-building firm Bullish goes way further: With culture prediction markets, they argue, “Younger generations, feeling locked out of traditional wealth-building opportunities and skeptical of institutional authority, have found a way to monetize their attention and cultural knowledge directly.”

Sure, sure — that’s possible. But alternatively, cultural betting could do to music, movies and celebrity weddings what fantasy leagues did to football: transform a shared, synchronous experience into a fragmented, individualized, screen-mediated one. I’m personally not excited for a future where even your group chat’s most trivial celebrity musings becomes a potential revenue stream; let the people speculate on the date of Traylor’s wedding without polluting it with MONEY, geeze.

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If you read anything this weekend

“Bland, Easy to Follow, for Fans of Everything: What Has the Netflix Algorithm Done to Our Films?” by Phil Hoad for The Guardian. I am sympathetic to Phil Hoad and his editors at The Guardian, who clearly went into this story with a valid question: Why are so many new movies and TV shows on streaming services so defiantly … mid? The real answer, however, is not terribly spicy (essentially: it’s most profitable for Netflix to cater to the masses, and as a matter of statistical necessity the masses have fairly middling taste) and so Hoad and/or his editors expend a lot of time and effort insinuating that “the algorithm” is to blame. I wish they hadn’t, alas, because the bits about Netflix’s business model and the artistic conservatism it fosters are … actually pretty sharp! And I say this as someone who has resignedly binged every uninspired, eye-rolly spy flick Netflix offers.

“AI Killed My Job: Translators,” by

Brian Merchant

for Blood in the Machine. This is the second installment in journalist Brian Merchant’s excellent series collecting the personal stories of workers displaced by automation, and it’s just the latest of many recent pieces to warn that AI’s eating knowledge work and white-collar employment. But this project, which includes contributions from more than a dozen translators, strikes me as particularly compelling.

For one thing, because many translators are paid per-word and on contract, it’s possible to quantify down to the fraction of a penny exactly how much work they’ve lost. (In some cases, all of it.) For another thing, both Merchant and several of his subjects make the fascinating case that the rush to embrace AI in translation and in other industries relates less to technological progress (i.e., LLMs are not really an improvement over humans or existing technologies) and more to emerging/shitty cultural norms (i.e., we’re newly dismissive of human expertise).

“Who Killed the Narrative Podcast?” by Eric Benson for Rolling Stone. One of these days, media types will finally learn to beware tech bros bearing gifts. In the 2010s, a generation of buzzy publishers famously grew fat on Facebook traffic, then withered when Facebook grew bored of them. Narrative podcasts, à la Serial, have lately met a similar fate: cut down, cancelled or sold for parts after the likes of Spotify realized they don’t make much money.

“Revenge of the Followers,” by Joseph Bernstein for The New York Times. On the rise of the “one-against many” format — best exemplified by “Surrounded,” the popular, feverish YouTube series wherein a single prominent figure debates 20 people with opposing views — and what the gimmick may say about our wider culture:

“That’s why these one-on-many stunts are not just stunts. They are dramas that enact the complex interplay between creators and the nameless masses to whom they owe their success. More than this, they are a new frontier in the parasocial, the traditionally one-sided exchanges between audience and star that define modern digital culture.”

A grab bag of reads on “historical nostalgia.” “Iris” is always the song of my summer — and also my winter and spring and fall — because I live in Buffalo and we love The Goo Goo Dolls almost as much as we love Bills football. But Gen Z is apparently and belatedly embracing the Goos, too, as part of a movement toward pre-digital and analog culture. Said movement also purportedly spans vinyl records, digital cameras, ‘90s music and TV, flip phones, tanning beds, George Dubya Bush and chain restaurant Chili’s. But before you pity the backwards-looking youth for lacking a generational identity of their own, consider recent research on nostalgia: It is, per a new op-ed in the Times, “a future-oriented endeavor.” [WSJ / Music Week / WaPo / NY Post / Cosmo / Newsweek / Fast Company / NYT]

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In case you missed it

The most-clicked Link from last week’s edition was a New York Times recipe for homemade ice cream. And if you don’t immediately clock why that merited inclusion here, you’ll just have to read the full story:

#739: How information works online now

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From the group chat

This week’s guest link comes from Sarah, who’s been a paid supporter since May 2024. “You consistently find articles that I think are interesting and/or important, and I like supporting independent journalism (especially women! especially people who are smart and not insane!),” she said. Delighted to have fooled at LEAST one person into thinking my brain still functions.

For your consideration: “Bringing Sexy Back,” by Kate Wagner for Lux Magazine. “It's a well-written, astute diagnosis of how the internet of self-surveillance affects our most intimate thoughts,” Sarah said. I had seen this piece shared around but had not gotten around to reading it, so thank you for that!

Below the jump, other ~friends of Links~ can find unlocked articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic, plus: the real economics of fitness influencing, the rise of the post-friend internet, the first ChatGPT murder and the actual best thing I read this week (not internet-related!).

For access to those postscripts and lots of other fun features, AND to support the newsletter, upgrade to a monthly or annual subscription.

That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin