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MUBI and the Curation
Model of Video on
Demand
Mattias Frey
MUBI and the Curation Model of Video on
Demand
Mattias Frey
MUBI and the

Curation Model of
Video on Demand
Mattias Frey
Department of Film and Media Studies
University of Kent
Canterbury, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-80075-8 ISBN 978-3-030-80076-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80076-5
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
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Cover illustration: Pattern © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
I express my sincere appreciation to the Leverhulme Trust, whose Philip

Leverhulme Prize (PLP-2015-008) funded much of the research behind
this project. I extend my gratitude to Lina Aboujieb and the staff at
Palgrave Macmillan for shepherding this project from commissioning to
production with supreme efficiency. Amanda Landa, Cecilia Sayad,
Roderik Smits, Peter Stanfield and Jonathan Wroot graciously provided
feedback, tips or other assistance. Many thanks are due to the three exter-
nal peer reviewers, who provided excellent advice with impeccable timing;
any leftover oversights or errors remain, as ever, mine. To my friends, my
family and my まり子: I owe so much to you and your support. Please save
space on your shelves!
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Curation as Discourse, Trend and Cultural Salve 15
3 The Curation Business Model 33
4 MUBI History: Connections, Community and Curation 53
5 Recommendation Credibility in the MUBI Interface 77
6 The MUBI Audience107
7 At the End of the Long Tail125
References145
Index163
vii
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 VOD service use, United Kingdom 45

Fig. 3.2 VOD service use, United States 46
Fig. 5.1 Diversity of MUBI’s thirty-film list by year of production on
selected day. For Table 5.1 and Fig. 5.1, data for 25 October
2018 derive from Smits and Nikdel (2019, 11); all other data
derive from mubi.com/showing via the Internet Archive
Wayback Machine 100
ix
List of Tables
Table 5.1 Diversity of MUBI’s thirty-film list by country of production

on selected day 99
Table 6.1 Demographics of MUBI subsample vs. overall weighted
representative sample of all UK adults online 112
Table 6.2 VOD use of UK MUBI users vs. UK Netflix users 113
Table 6.3 Source influence in film choice, UK MUBI users vs. UK
Netflix users 114
Table 6.4 Consumption diversity since starting to use VOD 116
Table 6.5 Trust in algorithms vs. critics 118
xi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Abstract This introduction outlines the backlash to algorithmic cultural

recommendation that followed the initial celebrations of technological
innovation and kill-the-gatekeeper rhetoric in the 1990s and early 2000s.
In the brave new world of video on demand (VOD), a number of ser-
vices—Jaman, MUBI, BFI Player, FilmStruck and many others—arose
that consciously partook of the rhetoric of human “curation” and cultural
taste-making, rather than computer-generated suggestions. Compared to
Netflix, Amazon and other algorithmic VOD providers, this more niche
type of platform has been rarely investigated by scholars. This chapter
previews the book’s argument that this “curation model” entails a distinct
business paradigm, marketing rhetoric, taste philosophy, choice architec-
ture and audience engagement—albeit residing on a spectrum with the
algorithmic providers and meeting with decidedly circumscribed long-
term market success.
Keywords Video on demand (VOD) • Algorithmic recommendation •

Curation • Cultural taste • Black box
The early public discussion of video on demand (VOD) often resembled a

rags-to-riches story of technological and entrepreneurial triumph, a cele-
bration of access to an abundance of content choice. This narrative fea-
tured market kings Netflix and Amazon as heroes. It highlighted these
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
M. Frey, MUBI and the Curation Model of Video on Demand,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80076-5_1
2 M. FREY
companies’ engineering capacity to predict users’ tastes using technically

sophisticated algorithmic recommender systems (e.g. Thompson 2008).
It indulged giddy cinephile dreams about a completist archive of all films
and series available at a moment’s whim and a single click (e.g. Scott 2007).
Inevitably, the initial techno-optimistic glow faded in the course of
practical use. The consumerist realities of paywalls and disappearing con-
tent set in; in a fractured media landscape, no single VOD provider offered
access to all films, all the time. There ensued a wider backlash against the
use of data collection, algorithms and computational processes. This
ranged from concerned statements about data surveillance and filter bub-
bles (e.g. Pariser 2011; Cheney-Lippold 2017) to indictments of these
systems’ cold rationality and low credibility (e.g. Steiner 2012; Hallinan
and Striphas 2014; Alexander 2016), not to mention critiques of racist
and sexist technological outcomes (e.g. O’Neil 2016; Noble 2018). To be
sure, as many such as Michael Gubbins (2012, 86) have noted, the “early
narrative of digital change was of a democratising trend away from ‘gate-
keepers’ restricting choice”—the emphasis here clearly on human gate-
keepers. In fact, the rejection of algorithms and the post-digital re-embrace
of the human guide has emerged as a second-wave sentiment that reaches
well beyond recalcitrant nostalgics, steam-punk hipsters and media critics.
Indeed, there has been an outpouring of commentary that “An Algorithm
Isn’t Always the Answer” (Kreizman 2017), that “Our Love Affair with
Digital Is Over” (Sax 2017), or general anti-tech, simplify-your-life digi-
tal-detox guides to “Save Your Sanity. Downgrade Your Life” (Paul
2017)—all of these within a three-month period of New York Times op-
eds. (The newspaper of record began a column entitled “Beyond the
Algorithm” [e.g. Bailey 2021] to provide a human critic’s “under-the-
radar” films and series recommendations that personalised AI might miss.)
In the Guardian, to cite another locus of this persistent message, Rebecca
Nicholson (2018) wrote a love letter to video shops (whose community
spirit and serendipitous word-of-mouth recommendations Netflix had, to
her mind, killed), Rafael Behr (2017) claimed that “Algorithms Outdo
Us. But We Still Prefer Human Fallibility,” while Michael Bhaskar (2016)
pronounced that “In the Age of the Algorithm, the Human Gatekeeper
Is Back.”
These commentators acknowledge cultural surplus—the fact or at least
perception that there are too many films, series, songs and so on, and too
little time to consume them all—as the root cause of VOD recommender
1 INTRODUCTION 3
systems and algorithmic culture more widely. “The more we have,”

according to Bhaskar, “the more we rely on algorithms and automated
recommendation systems. Hence the unstoppable march of algorithmic
recommendations, machine learning, artificial intelligence and big data
into the cultural sphere.” And yet, they submit, algorithmic recommend-
ers do not constitute the solution to cultural surplus, and certainly not the
resolution. The answer, above all, is curation. “Far from disappearing,
human curation and sensibilities have a new value in the age of algorithms.
Yes, the more we have the more we need automation. But we also increas-
ingly want informed and idiosyncratic selections. Humans are back.”
Bhaskar sees evidence for these seemingly blanket pronouncements in big-
tech cultural providers’ retreat from the rhetoric of banishing editorial
content at all costs. Already in the late 1990s, Amazon discarded its edito-
rial book reviews and Netflix similarly discontinued its human-generated
films of the week once their respective algorithmic recommender engines
were beta tested. Nevertheless, both companies seemed to retreat from
this absolutist position: the former company purchased Goodreads, a
trusted site of personal book reviews, and Netflix deploys a modern rec-
ommender system that relies on humans tagging subtle levels of emotion
in films and series, and as much on the “popular” as the “personalised”
(Frey 2021). For Bhaskar (2016), the new reverence for human gatekeep-
ing recognises the cultural (and above all business) value of a deeper, more
intimate and more transparent type of cultural recommendation: curation.
It captures this irreplaceable human touch. We want to be surprised. We

want expertise, distinctive aesthetic judgments, clear expenditure of time
and effort. We relish the messy reality of another’s taste and a trusted per-
sonal connection. We don’t just want correlations—we want a why, a narra-
tive, which machines can’t provide. Even if we define curation as selecting
and arranging, this won’t be left solely to algorithms. Unlike so many sec-
tors experiencing technological disruption, from self-driving cars to auto-
mated accountancy, the cultural sphere will always value human choice, the
unique perspective.
A number of other revisionist or contrarian media critics also began to

see the future of cultural recommendation as much like its past. According
to Michael Wolff (2015, 199), “the future of the future, the higher value
of the future, is always analog—handmade, sought after, exclusive….
Digital’s early attraction, its counterpoint to television, was the promise of
4 M. FREY
infinite uniqueness,” but the end result of algorithmic personalisation has

been “an effective repetition and blandness—that Hallmark drivel of social
media, the qualified and tested lists and headlines of BuzzFeed,” and a
curious resurrection of 1930s and 1940s cinema culture.
The backlash against algorithms has been careful to pitch itself not as
rearguard nostalgia (or late-born, rose-tinted fascination) but rather as a
positive alternative to computational conformity, somehow hipster and
authentic at once. Latching on to the term “curation,” it spawned a dis-
course, a Zeitgeist-feeling, but also a whole set of future-facing business
practices. In the world of VOD, a whole range of services—Jaman, MUBI,
BFI Player, FilmStruck, Criterion Channel, Docsville, FilmDoo,
Filmatique, alleskino, Realeyz, Trigon-Film, YardVibes, Crunchyroll,
Dekkoo, Spuul and many others still existing or already evanescent—
emerged to cater to niche demographics, and in particular the arthouse
and festival audience segments, under the banner of human(ist) sensibility
rather than random bundling. As Johnson (2019, 147) has noted, even
legacy television providers such as the BBC and Channel 4’s Walter
Presents section on its online service All 4 attempted to jump onto the
curation bandwagon.1 Using marketing rhetoric that implicitly (and often
explicitly) pitted itself against the “cold algorithmic logic” of Netflix and
Amazon, these platforms promised a different sort of “personalised” expe-
rience: not a confirmation of existing tastes but instead the provision of
quality audiovisual content (most often films rather than television, with all
of the attendant cultural connotations) delivered to a community with an
appreciation of the bespoke, the rare, the handcrafted or the artistic. With
classics, rare gems or new discoveries, these services purported to surprise
users (in their language often “members,” “friends,” “our community”)
and burst their filter bubbles. As such, these portals sought to fulfil a niche
market need but also take advantage of the expected (and indeed) grow-
ing propensity for North Americans and Europeans to “stack” subscrip-
tion video on demand (SVOD) services, that is, to subscribe to multiple
platforms much in the vein that cable and satellite subscribers added and
subtracted premium channels. In early 2016 US households on average
used 1.96 SVOD services. By 2019, US households subscribed to 3.4
1
Johnson (2019, 147) quotes a BBC executive who uses much the same rhetoric as that
we shall see of MUBI, BFI Player and others: the BBC “can compete with new OTT services
because we have people with editorial judgement. My view is, people plus data beats data,
and people plus data beats people.”
1 INTRODUCTION 5
(and used 4.2) SVOD services; UK usage increased from 1.7 to 2.6 sub-
scriptions in the same period (Gladher 2017; Broughton 2017; Dixon
2019; Albergotti and Ellison 2019). Many of these boutique services,
including MUBI and Shudder, also became available via Amazon as à la
carte “channels.”
Despite the many different SVOD services offering various permutations
of content in any given territory, we can understand and divide these
platforms into two broad categories, which in turn have distinct business
models, modes of content presentation and recommendation, and audi-
ence address. According to Amanda Lotz (2017, 24–26), for example,
two general strategies inform such portals. The first is a “conglomerated
niche strategy,” such as that pursued by large warehouse-style platforms,
whose offerings intend to service the tastes of a variety of distinct audience
segments. In other words, Netflix collects many small groups of people
who may be respectively most interested in sci-fi, horror, romcoms, binge-
worthy British series, Nordic noir and so on. The company then presents
a unique home screen to each of these users that highlights the sort of
content to which they have previously shown predilections, hiding most of
the rest. The second is the “audience strategy” (“curating content to meet
the needs of a specific audience or audience tastes”), in other words,
assembling a clear, coherent and narrower brand of content, for example
primarily or exclusively offering art films or reality series or horror flicks or
Bollywood or LGBTQ-themed content. In this book I will flesh out these
categories and speak, respectively, of two general sides of the SVOD spec-
trum: “algorithm-informed services” and the more niche “curation-style
platforms.”
There is no shortage of press accounts and academic scholarship
surrounding VOD as a concept (Lotz 2017; Robinson 2017; Johnson
2019) and in particular on the larger, warehouse-style, algorithm-informed
services such as Netflix or Amazon (e.g. Thompson 2008; Hallinan and
Striphas 2014; McDonald and Smith-Rowsey 2016; Barker and Wiatrowski
2017; Jenner 2018; Frey 2021). These companies command economies
of scale in content (thousands of licensed or original productions) and
wide swathes of audiences (Netflix boasted of over 200 million members
in early 2021), which they address with algorithmic recommender sys-
tems. These computational programmes weigh users’ behavioural data
with formulas that link users to other similar users (or users to similar
content to that which they have already shown interest) to predict and
present future consumption choices. The promise of these systems is
6 M. FREY
personalised film or series tips, derived from the wisdom of crowds and
tailored to the individual user.
Here, however, I seek to account for the other, less examined end of
the SVOD spectrum: the curation-style platform, focussing above all on
MUBI as a case study. The basic task of such services is the same as their
algorithm-informed counterparts: to provide users with enough satisfac-
tory content to continue subscribing, and to present that content in a way
that is manageable and attractive, rather than overwhelming. And yet their
messaging around the purpose and technology of their content presenta-
tion and recommendation could hardly be more different. Curation-style
providers purport to promote discovery rather than confirming existing
predilections, to elevate and widen taste, to keep up with the latest trends,
to provide a forum for the open- and like-minded, to bestow distinction
(often venerating content as art, rather than mere “content”) and above
all to galvanise decision-making in a more human and humanist form.
In contrast to the lavish attention on Netflix and company, scholarly
regard of MUBI and curation-style providers has been scant and piece-
meal. The few smart takes deserve mention here. Dina Iordanova and
Stuart Cunningham (2012) delivered a key early contribution in the form
of an edited collection of interviews and essays that delved into prime
movers such as Jaman and MUBI. Back then, with VOD in its infancy and
several years before the worldwide rollout of Netflix, predictive hopes and
fears of “disruption” (of film distributors’ and cinema exhibitors’ existing
business practices) were still central to most of the scholarly discussions.
More recently, two articles have examined aspects of MUBI in greater
depth. Hessler (2018) analyses MUBI Social, a forum that formed part of
the service’s early effort to create an interactive user community, arguing
that its shuttering evinced a larger demise of democratic dialogue on the
platform. My short book will elaborate on these insights, providing a full
account of the service’s evolving credibility building, social networking
and overall user address—and how these elements remain essential to the
overall curation-style business model and marketing rhetoric. In turn,
Smits and Nikdel (2019, 22) have provided a useful overview of how
MUBI’s ethos and acquisitions and distribution strategies in the special-
ised film market recall “conventional traditions and practices of linear and
physical media delivery formats.” This conclusion, as well as their clear-
eyed revision of MUBI beyond early utopian rhetoric on VOD, serves as
an important point of departure for my own investigation. My treatise
recognises and emphasises how the real-world practices of streaming
1 INTRODUCTION 7
services, whether algorithm-led or curation-style, represent continuity as

