OLD NEWS

EVERYTHING IS TELEVISION by Derek Thompson
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A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television. Three examples:
1.
You learn a lot about a company when its back is against the wall. This summer, we learned something important about Meta, the parent company. In an antitrust case with the Federal Trade Commission, Meta filed a legal brief on August 6, in which it made a startling claim. Meta cannot possibly be a social media monopoly, Meta said, because it is not really a social media company.
Only a small share of time spent on its social-networking platforms is truly “social” networking—that is, time spent checking in with friends and family. More than 80 percent of time spent on Face and more than 90 percent of time spent on Insta is spent watching videos, the company reported. Most of that time is spent watching content from creators whom the user does not know. From the FTC filing:
Today, only a fraction of time spent on Meta’s services—7% on I, 17% on F—involves consuming content from online “friends” (“friend sharing”). A majority of time spent on both apps is watching videos, increasingly short-form videos that are “unconnected”—i.e., not from a friend or followed account—and recommended by AI-powered algorithms Meta developed as a direct competitive response to TikTok’s rise, which stalled Meta’s growth.
Social media has evolved from text to photo to video to streams of text, photo, and video, and finally, it seems to have reached a kind of settled end state, in which TikTok and Meta are trying to become the same thing: a screen showing hours and hours of video made by people we don’t know. Social media has turned into television.
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2.
When I read the Meta filing, I had been thinking about something very different: the future of my podcast, Plain English.
When podcasts got started, they were radio for the Internet. This really appealed to me when I started my show. I never watch the news on television, and I love listening to podcasts while I make coffee and go on walks, and I’d prefer to make the sort of media that I consume. Plus, as a host, I thought I wanted to have conversations focused on the substance of the words rather than on ancillary concerns about production value and lighting.
But the most successful podcasts these days are all becoming YouTube shows. Industry analysts say consumption of video podcasts is growing twenty times faster than audio-only ones, and more than half of the world’s top shows now release video versions. YouTube has quietly become the most popular platform for podcasts, and it’s not even close. On Spotify, the number of video podcasts has nearly tripled since 2023, and video podcasts are significantly outgrowing non-video podcasts. Does it really make sense to insist on an audio-only podcast in 2025? I do not think so. Reality is screaming loudly in my ear, and its message is clear: Podcasts are turning into television.
3.
In the last few weeks, Meta introduced a product called Vibes, and OpenAI announced Sora. Both are AI social networks where users can watch endless videos generated by artificial intelligence. (For your amusement, or horror, or whatever, here is: Sam Altman stealing GPUs at Target to make more AI; the O.J. Simpson trial as an amusement park ride; and Stephen Hawking entering a professional wrestling ring.)
Some tech analysts predict that these tools will lead to an efflorescence of creativity. “Sora feels like enabling everyone to be a TikTok creator,” the investor and tech analyst MG Siegler wrote. But the internet’s history suggests that, if these products succeed, they will follow what Ben Thompson calls the 90/9/1 rule: 90 percent of users consume, 9 percent remix and distribute, and just 1 percent actually create. In fact, as Scott Galloway has reported, 94 percent of YouTube views come from 4 percent of videos, and 89 percent of TikTok views come from 5 percent of videos. Even the architects of artificial intelligence, who imagine themselves on the path to creating the last invention, are busy building another infinite sequence of video made by people we don’t know. Even AI wants to be television.
Too Much Flow
Whether the starting point is a student directory, radio, or an AI image generator, the end point seems to be the same: a river of short-form video. In mathematics, the word “attractor” describes a state toward which a dynamic system tends to evolve. To take a classic example: Drop a marble into a bowl, and it will trace several loops around the bowl’s curves before settling to rest at the bottom. In the same way, water draining in a sink will ultimately form a spiral pattern around the drain. Complex systems often settle into recurring forms, if you give them enough time. Television seems to be the attractor of all media.
By “television,” I am referring to something bigger than broadcast TV, the cable bundle, or Netflix. In his 1974 book Television: Technology and Cultural Form, Raymond Williams wrote that “in all communications systems before [television], the essential items were discrete.” That is, a book is bound and finite, existing on its own terms. A play is performed in a particular theater at a set hour. Williams argued that television shifted culture from discrete and bounded products to a continuous, streaming sequence of images and sounds, which he called “flow.” When I say “everything is turning into television,” what I mean is that disparate forms of media and entertainment are converging on one thing: the continuous flow of episodic video.
By Williams’s definition, platforms like YouTube and TikTok are an even more perfect expression of television than old-fashioned television, itself. On NBC or HBO, one might tune in to watch a show that feels particular and essential. On TikTok, by contrast, nothing is essential. Any one piece of content on TikTok is incidental, even inessential. The platform’s allure is the infinitude promised by its algorithm. It is the flow, not the content, that is primary.
