Few of my views on movie characters are stronger than my view that Miranda Priestly, the demanding editor-in-chief of a fashion magazine in “The Devil Wears Prada,” is actually the story’s heroine.
Not an uncomplicated heroine, certainly not a sympathetic person, but a figure to be hailed nonetheless: a demanding and uncompromising esthete whose decisions reverberate in society and whose idiosyncratic taste can impact world fashion.
In one of the film’s most famous moments, Miranda explains how the blue sweater — oops, “cerulean“—inexpensive worn by your assistant is actually “a sweater that has been selected for you by the people here.” The cheap end point of a complex aesthetic-commercial process that begins with a single brilliant idea.
I’m not exactly a fashionista (to say the least), but I love this scene. For this very reason, Amanda Mull’s recent essay in The Atlantic in which she suggests that the scene is fundamentally obsolete caught my attention. Life’s Miranda Priestlys are no longer in fashion, argues Mull. Who rules today is the algorithm.
The essay begins with an apparent paradox: at a time when “consumers have more choices than ever before, at least judging by the sheer volume of products available,” she writes, “much of the clothes that end up in stores look eerily the same.” .
The explanation, she suggests, is that fashion is increasingly separated “from the ideas and creative instincts of individuals”, being driven instead by a combination of cheaper production models and forecasting systems that “subtract the element of hunch of trends”. Production manufactures fashions; the algorithm reaffirms what sells in less time.
As one might predict, “when enough brands and retailers start using these inventory building tactics and these trend forecasting methods, the results homogenize over time.”
Everything is popular, but nothing is that thing you didn’t know you wanted. And even clothes that look superficially different and new are often a repurpose of past trends: “plus new details,” but underneath it’s the same dress as before.
This algorithmic repetition isn’t just a fashion trend — it’s the prevailing spirit in many cultural areas. What Mull noted in terms of clothing, critic Ted Gioia has been analyzing in music, where the Spotify era offers us the tried and true, while the opportunities open to new artists dwindle.
Rather than delving into a process of discovery, the online music browser is constantly taken back in time – and not into some communion with the history of classical music, something that could expand our awareness, but only for Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon and David Bowie, in an endless circle of the Baby Boomer era.
According to recent market research, notes Gioia, “the market for new music is actually shrinking”, while “the biggest investments in music are the acquisition of old catalogues, and practically nothing is spent to develop new artists”.
The same thing happens in film and television: the hegemony of superheroes, older actors dominating the box office, the climate that permeates a certain type of television streaming, usually on Netflix, which gives the impression of having been produced from of screenplays written by artificial intelligence, imitating 16 other hits.
But I don’t want to attribute these standards to technology alone. People can choose to be governed by algorithmic thinking without running a literal program to decipher what is popular. And the fact that we have a specific form of technology that facilitates the stifling of risk and creativity is hard to differentiate from the broader trends toward sclerosis and repetition—something I’ve spent an entire book calling decadence.
Consider two recent controversies in medicine and medical research, areas far removed from Miranda Priestly’s world. First there was the revelation that billions of dollars and years of research into Alzheimer’s disease were based on scientific papers that appear to include major falsehoods. If this proves to be true, it will be a startling example of the medical establishment moving down an incredibly expensive cul-de-sac, without listening to skeptics, for a decade and a half.
Second, there is the ongoing discussion, linked to two recent studies on how and whether the most frequently prescribed antidepressants actually work. Some of the new research has been overrated by critics of psychiatry; the premise that depression has important chemical components and that antidepressants help people, especially those with severe depression, was not suddenly disproved.
But both studies add to the strong suspicion that these drugs are over-prescribed and over-sold — that we’ve made them the standard response to modern unhappiness, based more on collective hope than precise evidence.
Possible fraud and possible over-prescribing are different types of problems, but both illustrate how bad cultural and institutional incentives can stifle creativity as surely as Netflix’s algorithms do.
A flurry of prescriptions and research dollars going in the wrong direction because everyone wants to imitate everyone else is the scientific equivalent of everyone producing the same dress because that seems to be what consumers want — no literal algorithm at work, just a collective mind where a dissenting voice has difficulty making itself heard.
This type of system is not impervious to innovation or criticism. If it were, the scientific frauds would never have been discovered and Netflix would not have lost nearly 1 million subscribers recently.
But resisting the dominance of the algorithm requires energy, creativity and courage, and the risk to our culture is that our technological skills and our cultural exhaustion are working in partnership, defending decay and closing the escape routes from sameness.