much as change—despite the often bombastic claims of novelty emanating
from these companies’ marketing departments.
Let me make my intentions known and this short book’s overall
argument plain. Using the case study of MUBI, I will demonstrate, on the
one hand, how such services set up the “curation model” via marketing
and publicity rhetoric, content acquisition and presentation,
recommendation styles and explanations, user interfaces and choice
architectures, community building, industry engagement, and a whole
bevy of associated cultural forms and business tactics. As such, “curation”
constitutes a boutique business model and concomitant marketing rhetoric
for a set of niche VOD providers, informed conceptually by contemporary
connotations of curation in popular discourse and (pseudo-)scholarly
business and cultural theories of the “long tail,” the “paradox of choice”
and the “curated model of selection.” On the surface, at least, these
services actively remediate (and defiantly celebrate) atavistic cultural
mediators, especially museum curators, festival programmers and critics
for newspapers, television and radio. They reject the algorithm-informed
personalisation taste-model and instead take pains to present a personal,
supposedly authentic experience, with the intention of boosting
recommendation credibility and intensifying users’ identification with
the brand.
On the other hand, however, I argue that although curation-style
services stake out a distinct brand identity as an antipole to Netflix or
Amazon in publicity messages, curation-style VOD services are best
understood on a spectrum with, and as a complement to, the mass-
audience algorithmic providers: like boutiques to the megamall. They seek
to fill in market gaps of diversity and artistic distinction left wide open by
Netflix and others, and slake real (if circumscribed) consumer demand for
feature films of periods, cultures, attitudes and styles more distant from
the mainstream. In the end, however, this book will show that although
many have tried, few companies have been able to survive long term using
this model, especially in the art film marketplace. Many if not most of
these services fail to attract sufficient user bases to sustain themselves as
going concerns. Indeed, Chap. 7, the afterword to the MUBI case study,
will demonstrate how the company eventually relinquished a pure
curation-style system in 2020 to become, in effect, an arthouse version of
Netflix or Amazon, settling on the strategy of vertical integration and the
tactics of pre-buys, original productions and theatrical distribution. The
8 M. FREY
itinerary of this history casts serious doubts about the sustainability of

long-tail items and curation as more than a short-term niche business
paradigm. This conclusion poses serious, larger questions about the future
diversity of VOD providers: many would seem to be under long-term
threat of extinction, faced with the increasing market concentration of
Netflix, Amazon and Disney.
Why is it important to investigate MUBI and how does this book
overall contribute to a better understanding of VOD, (art) film and digital
culture? First, this book offers the hitherto most comprehensive examina-
tion of MUBI, which claims to be the world’s most subscribed indepen-
dent SVOD service. Unlike other platforms that have grown out of media
empires or fiefdoms (e.g. FilmStruck, BFI Player, Curzon Home Cinema),
MUBI arose as a startup in 2007 and now figures as a major player in the
specialised film market. MUBI history helps us understand a broader busi-
ness narrative about how digital-media companies survive, especially
within contemporary art film culture. MUBI—but also competitor VOD
streamers, film festivals, exhibitors and distributors—has had to vertically
expand and integrate; what was once a licensee of art films is now a funder,
producer, theatrical and DVD distributor, not to mention (canny) bene-
factor of exhibitors, film festivals and film schools. By example, this book
suggests how even smaller “VOD streamers”—sometimes treated as mere
pipelines to deliver films to viewers’ homes—are having much wider effects
on the traditional film value chain in the digital age.
Second, examining MUBI stands in for a larger anatomy of “curation-
style” VOD as a cultural and social paradigm. In targeted and persistent
marketing messages, these services promote themselves as unlike Netflix
or Amazon not only for their distinct content; they highlight the fact that
human experts—rather than algorithms—“hand pick” this content and
present these films to audiences with explanatory rationales and other con-
textual information, on a sleekly designed website. Up to now, these plat-
forms have received far less scrutiny than overall market leaders Netflix or
Amazon Prime. And yet—at least taken in aggregate—they provide con-
tent variety and added value to many (niche-public) film consumers. The
book thus functions as a contribution to, and a call for, a wider body of
research into the logics, forms and formats of discoverability, recommen-
dation and choice architecture in digital (film and media) culture.
Third and finally, on a meta-level the MUBI case study (and indeed this
book overall) offers a new, holistic methodological approach to research-
ing VOD services in particular and digital-age media companies more
1 INTRODUCTION 9
broadly. My point of departure is closely aligned with the practices and

procedures of critical media industry studies (e.g. Holt and Perren 2009;
Havens et al. 2009; Herbert et al. 2020). The main principle that under-
pins this methodology—the conviction that media industries emerge from
(1) underlying social conditions and contradictions; (2) working practices,
hierarchies and ownership patterns; (3) and the discourses communicated
by practitioners (Freeman 2016)—necessitates diverse and complemen-
tary objects and methods of inquiry. With this project and case study, I
seek not only to adopt the best practices of critical media industry studies,
but to develop the approach further, specifically by exhibiting a triangula-
tive methodology that addresses what has become a traditional point of
complaint and practical hindrance when examining VOD and digital-age
media companies more broadly: these organisations’ lack of candour,
especially regarding their user base. This effort can serve as a paradigm for
researching and understanding, for instance, VOD audiences in the light
of streamers’ “black box” of proprietary data. To this end, I triangulate
analysis of:
• theoretical, cultural and business discourse surrounding “curation”;

• web/app interface and design;
• content;
• marketing and publicity rhetoric;
• company employees’ public statements, press releases, reports and
interviews (and my own interviews with them);
• business history as reported in the trade press, cinephile magazines
and the broader news media;
• publicly accessible audience data;
• my own specially commissioned nationally representative quantitative
VOD user surveys;
• my own qualitative semi-structured interviews and demonstrations
with VOD users.
This methodology explicitly blends top-down concerns and sources

(e.g. published statements by company executives) with bottom-up
approaches (e.g. empirical audience study), thus productively blending
what Alisa Perren (2013, 166) characterises as the two main ways of
researching film distribution and film culture more broadly. Whereas the
former, predominantly political economy-informed approaches tend to
dwell on corporate power and intentions by examining internal documents
10 M. FREY
and items from newspapers and the trades, the latter, influenced by cultural
studies, uses interviews to explain larger sociocultural issues. Like an alloy,
this admixture of methods strengthens the rigour and integrity of the
individual parts, with the aim of providing a fuller account and more
confident conclusions about MUBI and curation-style providers’ integral
features and their place within the larger media landscape.
By way of preview to the book and its overall structure, Chap. 2 sets the
scene by exploring curation as a contemporary cultural discourse. It illu-
minates how the concept ties into current self-help simplicity rhetoric and
reacts to long-standing and historical perceptions of “too many films” and
cultural surplus. Chapter 3 extends this discussion by outlining how cura-
tion has been theorised as a potent business model in digital culture and
how a few such exemplary VOD services consciously avail themselves of
the curation discourse in the structure of their consumer offer and
branding.
Chapters 4, 5 and 6 undertake a sustained case study of MUBI, which
claims to be the world’s largest curation-style art film SVOD service, by
examining trade press, industry documents, interviews with executives,
interface design, marketing messages, audience data and other sources.
Specifically, Chap. 4 narrates MUBI’s historical trajectory from arthouse
aggregator with weak forms of recommendation to a full embrace of a
thirty-film curation model. It simultaneously details the company’s busi-
ness model transformation, establishment of credibility within the (art)
film industry via partnerships and deal-making, and finally vertical forays
into original co-productions, DVD distribution and theatrical exhibition
partnerships. The company has thereby assumed traditional functions of
festivals, repertory cinemas, indie studios and arthouse distributors. In
turn, Chap. 5 dissects MUBI’s web and app interface, illuminating how
the service attempts to consolidate a taste community by reactivating and
modernising traditional recommendation models and inscribing a digital-
culture, neo-liberal, neo-Habermasian form of gatekeeping. Chapter 6
concludes the case study by offering a mixed-method, multimodal analysis
of MUBI’s audience. This analysis reveals, among other insights, how the
company has cultivated a relatively young, culturally omnivorous and
tech-savvy arthouse-style audience with a thirst for thorough contextual
information and a high trust in traditional human expertise, such as
onscreen recommendations and critics’ reviews.
Finally, Chap. 7 deliberates on the sustainability of the curation model
and the extent to which algorithmic and curation-style VOD providers in
1 INTRODUCTION 11
fact represent distinct business paradigms, recommendation modes and

audience experiences. Ultimately, MUBI partially abandoned the model in
2020, and many other ventures such as FilmStruck and Jaman have shut-
tered. These failures on the one hand provide another death knell for the
“long tail” and other curation theories, and on the other underline the
urgency for alternative models of media pluralism in a world increasingly
dominated by behemoths such as Netflix, Amazon and Disney.
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Frey, Mattias. 2021. Netflix Recommends: Algorithms, Film Choice, and the History
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1 INTRODUCTION 13
Paul, Pamela. 2017. Save Your Sanity. Downgrade Your Life. New York Times,
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CHAPTER 2
Curation as Discourse, Trend and Cultural

Salve
Abstract This chapter identifies curation as a contemporary cultural dis-

course. It illuminates how the concept ties into self-help simplicity rheto-
ric as well as acts on perceptions of cultural surplus. Although the scholarly
literature on cultural consumption choice by social psychology, economics
and marketing scholars is decidedly mixed, a number of cultural commen-
tators, concerned about cultural surplus, filter bubbles, data surveillance
and other matters, have captured the pop-cultural imagination by promot-
ing curation as a cultural salve to anxieties surrounding “too much” (data,
films, material objects and so on). This chapter also contextualises this
contemporary discourse historically: although this has been swelling
recently in response to real spikes in media production and data prolifera-
tion, humans have been anxious about too much information and cultural
products since at least Roman times.
Keywords Curation • Cultural surplus • Cultural choice • Filter

bubbles • Minimalism • Gatekeeping
Conceptually, curation incorporates principles of selecting and ordering,

combining or separating, aggregating and filtering, prioritising and con-
textualising, explaining and elucidating, evaluating, criticising or demysti-
fying. Its core purpose is the delivery of surplus value. Placing a spotlight
on one desired object or series of objects, curation is a subtraction that

