Much of the technology I invented was in the civic, politech and community organizing space. It was built to upend existing power dynamics. This is one astounding thing that web 2.0 did for the world in the early 2000s. It shifted power, literally, politically – elections were won thanks to that shift in power dynamics.
Messaging which had once been a metered broadcast became virally crowd-sourced. Manual operations became automated and infinitely scalable. It was pretty great for a while.
In the years since, lots has been written about the changes to our media and technology landscape through the “disruptor” framework, as Silicon Valley wants us to think of them. Uber tried to disrupt municipal bus service by reinventing a more expensive bus service they called Uber pool. A startup called Oyster tried to disrupt the public library by reinventing a more expensive service for borrowing ebooks. Sometimes disruptors fail, and sometimes they succeed…in becoming what they disrupted – for example, online streamers killed the cable bundle only to clump themselves into streaming bundles.
Any large complex structures that can be undermined by tech disruptors will be similarly attacked. But in many cases, this “disruptor” framework is unsatisfactory for understanding what’s actually happening because it leaves aside the audience and their reasons for adopting or rejecting the innovation. “Why” is always a much bigger question.
Something we hear all the time in Hollywood is “Young audiences today are different.” But why? And if they’re different, why did “disruptor” Quibi fail? Here’s part of the answer:
POWER DYNAMICS AND THE SHIFT OF SOVEREIGNTY
This is the framework we need to use to grapple with this issue: Power dynamics and the shift of sovereignty. This is one aspect of tech that I’m an expert in. I also happen to know a thing or two about Hollywood…
The Art of longform storytelling is a big, old industry. Feature films and longform prestige television spends (and earns) enormous amounts of money. But it is being devolved, undermined, and it is losing power because of a change in sovereignty perception amongst young viewers.
That is the real “why.” The perception that the audience have about their own sovereignty.
Why? Technology. As the world learned in the years between Howard Dean’s DNC blogosphere and Tahir Square’s video livestreams, technology works very, very well at shifting sovereignty and power. It always has.
{To be fair, some of this change in perception about Hollywood is due to our larger societal rights movements like the “Oscars so white” hashtag campaign, borne from diversity and representation activism. This agitation butts up against Hollywood’s white male ivy-league gatekeeper system and gives some of the audience and some storytellers an enhanced sense of ownership, autonomy, and sovereignty over their artform.}
When the printing press — the actual technology of the machine itself – got smaller and cheap enough that agitprop newspapers could be easily started, broadsheets were so plentiful that an edition sold for a penny. This was the Penny Press. Subsequently there arose a huge wave of Revolutionary Wars across Europe and Latin America in 1848 because of the Penny Press. Technology shifts power and our sense of sovereignty.
For young people today, smart phones are not toys, they are power. If you’re stuck somewhere and you need to flee, you can call an Uber. If there’s injustice, you can broadcast it. If there’s anything in the world you want to know, anything, you can ask your phone for the answer. This is power. The phone in your kid’s pocket represents their sovereignty.
THE SELFIE DEVOLUTION
A glance at the billions of videos on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts shows us how the overwhelming majority of phone video is self-centered – but why? Because the actual attraction young people have to their phone relates directly to their own personal sense of power and control.
Whether the content creator has made themselves the star of their monologue, their own reaction vid, their own playthrough on Minecraft, or their own presence in any meme mob, a person’s use of their phone to create content is oriented to self in every respect. This content of infinite monologues is now what young people are growing up watching for entertainment. That’s not a bad thing – just think it through… It exists on a continuum.
Before phone video and the selfie, film and television broadcasts were all voyeuristic in a manner invented by Ancient Greeks in 550 BCE. Audiences watched a story. Storytellers staged entertainment using theatrical conventions of a proscenium arch – the box inside which a story is told…for the audience which sits elsewhere, voyeuristically.
But what happened when all of that power to tell a story and see a story was upended and put into a child’s hand was a revolution. I mean, it caused a re-evolution. Young people who have only ever known the immediacy of selfie video are now starting to become storytellers, and they accidentally find themselves reinventing entertainment forms and structures that they didn’t even know existed.
From around 1830 to 1900, the Lyceum movement saw solo entertainers traveling the world performing a “lecture” on stage. Riding in a horse-drawn coach from town-to-town across the hinterlands on a “circuit,” these presentations started as educational events. Standing beside painted dioramas, the scholar often brought samples of exotic taxidermy, or geology. The monologist was usually some renowned academic from far away like Harvard or London. Soon though, this popular entertainment form was lampooned by comedians like Artemus Ward and Mark Twain whose monologues were send-ups of a learning experience. This was the birth of stand-up comedy.
Storytelling on Tiktok is now at the “lecture circuit” stage of entertainment’s evolution of form.
THE RE-EVOLUTION OF FORM
Because each storytelling form is based on earlier forms and formats, Tiktok audiences will soon reinvent Vaudeville, and it will do so via scripted pranks which are merely a low form of sketch comedy.
When the Vaudeville TikTok scene matures enough that very popular scripted “acts” bridge more than one video and include more than one beloved character, then young people will have reinvented longform storytelling via serials.
The most cutting-edge young Tiktok auteurs will then find themselves in the 1920s, reinventing all the setup-payoff tricks of cliffhangers, B-Stories, counter-cuts, and all the rest of the artform that they will be able to (hopefully) rediscover through America’s old radio dramas.
Not too long after that, young auteurs will rediscover episodic television. This re-evolution will happen fast, but we are not there yet.
This is why Quibi died. Short form video was not yet at that “advanced” stage of storytelling. The audience was still in the 1860’s era of storytelling’s re-evolution of form.
Media always evolves, but today, like so many other industries that find themselves power-charged and upended by technology, media also re-evolves. Like the cable bundle becoming the streaming bundle.
In the hands of this new generation of selfie-natives, storytelling is being completely re-invented. And yet there is actually nothing new. Not if you know where we come from.
If you want to win the future of storytelling, first understand its history.