2005 comes alive

I've spent the last few weeks writing almost exclusively about technology, and I think it's time to dip back into media and entertainment (and of course its intersections with technology). In the past, I've written pieces about building an online arts scene, my impressions of new media hardware, and the broken incentive structure of journalism. These have been some of my absolute favorite pieces to write.

Recently, I've been watching some twenty year old television. Old Jeopardy episodes from Ken Jennings's first runs, the first SNL episode after 9/11, a 2005 episode of SNL with Matthew McConaughey as the host. And boy-o do I have thoughts and feelings.

It's almost like magic

I know that this is not an original thought, but examining anthropological history is the closest thing we might ever get to time travel. In 2025, we are uniquely lucky that we have several decades of recorded material upon which to observe how people dressed and talked and what kinds of stories seemed important enough to record. With a library card or a couple media subscriptions you can reliably find audio-visual evidence of humans doing human stuff going back to at least World War II. I encourage it.

As mentioned, I've been drawn to television from 20-25 years ago. I think that this moment in American history is a fascinating one for artists, media analysts, and tech observers to come back to, particularly for the ways its echoes are being heard today.

There are so many fascinating things happening all at once. In roughly the time between 1995 and 2005, explosive pop culture events such as the OJ Simpson trial, high stakes geopolitical events such as 9/11 and the Iraq War, and the budding development of more mainstream "online" culture rocket boosted the American demand for media connectivity. As the decade of surplus ended under Clinton in 2000 and post-9/11 "consumer patriotism" took hold, American appetite for more, more, MORE struck upon our TV sizes, our cable subscriptions, and our bedazzled velour jumpsuits.

From this, the American media diet begins to drastically shift. In order to fill air time on fledgling networks, we get dozens of new television programs that maximize intrigue for bottom dollar. Leaving the "prestige" drama to HBO and Showtime, America's media companies develop an astounding number of reality and competition shows. In this one era we get this non-exhaustive list of institutions: Survivor, American Idol, Deal or No Deal, Big Brother, The Real Housewives, Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?. Instead of unionized actors gracing the screens, now whichever private citizen impresses a group of voracious producers the most gets to be famous for a moment. Whichever New York real estate jilter with a penchant for theatrics wants to "fire" Omarosa from behind a big boy desk gets to. The lines of legitimacy begin to blur.

But no amount of Arachne style word salads will adequately paint the picture of this time for you. Give it a try yourself. Find an old episode of Law and Order, or Wheel of Fortune, or The Tonight Show and you will learn (or remember) an enormous amount about American priorities and habits AND the perception of those things by media creators.

On an early episode of The Office that I recently watched with Mariah, a catered order of 8 subs gets delivered. The cost of these 8 subs is less than $40. A different world!

At this incredible juncture following the turn of the millennia, we have all of these forces coming together. Broadband is starting to roll out, cell phones are becoming ubiquitous, true media monoculture is disbanding, the loci of power aren't shifting but the endpoints certainly are. The foundation built in this time still props everything up. The social internet is born, surveillance capitalism takes root, the news becomes cheaper and easier to manipulate. In many ways our current moment will either course correct from the myopic decisions made in this time, or double down. After all, our president is the perfect symbol of the gluttonous, careless, and fractured world that the turn of the millennia gave us.

It is a time completely unlike our own in so many ways, yet it can be so instructive for today's biggest quandaries.

There are more and fewer famous people now

Saturday Night Live is not a perfect empirical barometer for American attention over the last 50 years, but it certainly provides a compelling case study for many of the trends that have come to define us.

Let's start here. Here are the names of some of the hosts of SNL in the 2004-2005 season that aired twenty whole-ass years ago:

• Ben Affleck
• Queen Latifah
• Jude Law (This is the infamous Ashlee Simpson episode for my culture fanatics out there)
• Kate Winslet
• Colin Farrell
• Robert De Niro
• Paul Giamatti
• Paris Hilton
• Jason Bateman
• Tom Brady
• Will Ferrell

These names will likely be familiar to you. That's because these people appeared in Super Bowl commercials, announced the Super Bowl, had featured presentation roles at the Grammys, host some of the country's biggest podcasts, feature in extremely ubiquitous advertising campaigns, were nominated for or won Oscars, and lead prestige television shows all extremely recently. In other words, these 2005 bonafide A-Listers are still very much part of national, mainstream media. Just quickly, Matthew McConaughey hosted the episode of SNL I mentioned in 2003, and he is god damn everywhere in America's commercial breaks these days.

