A few years ago, American authors like Winnie Wong and Peter Hessler stumbled across a curious phenomenon: Chinese towns that applied the mindless logic of mass production, backed by China’s unparalleled ability to conjure up entire industrial-scale supply chains from thin air, to an improbable export — schlocky oil paintings, often stroke-for-stroke knock-offs of museum treasures. These towns aren’t the colorful and carefree artists’ colonies of our imaginations (such places have largely been gentrified or touristed into oblivion); instead, they’re still dreary factory towns, complete with migrant peasants being worked to the hilt. Wong profiled the village of Dafen, one of the chengzhongcun (urban villages) embedded within the sprawl of metro Shenzhen. There are certainly fascinating original artists working within China, and zero-talent hacks passing off “art” in the West, but frankly I’m not sure what to make of mass-produced creativity.
It’s a through-the-looking-glass version of the idea that cities can structure their growth around cool “creative class” agglomeration economies that turn out stylish, disruptive innovations. Of course, that assumes that customers want tasteful products — a point Barnum disproved.
Now comes word that painting isn’t the only labor-intensive “creative” industry that’s ripe for export, provided the aesthetic qualities get dumbed down along the way. It turns out that the clickbait that passes for social-media “news” has also been dumbed down to the point where it can also thrive inside a sweatshop, rather than a fancy newsroom. For instance, Macedonian child-labor sweatshops churn out truthy clickbait, according to a report from Craig Silverman and Lawrence Alexander in Buzzfeed. A few countries to the east in Russia, a cottage industry of basement-dwelling trolls (backed by an army of bot brethren) intentionally lobs multilingual insults around the globe to sow discord and upset democratic consensus.
Globalization didn’t just flood the world’s markets with cheap (and poorly made) toys, clothes, and electronics. Now it’s flooding the world’s markets with cheap (and poorly made) content, as well.
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