INDEPENDENCE DAY

Way back when it was still worth watching – around 15 years ago – I remember writing and sending a script to ‘Doctor Who’; I’ve often said I received it back so quickly that it was practically returned to me before I’d even posted it. But as demoralising as that happened to be, there was nothing especially unique about it as experiences go. Like every other writer, I gradually amassed enough rejection letters to wallpaper the proverbial spare bedroom; most authors of renown can tell you a similar story. One had to simply keep repeating the process, hoping that somewhere out there there’d be an agent or an employee of a publishing house whose tastes would chime with my own and would therefore take a chance on signing me up. That’s the way it had always been done, and one had to play the game to achieve one’s objective. Had I been born half-a-century or a full 100 years earlier, the cycle would’ve been the same, and my ability to string a sentence together would probably have led me elsewhere. Perhaps I’d have been a columnist or critic on a newspaper, having progressed from the hotbed of the local press to Fleet Street, for there would’ve been no internet to provide me with a platform. Of course, that world no longer exists; but the world of the Winegum does – and the destiny of that is entirely in my hands.

I was prompted in the direction of such reflections a couple of days ago when I watched a video on Rick Beato’s YT channel. It centred on an illuminating and thought-provoking 90-minute interview conducted by the host with musician, historian and author Ted Gioai. It’s the second time Beato has interviewed Gioai and the first was equally compelling, making the viewer feel like a fly on the wall observing a fascinating conversation between a pair of eloquently entertaining buddies. Like Beato himself, Gioai largely owes his current profile amongst those who seek out intelligent discussion on pop cultural topics to the internet; but he is as conscious of the medium’s drawbacks as he is its advantages. ‘The internet has been a curse and a blessing,’ says Gioai in the interview. ‘It’s a curse because it’s destroyed a lot of the institutions that creative people depended on in the past. In the old days, I probably would’ve been a jazz critic for a newspaper; those jobs are all gone…What the internet did allow was direct contact with the audience…What I’m doing right now I could not have done without the internet…but I’m fully aware of how disruptive and destructive the internet has been for many creative people.’

Gioai talks of how our risk-averse and monolithic creative corporations – those that churn out music, cinema, television, and publishing for the mass market – have exhausted their tired formulas and the public are deserting them in their droves, turning instead to what Gioai refers to as the ‘Micro-Culture’. He’s basically talking about the online cottage industries that enable creators to connect directly with their audiences and have no need to depend upon the patronage and support of the old mediums. He even drew parallels with the rise of the Romantics in the early 19th century, pointing out that Beethoven eventually became so huge a force within the culture of the era that he broke free of the restraints that past composers were constricted by, i.e. having to be the Court Composer or be at the mercy of an aristocratic patron in order to reach any kind of public recognition. This novel new individualism emancipated the creator, no longer the pet of the privileged and powerful. It mirrored the rise of the self-made man that came with the Industrial Revolution, when the conditions within society had sufficiently altered that wealth could suddenly be generated by an idea or innovation that didn’t need the investment of someone who’d inherited wealth. Gioai was cleverly making a comparison between the sea-change of 200 years ago and the creative free spirits who populate today’s Micro-Culture, making their mark without having to go cap-in-hand to the old irrelevant mediums.

Regardless of my own banishment from YouTube, the platform remains a go-to source for niche entertainment of the like that television once had in abundance and no longer produces. I’ve written many times of the fact that everyone now has between half-a-dozen to a dozen favourite YT channels that have replaced favourite TV channels, with the regular uploading of new videos supplanting the favourite TV shows viewers used to tune in for on a weekly basis. Like all the other online platforms, whether a YT channel succeeds or fails is down to the content creator; its popularity – or lack of – is their responsibility, and this is the common thread that runs through the Micro-Culture; although YT can curtail a career solely reliant on YT if a creator happens to be a mischievously insubordinate character (it pays to have other options), by and large creators are left to their own devices by these platforms, free from interference and liberated from the creative compromises imposed by the corporate elders. And best of all, they cut out the middle men and provide creators with a clear line of communication to the audience. Speaking personally, none of the people I have connected with over the past decade – and in this I include friends both of the platonic and non-platonic variety as well as kindred spirits I’ve had rewarding and enjoyable exchanges with on this very blog – could possibly have appeared on my radar were it not for the internet. Indeed, there’d be no Winegum Telegram at all without it.

Strange as it may seem, however, making such connections doesn’t necessarily raise one’s awareness of being part of a wider cultural revolution when entombed in the laboratory of solitude that the creativity of an individual requires to produce the goods. It was only when watching Rick Beato’s interview with Ted Gioai that it belatedly dawned on me just how much the bloated ancient regime that has stifled creative progress and bred a sense of stagnation over the past couple of decades has inadvertently elevated the new mediums of which I myself am a beneficiary to centre stage in pop culture. For once, I feel as though I’m in the right place at the right time, and both Beato and Gioai – owing their current status to their own respective online platforms – express similar sentiments. For example, all of our newspapers have reacted to falling revenues by gradually pensioning-off their remaining great writers in recent years and are no longer attracting – or appear interested in – the great writers of tomorrow; those writers wouldn’t even consider a redundant medium such as a newspaper a fitting platform for their particular talents anyway; newspapers have become the haunt of the illiterate clickbait gobshite operating in an insular echo-chamber. And the same could be said of all the other old mediums that were once the creative hot-spots that those with something to say gravitated towards. We don’t need them anymore.

Comfort zones may be the default position of the old mediums, but art in all its permutations has always survived and thrived when in the hands of those who think outside the increasingly narrow confines of the box. That those who do so today do so within the far more expansive (not to say conducive) arena of the Micro-Culture is why audiences who’ve had enough of being lectured to by corporate entertainment outlets and their tediously trendy agendas are finding something fresh in this. The old mediums, particularly cinema and music, have faced severe challenges from the new in the past 20 years and have stuck to formulas with a track record of success out of fear; at the same time, they’ve fully embraced whatever causes they feel will keep them relevant, another desperate move that only a fool would be convinced by. Comparing the early 21st century to the seismic shifts of the early 19th might sound a tad OTT on paper, but Ted Gioai puts forward a plausible argument; and perhaps it’s hard to stand back and survey such comparisons when you’re in the thick of it. One thing is undeniable, however: the old ways and those who profited from them are effectively over. And so say all of us.

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