Deep catalog

The Indestructible Record Company was an American record label that existed between 1907 and 1922. They traded in the earliest commercial medium for recording and reproducing sound, and for a brief moment represented, literally, the cutting technological edge in mass entertainment. Most of their recordings have survived more than a hundred years of change in what it means to produce immersive, compelling, futuristic media.

Sometime around the half of this century, big shot labels with deep pockets let their algorithms loose and went to work on their vast catalogs, hired the best prompt designers and fed their in-house image generators a small infinity of television and film recordings. It took a while, the first products were predictably jittery and free, but clearly irresistible. A few months of social feedback loops, underground meme wars, and the paid subscription packages started hitting the stock market, leveraging all their copyrighted assets and gobbling up the public domain: maybe you spell out the prompt on your way home, inspired by the shape of tonight’s traffic, a colorful rendering of la politique des auteurs in the style of Michael Bay - no subtitles.

Maybe you’re altruistic and social-minded, and for a month all you want to watch is your favorite teen sitcom remixed according to some highly specific ethno and demographic casting standard. Of course you can also subscribe to your friends’ and family’s playlists - passively or, for a small premium, become able to introduce your own plot lines and cast recombination into their already highly mutated pieces. The Godfather, verbatim, only with De Niro playing Sonny. In part II, add a couple of extra scenes at the end so I can see what Brando coming home really meant to the family.

After almost three decades of reality-inspired fiction, synthetic media became the dominant and abundant genre in entertainment and advertising. Depending on your connection speed and your chosen subscriptions, your synths became interoperable, customizable between the plausible and the atrocious, surrendering to a moment’s whim the entirety of recorded film history. That actors and musicians and creatives of all sorts had once believed they were anything else than source material to be scanned and ingested by the neural networks now seemed a particularly quaint notion, in the face of the newfound technical might of the corporate studios.

Democracy is not of this world, the show business people used to quip. Our generation was never bored again.

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Originally published in The Blind Machine