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80076-5_2
16 M. FREY
adds: by limiting or otherwise altering the perspective of a search, applying

a category by which to browse, or designating a specific audience to tar-
get, it filters out waste or excess and thereby adds a perception of quality,
customisation and efficiency.
In this manner, moreover, curation aspires to provide coherence. For its
many enthusiastic proponents and business aficionados, it focusses atten-
tion, imposes order and makes meaning. Curation is about providing a
better kind of choice. Of course, any filtering hides, predigests, alters con-
texts and modifies perspectives; it forecloses alternatives and can obscure
the bigger picture and its principles (and biases) of selection. Nevertheless,
the aggregation that curation provides is supposedly a smart form of sim-
plification: joined-up thinking, an economy of small scale, a critical mass,
a collection more valuable than the sum of its individual parts. Curation
aims to provide safety in numbers. Even if the amassed objects or data can-
not be consumed in whole by one human being in one sitting, they are
organised into categories and hierarchies, they are searchable or otherwise
masterable.
As a term, curation has redefined (or at least rebranded) occupations,
old and new. Before 2010, the profession of “content curator” would have
elicited blank stares; now such positions regularly appear in advertise-
ments. Well-worn job descriptors—including programmers and librarians,
photo editors, film funders, network executives and distributors—are
being reinvented as “curators.” These monikers also function as euphe-
misms to dress up older tasks, such as censorship, now performed with
new technologies. As ever, new media appropriate the language of the old
and extant.
In turn, various connotations and levels of cultural status adhere to
curation vis-à-vis “programming” or “filtering” or “gatekeeping.” By sub-
tly and silently invoking desired values of taste and class, “curation” deliv-
ers significant appeal to marketers. Curation comes laden with over a
century’s worth of cultural capital from visual arts museums and highbrow
critical organs. (Woe to all who tell self-described “curators” that their
mission is merely selecting or programming.) Whereas filtering implies a
mere whittling down (of unnecessary or superfluous content), curation
also gestures to joining, adding, combining. It is no accident that the
authors who celebrate new tools to combat too much media choice call it
curation (e.g. Bhaskar 2016); the treatises about how such processes frag-
ment our society or brainwash users tend to use other epithets (e.g. Pariser
2011). Indeed, these terms activate alternate normative moral judgements
2 CURATION AS DISCOURSE, TREND AND CULTURAL SALVE 17
in jeremiads about filter bubbles, public sphericules or the gauche ubiquity

of curation. Contested concepts that commentators bend to fit their cho-
sen focus and agenda, such words elide (or, depending on one’s perspec-
tive and inclination to self-reflect, help us talk about) taboo subjects.
Today we often speak about curation or discovery rather than taste (let
alone class) hierarchies.
Despite its current cachet, however, curation persists as a form of cul-
tural recommendation whose origins precede the digital age. The very first
public museums, founded well before the Common Era, assembled vener-
ated items of religious and cultural import; for over two centuries the
Louvre Museum has curated a collection of painting, sculpture and other
art forms, a one-stop shop for the best of human cultural production. The
Book of the Month Club, which offered a curated book subscription
selection to members was founded in 1926; the Columbia House and
BMG music clubs deployed similar business models for records, cassette
tapes and CDs since the mid-1950s. The cable channel Turner Classic
Movies, to cite an example from television, has since 1994 created value
by aggregating the MGM and early Warner Bros. film libraries and broad-
casting them throughout the year.1 Indeed, since the beginnings of media
all humans have performed their own self-filtering in the form of various
conscious and unconscious heuristics and repertoires. Responding psy-
chologically to media choice, some of us remain satisfied with the first
attractive option, whereas others pore through long lists in the anxiety
that there might be a better choice forthcoming (Webster 2014, 36–38;
Hasebrink and Domeyer 2012). For a long time now, even the greediest
culture vulture lacks the time to consume every film or series available to
her or him. Filtering, if not curation, is a necessary and permanent human
task in order to navigate and provide coherence to the cultural sphere.
Although, as we shall see, commentators outline various conceptual
underpinnings of curation, nearly all agree on one fundamental principle:
curation is not a neutral presentation, but rather an intellectual and social
intervention that an algorithm or computer a priori cannot execute.
Activities performed under the banner of curation have attempted to
impart knowledge; they have also sought to inculcate social protocols and
norms, forms of communal belonging and citizenship, and ways of seeing
and understanding (Dovey 2015, 29; Morgan 2013, 23). At least since
the 1960s, with the rapid postwar rise and expansion of film festivals,
1
On the history of studio film libraries, see Hoyt (2014).
18 M. FREY
curation has accrued heroic, romantic associations in audiovisual culture.

The curator has in some (self-)presentations figured as a pendant to the
auteur, a bearer of an against-the-grain subjective vision. Through selec-
tion and arrangement, s/he authors a narrative; through presentation and
context, the curator acts as a stylist, aesthete and critic. These aspirational
tasks overlap and compete with new and legacy roles of cultural recom-
mendation. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the periods of what film his-
torians call the “age of the programmer” and the “golden age of criticism”
coincided. The auratic qualities, but also the good-taste signalling and the
promotion of a common set of classic works registered special importance
at a time when many were agitating for film’s artistic status and worth as a
subject of serious appreciation and study.2
Recently, Robinson (2017, 5–6) has proposed to see “curation” as a
metaphor in the sense of Lakoff and Johnson (1980): a word whose vari-
ous cultural appropriations structure how we understand the (media)
world and something that veils hidden meanings. Robinson coins the term
“curatorial culture” to describe “a new era of media consumption” in
which a “scarcity of viewing access and options” has been superseded by
“scarcity of viewer time and attention” (12–13). Faced with the disparate
usages of “curation”—the old-world concept of stewarding artistic work
and the new-media entrepreneurialism of filtering out noisy data—
Robinson squares the circle and follows previous commentators by pro-
posing that the root of these shifting definitions is the idea of “guardianship”;
curation exceeds mere aggregation by providing the added value of evalu-
ation (20–23).
To be sure, curation-style VOD services such as MUBI recall old-media
recommendation concepts: gatekeeping, human expertise, professional-
ism and broadcasting. As Roderik Smits and E. W. Nikdel (2019, 25) cor-
rectly note, “MUBI’s online strategy is rooted in common practices
associated with repertory film programming, reinforcing the theme of
continuity, rather than outright disruption” in digital culture. In addition,
curation-style providers infuse this top-down wisdom with modern forms
of consumer address, a mode of relating to their community of viewers
that implies egalitarian, populist cultural flows. To an extent, new curation
services resuscitate traditional one-size-fits-all theories of curation, for
2
For an account of film festival periodisation by which curation became a central concern,
see De Valck (2007, 167–170, 2012, 29–32). For an example of the curator-as-author line,
see Cousins (2013).
example canon-building à la Matthew Arnold (1993 [1869]) and

F. R. Leavis (1948), which promised to enlighten the masses with the best
of the hitherto thought, said and created. Under this understanding, taste
is not merely an instrumental synonym for consumer preference, but
rather “good taste is a valuable thing to attain and train in others,” a
shared, communal process “through which idealized versions of the per-
son are imagined, through which people are trained for social life and
through which identities are formed” (Wright 2015, 2).
Nevertheless, this reactivation comes with a modern twist: the new
curation-style recommenders approach their task largely cognisant of
widespread cynicism towards authority, performing their service with
canny and ironic acquisitions principles, critical context, marketing mes-
sages and recommendation explanations that, at least on the surface, dis-
avow “great works” rhetoric for the language of hidden gems, discoveries
and authenticity. The proliferation of choice enabled by on-demand plat-
forms—the power for the individual user to choose among wide assort-
ments of content available outside of linear cinema or television listings
and with fewer restrictions on time, place and device—has increased the
visibility and cultural-economic potential for aggregation, but has also
stoked anxious perceptions of fragmentation and excess, not to mention
the fear of missing out. Curation-style recommenders’ strategies of surplus
management seek to assuage these anxieties.
In so doing, these services consciously partake of, and feed into, a
trend, wider discourse and cultural phenomenon. Curation—together
with words such as artisan, bespoke or (hand)craft(ed)—has gained
remarkable traction in the twenty-first century’s digital age. Google
Trends indicates that the term curation has tripled in search frequency
since 2004, with an especially accelerated growth between 2009 and
2012. “Data curation” and “digital curation” are some of the most fre-
quently sought after subjects, key skills in the age of Metafilter, Slashdot
and Reddit. Google’s Ngram Viewer also reveals a sharp spike in books
about curation since 1980, after an overall downturn in the twentieth
century (Bhaskar 2016, 78–81). Indeed, it is vital to emphasise the con-
temporary polyvalence of curation: as a word and concept, it resounds
with at least two distinct (yet surely overlapping) meanings. First, it func-
tions as an operative logic with an intended perceptible distinction from
“programming,” “list-building,” “archiving” or other common terms to
describe the assemblage and offering of cultural objects to an audience.
Second, curation figures as a symbolic cultural phenomenon and
20 M. FREY
somewhat empty cipher in the early twenty-first century, one hardly iso-
lated to film and also encompassing music, food, material objects and
so forth.
In digital-humanities power searches, in research librarians’ data-
storage conferences and in web developers’ instruction manuals on digital
curation, the term has achieved an increasingly inflationary currency, with
many diverse activities being subsumed under this rubric (e.g., Sabharwal
2015; Gardiner and Gere 2010; Johnston 2017; Valenza 2014; Anderson
2015; Betts and Anderson 2016). Apple speaks of “Curated Computing”
to describe the process of selecting (or rejecting) iPhone applications for
its online store (Van Buskirk 2010). These days, the word describes how
Facebook or Google News collates news outlets’ items in users’ feeds, or
how Pandora or Spotify organises music. Online marketers use software
tools to effect “content curation,” in other words “the process of sifting
through all the various sources of content on the web to compile a list of
the most informative or interesting pieces to then share with your target
audience” (De Cunha 2017), a task charged to a newly coined profession,
“Learning Curators” (Bower n.d.). Ross Harvey (2010, 7) contends that
curation is an “inclusive” term that incorporates but transcends mere
archiving or preservation by both adding value to content as well as
addressing a range of processes over the lifecycle of digital content (rather
than at a single point in time), akin to a “digital stewardship.” Bachelor
and Master courses in curation (or overarching fields such as “Culture,
Criticism and Curation,” which Central St Martins University of the Arts
London offers) have proliferated in recent years. Travel itineraries are no
longer planned but rather “carefully curated,” and the word is applied to
furniture, cosmetics, restaurant menus, clothing lines, recipes, Instagram
shares and YouTube cat videos. In turn, the term has faced disparagement
in the news media and parody from comedians as one of today’s most
overused and misused words (Rosenbaum 2014; Bhaskar 2016, 3–4). In
a recent New York Times article (Stoppard 2020), the US-American paper
of record declared that “Everyone’s a Curator Now,” posing the conun-
drum that if “everything is ‘curated,’ what does the word even mean?”
Film culture has proved no exception to the rule; its usage carries a
similarly ambiguous halo. The Film Curation MA degree at the University
of Glasgow is one indicator: “The MSc in Film Curation offers you the
opportunity to explore film programming in a variety of theoretical,
historical and practical contexts.”3 One wonders if this is not film pro-
gramming, by another name? In fact, scanning contemporary film trade
papers, whole sets of activities now come under the lexical auspices of
curation. In a recent article about the supposed current overproduction of
films, various industry insiders deploy the word to describe at least four
different activities and agents. The CEO of a Scandinavian distributor, for
instance, refers to the “audience as the curator,” to express how consumer
choices determine which films will succeed or fail, a primitive idea expressed
in much less lofty terms for most of film history; a bureaucrat working for
Eurimages, the European cinema subsidy fund, calls himself a “curator”
(Mitchell 2017). From festival selectors to funding bodies to distribution
companies, the feared “gatekeeper” now re-emerges as the friendly,
democratic-yet-upmarket “curator.”
In film scholarship, activities that have traditionally and routinely been
referred to as “archiving,” “preservation,” “programming,” “collection,”
“cataloguing,” “documentation,” “selection” or “buying/acquiring”
now bear the catch-all phrase. The historians, programmers, archivists and
self-professed “film curators” Paolo Cherchi Usai et al. (2008, 5) differen-
tiate curating from archiving by virtue of intellectual added value: “inter-
pretation is what differentiates a collecting body from a mere repository of
audiovisual content.” After hours of dialogues, transcribed over 230
pages, they agree on a working definition of film curatorship as the “art of
interpreting the aesthetics, history, and technology of cinema through the
selective collection, preservation, and documentation of films and their
exhibition in archival presentations” (231).
Curation, as a discourse today, is fundamentally Janus-faced: old and
new, highbrow but democratic and accessible, tech-savvy yet nostalgically
authentic. It looks back to the great-works selection processes that prom-
ise enlightenment to the follower, absorbing the status of the gallery and
museum circuit. But it also appropriates the digital-culture language of
the present and supposed future, the data and content curation of today’s
computer programming. A less threatening placeholder for “taste,” a term
laden with hierarchical associations about class and cultural authority, and
anathema to pseudo-democratic new-media rhetoric, “curation” contains
multiple points of attraction that gesture to a politics of authenticity, a
potential economy of consumer desire and cultural mediation. Subject to
hyperinflation, the “curation” cultural currency nonetheless retains an
3
See http://www.gla.ac.uk/postgraduate/taught/filmcuration/.
22 M. FREY
essential value among receptive marketing demographics, especially as a

response to perceived problems of cultural surplus.
“Too Much”: Curation as Salve to Perceptions

of Cultural Surplus
Examining curation as a concept, buzzword and trend helps explain the

function and appeal of VOD recommender systems. It speaks to a wider
cultural phenomenon that contextualises and inflects these practices. As
one art historian notes, the processes of collecting and curating “cannot
be considered separately from the cultural characteristics of the society
undertaking it” (Cannon-Brookes 1984, 115). Despite the fuzziness of
the term in bestseller how-to manuals, adverts and hipster bartalk (these
are popular discussions and marketing slogans, after all, not philosophical
symposia), among these diverse accounts a few first principles obtain:
above all, that we need curation to survive the modern world’s economy
of attention. If curation is the answer, excess is the purported problem.
Curation remains a symptom of, and seeks to resolve, problems of pleni-
tude; it figures, according to its champions, as a safe and authentic alterna-
tive to algorithmic recommendation.
Statistical indicators demonstrate how choice in audiovisual produc-
tions, channels of dissemination and media platforms increased precipi-
tously in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. For example,
between 2006 and 2019 the number of films exhibited theatrically each
year rose 41 per cent in the United States and 78 per cent in the United
Kingdom; the number of films produced per annum (rather than those in
theatrical distribution) in EU countries increased substantially between
2007 (1444 features) and 2016 (2124 features), for a sum total of 18,000
films across the ten-year period (European Audiovisual Observatory 2017,
1). In the late 1990s, to cite one last example of the surge, about fifteen
to twenty film festivals ran each year in the United Kingdom; by 2017,
that number had ballooned 1900 per cent to four hundred (Follows 2013;
Koljonen 2017, 11); Moeran and Pedersen (2011, 4) estimated 3500
worldwide only a decade into the twenty-first century. Of course, these
data points do not yet broach matters such as the three-figure television
channel landscape and the hundreds of VOD services currently on offer.
The available quantities of media content and consumption portals have
long since surpassed individual humans’ abilities to adequately survey

