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- 🔆 The Physics of Culture: When Algorithms Shape Our World
🔆 The Physics of Culture: When Algorithms Shape Our World
How friction might save creativity & innovation, Anthropic's latest product update and the automated gatekeepers of culture
Emma G Moller & Allegra Guinan
October 24, 2024
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🗞️ Issue 41 // ⏱️ Read Time: 5 min
Hello 👋
Remember the last time you discovered a new song? Chances are it wasn't through a friend's recommendation or by wandering into a record store – it was probably served to you by an algorithm. Today, we're diving into how these invisible forces are shaping not only what we listen to, but how we experience culture itself.
In this week's newsletter
What we’re talking about: How algorithms are becoming the new physics of culture, influencing everything from our music choices to our creativity.
How it’s relevant: As AI systems increasingly curate our cultural experiences, we're seeing unprecedented amounts of content but potentially less creativity and innovation.
Why it matters: Understanding how algorithms shape our cultural landscape helps us make more conscious choices about how we consume and create.
Big tech news of the week…
🖥️ Anthropic announced an update to Claude that allows the chatbot to take actions on a user's computer: It can control the computer by looking at a screen, moving a cursor, clicking buttons, and typing text.
🌍 11,500 creatives criticise the “unlicensed use of creative works” to train data. “There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, compute, and data. They spend vast sums on the first two – sometimes a million dollars per engineer, and up to a billion dollars per model. But they expect to take the third – training data – for free,” the British composer and former AI executive Ed Newton-Rex said.
📕 Penguin Random House (PRH) is one of the first major publishers to address the issue of AI training explicitly by introducing a new statement to its copywriter wording: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.”
The New Laws of Cultural Gravity
Just as physics governs how objects move through space, algorithms now govern how information and culture move through our digital world. But unlike the laws of physics, these "laws" are written by humans – and they are often optimized for the speed of consumption or efficiency, not necessarily for cultural richness.
Think about it: When was the last time you spent an hour browsing through a bookstore, getting lost in random selections? Digital convenience has replaced these moments of serendipity with hyper-optimized recommendations. Recent data shows that on major streaming platforms, 60% of viewed content is now algorithm-selected, fundamentally changing how we discover and consume culture.