From Brain Rot & AI Slop to the Box Office: How Embracing Authenticity is a Way to Save Independent Film (and Brands) from the Algorithm’s Grip
If brands/studios can't be bothered to write their own content or make their own images, how can consumers/viewers trust their quality? (They can't.) Plus: is the shift back to IRL the answer?
I’ve been debating about what to cover in this week’s free newsletter due to so much going on in the world (it’s a little overwhelming TBH). But I decided to cover something that’s been bugging me for quite some time now: the shift of the algorithms in social media and how they actively create an echo chamber designed to keep people scrolling endlessly and what that does to art and storytelling in general and in particular, independent film.
First, a quick Internet history lesson to see how we got here.
(BTW did you see the Fortune article that lays out how people spend five days a YEAR scrolling through platforms deciding what to watch? FIVE DAYS a year of your life, wasted. The ad campaign writes itself.)
If you’ve been following the TikTok drama, then you know there are several major players (all billionaires) vying to get their hands on the platform. But what might surprise you is that there are two things for sale here: TikTok’s platform and their algorithm. And both have billion dollar price tags.
Social media platforms began to switch to algorithmic feeds optimized for engagement in the mid 2010s (remember when your timeline switched from being chronological to randomized content and then started showing you content from other people and brands you didn’t follow?)
Engineer Aza Raskin created Infinite Scroll in 2006, and subsequently designed what would become an addiction for people all over the world.
Raskin said in a BBC interview:
"If you don't give your brain time to catch up with your impulses, you just keep scrolling." He claimed that the innovation caused people to look at their phones for far longer than was necessary. "It's as if they're taking behavioral cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface and that's the thing that keeps you like coming back and back and back."
We’re all well aware that we spend WAY too much time on social media, getting sucked into the endless supply of dopamine that comes with endlessly scrolling and the hits that come with every like, comment and interaction. The effects this has had on consumer behavior is well-documented. It’s also well-documented as a reason why many people no longer favor film and television as the preferred medium (and perhaps this is why platforms have designed infinite menus that suck up five days of people’s lives each year to mirror the success of social media platforms).
And still:
And what’s even worse than the endless scroll model of entrapment are the social media platform’s deliberate manipulation of people to get them to engage more, create more, and spend more time on the apps by artificially inflating view counts.
In 2019, Facebook settled a $40MM lawsuit that accused the tech giant of lowering the threshold for what counted as a “view”.
Raskin said in the same BBC interview:
“In order to get the next round of funding, in order to get your stock price up, the amount of time that people spend on your app has to go up, so when you put that much pressure on that one number, you’re going to start trying to invent new ways of getting people to stay hooked."
While Facebook counts three seconds (yup, that’s all) as a “view”, TikTok lowered the standards even more, and counts impressions as views. That just means someone had to look at your video, not even watch a second of it.
And of course, insouciant South African huckster and walking clown-show Elon Musk watered down Twitter’s metrics even more when he took over the platform (I’ll never call it X) and added to the growing list of problems surrounding our relationship with media, including the place film and television have in the world and the public’s continued erosion of trust in legacy media.
It’s absolutely easy to see how people get manipulated by the platforms and their major players, especially when they all agree to share and repurpose content across the platforms to proliferate their messaging and spike their engagement numbers. Couple this with paid ads, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for public deception.
But here’s the thing:
None of it is real.
It’s all being manipulated to feed the algorithm and get you to spend more time on the platform.
And the truly terrible part of all this is that it carries real-world repercussions, say with elections and those targeted by hate groups, or the drop in demand for I don’t know… independent film.
The internet promised, among other things, absolute audience surveillance, full measurability, and perfect knowledge of who was watching what, when, and for how long. What it delivered, instead, was metric tons of metric bullshit. - John Herrman, Intelligencer Article
When I launch marketing and PR campaigns, I have to look at the whole picture and that encompasses online marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, PR, events and more. No one campaign is ever the same and in order to be successful, the stewards of the campaign must carve out a unique path to follow, which I always aim to do.
And for me, those are heavily researched, considered approaches to how I tackle marketing and PR campaigns always come from a place of authenticity, not only because it feels better to me, but because it feels better to the audiences as well and they have pretty good BS detectors.
For the most part (and I’m being generous in some cases) people know when something’s not authentic. A filmmaker I worked with a while ago insisted on hiring “influencers” for their launch, despite my pushback and expert opinion that it would do nothing for their brand or their film. They wanted to do so because said influencers had millions of followers yet no active presence in the space relevant to their film and proceeded to do so. And of course, the net result didn’t move the needle for whatever the cost was that they spent.