Now, it's hard to make clean 1:1 comparisons, but I have a sense that, due to technological and media proliferation, true monocultural notoriety is much harder to attain for upstart creative labor, and that the forces that prop up celebrity are far less incentivized to even form an "A-List" as might have existed in 2005.

Consider what has happened in the twenty years between 2005 and 2025. Just as cable exploded media access following the network broadcast days, YouTube, social media, and streaming have even further kaboom-ed it. As the methods for creating and distributing creative work got cheaper, an entire class of cultural creators (e.g. Donald Glover, Quinta Brunson, Issa Rae, Justin Bieber, Bo Burnham, Phoebe Waller-Bridge) got their initial boosts by self-producing internet content, and viewers inherited previously inaccessible stories, themes, and artists.

But just because the pie has gotten bigger doesn't mean that more people are getting the best pieces of it.

It is my hypothesis that since media proliferation has made available exponentially more avenues for consumer attention to be diverted, the purse holders of the last few vestiges of American monoculture - The Super Bowl, the Oscars, the Olympics, things of that ilk - are more risk averse to funding the "celebritification" of new personalities.

Not to immediately undercut my supposition here, but this hypothesis is founded on some basic assumptions of which there are serious counter-arguments. For example, this idea that celebrities are "made" by powers above their control. It is fair to say that because of this wide open terrain, people have easier avenues to fame. I am thinking here of people like Mr. Beast, who quite literally cracked the code of the YouTube algorithm to boost his relevance and notoriety. But it is my assumption that notoriety does not simply beget notoriety. Only money can do that. And money looks like brand deals, venture capital investment, production contracts.

If getting advertising play for the big events is more expensive than ever (it is), and there are fewer and fewer opportunities to get hundreds of millions of viewers, then those seeking out talent for programming and advertising are looking for more sure bets. If, for example, NBC is lining up to pay $2.5 billion a year for 11 years for rights to broadcast some NBA games, they need to make good on that investment. As subscription revenue doesn't even come close to advertising revenue yet, that looks like asking advertisers for more money. If you ask the advertisers for more money, they need to pay for bigger talent and production value. If they need to pay for bigger talent, then they are more incentivized to go fishing in the A-list pond.

And who is in the A-list pond? My hypothesis is that it is disproportionately more people that were famous 20 years ago, who were able to leverage the last vestiges of the American monocultural media diet into thriving internet and prestige film/television careers. To the end user, you, this means more Peyton Manning, more McConaughey, more Jennifer Garner, more of 2005's best.

In short: It is easier to sign bigger checks for known entities than it is for even marginally risky players.

This, I think, even partially accounts for current reactionary stifling of the Me Too movement. Alongside rapid "conservatization" of the American public, there is at least a surface level appearance of sweeping new allegations under the rug. After all, the entertainment and advertising industries that got burned on public sentiment moving against longtime mass-market-appealing-personalities-and-predators like Kevin Spacey or James Franco do not want to see the same things happen to people for whom they have since invested enormous sums, like Snoop Dogg or Casey Affleck. Both of whom have had lawsuits launched against them for sexual assault and both of whom featured prominently in Super Bowl commercials this year. In order for your risk averse investments to return, you have to see to it that your A-listers remain your A-listers.

In conclusion, despite the growth of the populace of individuals paid for their personality and creative labor, the distribution of these dollars appears to be entrenching itself further in an establishment that formed 20-25 years ago. In the end, what this will mean for culture is tough to predict, although I believe we are already beginning to see a reactionary "flattening" of popular media as investment dollars and corporate willpower for diversity dry up. We will still get invention and innovation, but I think that this media environment will not amplify novelty in the ways 2005-2025 might've.

After all this, though, they need us to keep watching and to keep spending. And if the product ain't good? Well, maybe the pendulum will swing back.

That's all for today. Thanks for reading.

I haven't done this before, but I am going to make public my Venmo handle, which is @Alex-Schneidman. Writing Arachne has been and will continue to be one of my favorite things that I do, and thanks to the privileges and resources I have, I am okay while I am unemployed. But if you'd like to support the work I do monetarily, I would sincerely appreciate it. If not, thanks for even reading to the bottom of this entry. That in itself is a kindness that I greatly appreciate.