The Internet

Two recent books, Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine and Andrew deWaard’s Derivative Media, explore the consequences of these technological intermediaries for the music, film, and television industries. While Pelly’s account focuses on the power of Spotify’s ever-changing playlisting practices, deWaard turns to the rise of intellectual property, as remakes, reboots, and spin-offs have come to saturate mass media markets. Both center on the changing relationship between labor and capital in the platform era.

The “podcast bubble,” as it’s now being called, was a period of extraordinary productivity for Gimlet in particular, which produced forty-five different shows during its nine years of activity, including limited series like The Habitat; weekly chat shows like The Cut on Tuesdays; recurring documentary series like Crimetown; kids’ shows like Story Pirates and Chompers; scripted dramas like Homecoming and Sandra that starred big-name actors like Oscar Isaac and Kristen Wiig; and branded podcasts for companies including eBay, Tinder, and Gatorade. And with all those shows came a sudden abundance of podcast-related jobs.

There were times when the drama in the lives of certain streamers conquered our interest in the show. One curator, after skipping from feed to feed, found a streamer who would go on to broadcast heroically for nearly the remainder of the night, and we stuck with her, too. She had brought her young child. At one point, the child asked: “Why are you crying?” “Because I’m having the best time with you.”