One implication of “everything is becoming television” is that there really is too much television—so much, in fact, that some TV is now made with the assumption that audiences are always already distracted and doing something else. Netflix producers reportedly instruct screenwriters to make plots as obvious as possible, to avoid confusing viewers who are half-watching—or quarter-watching, if that’s a thing now—while they scroll through their phones. As the writer Will Tavlin reported:
Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” (“We spent a day together,” Lohan tells her lover, James, in Irish Wish. “I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” “Fine,” he responds. “That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”)
Among Netflix’s 36,000 micro-genres, one is literally called “casual viewing.” The label is reportedly reserved for sitcoms, soap operas, or movies that, as the Hollywood Reporter recently described the 2024 Jennifer Lopez film Atlas, are “made to half-watch while doing laundry.” Critics who actually watch a great deal of streaming television for the purpose of appraising it these days are somewhat like children staring directly at the sun. You’re not supposed to watch it! The whole point is that it’s supposed to just be there, glowing, while you do something else. Perhaps a great deal of television is not meant to absorb our attention, at all, but rather to dab away at it, to soak up tiny droplets of our sensory experience while our focus dances across other screens. You might even say that much television is not even made to be watched at all. It is made to flow. The play button is the point.
Lonely, Mean, and Dumb
… and why does this matter? Fine question. And, perhaps, this is a good place for a confession. I like television. I follow some spectacular YouTube channels. I am not on Instagram or TikTok, but most of the people I know and love are on one or both. My beef is not with the entire medium of moving images. My concern is what happens when the grammar of television rather suddenly conquers the entire media landscape.
In the last few weeks, I have been writing a lot about two big trends in American life that do not necessarily overlap. My work on the “Antisocial Century” traces the rise of solitude in American life and its effects on economics, politics, and society. My work on “the end of thinking” follows the decline of literacy and numeracy scores in the U.S. and the handoff from a culture of literacy to a culture of orality. Neither of these trends is exclusively caused by the logic of television colonizing all media. But both trends are significantly exacerbated by it.
Television’s role in the rise of solitude cannot be overlooked. In Bowling Alone, the Harvard scholar Robert Putnam wrote that between 1965 and 1995, the typical adult gained six hours a week in leisure time. As I wrote, they could have used those additional 300 hours a year to learn a new skill, or participate in their community, or have more children. Instead, the typical American funneled almost all of this extra time into watching more TV. Television instantly changed America’s interior decorating, relationships, and communities:
In 1970, just 6 percent of sixth graders had a TV set in their bedroom; in 1999, that proportion had grown to 77 percent. Time diaries in the 1990s showed that husbands and wives spent almost four times as many hours watching TV together as they spent talking to each other in a given week. People who said TV was their “primary form of entertainment” were less likely to engage in practically every social activity that Putnam counted: volunteering, churchgoing, attending dinner parties, picnicking, giving blood, even sending greeting cards.
When Putnam was writing Bowling Alone, many of his critics insisted that he was being histrionic about the decline of social capital in America because the Internet was going to solve all our problems. In his 1995 essay on the decline of reading and the rise of digital technology, Jonathan Franzen wrote that the decade’s biggest tech boosters believed that the Internet would heal the wound that television had sliced into culture. “Digital technology, the argument goes, is good medicine for an ailing society,” Franzen wrote. Summarizing the views of tech boosters, he continued:
TV has given us government by image; interactivity will return power to the people. TV has produced millions of uneducable children; computers will teach them. Top-down programming has isolated us; bottom-up networks will reunite us.
But digital media hasn’t become the antidote to television. Digital media, empowered by the serum of algorithmic feeds, has become super-television: more images, more videos, more isolation. Home-alone time has surged as our devices have become more bottomless feeds of video content. Rather than escape the solitude crisis that Putnam described in the 1990s, we now seem to be more on our own. (Not to mention: meaner and stupider, too.)
It would be rash to blame our berserk political moment entirely on short-form video, but it would be careless to forget that some people really did try to warn us that this was coming. In Amusing Ourselves to Death1, Neil Postman wrote that “each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.” Television speaks to us in a particular dialect, Postman argued. When everything turns into television, every form of communication starts to adopt television’s values: immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity. In the glow of a local news program, or an outraged news feed, the viewer bathes in a vat of their own cortisol. When everything is urgent, nothing is truly important. Politics becomes theater. Science becomes storytelling. News becomes performance. The result, Postman warned, is a society that forgets how to think in paragraphs, and learns instead to think in scenes. 2
Does that sound familiar? Look at today’s political protagonists. The right-wing president is a reality-TV star. The most exciting new voice on the left is a straight-to-camera savant. Mastering the grammar of television—especially short-form television—does not feel secondary to political success in America; it is political success in America.
