In the reformation-era epic “Q”, the pseudonymous collective author Luther Blissett spins up a fantasy-world in which ideas catch fire. A single pamphlet can enflame whole regions, destabilise Princes, and challenge Popes. Our protagonist ‘Gert in the Well’ travels the land, spreading his vaguely anarcho-communist, protestant heresies with ease. Each town he speaks to is instantly susceptible to his skilled speaking (and gang of fellow riler-uppers) and it seems he only has to drop a scrap of paper reading “DOWN WITH THE LANDSKENCHTS” and he is at the head of a revolution.
I think this is the world that many activists still live in:
There used to be a sense that you would smack the bad guys in the face with your awesome art, and they’d fold, and that was how the good guys won. On the face of it that seems like a really stupid theory. In fact I’m not so sure; cultural change underlies political change and all the rest of it, and cultural change is in fact achieved by exposing people to mind-altering media. I’d be hard-pressed to say that texts like Rent and even Star Trek didn’t in fact have substantial political impact.
They believe we are one really good book about climate change away from defeating the capitalist machine. Or that with the right slam poetry night, or raw, hard-hitting documentary, or protest song, the masses will rise up and challenge the powers that be. Why this view is so popular can be given a cynical or functional explanation. The ‘art enflames the world’ view – predominantly of those on the left – is the product of: (a) the overrepresentation of humanities university graduates on the left (when all your tools are art or art-adjacent, it is convenient to believe art is ridiculously impactful); and, the inverse: (b) the fact that any action with significant impact in the modern world is a complex process which some bad and good effects, and thus only the most diffuse, impactless actions can be truly appear morally immaculate (Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics).
These cynical explanations are downstream of the functional: that art has, in fact, become less impactful; that media has less influence on politics than ever before. If true, this would imply the tools, time, and effort of thousands of campaigners across the West are being wasted. They don’t know what time it is.
In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention… (Herbert A. Simon)
It is a tragedy of the commons, where the commons is ‘audience attention’ and the extractors are communicators.
Today, each individual act of communication – whether novel, movie, protest, or conversation - is fractionally a far smaller proportion of what the average person will consume. Yes, they might read your emotionally devastating novel about deforestation, but they might also read two other similar books on related causes, watch several documentaries, read disturbing news exposes, and consume several hundred tweets, reels, videos on any number of issues. Each piece of media occupies a smaller part of a person’s total media input (assuming that media does, in fact, change people) and a smaller part of their attention.
We can contrast this to even a short time ago: to the 50s, for example, in which the average person, politician, official, and academic read far fewer books, got their news from fewer sources, and tuned into a narrow range of radio and televisions stations. For this person, a single book -say, Silent Spring – could be a life-determining event. She could – and might have to – spend hours poring over it, turning it over in her mind. The same, indeed, could be said about a single conversation: a single sermon, or visiting preacher, or protest, could radicalise a town. It occupied a much larger share of their media-input, and a much larger share of their attention.
For the 13th century peasants in Luther Blisset’s Q, Gert in the Well’s pamphlet might be the most interesting thing they read in years. The complete and utter poverty of media (manifesting in massive excitement when seemingly trivial things occur, like the arrival of a stranger or a strange weather event) made the lone pamphlet enormously powerful. The printing press must therefore be controlled in a way totally unnecessary in the modern liberal country. 1 printing press is an atom bomb; 100,000 is a matchstick.
Counterintuitively, this means in countries with stricter media controls – e.g., censorship or conservative ‘endarkening’ – the power of the artist grows massively, and the need for their control. The artificial constraints on media-production renders the memetic environment parched and dry, and as a result single inspirational pieces of media, songs, artwork, performances, public conversations even, can spark an inferno. This is the world of the 1930s-1960s.
Conversely, in a world of high saturation and competition, it is much harder to produce a classic: although your book will reach more readers, it will occupy a much smaller fraction of their attention. The impact is diluted. The same can be said of conversations, and, for that matter, social events. In 1960, a sizeable fraction of the American populace would have seen and concerned themselves – for weeks or months – about the death of JFK, or the peace march. In 1950, single government reports, academic conferences, and articles could radically alter the attention of an expert community. In 2025, a protest is likely to occupy between 1-3 days of the news cycle. It then vanishes under a wave of new, stimulating content.
A second argument is that our culture has fragmented into countless tiny parts. There is an ever smaller – possibly homogenised, ‘safe’ – body of media which can be reliably said to have reached the majority of a population. These items of culture, assuming they can somehow stay in the spotlight for an extended period of time, are all that is left of the ‘mainstream.’ This produces a weird dynamic whereby a cultural icon like Taylor Swift is regarded as a transcendent anomaly for reaching the same degree of household recognition as the average television singer in the 1950s.
