Douglas Rushkoff
2 min readOct 1, 2024

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There are some great ideas in here, but very confusingly presented. Don't sacrifice clarity for style - unless you intend to alienate, which I don't think is your purpose.

I get most confused where you get into the two bodies of data.

I think you are saying:

Now that art and technology have merged into a profit-driven business, artists who want to be paid for their work must create content intended to be shared: each work becomes a copy of a copy of a copy. (I don't see how the resulting space is a simulacrum of content. The content consists of copies, but the platform itself may or may not be.)

Anyway, we go on. I am trying to parse the next sentence. You say that in order to disseminate these pieces of copyable content, two things end up being connected. "Online accounts" and "online content"

I think you mean the online accounts of the viewers? Or do you mean the online accounts of the creators? Or do you mean that the accounts of creators are connected with the accounts of viewers through a pipeline controlled by algorithms?

Then you say there are two bodies of data:

1 - online accounts receiving content

2 - algorithms disseminating posts.

This confuses me, because when I hear "bodies of data" I think of a bunch of content. Like, words and pictures and things. And now you're really talking about two different kinds of digital things - algorithms, which are programs, and accounts, which I guess are partitions?

So I kind of wish you just spoke this out loud.

I think you're saying that in order to conform to succeed on the current digital platforms, digital art must be made to be copied and recopied. All of these copies end up passing through algorithms, that decide everything about whose work gets delivered to which users. Content creators and content audiences are delivered to one another through various identity markers that the algorithms have determined are compatible.

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Douglas Rushkoff
Douglas Rushkoff

Written by Douglas Rushkoff

Author of Survival of the Richest, Team Human, Program or Be Programmed, and host of the Team Human podcast http://teamhuman.fm

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