'The Long Tail' and Generative AI

Gia Festa is a digital producer and writer based in Sydney, Australia. She is a 2025 DNR Bootcamp alumni. Down the rabbit hole:Mark Leckey’s 2009 thesis, “Mark Leckey in a Long Tail World”, is a futurist theory on the revolutionary potential of the internet as a vehicle for artists to meaningfully shape culture. In the years since his lecture, many of the ideas he presented have, in various ways, been realized. The internet has removed many of the barriers of cultural production, allowing for the formation of micro-centers of culture, politics and art (including, arguably, this very blog). Various types of heretofore undocumented or suppressed information has been distributed and popularized, bringing new ways of understanding the world, providing people with access to functionally life-saving knowledge and shaping the political desires of a whole generation. But in the 17 years since Leckey’s lecture, platform capture and monopolization, big data surveillance, reactionary lawmaking…