them, let alone watch a substantial fraction of these films.
To be sure, rigorous meta-analyses delineate decidedly mixed effects of
numerous choice options on cultural consumption and decision-making.
A prominent strand of traditional theoretical choice models and empirical
research in social psychology, economics and marketing indicates that
humans crave expanded choice and enjoy choosing from many options
(e.g. Arrow 1963; Rieskamp et al. 2006). These studies suggest that more
choice leads to more choosing: in other words, higher sales and more sat-
isfied consumers (Rolls et al. 1981; Sloot et al. 2006). On the other hand,
further research (e.g. Iyengar and Lepper 2000; Chernev 2003) has sug-
gested that when we have too many choices at our disposal—whether
chocolate assortments, jam flavours, wine varieties or television chan-
nels—we are apt to choose none of the above. This is the so-called choice
overload hypothesis. When Scheibehenne et al. (2010) performed a meta-
analysis of fifty experiments on this overall subject, they found a mean
effect size of virtually zero and considerable variance between the studies.
Another meta-analysis (Chernev et al. 2015) of ninety-nine experiments
found that choice size is indeed significant, but only when taking into
account choice set complexity, decision task difficulty, preference uncer-
tainty and decision goals. My purpose here is not to take a side in what is
clearly an active debate. Rather, I seek to point out how one side—the
choice overload hypothesis—has successfully and perhaps disproportion-
ately filtered into the news media and pop culture. Indeed, Scheibehenne
et al. (2010, 417) found a publication bias towards the choice overload
hypothesis among the scientific studies, which they attribute to the “so-
called Prometheus effect, according to which tantalizing counterintuitive
findings have an initial advantage for getting published.” Precisely this
paradoxical, counterintuitive idea—no doubt easily relatable to many in an
anecdotal, confirmatory way—has found many proponents and followers
outside ivory towers.
The proliferation of media choice has manifested as a discourse of anxi-
ety. We can read about problematic excess in university bookshop titles
but also online bestsellers and breezy sign-of-the-times airport hardbacks.
These Zeitgeist diagnoses—Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice: Why
More Is Less (2004); Steven Rosenbaum’s Curation Nation: How to Win in
a World Where Consumers Are Creators (2011); Tom Vanderbilt’s Taste in
an Age of Endless Choice (2016); Michael Bhaskar’s Curation: The Power of
Selection in a World of Excess (2016)—remain perhaps more valuable as
24 M. FREY
symptoms than as rigorous scientific analyses of cultural epiphenomena.

“When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable,” Schwartz (2004,
2) writes in his popular survey. But as choice continues to expand, “the
negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no
longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.” The
disadvantage of having access to so many films, according to Vanderbilt
(2016, 51), “is expending more time in deciding what to watch.” Absent
the time to read critical reviews in cinephile magazines, he continues,
referring to VOD recommender systems, “there might be some benefit to
off-loading some of my decision making and discovery process to a
computer.”
Excess is the culprit in Marie Kondo’s self-help guides and Netflix
series; her KonMari method of discarding unused clothing and other clut-
terbugs, heavily covered in upmarket left-liberal dailies like the New York
Times and the Guardian, advocates a tidy living space with heavy doses of
faux-Zen self-Orientalism. The move towards downsizing material goods
and cultural offerings in the name of simplicity and the elimination of
agonising or time-consuming decisions resound also with trends towards
slow food, slimmed-down or chef’s-choice restaurant menus, not to men-
tion the frugal FIRE (financial independence retire early) crusaders. In
hoary hoarder reality shows, pack rats are the new fat, served up with prêt-
à-manger Schadenfreude. The minimalism movement propels forward in
a thousand new-age-guru blogs and films such as Minimalism: A
Documentary About the Important Things (2015). Curation, it seems, like
thinness or mindfulness, functions as a virtue in itself, a will to
self-fulfilment.
These meanings, perceived problems and social needs circulating in the
public sphere are important motivations for the curation-style VOD rec-
ommender systems and their marketing address: a service for the cash rich
and time poor that combines “best of” culture with a low-stress “healthy”
format. Bhaskar’s pop-scholarly ode (2016) provides a symptomatically
revealing insight into the draw of curation as a method of cultural media-
tion. Defining curation as the act of selecting and arranging (including
related operations such as refinement, reduction, display, simplification,
presentation and explanation) in order to add value, Bhaskar argues that
curation is nothing short of a sociocultural remedy, yes necessity, in an age
of unprecedented abundance, satiety and excess (8, 85). Indeed, Bhaskar
sees curation—despite its long history and his ex post facto application of
the term to many tasks undertaken by humans for thousands of years—as
a sign of the contemporary moment. Noting the 2.5 quintillion bytes of

data that the world produces each day—data that includes tweets, e-mail
spam and CCTV footage—Bhaskar wonders how a society can manage a
daily information overload in which a pocket device can store the entire
contents of the Library of Congress (1–2). A civilisation that has solved
the problem of information scarcity now faces the dilemma of information
overload: “We don’t always need more information. Instead, value lies
today in better curating information” (3).
In pop-scholarly literature, curation functions as a code for a reinvigo-
rated economy of cultural presentation and recommendation. Its champi-
ons promote curation as a quick fix to contemporary first-world,
middle-class problems of both material and data abundance, a new devel-
opment after the long era of informational asymmetry. That is, for much
of human history, sellers of services and products have leveraged superior
intelligence about the quality of their goods—a particularly vexing prob-
lem for experience goods such as films, television programmes, restaurant
visits or holiday trips, transactions whose subjective value can only truly be
confirmed by the buyer after consumption (Akerlof 1970). Today, how-
ever, a jaunt to Yelp, TripAdvisor or Rotten Tomatoes can reveal a whole
wealth of reviews and caveats about any particular restaurant, hotel, film
and so on. In theory, the proliferation and democratisation of recommen-
dation represent welcome developments. Yet because media consumers in
rich countries like the United States and United Kingdom are now inun-
dated with cultural recommendations of various shapes and provenance, a
second-order need arises: to sift through the quality and credibility of
recommendations themselves. Curation advocates argue that we need a
benign authority to tell us what to watch.
On the one hand, popular accounts of curation must be read with scep-
ticism, mindful of stakeholders’ roles, interests and imperatives. Authors
like Bhaskar, Rosenbaum, Schwartz or Vanderbilt have strong incentives
to play up the severity of an urgent problem and offer a catch-all,
buzzword-heavy solution ready for the New York Times bestseller list.
Vincent Mosco (2004, 36) has described such new-media storytellers as
bricoleurs who pull “together the bits and pieces of technology’s narra-
tives, to fashion a mobilizing story for our time.”
On the other hand, we need to consider how the discourses of surplus
and curation resurrect long-standing social anxieties and cultural prescrip-
tions. The motion picture industry has long complained about too much
product, a fact that seems to attenuate snap judgements about an
26 M. FREY
unprecedented, novel dilemma. Between 1906 and 2016, Variety contains

422 references to “too many films,” 89 mentions of “too many movies,”
171 complaints about “too many pictures” and 88 notices regarding “too
many pix,” with the earliest mention in 1913. To be sure, some of these
referred to “too many films in 3D” or “too many movies about superhe-
roes.” Nevertheless, in general, the point about an anxiety regarding over-
production obtains. Trolls through other industry trade papers, such as
Boxoffice, Independent Exhibitors Film Bulletin, Broadcasting, Hollywood
Reporter, Radio and Television Mirror, Modern Screen and Screen
International, and searches for “too many TV shows,” yielded similar
results. These earnest lamentations took place in the historical context of
a fraction of today’s film production, well before the 300-channel televi-
sion palette and overpopulated VOD landscape.
Indeed, tracking out from digital film and television to the larger issue
of cultural surplus, there is no shortage of historical complaints about too
many media options and a thirst for cultural guidance. Alvin Toffler’s
Future Shock, a six-million-copy bestseller from 1970, argued that society
was changing at a pace that exceeded human limitations to process and
understand. Bearing down on the key terms “overstimulation” and “infor-
mation overload,” the book contends that developments in technology
and the resulting increases in choice would have profound (and dire) soci-
ological and psychological consequences. Among the culprits of this cog-
nitive overstimulation are the mass media, including television, but in
particular what Toffler saw as a dangerous trend for market segmentation
and niche media products, evidenced both in the trend for smaller cinemas
in the United States and Europe (nostalgic for film palaces with capacities
of 4000, he calls then-new 150-seaters in London “midget movie houses”),
but also to what he deems smaller films. “Today in cities across the coun-
try these ‘mainstream’ movies,” which sought to attract a mass audience,
“are supplemented by foreign movies, art films, sex movies, and a whole
stream of specialized motion pictures consciously designed to appeal to
sub-markets—surfers, hot-rodders, motorcyclists, and the like” (252).
One shudders to think what Toffler would have made of today’s postage-
stamp- sized multiplex cinemas, cocooned Netflix-and-chilling, not to
mention the spectre of algorithm-assisted niche-content produc-
tion models.
In crucial ways, Toffler’s argument represents The Filter Bubble avant la
lettre: his work anticipates many contemporary cultural theorists’ con-
demnations of the internet and its effects on content diversity, cultural
gatekeeping and social atomisation in film and television culture. And yet,
we should remember, Toffler’s ideas were hardly unprecedented even in
1970: they constitute one marker in a long genealogy. In an essay on the
“Cult of Distraction” (1926) and several others (e.g. 1927), cultural critic
Siegfried Kracauer illuminated a world of mass communications—includ-
ing cinema, photography and illustrated daily newspapers—designed to
elicit an overstimulation of the senses. This sentiment was shared among
various thinkers in 1920s Weimar Germany, for example Martin
Heidegger’s (1927) critique of modern technology and the loss of con-
templative perception. And yet these sign-of-the-times treatises on specific
matrices of new entertainment offerings and sociopolitical constellations
echo a longer historical trajectory of similar observations. Already in 1903
sociologist Georg Simmel diagnosed a fragmented urban culture and
mental life riddled and oversaturated with the trappings of technological
innovation. In the nineteenth century, following Industrial Revolution
moral panics about cold capitalist overproduction, leading Victorian think-
ers in England wrote invectives that considered the sprawling intellectual
interests of new university departments and their associated scholarly jour-
nals as a danger to a cohesive public sphere (D. Williams 2006, 24). Others
(Frey 2015, 14–17, 141–143) have detailed film critics’ long-standing and
recurrent worries about a fragmented cultural landscape. Indeed, histori-
ans have demonstrated how perceptions of information overload date back
even prior to Seneca’s first-century pronouncements on the overabun-
dance of books and the need to read selectively. The fourteenth-century
philosopher Jean Buridan was already profoundly worried about informa-
tion overload in decision-making, inspiring later ruminations on the sub-
ject (Zupko 2003; Lipowski 1970). By the late antiquity and early modern
period there were already numerous well-developed strategies to navigate
the perceived surfeit of information via recommendation systems, includ-
ing digests, indexes and compendia, prototypes of today’s filtering, “data
mining,” aggregators and “content curation” (Blair 2010a, b). In sum,
today’s buzzwords of information anxiety, data glut, infoxication, cogni-
tive overload, FOMO (fear of missing out) or data smog reanimate a long
tradition of o-tempora-o-mores concern about having to manage too much
information and too many media choices—not to mention the elites’ pre-
occupations about choreographing perceptions of cultural value. Clearly,
and already for thousands of years, it has been impossible to consume even
a fraction of extant media content, whether books or audiovisual media.
28 M. FREY
The introduction of new media and technologies has consistently exacer-

bated such fears.
Notwithstanding this history and its eternal regress of surplus and cura-
tion, my trade-press research reveals that such complaints within the film
and television industry have increased significantly since the 1990s and
especially in the 2010s. Moreover, the (pre-COVID-19-era) data clearly
show exponential growth in the audiovisual marketplace, whether mea-
sured in films produced or theatrically exhibited, or in the proliferation of
film festivals, television channels or VOD portals. The crucial big picture
is how the discourses of curation and cultural surplus feed off each other
as symbiotic halves. The American Psychological Association and Pew
Research Center, among other organisations, have released research indi-
cating that social anxiety about the roles of algorithmic and automated
computational processes may be increasing in the general populace (Paul
2017; Sax 2017). In equal and opposite measure, canny business opera-
tors stand ready to stoke and fulfil perceived social needs for downgrading,
simplification and curation—especially as performed by benign human(ist)
cultural mediators. Let us now turn to this cohort and detail how curation
not only functions as a buzzword in cultural discussions, but also as a key
term in popular business theories as an instruction manual for accruing
economic value in the media industries.
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CHAPTER 3
The Curation Business Model
Abstract This chapter extends the discussion of curation as a cultural dis-

course by outlining how the term has been theorised—such as in Chris
Anderson’s “long tail”—as a potent business model in digital culture. As a
preview to the MUBI case study, the chapter briefly sketches some other
exemplary VOD services—in particular, BFI Player and FilmStruck/
Criterion—that consciously avail themselves of the curation discourse in
their consumer offer and branding. This chapter concludes by outlining
the main points of distinction between the two sides of the VOD spec-
trum: the algorithmic and curation models. These distinctions generally
revolve around methods of personalisation, scale and credibility building,
not to mention different taste philosophies and levels of transparency.
Curation-style providers generally target and reach a small, narrow market.
Keywords VOD • Streaming services • Long tail • BFI Player •

FilmStruck
Some business-world actors have proposed curation as a lucrative new

economic model, a powerful market-gap filler in an age of excess. The
next-big-thing subgenre of Gladwellian non-fiction bills curation as the
heartbeat of start-ups across the culture economy. At least as far back as
the 1990s, internet cheerleader Nicholas Negroponte (1996, 155) sug-
gested that there is great money to be made in the aggregation and