In fact, that last sentence might be one word too long, and we could stand to lose the modifier political. Short-form video is indistinguishable from what today’s youth consider the definition of American success. For five straight years, Gen Z has told pollsters that the thing they most want to be when they grow up is an “influencer.”
When literally everything becomes television, what disappears is not something so broad as intelligence (although that seems to be going, too) but something harder to put into words, and even harder to prove the value of. It’s something like inwardness. The capacity for solitude, for sustained attention, for meaning that penetrates inward rather than swipes away at the tip of a finger: These virtues feel out of step with a world where every medium is the same medium and everything in life converges to the value system of the same thing, which is television. I don’t have the answers here. But we should figure it out soon. The marble is still spinning, but it is reaching the bottom of the bowl. _DerekThompson

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/ms4fnjxn> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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THE KEY TO THE NEXT GENERATION OF MUSEUMS IS... TV? by Tim Schneider
Has the museum model as we know it already peaked? Do American art institutions have it in them to relentlessly compete against every other candidate for attention in the infinite stream of content that defines the 2020s? And if it’s not a lost cause yet, how exactly should museums old and new adapt to give themselves a fighting chance in this melee?
I’m reconsidering all these questions after talking with Ben Davis about the cultural trends he’s watching in 2026. One of the themes we batted back and forth is the rise of the post-immersive museum. The term is shorthand for a new breed of art institution—one that aims to take the crowd-pleasing, selfie-optimizing mandate of traps like the Museum of Ice Cream and inject it with enough substance and sophistication to justify calling what’s inside art.
Two landmark post-immersive museums will open in the US in 2026 if all goes according to plan. Generative AI colossus Refik Anadol is set to debut Dataland, his 20,000 square-foot institution for algorithmic art, in Downtown LA this spring. On the opposite coast, the veteran digital art collector Robert Rosenkranz and the museum stalwart Joseph C. Thompson plan to launch Canyon, a new-look nonprofit dedicated to moving-image work, in a gut-renovated, 42,000 square-foot space on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
Although Dataland and Canyon differ in the details, both are trying to rethink how institutions can use art to attract and engage new audiences, especially young people. And the most useful way to frame what they’re up to—and what it would mean for the wider museum landscape if they succeed—is to look at it through two surprisingly related prisms: the Museum of Ice Cream itself, and 21st century TV.
Cream of the crop
Since the Museum of Ice Cream is effectively the Abraham of all traps, it deserves to be our first stop on this journey. (Also, let’s just call it the MIC from here on out, yeah?)1 Words like “immersive” and “experiential” have hovered around the business from the beginning. Its co-founders even tried to incept the world into calling their creation an “experium”—a mashup of “experience” and “museum.”2
How much the MIC deserves any of these associations is a separate question. True, it is immersive in the sense that it gives visitors the chance to hurl themselves down a multistory slide, splash around in a (supposedly) “world-famous” Sprinkle Pool, and romp into any number of other cute dessert-themed setups for social pics. But I also feel like calling this stuff anything other than just “play” risks plunging us even deeper into a world where words don’t really have meanings anymore.3
No matter how you categorize the MIC, however, there’s no denying its success. A pitch deck from the museum’s parent company claims that each location was bringing in 750,000 annual visitors as of 2022. If true, this stat means every iteration was as popular as the Guggenheim, which ranked as the 75th best-attended museum in the world in annual visitor figures survey that same year.
But the MIC didn’t become a phenomenon because it’s cheap to visit. On the contrary, when I wrote about its plan to open a permanent flagship in New York in 2019, I found that the planned cost of a general admission ticket ($38) was higher than at any major art museum in America.
<https://tinyurl.com/7kxad7md>
What makes the pricing feel even more delirium-inducing is that the attractions inside every MIC location are, if not worthless, then at least eminently replaceable. For example, the Rijksmuseum had to pay millions of euros over multiple years to clean and retouch The Night Watch, according to the institution’s director in 2018, but the MIC is never going to have to invest serious cash in a skilled professional to meticulously conserve the Sprinkle Pool. It never has to rotate what’s on view, either, let alone insure it or store it in climate-controlled quarters. Everything inside is only as valuable as it is conducive to a fun selfie.
Things have only gotten pricier as the MIC has expanded over the past six-plus years. Aside from its New York location, the business currently operates experiential paeans to frozen sweets in Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, Miami, and Singapore. General admission at the Manhattan flagship is still $38.99 during sleepy weekday time slots, but it jumps as high as $59 for peak weekend access. Or you can upgrade to a VIP ticket—including priority entry, one drink, and “cool collectibles”—for $63.99 to $89, depending on your precise timing and level of interest in mocking the value of a dollar.
