One of the most common woes among creative people forced to work in zones defined by algorithms is that they have to compromise on their vision. If they want to write or paint or produce something that their heart is screaming, they still have to take things like SEO and algorithmic feeds into consideration before they publish it. If they don't, if they just "follow their heart", they risk invisibility, or worse, disinterest.

But the creator is not the only part of this equation. The audience is essential to it too, and the middle-man (the content platform in this case). Because they all go with the flow, the thrust of culture in these times tends towards a middle ground where many don't get to do what they want, but a few do. The many play to the gallery in hopes of becoming the few one day. Common wisdom says you should start by catering to the crowds and then, when you have enough eyeballs on you, present the art you truly want to make.

But why does the crowd want what it wants?

We can't pretend that public preferences are somehow removed from the context of prevailing cultural biases. The young man whose YouTube home page is full of reaction videos wasn't born desiring the approval of Westerners. Something made him into what he is. What was it?

Could it be that what is generally available forms our general preferences?

If you live in a place where every ice cream shop only sells three flavours of ice cream, every time you get asked about your favourite flavour of ice cream, you are going to answer with one of those three options. You don't know of any other flavour. You don't ask for any other flavours. The shops have no need to add more flavours to their existing menu. If someone from outside town were to ask the shop why they only provide three flavours, they might point at their menu, shrug, and say something on the lines of "this is what the people want".

People know what they want. But they don't always know what they need. That has always been the job of the artist. And in an economy that forces the creator to give people what they want, the artist struggles to fulfill her responsibility of being the guardian of culture and pushing society towards the future.

I think that in terms of online content, we are right now in the 3-flavour era. The flavours are all the "popular" topics and formats and all the average mediocrity that fills them. Our collective imagination has to choose from among them because there is no choice.

When I say there is no choice, I merely mean that the choices do not surface in the sea of mediocrity. They exist in the digital deep, making themselves known to those who dive and manage to see past the murky waters of retention-edited short form garbage and scammy videos with exaggerated and breathless 3-second intros.

Now, with AI driving (or aiding) content planning and generation, the race towards mediocrity is more intense. Many who aspire to a creator career are not only shouting louder and speaking cheaper lies, they are now also using AI to do so. There are still only three flavours of ice cream, but now the ice cream isn't actually ice cream at all.