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80076-5_3
34 M. FREY
curation business: “The fact that TV Guide has been known to make larger
profits than all four broadcast networks combined suggests that the value
of information about information can be greater than the value of the
information itself.” Indeed, according to Eli Pariser (2011, 67), compared
to traditional “push” delivery systems such as linear broadcast television,
the “problem” is that “pull” technology, such as the web or VOD, “is
actually a lot of work. It requires you to be constantly on your feet, curat-
ing your own media experience. That’s way more energy than TV requires
during the whopping thirty-six hours a week that Americans watch today.”
Cultural recommendation—despite prevalent death-of-the-critic worries
and new-media kill-the-gatekeeper rhetoric—is a promising growth
industry.
Numerous theoretical ideas have arisen to explain or predict how the
logic of curation can add value to consumers’ lives and thus help busi-
nesses extract new revenue sources. According to these theories, in an era
in which overwhelmed consumers are too busy to “read back issues of
Cahiers du Cinéma” (Vanderbilt 2016, 51) or otherwise research which of
the many films, series and fuzzy bunny YouTube clips they should bother
watching, a whole business market awaits to help consumers whittle down
their expanded media options.
These theories attempt to show how new media affect patterns of cul-
tural production, consumption and distribution, and in particular how
they might incentivise niche or blockbuster products, respectively. To be
sure, the debate is not uncontested, for example between the “long tail”
of niche cultural goods and the “winner-takes-all” blockbuster model of
making huge bets on a small number of potential hits (e.g. Anderson
2004; cf. Elberse 2013). And yet each takes the business of entertainment
production and distribution as its point of departure, and the internet and
new technologies as its catalysts. Faced with an explosion of production,
these grand narratives seek to explain how these items can be bundled and
harnessed to reach audiences and achieve profits. If there are a potentially
infinite number of cultural productions on offer, how many and which
should be supplied with what level of capital support to bring them to the
attention of audiences? Business paradigms about taming and profiting
from an unprecedented wealth of product and information, each recom-
mends amassing critical volumes in aggregate or otherwise filtering pre-
cisely in a zero-sum neo-liberal economy.
Perhaps the most prominent and widely discussed of these theories was
Wired editor Chris Anderson’s “long tail.” In a 2004 article, a 2006 book
3 THE CURATION BUSINESS MODEL 35
and a 2009 updated revision, Anderson envisions a bright future for inter-
net retailers and all those who sell niche products in bulk. Anderson’s
“long tail” model is essentially a curation economics: aggregated selection
together with good search functions and recommender systems will unlock
new value by matching niche products and niche tastes.
According to Anderson, digital distribution innovations hail the end of
the blockbuster age; companies that achieve economies of scale by allow-
ing consumers to find and purchase deep-catalogue cultural items will
flourish. Their cumulative aggregation will henceforth outpace high-risk
wagers on top-ten pop hits and tent-pole movies. Like many other gurus,
Anderson’s ideas—so influential that his book itself became a blockbuster
bestseller—coalesced around assumptions of cultural surplus and fragmen-
tation. Once consumers have a whiff of bespoke narrowcasting, Anderson
posits, they will reject four-quadrant, one-size-fits-all mass address. A for-
merly docile public, happy to share watercooler chitchat about Leave It to
Beaver (1957–1963) or wonder who shot J.R., has fractured into an
immediate-gratification-only “mass of niches” (2009, 5). To be sure,
Anderson admits, divergent tastes have always bubbled beneath the veneer
of mass-media pop culture. It is only in the digital age, however—via
algorithm-equipped recommendation systems, the ability to amass huge
central storage facilities (to replace neighbourhood bricks-and-mortar
retail outlets) and concomitant lowered price points—that satisfying con-
sumers’ more finicky predilections has become economically viable.
Anderson singles out a number of sign-of-the-times “long-tail compa-
nies.” Whereas a local Blockbuster could only stock 3000 titles, the
internet-based DVD-by-post Netflix could hoard 90,000 films and poten-
tially many more as a streaming site (23). Whereas yesterday’s cinemas and
video stores needed to focus on lowest common denominators because
their screening times, seats or shelf space were finite, digital distribution
has allowed big-boy outfits such as Amazon and Apple’s iTunes to stock
and profit from obscure backlists.
Anderson heralds a cultural landscape where hidden gems are ripe for
discovery, cultural hierarchies overturn, tyrannies of locality vanish and
consumers become empowered to break through corporate gatekeepers.
It is a model that—in the vein of Yochai Benkler (2006), Henry Jenkins
(2006) and other digital-democracy champions—assumes an active con-
sumer, networked sharing, satisfied niche communities, tailored content,
limitless selection and a cornucopia of media diversity (Anderson 2009, 7;
cf. Turow 1997, 3). According to Anderson (2009, 52–57), three forces
36 M. FREY
of the new media revolution will engorge the far end of the demand
curve—the long tail—and balance off the blockbuster’s hitherto heavy
head. First, democratised production (e.g. digital video cameras, desktop
editing programs) lengthens the tail. Second, democratised tools of distri-
bution (aggregators like Amazon, eBay, iTunes, Netflix and YouTube)
results in greater access to niche content, which fattens the tail. Third,
recommendation filters connect supply and demand and shepherd busi-
ness from hits to niches.
The long-tail theory meshed well with other breathless assessments
(e.g., Greenleigh 2014) of the internet’s ability to bypass gatekeepers and
inspired many fans in the tech community, such as Google’s CEO Eric
Schmidt. It also gained considerable traction in the commentariat and the
academy. After all, the long tail represented the fulfilment of a coveted
dream: that cult fandom was swelling into a critical mass (Jenkins 2006,
263). An army of academics—from film, media, economics and business
departments alike—mobilised empirical data to support Anderson’s pro-
nouncements. They offered evidence about how the demand for difficult-
to-pronounce and niche erotica products increased when offered online or
how the concentration of top-100 DVD rentals reduced from 85 per cent
in bricks-and-mortar stores to 35 per cent on internet platforms (Goldfarb
et al. 2015; Zentner et al. 2013; Smith and Telang 2016, esp. 70–73).
Television scholars pointed to the quickly increasing and potentially
boundless proliferation of digital cable channels as proof of the long tail
(Curtin and Shattuc 2009, 119–120). Still others poured attention on the
inventory and balance sheets of Amazon as demonstrations of long-tail
demand and business success in an age of excess. The number of new book
titles had rocketed from 122,000 (in 2000) to 560,000 (in 2008) to 3.1
million (in 2010) and the number of new albums had quadrupled in this
period; yet between a third and a half of Amazon’s sales came from titles
for which even the largest physical bookstores and record shops would not
have had room. These facts lead Michael D. Smith and Rahul Telang
(2016, 67) to conclude that there is “strong evidence that online consum-
ers had a great appetite for obscure titles.” Indeed, one could argue that
the very existence and success of companies like Amazon and eBay and
niche breakouts like Fifty Shades of Grey demonstrated the viability of a
long-tail business model. Advocates like Smith and Telang (70) predicted
that profitability would follow those aggregators and curators who pursue
the long tail: “If consumers derive an enormous amount of value from
being able to find obscure products that match their tastes, as we have
found that they do, that opens up many business opportunities for firms
that can create these matches.” Because of this new market for a wide array
of niches, the logic goes, more media producers and retail companies will
be able to sustain themselves financially with the production and distribu-
tion of niche products, leading in a virtuous circle to increased develop-
ment of such products, whether chanting monk records or art films.
It is important to emphasise that although Anderson’s theory focussed
on niche cultural items (rather than blockbusters), he explicitly linked
these items to large-scale selection and AI-assisted matchmaking. For this
reason, Amazon’s retail arm and Netflix’s DVD-by-post operation (which
maintained a selection ten times the size of its streaming service) func-
tioned as key examples. In contrast, however, other theories downplayed
Anderson’s points about mass aggregation and algorithmic recommend-
ers, explicitly tying curation economics with the cultural trends towards
minimalism outlined in Chap. 2. Indeed, one of Bhaskar’s (2016) most
resonant points revolves around curation’s business prospects and how
canny businesspeople have sought to derive profit by offering less. He
asserts that—after the Industrial Model of Selection, a Fordist business
model based on mass production of a limited selection of goods marketed
to mass consumers—a Curated Model of Selection, “one of the major
business transitions of our time,” now dominates: “more producers and
products, but more expertly matched to consumers” (99–100). According
to Bhaskar (99), selection “isn’t just a necessary part of doing business;
selection is a primary asset. Selection isn’t an afterthought; it’s the priority.
Selection is no longer a by-product of being a retailer; it is the point of
being a retailer.”
Chapter 7 will evaluate the claims of Anderson and others and show
that, by and large, many curation-style VOD services have failed as busi-
nesses. Nevertheless, such theories of recommendation and exchange help
us understand the intentions of VOD business models and marketing
rhetoric, as well as their potential user appeal.
Indeed, a whole breed of VOD services have sought to turn their com-
parative disadvantage in terms of content acquisition volume into a com-
petitive advantage by using a curation business model that emphasises the
quality, rather than quantity, of its offerings. In 2020, the European
Audiovisual Observatory (Grece and Pumares 2020, 16–17) found 185
SVOD and 138 TVOD platforms operating in the EU-27, determining
that while “multi-country TVOD services seemed to focus on offering a
large choice to their customers, proposing recent and catalogues [sic]
38 M. FREY
films, several national TVOD and SVOD services had more a logic of
curation.” The report revealed that TVOD catalogues had seven times the
median number and five times the mean number of film titles that the
SVOD catalogues offered.
To be sure, the precise nature and branding of each portal’s content
varies: some services concentrate on a single genre or format, others on a
geographical region or cultural heritage, while still others focus on demo-
graphic or niche-taste groups. The profiles range from niche horror, real-
ity TV, anime and documentary platforms, to specialists for African cinema,
Latin American series and Bollywood, to those services aimed at the
LGBTQ community and even British royal family enthusiasts (e.g., Saner
2017). Yet all promise to fill in the gaps of generalist, warehouse-style
platforms such as Netflix and Amazon: to offer more distinct, diverse,
focussed or perhaps higher-prestige content, but above all to provide a
community of (taste) identity and often the positive presentation of scar-
city. For instance, Jaman (founded in 2007) brought Bollywood, European
arthouse and American independent films to interested users in a host of
worldwide territories; seven leading film festivals launched DocAlliance
(from 2008), a platform for documentaries. Fandor (from 2010) used a
revenue-sharing model to distribute silent and classic films, arthouse and
independent fare, as well as documentaries and shorts. Filmatique emerged
in 2016 to offer one new (usually recent, usually non-English-language)
film per week, while Nicolas Winding Refn’s byNWR.com promised a
revolving program of exploitation films from the ragamuffin director’s
personal collection, cleaned up and made streaming-ready by the Harvard
Film Archive. MUBI was founded in 2007 under the name The Auteurs,
concentrating squarely on contemporary and classic arthouse feature films.1
Not only has curation as a concept informed these companies’ business
models and inflected their strategic decisions as well as day-to-day activi-
ties; it forms the core of marketing strategies, investment pitches, interface
design and recommendation explanations. FilmStruck’s “tightly curated
rotation of about 500 films at a time” and MUBI’s “heavily curated”
thirty-film selection have figured prominently in these companies’ press
releases, adverts, interviews and promotional materials as a key reason to
subscribe. One MUBI advert, a white text in all caps, succinctly summed
up its appeal to those suffering from choice overload: “IF YOU’VE EVER
1
For chronicles and timelines of the fitful history of early digital distribution enterprises,
see Cunningham and Silver (2012, 2013).
SPENT MORE TIME LOOKING FOR A GREAT FILM THAN

