It Will Come When it Comes

An Experiment in Video Poetry

This video is a culmination on my thoughts on the systems that govern promotion within online social media contexts. In this increasingly digital world, the output of artists is forced to constrain to promotional algorithms, such as YouTube's. The demand for content is so high, however, that these algorithms put so much strain on creatives that it either burns them out, forces them to over-sensationalize their work, or reduce their quality to vapid garbage. While YouTube seems to be making efforts avoid this outcome, it nevertheless persists. I believe the reason YouTube struggles with censorship and things like that is because of this pressure to produce poorly thought-out content.

The video prominently features a graphed simulation I constructed based on a predator-prey model in Netlogo. Manipulating some of the variables meant that rather than the model showing wolves and sheep, it showed artists and consumers. The key variable was the time it took for an artist to create “art” which the consumer would consume. There is a happy medium where the system is sustainable, with the artist creating art at a speed in which the consumer was satisfied but still wanted more. As the time increased, the art took too long to make, and the consumers died out. If the time is decreased, it becomes harder and harder for artists to sustain themselves, and they die out. I believe YouTube and other social media platforms are forcing artists to die out by doing just this, decreasing the amount of time allowed to create something. The video complimenting the graph is compiled with stock footage from the Internet Archive or YouTube set to music to show the progression we’ve made as a society conforming to this simulated graph, ending with the real-life repercussions this unreasonable pressure has led to.

Below, you can see a more raw recording of the graph in Netlogo, to perhaps gain a better understanding of how it works.