But we’re all swept up by the allure of it: if they’ve got millions of people following them, they must be important and maybe some of that can rub off you. To me, it’s akin to paying the popular kid at school $20 to sit with you at the lunch table for one day. At the end of the day, they get your $20 and you’re the kid who paid them $20 to hang out.
And while all of this is going on, the algorithm is actively choking your content out (unless you’re doing paid ad campaigns) and promoting content that’s designed to be shocking, controversial and yes… keep people glued to their phones.
The algorithm is not your friend.
Social Media is Not Designed to Make You Succeed: It is Designed to Make the Platforms Succeed.
One of the most egregious things happening in our industry as a result of this is the level of talent that’s being passed over due to their lack of followers. I hear time and time again from actors and casting agents and authors that unless a talent has X amount of followers, they won’t even get looked at for a role.
The same is true for authors as well:
The reason for this paradox is because no one wants to take a risk on an “unknown”. When we were putting our movie together, no one wanted to be the first person to say “yes”, everyone wanted to be on the train when it was already moving, not when we were still at the station, putting it together.
I can’t fight this larger industry-wide problem single handedly but I will say this: if you’re basing your casting / producing / publishing decisions on the number of followers your cast / author / whatever has, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Because if you do happen to have someone with a significant following, they’re in the business of selling themselves, not your project.
And as we’ve just discussed, metrics are mostly BS anyways.
So why not take a chance on the “unknown” talent?
They’re more authentic anyways. And there’s beauty in authenticity and in imperfection. Wabi sabi: the beauty in being perfectly imperfect, which is now a harbinger of distinction and a key way consumers are cutting through AI slop and brain rot.
How Viewers/Consumers See AI Slop & Brain Rot in Film & Branding
All of what was discussed above feeds into another issue that consumers are picking up on but may not have the language for yet: AI Slop and Brain Rot. AI slop is of course, what people refer to as the crap that’s generated by AI and brain rot is the crap that keeps you endlessly scrolling. And these two things are taking over your feeds.
But all you have to do is look at the response to the Studio Ghibli-fication of the Internet last week to understand that actually, people aren’t so okay with ripping off art from artists, especially when it’s ripping off a master artisan like Hayao Miyazaki.
According to Substack writer
, the AI-ification of everything will lead brands to do what she calls “proof of reality posts”.She argues that it will become “social media currency for the brands that abstain from using AI in creative to share their “proof of reality”. The polite way of saying ‘AI could never’.”
Her full quote on
:Brands that use AI images or videos on social—whether perceivable or not—are making a statement to the consumer about craft. If your brand cares about how your product is made, then it would seem incongruous to use AI to mimic the style of a maker. For example, it surprised me when Sweetgreen—a company that highlights farmers and well-sourced ingredients—participated in the Studio Ghibli trend. As Elizabeth told me, “AI usage communicates a lack of investment or care to me—either in budget, time, or creative team infrastructure. Viewers care about how things are made, even if they don’t always know how to articulate it. If a brand can’t be bothered to write its own product detail page copy, why should I trust they’ve vetted their ingredients? If they’re outsourcing their social content, what else are they cutting corners on?” Rachel Karten, Link In Bio
AI usage communicates a lack of investment to care. Say that again: AI usage communicates a lack of investment to care.
And I argue that the same is true for film and television as well. AI is novel now for sure, and a shortcut for many wanting to break into the arts. But they’re not breaking into the arts: they’re riding on the backs of artisans who truly broke the mold and painstakingly dedicate their lives to their crafts. And THAT is what counts.
Is this all tying in for you now?
I’m doing my best to thread the needle with these big ideas and demonstrate how our dire need to inflate our own numbers, followers, impressions, etc on social media is like a snake eating its own tail: it will never be enough, it will always be infinite scroll and the only way to break the cycle is to understand how it all works and what it was designed to do so we can do better and be better and beat the algorithm by being authentic. Because the rest of it is not real.
The Return to IRL (In Real Life, IYKYK)
I’ve been keeping tabs on a number of recent trends with Gen Z (and millennials) and have noted that many of them are returning to analog technology as a means of divesting themselves from the chaos and noise surrounding us, the churn as it is.
That means that they’re buying dumb phones, reading actual magazines again, and gasp… meeting people the old-fashioned way (in bars and out in the world at large).
And I think studios are coming to realize this as well, as they prioritize theatrical releases are moving back to a weekly roll-out of television shows ala The White Lotus, instead of dumping everything at once to binge.
I’m not a purist by any sense of the means: I believe there’s a balance to be struck between tech and traditional methods of media and comms and that we’re barreling towards a reckoning of sorts.
But in the meantime, I’m going to encourage filmmakers and artists to keep going and keep persisting with their art IRL and take a holistic approach to their marketing and PR and build their basis upon a core pillar that will never be out of fashion: authenticity.
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