WATCHING A GREAT FILM, TRY MUBI.” In smaller text below:
“MUBI. Hand-Picked Cinema.” In turn, Fandor has promised “carefully
selected films from around the world.” According to its co-founder,
Jonathan Marlow (qtd. in Appelo 2011), the service “relies on human
expertise to curate, like a film fest programmer or the proprietor of a great
video store like Chicago’s Facets or Seattle’s Scarecrow Video…. It isn’t
just a simple algorithm,” but rather “an actual individual who can distil the
reasons why you might be interested in the movie.” This statement epito-
mises the appeal of these services to the human touch, pitching their puta-
tively superior forms of explanations as added value over algorithmic
services, which in Marlow’s telling are simplistic in comparison to the
complexity of a human expert’s curation. Initiating a cooperation with
Facebook that allowed users to view platform films and then share “a rave
(or pan) with friends”—a telling simultaneous embrace and rhetorical
rejection of big tech—the service furthermore encouraged community
building and a bottom-up form of word of mouth more transparent than
algorithmic collaborative filtering.
Two brief examples of the curation business model in practice,
FilmStruck and BFI Player, help us contextualise the in-depth case study
of MUBI that begins in the next chapter. In 2016, with Netflix and
Amazon in the throes of global expansion and yet retreating from the
diversity of world cinema and from most of film history in their dwindling
catalogues, FilmStruck, a joint venture between Criterion Collection and
Turner Classic Movies (and Curzon for the United Kingdom platform),
emerged to disseminate international, arthouse, independent and classic
films. Directly addressing cinephiles, the now-defunct portal offered a
curated programme revolving around movements (Italian Neo-Realism),
themed collections (“Female Friendships”) and retrospectives (Agnès
Varda), but above all bonus features such as interviews with directors or
actors, or video commentaries prepared by film scholars and critics—thus
replacing the old function of DVD/Blu-ray extras. According to Charlie
Tabesh (qtd. in Brandman 2016a), FilmStruck SVP of Programming and
Production, the independent service emerged as an antidote to the non-
transparent recommendations of Netflix and Hulu, which “didn’t have
any special features, any explanations of why that scene was there, any kind
of sense that there was a lot of curation, any significant curation behind
the scenes.” Deploying a unique “editorial voice” sustained a key point of
contrast.
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time. So I shall turn away from the thunders of the political battle
upon which every American hangs intent, and repress the ardor that
at this time rises in every American heart—for there are issues that
strike deeper than any political theory has reached, and conditions of
which partisanry has taken, and can take, but little account. Let me,
therefore, with studied plainness, and with such precision as is
possible—in a spirit of fraternity that is broader than party limitations,
and deeper than political motive—discuss with you certain problems
upon the wise and prompt solution of which depends the glory and
prosperity of the South.
But why—for let us make our way slowly—why “the South.” In an
indivisible union—in a republic against the integrity of which sword
shall never be drawn or mortal hand uplifted, and in which the rich
blood gathering at the common heart is sent throbbing into every
part of the body politic—why is one section held separated from the
rest in alien consideration? We can understand why this should be
so in a city that has a community of local interests; or in a State still
clothed in that sovereignty of which the debates of peace and the
storm of war has not stripped her. But why should a number of
States, stretching from Richmond to Galveston, bound together by
no local interests, held in no autonomy, be thus combined and drawn
to a common center? That man would be absurd who declaimed in
Buffalo against the wrongs of the Middle States, or who demanded in
Chicago a convention for the West to consider the needs of that
section. If then it be provincialism that holds the South together, let
us outgrow it; if it be sectionalism, let us root it out of our hearts; but
if it be something deeper than these and essential to our system, let
us declare it with frankness, consider it with respect, defend it with
firmness, and in dignity abide its consequence. What is it that holds
the southern States—though true in thought and deed to the Union—
so closely bound in sympathy to-day? For a century these States
championed a governmental theory—but that, having triumphed in
every forum, fell at last by the sword. They maintained an institution
—but that, having been administered in the fullest wisdom of man,
fell at last in the higher wisdom of God. They fought a war—but the
prejudices of that war have died, its sympathies have broadened,
and its memories are already the priceless treasure of the republic
that is cemented forever with its blood. They looked out together
upon the ashes of their homes and the desolation of their fields—but
out of pitiful resource they have fashioned their homes anew, and
plenty rides on the springing harvests. In all the past there is nothing
to draw them into essential or lasting alliance—nothing in all that
heroic record that cannot be rendered unfearing from provincial
hands into the keeping of American history.
But the future holds a problem, in solving which the South must
stand alone; in dealing with which, she must come closer together
than ambition or despair have driven her, and on the outcome of
which her very existence depends. This problem is to carry within
her body politic two separate races, and nearly equal in numbers.
She must carry these races in peace—for discord means ruin. She
must carry them separately—for assimilation means debasement.
She must carry them in equal justice—for to this she is pledged in
honor and in gratitude. She must carry them even unto the end, for
in human probability she will never be quit of either.
This burden no other people bears to-day—on none hath it ever
rested. Without precedent or companionship, the South must bear
this problem, the awful responsibility of which should win the
sympathy of all human kind, and the protecting watchfulness of God
—alone, even unto the end. Set by this problem apart from all other
peoples of the earth, and her unique position emphasized rather
than relieved, as I shall show hereafter, by her material conditions, it
is not only fit but it is essential that she should hold her brotherhood
unimpaired, quicken her sympathies, and in the light or in the
shadows of this surpassing problem work out her own salvation in
the fear of God—but of God alone.
What shall the South do to be saved? Through what paths shall
she reach the end? Through what travail, or what splendors, shall
she give to the Union this section, its wealth garnered, its resources
utilized, and its rehabilitation complete—and restore to the world this
problem solved in such justice as the finite mind can measure, or
finite hands administer?
In dealing with this I shall dwell on two points.
First, the duty of the South in its relation to the race problem.
Second, the duty of the South in relation to its no less unique and
important industrial problem.
I approach this discussion with a sense of consecration. I beg your
patient and cordial sympathy. And I invoke the Almighty God, that
having showered on this people His fullest riches has put their hands
to this task, that He will draw near unto us, as He drew near to
troubled Israel, and lead us in the ways of honor and uprightness,
even through a pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night.
What of the negro? This of him. I want no better friend than the
black boy who was raised by my side, and who is now trudging
patiently with downcast eyes and shambling figure through his lowly
way in life. I want no sweeter music than the crooning of my old
“mammy,” now dead and gone to rest, as I heard it when she held
me in her loving arms, and bending her old black face above me
stole the cares from my brain, and led me smiling into sleep. I want
no truer soul than that which moved the trusty slave, who for four
years while my father fought with the armies that barred his freedom,
slept every night at my mother’s chamber door, holding her and her
children as safe as if her husband stood guard, and ready to lay
down his humble life on her threshold. History has no parallel to the
faith kept by the negro in the South during the war. Often five
hundred negroes to a single white man, and yet through these dusky
throngs the women and children walked in safety, and the
unprotected homes rested in peace. Unmarshaled, the black
battalions moved patiently to the fields in the morning to feed the
armies their idleness would have starved, and at night gathered
anxiously at the big house to “hear the news from marster,” though
conscious that his victory made their chains enduring. Everywhere
humble and kindly; the bodyguard of the helpless; the rough
companion of the little ones; the observant friend; the silent sentry in
his lowly cabin; the shrewd counselor. And when the dead came
home, a mourner at the open grave. A thousand torches would have
disbanded every Southern army, but not one was lighted. When the
master going to a war in which slavery was involved said to his
slave, “I leave my home and loved ones in your charge,” the
tenderness between man and master stood disclosed. And when the
slave held that charge sacred through storm and temptation, he gave
new meaning to faith and loyalty. I rejoice that when freedom came
to him after years of waiting, it was all the sweeter because the black
hands from which the shackles fell were stainless of a single crime
against the helpless ones confided to his care.
From this root, imbedded in a century of kind and constant
companionship, has sprung some foliage. As no race had ever lived
in such unresisting bondage, none was ever hurried with such
swiftness through freedom into power. Into hands still trembling from
the blow that broke the shackles, was thrust the ballot. In less than
twelve months from the day he walked down the furrow a slave, the
negro dictated in legislative halls from which Davis and Calhoun had
gone forth, the policy of twelve commonwealths. When his late
master protested against his misrule, the federal drum-beat rolled
around his strong-holds, and from a hedge of federal bayonets he
grinned in good-natured insolence. From the proven incapacity of
that day has he far advanced? Simple, credulous, impulsive—easily
led and too often easily bought, is he a safer, more intelligent citizen
now than then? Is this mass of votes, loosed from old restraints,
inviting alliance or awaiting opportunity, less menacing than when its
purpose was plain and its way direct?
My countrymen, right here the South must make a decision on
which very much depends. Many wise men hold that the white vote
of the South should divide, the color line be beaten down, and the
southern States ranged on economic or moral questions as interest
or belief demands. I am compelled to dissent from this view. The
worst thing in my opinion that could happen is that the white people
of the South should stand in opposing factions, with the vast mass of
ignorant or purchasable negro votes between. Consider such a
status. If the negroes were skillfully led,—and leaders would not be
lacking,—it would give them the balance of power—a thing not to be
considered. If their vote was not compacted, it would invite the
debauching bid of factions, and drift surely to that which was the
most corrupt and cunning. With the shiftless habit and irresolution of
slavery days still possessing him, the negro voter will not in this
generation, adrift from war issues, become a steadfast partisan
through conscience or conviction. In every community there are
colored men who redeem their race from this reproach, and who
vote under reason. Perhaps in time the bulk of this race may thus
adjust itself. But, through what long and monstrous periods of
political debauchery this status would be reached, no tongue can tell.
The clear and unmistakable domination of the white race,
dominating not through violence, not through party alliance, but
through the integrity of its own vote and the largeness of its
sympathy and justice through which it shall compel the support of the
better classes of the colored race,—that is the hope and assurance
of the South. Otherwise, the negro would be bandied from one
faction to another. His credulity would be played upon, his cupidity
tempted, his impulses misdirected, his passions inflamed. He would
be forever in alliance with that faction which was most desperate and
unscrupulous. Such a state would be worse than reconstruction, for
then intelligence was banded, and its speedy triumph assured. But
with intelligence and property divided—bidding and overbidding for
place and patronage—irritation increasing with each conflict—the
bitterness and desperation seizing every heart—political debauchery
deepening, as each faction staked its all in the miserable game—
there would be no end to this, until our suffrage was hopelessly
sullied, our people forever divided, and our most sacred rights
surrendered.
One thing further should be said in perfect frankness. Up to this
point we have dealt with ignorance and corruption—but beyond this
point a deeper issue confronts us. Ignorance may struggle to
enlightenment, out of corruption may come the incorruptible. God
speed the day when,—every true man will work and pray for its
coming,—the negro must be led to know and through sympathy to
confess that his interests and the interests of the people of the South
are identical. The men who, from afar off, view this subject through
the cold eye of speculation or see it distorted through partisan
glasses, insist that, directly or indirectly, the negro race shall be in
control of the affairs of the South. We have no fears of this; already
we are attaching to us the best elements of that race, and as we
proceed our alliance will broaden; external pressure but irritates and
impedes. Those who would put the negro race in supremacy would
work against infallible decree, for the white race can never submit to
its domination, because the white race is the superior race. But the
supremacy of the white race of the South must be maintained
forever, and the domination of the negro race resisted at all points
and at all hazards—because the white race is the superior race. This
is the declaration of no new truth. It has abided forever in the marrow
of our bones, and shall run forever with the blood that feeds Anglo-
Saxon hearts.
In political compliance the South has evaded the truth, and men
have drifted from their convictions. But we cannot escape this issue.
It faces us wherever we turn. It is an issue that has been, and will be.
The races and tribes of earth are of Divine origin. Behind the laws of
man and the decrees of war, stands the law of God. What God hath
separated let no man join together. The Indian, the Malay, the Negro,
the Caucasian, these types stand as markers of God’s will. Let not
man tinker with the work of the Almighty. Unity of civilization, no
more than unity of faith, will never be witnessed on earth. No race
has risen, or will rise, above its ordained place. Here is the pivotal
fact of this great matter—two races are made equal in law, and in
political rights, between whom the caste of race has set an
impassable gulf. This gulf is bridged by a statute, and the races are
urged to cross thereon. This cannot be. The fiat of the Almighty has
gone forth, and in eighteen centuries of history it is written. We would
escape this issue if we could. From the depths of its soul the South
invokes from heaven “peace on earth, and good will to man.” She
would not, if she could, cast this race back into the condition from
which it was righteously raised. She would not deny its smallest or
abridge its fullest privilege. Not to lift this burden forever from her
people, would she do the least of these things. She must walk
through the valley of the shadow, for God has so ordained. But he
has ordained that she shall walk in that integrity of race, that created
in His wisdom has been perpetuated in His strength. Standing in the
presence of this multitude, sobered with the responsibility of the
message I deliver to the young men of the South, I declare that the
truth above all others to be worn unsullied and sacred in your hearts,
to be surrendered to no force, sold for no price, compromised in no
necessity, but cherished and defended as the covenant of your
prosperity, and the pledge of peace to your children, is that the white
race must dominate forever in the South, because it is the white
race, and superior to that race by which its supremacy is threatened.
It is a race issue. Let us come to this point, and stand here. Here
the air is pure and the light is clear, and here honor and peace abide.
Juggling and evasion deceives not a man. Compromise and
subservience has carried not a point. There is not a white man North
or South who does not feel it stir in the gray matter of his brain and
throb in his heart. Not a negro who does not feel its power. It is not a
sectional issue. It speaks in Ohio, and in Georgia. It speaks
wherever the Anglo-Saxon touches an alien race. It has just spoken
in universally approved legislation in excluding the Chinaman from
our gates, not for his ignorance, vice or corruption, but because he
sought to establish an inferior race in a republic fashioned in the
wisdom and defended by the blood of a homogeneous people.
The Anglo-Saxon blood has dominated always and everywhere. It
fed Alfred when he wrote the charter of English liberty; it gathered
about Hampden as he stood beneath the oak; it thundered in
Cromwell’s veins as he fought his king; it humbled Napoleon at
Waterloo; it has touched the desert and jungle with undying glory; it
carried the drumbeat of England around the world and spread on
every continent the gospel of liberty and of God: it established this
republic, carved it from the wilderness, conquered it from the
Indians, wrested it from England, and at last, stilling its own tumult,
consecrated it forever as the home of the Anglo-Saxon, and the
theater of his transcending achievement. Never one foot of it can be
surrendered while that blood lives in American veins, and feeds
American hearts, to the domination of an alien and inferior race.
And yet that is just what is proposed. Not in twenty years have we
seen a day so pregnant with fate to this section as the sixth of next
November. If President Cleveland is then defeated, which God
forbid, I believe these States will be led through sorrows compared
to which the woes of reconstruction will be as the fading dews of
morning to the roaring flood. To dominate these States through the
colored vote, with such aid as federal patronage may debauch or
federal power deter, and thus through its chosen instruments
perpetuate its rule, is in my opinion the settled purpose of the
Republican party. I am appalled when I measure the passion in
which this negro problem is judged by the leaders of the party.
Fifteen years ago Vice-President Wilson said—and I honor his
memory as that of a courageous man: “We shall not have finished
with the South until we force its people to change their thought, and
think as we think.” I repeat these words, for I heard them when a
boy, and they fell on my ears as the knell of my people’s rights—“to
change their thought, and make them think as we think.” Not enough
to have conquered our armies—to have decimated our ranks, to
have desolated our fields and reduced us to poverty, to have struck
the ballot from our hands and enfranchised our slaves—to have held
us prostrate under bayonets while the insolent mocked and thieves
plundered—but their very souls must be rifled of their faiths, their
sacred traditions cudgeled from memory, and their immortal minds
beaten into subjection until thought had lost its integrity, and we were
forced “to think as they think.” And just now General Sherman has
said, and I honor him as a soldier:
“The negro must be allowed to vote, and his vote must be counted;
otherwise, so sure as there is a God in heaven, you will have another
war, more cruel than the last, when the torch and dagger will take the
place of the muskets of well-ordered battalions. Should the negro strike
that blow, in seeming justice, there will be millions to assist them.”
And this General took Johnston’s sword in surrender! He looked

