Somewhere in the last decade, corporate PR and organisational mechanics became cultural output.
Consider what now counts as culture. A small business owner with a ring light has a podcast. A rebrand is passed around design circles with the reverence once reserved for a film or an album. A panel of millionaires is filmed deciding whether a stranger’s invention deserves funding, and it is scheduled as family entertainment. Nike’s handing a cheque to the woman who drew its logo gets shared every year, as though a commercial transaction were a parable.
This is not harmless enthusiasm. It is the aestheticisation of commerce, and it is displacing actual cultural output.
The usual objection is that none of this is zero-sum. A podcast did not take airtime from a novelist; the audience simply grew. But the scarce resources were never minutes. They are the prestige and the budgets of the people who commission work. There is a fixed amount of being-taken-seriously to go around, and we are spending it on the operating lessons of men who middle-managed things.
WeWork has a film. WeWork has a drama series. The sensibility that backed the company is the sensibility that now backs the content business: growth over substance, the founder as the unit of interest. It is the venture flywheel applied to culture. Fund the story, inflate the story, then fund the story about the story. The people who could not tell you why a co-working lease was a technology business are the people deciding which stories get told, and unsurprisingly they are all ones about themselves.
Nike releases a feature film about the signing of a trainer endorsement, and we discuss its cinematography.
Companies learned that attention is a commercial asset. The founder gets a profile, the profile becomes a book, the book becomes a festival slot. The man who leaves a large technology company after fifteen years of well-paid service and writes a book about how rotten it was is applauded for his courage, then invited to a literary festival to discuss craft. Writers who spent ten years on a novel are on the next stage along, or are not on a stage at all. This is reputation laundering with a publishing imprint attached.
Design has been a willing accomplice. A rebrand is a procurement decision wearing good typography. It can be skilled, and occasionally it is very good. It is not a film. Treating it like one tells the people who commission it that the world should care about their wordmark and the 134 concentric circles they drew on it to prove its geometric DNA. And then they go make a four-part behind-the-scenes documentary about it.
The case against this is not that commerce is vulgar. Commerce has always paid for art, and the best patrons knew the difference between funding something and starring in it. My complaint is that we have stopped distinguishing patronage from self-promotion. A company that sponsors a documentary about a river is a patron. A company that commissions a documentary about itself is advertising, and we have agreed to call it content so that nobody has to feel bad about watching. Then it gets written about, and the writing gets written about, and the whole thing becomes an endless cycle of crap and commentary on crap.
Real cultural work is strange and generally unprofitable. It does not come with a case study. It does not end with a lesson for your team. It is made by people who could not have told you at the outset what it was for, and no one would have approved it in a quarterly plan.
I want fewer stories about business. The men in quarter-zip fleeces you avoid standing next to in the pub should not be the people you outsource your cultural meal plan to, whether via their algorithms, their investments or their own incredibly dull stories. Who would read the actual diary of a CEO, for God’s sake?