Industrial-era curatorial gatekeepers gave way to unvetted self-serve advertising platforms.

Evidence

Legacy companies buying the back cover of Vogue trusted that Anna Wintour would deliver a glossy, high-quality magazine. As Vanity Fair’s deputy editor Dana Brown believed, “Magazines aren’t democracies. Editors in chief are dictators, ruling by decree.” Online platforms, by contrast, offered no such assurances. Marketers buying ads on Facebook or Twitter had less control over what content their ads would support. While established businesses might hesitate to risk brand value, lesser-known companies saw this as an opportunity. Cheap search and display advertising offered instant visibility—particularly for grifts and scams. Podcast listeners, meanwhile, grew accustomed to hosts peddling direct-to-consumer mattresses and underwear subscriptions. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 590

Categorization

• XREF: The magazine-editor-as-dictator contrast with algorithm-distributed ads supports the reader’s omnivore-monoculture argument about lost cultural signaling quality.