upon the thin and ragged battalions in gray, that for four years had
held his teeming and heroic legions at bay. Facing them, he read
their courage in their depleted ranks, and gave them a soldier’s
parole. When he found it in his heart to taunt these heroes with this
threat, why—careless as he was twenty years ago with fire, he is
even more careless now with his words. If we could hope that this
problem would be settled within our lives I would appeal from neither
madness nor unmanliness. But when I know that, strive as I may, I
must at last render this awful heritage into the untried hands of my
son, already dearer to me than my life, and that he must in turn
bequeath it unsolved to his children, I cry out against the inhumanity
that deepens its difficulties with this incendiary threat, and beclouds
its real issue with inflaming passion.
This problem is not only enduring, but it is widening. The exclusion
of the Chinese is the first step in the revolution that shall save liberty
and law and religion to this land, and in peace and order, not
enforced on the gallows or at the bayonet’s end, but proceeding from
the heart of an harmonious people, shall secure in the enjoyment of
these rights, and the control of this republic, the homogeneous
people that established and has maintained it. The next step will be
taken when some brave statesman, looking Demagogy in the face,
shall move to call to the stranger at our gates, “Who comes here?”
admitting every man who seeks a home, or honors our institutions,
and whose habit and blood will run with the native current; but
excluding all who seek to plant anarchy or to establish alien men or
measures on our soil; and will then demand that the standard of our
citizenship be lifted and the right of acquiring our suffrage be
abridged. When that day comes, and God speed its coming, the
position of the South will be fully understood, and everywhere
approved. Until then, let us—giving the negro every right, civil and
political, measured in that fullness the strong should always accord
the weak—holding him in closer friendship and sympathy than he is
held by those who would crucify us for his sake—realizing that on his
prosperity ours depends—let us resolve that never by external
pressure, or internal division, shall he establish domination, directly
or indirectly, over that race that everywhere has maintained its
supremacy. Let this resolution be cast on the lines of equity and
justice. Let it be the pledge of honest, safe and impartial
administration, and we shall command the support of the colored
race itself, more dependent than any other on the bounty and
protection of government. Let us be wise and patient, and we shall
secure through its acquiescence what otherwise we should win
through conflict, and hold in insecurity.
All this is no unkindness to the negro—but rather that he may be
led in equal rights and in peace to his uttermost good. Not in
sectionalism—for my heart beats true to the Union, to the glory of
which your life and heart is pledged. Not in disregard of the world’s
opinion—for to render back this problem in the world’s approval is
the sum of my ambition, and the height of human achievement. Not
in reactionary spirit—but rather to make clear that new and grander
way up which the South is marching to higher destiny, and on which I
would not halt her for all the spoils that have been gathered unto
parties since Catiline conspired, and Cæsar fought. Not in passion,
my countrymen, but in reason—not in narrowness, but in breadth—
that we may solve this problem in calmness and in truth, and lifting
its shadows let perpetual sunshine pour down on two races, walking
together in peace and contentment. Then shall this problem have
proved our blessing, and the race that threatened our ruin work our
salvation as it fills our fields with the best peasantry the world has
ever seen. Then the South—putting behind her all the achievements
of her past—and in war and in peace they beggar eulogy—may
stand upright among the nations and challenge the judgment of man
and the approval of God, in having worked out in their sympathy, and
in His guidance, this last and surpassing miracle of human
government.
What of the South’s industrial problem? When we remember that
amazement followed the payment by thirty-seven million Frenchmen
of a billion dollars indemnity to Germany, that the five million whites
of the South rendered to the torch and sword three billions of
property—that thirty million dollars a year, or six hundred million
dollars in twenty years, has been given willingly of our poverty as
pensions for Northern soldiers, the wonder is that we are here at all.
There is a figure with which history has dealt lightly, but that,
standing pathetic and heroic in the genesis of our new growth, has
interested me greatly—our soldier-farmer of ’65. What chance had
he for the future as he wandered amid his empty barns, his stock,
labor, and implements gone—gathered up the fragments of his
wreck—urging kindly his borrowed mule—paying sixty per cent. for
all that he bought, and buying all on credit—his crop mortgaged
before it was planted—his children in want, his neighborhood in
chaos—working under new conditions and retrieving every error by a
costly year—plodding all day down the furrow, hopeless and adrift,
save when at night he went back to his broken home, where his wife,
cheerful even then, renewed his courage, while she ministered to
him in loving tenderness. Who would have thought as during those
lonely and terrible days he walked behind the plow, locking the
sunshine in the glory of his harvest, and spreading the showers and
the verdure of his field—no friend near save nature that smiled at his
earnest touch, and God that sent him the message of good cheer
through the passing breeze and the whispering leaves—that he
would in twenty years, having carried these burdens uncomplaining,
make a crop of $800,000,000. Yet this he has done, and from his
bounty the South has rebuilded her cities, and recouped her losses.
While we exult in his splendid achievement, let us take account of
his standing.
Whence this enormous growth? For ten years the world has been
at peace. The pioneer has now replaced the soldier. Commerce has
whitened new seas, and the merchant has occupied new areas.
Steam has made of the earth a chess-board, on which men play for
markets. Our western wheat-grower competes in London with the
Russian and the East Indian. The Ohio wool grower watches the
Australian shepherd, and the bleat of the now historic sheep of
Vermont is answered from the steppes of Asia. The herds that
emerge from the dust of your amazing prairies might hear in their
pauses the hoof-beats of antipodean herds marching to meet them.
Under Holland’s dykes, the cheese and butter makers fight American
dairies. The hen cackles around the world. California challenges
vine-clad France. The dark continent is disclosed through meshes of
light. There is competition everywhere. The husbandman, driven
from his market, balances price against starvation, and undercuts his
rival. This conflict often runs to panic, and profit vanishes. The Iowa
farmer burning his corn for fuel is not an unusual type.
Amid this universal conflict, where stands the South? While the
producer of everything we eat or wear, in every land, is fighting
through glutted markets for bare existence, what of the southern
farmer? In his industrial as in his political problem he is set apart—
not in doubt, but in assured independence. Cotton makes him king.
Not the fleeces that Jason sought can rival the richness of this plant,
as it unfurls its banners in our fields. It is gold from the instant it puts
forth its tiny shoot. The shower that whispers to it is heard around
the world. The trespass of a worm on its green leaf means more to
England than the advance of the Russians on her Asiatic outposts.
When its fibre, current in every bank, is marketed, it renders back to
the South $350,000,000 every year. Its seed will yield $60,000,000
worth of oil to the press and $40,000,000 in food for soil and beast,
making the stupendous total of $450,000,000 annual income from
this crop. And now, under the Tompkins patent, from its stalk—news
paper is to be made at two cents per pound. Edward Atkinson once
said: “If New England could grow the cotton plant, without lint, it
would make her richest crop; if she held monopoly of cotton lint and
seed she would control the commerce of the world.”
But is our monopoly, threatened from Egypt, India and Brazil, sure
and permanent? Let the record answer. In ’72 the American supply
of cotton was 3,241,000 bales,—foreign supply 3,036,000. We led
our rivals by less than 200,000 bales. This year the American supply
is 8,000,000 bales—from foreign sources, 2,100,000, expressed in
bales of four hundred pounds each. In spite of new areas elsewhere,
of fuller experience, of better transportation, and unlimited money
spent in experiment, the supply of foreign cotton has decreased
since ’72 nearly 1,000,000 bales, while that of the South has
increased nearly 5,000,000. Further than this: Since 1872,
population in Europe has increased 13 per cent., and cotton
consumption in Europe has increased 50 per cent. Still further: Since
1880 cotton consumption in Europe has increased 28 per cent., wool
only 4 per cent., and flax has decreased 11 per cent. As for new
areas, the uttermost missionary woos the heathen with a cotton shirt
in one hand and the Bible in the other, and no savage I believe has
ever been converted to one, without adopting the other. To
summarize: Our American fibre has increased its product nearly
three-fold, while it has seen the product of its rival decrease one-
third. It has enlarged its dominion in the old centers of population,
supplanting flax and wool, and it peeps from the satchel of every
business and religious evangelist that trots the globe. In three years
the American crop has increased 1,400,000 bales, and yet there is
less cotton in the world to-day than at any time for twenty years. The
dominion of our king is established; this princely revenue assured,
not for a year, but for all time. It is the heritage that God gave us
when he arched our skies, established our mountains, girt us about
with the ocean, tempered the sunshine, and measured the rain—
ours and our children’s forever.
Not alone in cotton, but in iron, does the South excel. The Hon. Mr.
Norton, who honors this platform with his presence, once said to me:
“An Englishman of the highest character predicted that the Atlantic
will be whitened within our lives with sails carrying American iron and
coal to England.” When he made that prediction the English miners
were exhausting the coal in long tunnels above which the ocean
thundered. Having ores and coal stored in exhaustless quantity, in
such richness, and in such adjustment, that iron can be made and
manufacturing done cheaper than elsewhere on this continent, is to
now command, and at last control, the world’s market for iron. The
South now sells iron, through Pittsburg, in New York. She has driven
Scotch iron first from the interior, and finally from American ports.
Within our lives she will cross the Atlantic, and fulfill the
Englishman’s prophecy. In 1880 the South made 212,000 tons of
iron. In 1887, 845,000 tons. She is now actually building, or has
finished this year, furnaces that will produce more than her entire
product of last year. Birmingham alone will produce more iron in
1889 than the entire South produced in 1887. Our coal supply is
exhaustless, Texas alone having 6000 square miles. In marble and
granite we have no rivals, as to quantity or quality. In lumber our
riches are even vaster. More than fifty per cent. of our entire area is
in forests, making the South the best timbered region of the world.
We have enough merchantable yellow pine to bring, in money,
$2,500,000,000—a sum the vastness of which can only be
understood when I say it nearly equaled the assessed value of the
entire South, including cities, forests, farms, mines, factories and
personal property of every description whatsoever. Back of this our
forests of hard woods, and measureless swamps of cypress and
gum. Think of it. In cotton a monopoly. In iron and coal establishing
swift mastery. In granite and marble developing equal advantage and
resource. In yellow pine and hard woods the world’s treasury. Surely
the basis of the South’s wealth and power is laid by the hand of the
Almighty God, and its prosperity has been established by divine law
which work in eternal justice and not by taxes levied on its neighbors
through human statutes. Paying tribute for fifty years that under
artificial conditions other sections might reach a prosperity
impossible under natural laws, it has grown apace—and its growth
shall endure if its people are ruled by two maxims, that reach deeper
than legislative enactment, and the operation of which cannot be
limited by artificial restraint, and but little hastened by artificial
stimulus.
First. No one crop will make a people prosperous. If cotton held its
monopoly under conditions that made other crops impossible—or
under allurements that made other crops exceptional—its dominion
would be despotism.
Whenever the greed for a money crop unbalances the wisdom of
husbandry, the money crop is a curse. When it stimulates the
general economy of the farm, it is the profiting of farming. In an
unprosperous strip of Carolina, when asked the cause of their
poverty, the people say, “Tobacco—for it is our only crop.” In
Lancaster, Pa., the richest American county by the census, when
asked the cause of their prosperity, they say, “Tobacco—for it is the
golden crown of a diversified agriculture.” The soil that produces
cotton invites the grains and grasses, the orchard and the vine.
Clover, corn, cotton, wheat, and barley thrive in the same inclosure;
the peach, the apple, the apricot, and the Siberian crab in the same
orchard. Herds and flocks graze ten months every year in the
meadows over which winter is but a passing breath, and in which
spring and autumn meet in summer’s heart. Sugar-cane and oats,
rice and potatoes, are extremes that come together under our skies.
To raise cotton and send its princely revenues to the west for
supplies, and to the east for usury, would be misfortune if soil and
climate forced such a curse. When both invite independence, to
remain in slavery is a crime. To mortgage our farms in Boston for
money with which to buy meat and bread from western cribs and
smokehouses, is folly unspeakable. I rejoice that Texas is less open
to this charge than others of the cotton States. With her eighty million
bushels of grain, and her sixteen million head of stock, she is rapidly
learning that diversified agriculture means prosperity. Indeed, the
South is rapidly learning the same lesson; and learned through years
of debt and dependence it will never be forgotten. The best thing
Georgia has done in twenty years was to raise her oat crop in one
season from two million to nine million bushels, without losing a bale
of her cotton. It is more for the South that she has increased her crop
of corn—that best of grains, of which Samuel J. Tilden said, “It will be
the staple food of the future, and men will be stronger and better
when that day comes”—by forty-three million bushels this year, than
to have won a pivotal battle in the late war. In this one item she
keeps at home this year a sum equal to the entire cotton crop of my
State that last year went to the west.
This is the road to prosperity. It is the way to manliness and
sturdiness of character. When every farmer in the South shall eat
bread from his own fields and meat from his own pastures, and
disturbed by no creditor, and enslaved by no debt, shall sit amid his
teeming gardens, and orchards, and vineyards, and dairies, and
barnyards, pitching his crops in his own wisdom, and growing them
in independence, making cotton his clean surplus, and selling it in
his own time, and in his chosen market, and not at a master’s
bidding—getting his pay in cash and not in a receipted mortgage that
discharges his debt, but does not restore his freedom—then shall be
breaking the fullness of our day. Great is King Cotton! But to lie at his
feet while the usurer and grain-raiser bind us in subjection, is to
invite the contempt of man and the reproach of God. But to stand up
before him and amid the crops and smokehouses wrest from him the
magna charta of our independence, and to establish in his name an
ample and diversified agriculture, that shall honor him while it
enriches us—this is to carry us as far in the way of happiness and
independence as the farmer, working in the fullest wisdom, and in
the richest field, can carry any people.
But agriculture alone—no matter how rich or varied its resources—
cannot establish or maintain a people’s prosperity. There is a lesson
in this that Texas may learn with profit. No commonwealth ever came
to greatness by producing raw material. Less can this be possible in
the future than in the past. The Comstock lode is the richest spot on
earth. And yet the miners, gasping for breath fifteen hundred feet
below the earth’s surface, get bare existence out of the splendor
they dig from the earth. It goes to carry the commerce and uphold
the industry of distant lands, of which the men who produce it get but
dim report. Hardly more is the South profited when, stripping the
harvest of her cotton fields, or striking her teeming hills, or leveling
her superb forests, she sends the raw material to augment the
wealth and power of distant communities.
Texas produces a million and a half bales of cotton, which yield
her $60,000,000. That cotton, woven into common goods, would add
$75,000,000 to Texas’s income from this crop, and employ 220,000
operatives, who would spend within her borders more than
$30,000,000 in wages. Massachusetts manufactures 575,000 bales
of cotton, for which she pays $31,000,000, and sells for
$72,000,000, adding a value nearly equal to Texas’s gross revenue
from cotton, and yet Texas has a clean advantage for manufacturing
this cotton of one per cent a pound over Massachusetts. The little
village of Grand Rapids began manufacturing furniture simply
because it was set in a timber district. It is now a great city and sells
$10,000,000 worth of furniture every year, in making which 125,000
men are employed, and a population of 40,000 people supported.
The best pine districts of the world are in eastern Texas. With less
competition and wider markets than Grand Rapids has, will she ship
her forests at prices that barely support the wood-chopper and
sawyer, to be returned in the making of which great cities are built or
maintained? When her farmers and herdsmen draw from her cities
$126,000,000 as the price of their annual produce, shall this
enormous wealth be scattered through distant shops and factories,
leaving in the hands of Texas no more than the sustenance, support,
and the narrow brokerage between buyer and seller? As one-crop
farming cannot support the country, neither can a resource of
commercial exchange support a city. Texas wants immigrants—she
needs them—for if every human being in Texas were placed at equi-
distant points through the State no Texan could hear the sound of a
human voice in your broad areas.
So how can you best attract immigration? By furnishing work for
the artisan and mechanic if you meet the demand of your population
for cheaper and essential manufactured articles. One-half million
workers would be needed for this, and with their families would
double the population of your State. In these mechanics and their
dependents farmers would find a market for not only their staple
crops but for the truck that they now despise to raise or sell, but is at
least the cream of the farm. Worcester county, Mass., takes
$720,000,000 of our material and turns out $87,000,000 of products
every year, paying $20,000,000 in wages. The most prosperous
section of this world is that known as the Middle States of this
republic. With agriculture and manufacturers in the balance, and
their shops and factories set amid rich and ample acres, the result is
such deep and diffuse prosperity as no other section can show.
Suppose those States had a monopoly of cotton and coal so
disposed as to command the world’s markets and the treasury of the
world’s timber, I suppose the mind is staggered in contemplating the
majesty of the wealth and power they would attain. What have they
that the South lacks?—and to her these things were added, and
climate, ampler acres and rich soil. It is a curious fact that three-
fourths of the population and manufacturing wealth of this country is
comprised in a narrow strip between Iowa and Massachusetts,
comprising less than one-sixth of our territory, and that this strip is
distant from the source of raw materials on which its growth is
based, of hard climate and in a large part of sterile soil. Much of this
forced and unnatural development is due to slavery, which for a
century fenced enterprise and capital out of the South. Mr. Thomas,
who in the Lehigh Valley owned a furnace in 1845 that set that
pattern for iron-making in America, had at that time bought mines
and forest where Birmingham now stands. Slavery forced him away.
He settled in Pennsylvania. I have wondered what would have
happened if that one man had opened his iron mines in Alabama
and set his furnaces there at that time. I know what is going to
happen since he has been forced to come to Birmingham and put up
two furnaces nearly forty years after his survey.
Another cause that has prospered New England and the Middle
States while the South languished, is the system of tariff taxes levied
on the unmixed agriculture of these States for the protection of
industries to our neighbors to the North, a system on which the Hon.
Roger Q. Mills—that lion of the tribe of Judah—has at last laid his
mighty paw and under the indignant touch of which it trembles to its
center. That system is to be revised and its duties reduced, as we all
agree it should be, though I should say in perfect frankness I do not
agree with Mr. Mills in it. Let us hope this will be done with care and
industrious patience. Whether it stands or falls, the South has
entered the industrial list to partake of his bounty if it stands, and if it
falls to rely on the favor with which nature has endowed her, and
from this immutable advantage to fill her own markets and then have
a talk with the world at large.
With amazing rapidity she has moved away from the one-crop
idea that was once her curse. In 1880 she was esteemed
prosperous. Since that time she has added 393,000,000 bushels to
her grain crops, and 182,000,000 head to her live stock. This has not
lost one bale of her cotton crop, which, on the contrary, has
increased nearly 200,000 bales. With equal swiftness has she
moved away from the folly of shipping out her ore at $2 a ton and
buying it back in implements from $20 to $100 per ton; her cotton at
10 cents a pound and buying it back in cloth at 20 to 80 cents per
pound; her timber at $8 per thousand and buying it back in furniture
at ten to twenty times as much. In the past eight years $250,000,000
have been invested in new shops and factories in her States;
225,000 artisans are now working that eight years ago were idle or
worked elsewhere, and these added $227,000,000 to the value of
her raw material—more than half the value of her cotton. Add to this
the value of her increased grain crops and stock, and in the past
eight years she has grown in her fields or created in her shops
manufactures more than the value of her cotton crop. The incoming
tide has begun to rise. Every train brings manufacturers from the
East and West seeking to establish themselves or their sons near
the raw material and in this growing market. Let the fullness of the
tide roll in.
It will not exhaust our materials, nor shall we glut our markets.
When the growing demand of our southern market, feeding on its
own growth, is met, we shall find new markets for the South. Under
our new condition many indirect laws of commerce shall be
straightened. We buy from Brazil $50,000,000 worth of goods, and
sell her $8,500,000. England buys only $29,000,000, and sells her
$35,000,000. Of $65,000,000 in cotton goods bought by Central and
South America, over $50,000,000 went to England. Of $331,000,000
sent abroad by the southern half of our hemisphere, England
secures over half, although we buy from that section nearly twice as
much as England. Our neighbors to the south need nearly every
article we make; we need nearly everything they produce. Less than
2,500 miles of road must be built to bind by rail the two American
continents. When this is done, and even before, we shall find
exhaustless markets to the South. Texas shall command, as she
stands in the van of this new movement, its richest rewards.
The South, under the rapid diversification of crops and
diversification of industries, is thrilling with new life. As this new
prosperity comes to us, it will bring no sweeter thought to me, and to
you, my countrymen, I am sure, than that it adds not only to the
comfort and happiness of our neighbors, but that it makes broader
the glory and deeper the majesty, and more enduring the strength, of
the Union which reigns supreme in our hearts. In this republic of ours
is lodged the hope of free government on earth. Here God has
rested the ark of his covenant with the sons of men. Let us—once
estranged and thereby closer bound,—let us soar above all
provincial pride and find our deeper inspirations in gathering the
fullest sheaves into the harvest and standing the staunchest and
most devoted of its sons as it lights the path and makes clear the
way through which all the people of this earth shall come in God’s
appointed time.
A few words for the young men of Texas. I am glad that I can
speak to them at all. Men, especially young men, look back for their
inspiration to what is best in their traditions. Thermopylæ cast
Spartan sentiments in heroic mould and sustained Spartan arms for
more than a century. Thermopylæ had survivors to tell the story of its
defeat. The Alamo had none. Though voiceless it shall speak from
its dumb walls. Liberty cried out to Texas, as God called from the
clouds unto Moses. Bowie and Fanning, though dead still live. Their
voices rang above the din of Goliad and the glory of San Jacinto,
and they marched with the Texas veterans who rejoiced at the birth
of Texas independence. It is the spirit of the Alamo that moved
above the Texas soldiers as they charged like demigods through a
thousand battle-fields, and it is the spirit of the Alamo that whispers
from their graves held in every State of the Union, ennobling their
dust, their soil, that was crimsoned with their blood.
In this spirit of this inspiration and in the thrill of the amazing
growth that surrounds you, my young friends, it will be strange if the
young men of Texas do not carry the lone star into the heart of the
struggle. The South needs her sons to-day more than when she
summoned them to the forum to maintain her political supremacy,
more than when the bugle called them to the field to defend issues
put to the arbitrament of the sword. Her old body is instinct with
appeal calling on us to come and give her fuller independence than
she has ever sought in field or forum. It is ours to show that as she
prospered with slaves she shall prosper still more with freemen; ours
to see that from the lists she entered in poverty she shall emerge in
prosperity; ours to carry the transcending traditions of the old South
from which none of us can in honor or in reverence depart, unstained
and unbroken into the new. Shall we fail? Shall the blood of the old
South—the best strain that ever uplifted human endeavor—that ran
like water at duty’s call and never stained where it touched—shall
this blood that pours into our veins through a century luminous with
achievement, for the first time falter and be driven back from
irresolute heat, when the old South, that left us a better heritage in
manliness and courage than in broad and rich acres, calls us to
settle problems? A soldier lay wounded on a hard-fought field, the
roar of the battle had died away, and he rested in the deadly stillness
of its aftermath. Not a sound was heard as he lay there, sorely
smitten and speechless, but the shriek of wounded and the sigh of
the dying soul, as it escaped from the tumult of earth into the
unspeakable peace of the stars. Off over the field flickered the
lanterns of the surgeons with the litter bearers, searching that they
might take away those whose lives could be saved and leave in
sorrow those who were doomed to die with pleading eyes through