From a pure business standpoint, though, the MIC has cracked the code. It charges significantly higher ticket prices than real art museums and runs a merch operation that is at least as good, if not better, all while having to pay significantly lower, and fewer, expenses than real art museums do. Which is great, as long as you don’t want the attraction you’re running to be taken as seriously as a real art museum.
But if you do want that, the MIC model only gets you so far. And this is where TV enters the chat.
TV eye
In a recent post called Everything Is Television, the journalist Derek Thompson unspooled his theory that all roads in new media are, weirdly, converging on the decades-old format in his headline.
Exhibit A is social media. In a 2025 legal filing in an antitrust case against Meta, the tech giant’s lawyers alleged that users spend more than 80% of their time on Face and more than 90% of their time on Insta just passively watching videos, not interacting with each other. Social media, in other words, is no longer really “social” at all.
What about podcasts? Well, Thompson reports…
Industry analysts say consumption of video podcasts is growing twenty times faster than audio-only ones, and more than half of the world’s top shows now release video versions. YouTube has quietly become the most popular platform for podcasts, and it’s not even close. On Spotify, the number of video podcasts has nearly tripled since 2023, and video podcasts are significantly outgrowing non-video podcasts.
Last but not least, AI—the technology marketed by its developers as the key to a new era of human progress—seems to be following the same path into a bygone era. OpenAI’s most recent product is Sora, whose only aspiration is to mimic TikTok, except strictly with videos generated through text prompts to a chatbot. Meta is also running out a competitor, called Vibes, because apparently the best complement to having two social (“social”) networks where people mostly watch videos that might be AI is a dedicated app where people only watch videos that must be AI.
This leads us back to Dataland and its founder, Anadol. Even though advanced algorithms are the engine, his works ultimately just function as video. Their level of immersiveness strictly depends on how many surfaces they’re projected onto in a given space. Unsupervised, his fan favorite 2022 lobby commission at MoMA, ran continuously on a single screen for hours at a time. You can say that calling it TV undersells the work, but in a Derek Thompsonian sense, it wouldn’t be wrong.
Is Canyon’s story different? We already know it’s an institution committed to moving-image work (aka video). Its director told Zachary Small at the Times that the galleries “will be equipped more like living rooms than a typical white box.” Small added that they “would have time bars over the doors, telling viewers if a video was in progress and when it would end; visitors would be able to take their food and drinks into the galleries.” Sounds an awful lot like an institution built around the spirit of TV, doesn’t it?
You can also make the same case for every museum and standalone installation opened to date by teamLab, the Japanese-founded immersive art outfit that consistently draws blockbuster crowds around the world. As with Anadol’s practice, some teamLab pieces are more experiential or interactive than others, but at the end of the day they’re mostly just kinetic digital images running on screens or projected onto surfaces. So here too distinguishing between immersive art and TV devolves into semantics.
Racing in parallel
At one point in our discussion at TGM Live, Ben wondered if the goal of post-immersive museums was to be something like “peak TV,” the coinage for the roughly 10-year period where the very best TV shows were widely considered on par with great movies (and the sheer production volume of scripted series overwhelmed Hollywood). Basically, his question was whether new-breed institutions like Dataland and Canyon could combine the accessibility of the Museum of Ice Cream with the prestige of a traditional art museum—or at least some approximation of it.
The more I’ve considered it, though, the more I’ve started thinking that the skeleton key isn’t just the format of peak TV; it’s the business of peak TV. Ted Sarandos, now the co-chief executive of Netflix, said in a 2013 interview that his company’s goal was “to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” In other words, Netflix was aiming to upgrade the quality of its original content to the gold standard that HBO represented before HBO could figure out how to upgrade its streaming, distribution, and licensing capabilities to the gold standard that Netflix represented.
Traditional museums and post-immersive museums are now competing in a parallel race. Phrased one way, the key question is whether an institution like Canyon can become MoMA faster than MoMA can become an institution like Canyon.
There are some good reasons to think that the answer might be yes. The most important is that post-immersive museums are much nimbler than their established peers. They don’t have hundreds or thousands of physical objects to steward. They don’t have dozens and dozens of trustees with competing agendas. They don’t have decades, let alone centuries, of institutional memory to preserve and honor.4
In this sense, they have all the strengths that another modern media exec has been championing throughout his career. Barry Diller, who ran ABC and Paramount before co-founding Fox with Rupert Murdoch, has argued over and over again that trying to fix a dysfunctional business model is often a massive waste of time. The superior solution is usually to walk away and begin fresh.
“I think the best thing that you can ever have is a clean piece of paper,” he said in a 2017 interview. “Meaning, nothing is sacred—you get to just start.“
Post-immersive institutions have that opportunity. Will they be able to capitalize on it by attracting Museum of Ice Cream-sized crowds with MoMA-quality art—or something even closer to either? The only way to find out is to stay tuned. _TheGrayMarket