Culture on Demand

The queue is always full. That’s the defining condition — not abundance, not variety, but availability: the culture is there, the tap is on, and the only question is what to want.

That’s not just a consumption habit any more, it’s an expectation. Culture doesn’t arrive — you summon it. And if it comes wrong, you say so immediately: rate it, post about it, make sure everyone knows before you’ve finished watching. The feedback loop used to take months. Now it takes an afternoon.

This would matter less if the people making things weren’t watching. They are. What’s shifted is that reaction, not actual reviews, not sitting with it, just the immediate pile-on or pile-in, has started getting treated as instruction. You make a thing, people respond, you adjust: looks the same from outside. But there’s a difference between hearing the room and waiting for the room to tell you what to make next.

You can see it in how streaming platforms work now. A show that doesn’t hook fast enough, not bad enough to hate, just not catching, gets pulled. The Wheel of Time had Amazon behind it, a proper budget, the books. Still not enough. The algorithm flags the drop-off and that’s the decision made, before the thing has had a chance to find itself or its audience. The platforms aren’t wrong to be watching. They’re businesses; they need the numbers. It’s just that the watching has become the making.

Fan campaigns run the same logic from the other end. A series ends a way nobody wanted, the petition’s up before the credits finish. Sometimes it works: studios reverse, bring back a character, extend a run. The audience has learned the product can be corrected on complaint. Fair thing to learn if it keeps working. What it also teaches is that the ending was a beta release.

That logic has started crossing into theatrical releases. The Mandalorian and Grogu was designed so that no prior viewing was required: nothing owed, nothing assumed. Jon Favreau said it needed to work for viewers who’d never seen the show. The on-demand mentality engineered into a cinema ticket. Critics gave it 53 on Metacritic; audiences gave it 86% on Rotten Tomatoes. Both probably right about what they noticed. What the audience came for is exactly what the on-demand relationship had trained them to want: familiar faces, satisfying action, resolution within two hours.

AI sharpens this rather than starting it. The habit was already there — streaming algorithms, recommendation engines, every thumbnail optimised to catch you before you scrolled past — all of it pointing the same direction long before large language models became something your nan could use. What AI adds is that things can now be made at the rate of the asking.

Right now it knows, roughly, what you’ll click. The next move is that it starts making things for you before you ask. Not choosing from the shelf: filling it.

The risk is the confirmation loop. On-demand culture already selects heavily for confirm over expand: give people what they know they want, watch the numbers go up. AI applied to that model selects harder. Not because anyone decided surprise was bad. Just because surprise doesn’t come with a recommendation.

But I’d be dishonest not to name the other side, and it’s a real one. AI has found me things I’d have had no way of finding. Not surfaced from my watch history, not because I went looking; it read something about what I was actually after and went to work. The Expanse. Black Sails. The philosophy of Marsilio Ficino. None of these came from a thumbnail I’d have clicked. Some of them I’d call genuinely formative: the kind of thing that shifts how you see everything after. The streaming algorithm would never have got there. It only cares about what you clicked last Tuesday.

That’s a different operation entirely. The streaming algorithm reads your behaviour and mirrors it back. An AI you’re actually talking to reads context: what you’ve said, what you’re after, what kind of person you seem to be. That gap matters. One confirms the loop; the other sometimes breaks it.

Both exist right now. You can get either, depending on how you use it. But the economics push in one direction, and it isn’t toward the side that found me Marsilio Ficino.

A culture that only delivers what you already know how to ask for gets faster. It does not, in any obvious sense, get larger.