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MUBI and the Curation Model of Video

on Demand 1st Edition Mattias Frey

Big Data's Threat to Liberty: Surveillance, Nudging,

A companion to curation Buckley

Suharto's Cold War: Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and the

The Art and Science of Facelift Surgery: A Video Atlas

Intermittent Demand Forecasting: Context, Methods and

Bus Transportation: Demand, Economics, Contracting, and

News Media Coverage of Environmental Challenges in

The Power of Scarcity: Leveraging Urgency and Demand to

MUBI and the

ISBN 978-3-030-80075-8 ISBN 978-3-030-80076-5 (eBook)

Cover illustration: Pattern © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com

I express my sincere appreciation to the Leverhulme Trust, whose Philip

2 Curation as Discourse, Trend and Cultural Salve 15

3 The Curation Business Model 33

4 MUBI History: Connections, Community and Curation 53

5 Recommendation Credibility in the MUBI Interface 77

6 The MUBI Audience107

7 At the End of the Long Tail125

Fig. 3.1 VOD service use, United Kingdom 45

Table 5.1 Diversity of MUBI’s thirty-film list by country of production

Abstract This introduction outlines the backlash to algorithmic cultural

Keywords Video on demand (VOD) • Algorithmic recommendation •

The early public discussion of video on demand (VOD) often resembled a

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

companies’ engineering capacity to predict users’ tastes using technically

systems and algorithmic culture more widely. “The more we have,”

It captures this irreplaceable human touch. We want to be surprised. We

A number of other revisionist or contrarian media critics also began to

infinite uniqueness,” but the end result of algorithmic personalisation has

services, whether algorithm-led or curation-style, represent continuity as

itinerary of this history casts serious doubts about the sustainability of

broadly. My point of departure is closely aligned with the practices and

• theoretical, cultural and business discourse surrounding “curation”;

This methodology explicitly blends top-down concerns and sources

fact represent distinct business paradigms, recommendation modes and

Curation as Discourse, Trend and Cultural

Abstract This chapter identifies curation as a contemporary cultural dis-

Keywords Curation • Cultural surplus • Cultural choice • Filter

Conceptually, curation incorporates principles of selecting and ordering,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 15

adds: by limiting or otherwise altering the perspective of a search, applying

in jeremiads about filter bubbles, public sphericules or the gauche ubiquity

curation has accrued heroic, romantic associations in audiovisual culture.

example canon-building à la Matthew Arnold (1993 [1869]) and

essential value among receptive marketing demographics, especially as a

“Too Much”: Curation as Salve to Perceptions

Examining curation as a concept, buzzword and trend helps explain the

long since surpassed individual humans’ abilities to adequately survey

symptoms than as rigorous scientific analyses of cultural epiphenomena.

a sign of the contemporary moment. Noting the 2.5 quintillion bytes of

unprecedented, novel dilemma. Between 1906 and 2016, Variety contains

The introduction of new media and technologies has consistently exacer-

Hasebrink, Uwe, and Hanna Domeyer. 2012. Media Repertoires as Patterns of

The Curation Business Model

Abstract This chapter extends the discussion of curation as a cultural dis-

Keywords VOD • Streaming services • Long tail • BFI Player •

2 Curation as Discourse, Trend and Cultural Salve 15

3 The Curation Business Model 33

4 MUBI History: Connections, Community and Curation 53

5 Recommendation Credibility in the MUBI Interface 77

6 The MUBI Audience107

7 At the End of the Long Tail125

Fig. 3.1 VOD service use, United Kingdom 45