For the remainder – and the remainder is very large indeed – art cannot be targeted at the mainstream. Instead, it must be aimed at a subculture which can be trusted to like your work. Thus, two effects: (1) art’s scope of impact is limited to subcultures; and (2) cross-aisle art is harder to produce as people splinter off into different spheres (polarisation, ‘bubbles’ etc). This helps explain the perception art is getting ‘worse’ (no, it is merely getting more specific in the tastes it targets), and subtleties in art’s mixed influence (aiming at the right subculture could produce large effects – e.g., successful rationalist-coded art, or high-volume homogenous echo-chambers/pipelines).
The subculture explanation extends to in-person conversation as well. People do not go out as much in general and when they do it is in less socially diverse settings. Previous mixing-places, such as church, sports, marketplaces, cultural festivals, are either vanishing in a haze of ‘remote’ alternatives, or becoming hyper-tailored to particular groups. In these conditions, the possibility a mass movement could be triggered by art is becoming ever more remote. You release your art into the world: it inspires A, who talks to B, who… doesn’t go out much. Or it inspires A, who talks to B, who talks to C… who talks to A and B.
This is a problem related to the production and structure of subcultures: general atomisation and individualism in society. Persuading the average person of something might now have the least average impact in history: not only are they proportionally less significant through sheer population sizes, but they are less meaningfully networked. They speak to fewer people, are influential in fewer civic organisation, have fewer neighbours, have smaller families and tighter circles of friends. The flame you ignite in their heart will peter out within 1 degree of separation.
The exception, of course, is in their online networks. The question then becomes: is getting someone to repost a video, or share it, or send it to someone else, in their highly curated circles, of the same impact as discussing it at work or tabling it for discussion at their local trade association? The answer is: almost certainly not, it is mere content aggregation and distribution (so-called ‘clicktivism’). It is the perfect form of ‘engagement’ for the thin, high-optionality subcultures modern people prefer. The social commitment is minimal, as is the commitment in time and social repercussions (with, as always, qualifications for more targeted media and thought-bubbles). Communicators and activists are left competing for ever shrinking attention-spans and social commitment.
If you want to have an influence on people by making media, or having conversations about politics, it has to be targeted and intelligent. Whilst there is still a chance of both going totally mainstream and of producing mass-movement through a lone masterpiece, the chances are incredibly small. The days in which substantial national influence in large countries could reliably be achieved by a reasonably skilled writer with connections has vanished. The terrain has changed.
Now, if you want to achieve influence, you had better pick a subculture with the following characteristics: (1) contains influential/powerful members; (2) these members primarily form their views you wish to alter based on media from that subculture; (3) the subculture has relatively few members producing content. In short, an emergent subculture which nonetheless has several influential and obsessive members (who ideally control, or may someday control, technocratic levers of power).
And then you merely have to produce actually compelling, persuasive, and powerful art for that subculture, in sufficient volumes and over however long to produce lasting influence. Such subcultures can be found and entered, or they can be produced – either through cultivating a readership or, in person, building up a thought community (which will gestate into institutionally-sustained think-tanks, university chairs, programmes, research projects, non-profits, NGOs, magazines, journals, etc). Either way, they are essential if you want to create impactful work.
The television, radio, and rotary printing press democratised the consumption of art; multi-channel T.V., social media, and the internet democratised its production and distribution. The media landscape was ‘naturally’ censored in the 18th and 19th centuries: it is not an infringement of free speech or liberty for society to deny you access to a media-technology which has yet to exist.
Once new technology is invented, however, any restriction becomes a political matter. If we want to return to a world where a single genius artist – from the present or past – can influence an entire culture, we would need:
First: more censorship. This will reduce the total amount of media and therefore increase the relative impact of the ‘great art’ you want to support. This could be overt (the Great Firewall) or it could be more subtle (via cultural filtering, as in some inward-looking or culturally chauvinistic European countries).
Second: a degree of amplification is required. This could be via commercial support (assuming for whatever reason capital has good taste), or via state support (assuming for whatever reason state bureaucrats have good taste) to produce a ‘canon’ backed by state broadcasting, arts funding, high school education, arts prizes etc.
These tools are apparently unacceptable according to liberal values: once social media is invented, liberalism demands we max it out as fast as possible. At most, we might accept these restrictions for children under the age of X on the spurious grounds of ‘health.’
Even if we wanted to restore mass-society and consensus reality, could we? Can the clock be turned back? This would amount to reversing the 1960s via a counter-revolution, with a high likelihood that the short-term would be far worse than the present. Why fight when you can relax in a local minima?