Fifty People Control the Culture
The state of the culture 2026
At the start of each year, I offer my perspective on the “State of the Culture.” My assessments for 2024 and 2025 stirred up a lot of discussion—and were two of the most widely read articles ever published on The Honest Broker.
So what do I see happening in 2026? Read on and find out…
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Some years ago, Tom Wolfe claimed that just 3,000 collectors and dealers control the global market for visual art.
Just a few people create (and destroy) reputations in the art world. They set the price for everything. What they like goes up in value—and when they change their minds, it drops. What they ignore is shut out in the cold.
I was shocked when I read that. But the current situation is even worse. By my measure, just fifty people now control the entire culture.
That’s right fifty people—and none of them elected by us. Or trained for the responsibilities they now hold.
This runs against everything we expected from the Digital Age. The web has provided a few opportunities for creators to bypass the system, but the larger trend is tremendous consolidation in the culture business.
You see it in every form of creative expression—in music, media, movies, and everywhere else. A tiny number of people have a chokehold on the channels that deliver arts and entertainment to the audience.
But who are the people running these companies, and how did they get so much power?
Not long ago, the Internet promised liberation from this kind of centralized control. And for a while we believed, waiting for it to happen—like cult members counting down days to the Rapture.
Gatekeepers would disappear. Authorities would get bypassed. Everybody could connect directly with everything—the entire world was just a click away. And nothing could stop us
There were already 50 million websites by the year 2000, and they presented endless possibilities for learning, shopping, activism, romance, friendship, fun—and non-stop dialogue.
Meet the new boss: It’s us! We were in charge.
We would create our own private utopias. We would reinvent ourselves—and do it again and again. Politics might even become irrelevant. After all, when all the citizens are connected, collaborating, and conversing, who needs leadership from above?
I never believed all that malarkey. But even I had great hopes for the Digital Age—especially in my world of music, books, and culture.
Creativity would blossom, liberated from the centralized control of elites. Musicians could connect directly with listeners. Writers could connect directly with readers. Artists wouldn’t need galleries—just a website.
All the blocked creativity on the planet would get unleashed. We would experience a new era of artistic innovation, maybe even a new Renaissance.
I was wrong. Even worse, the results are the exact opposite of my hopes and dreams.
After three decades of total connectivity, here’s where we stand:
Four movie studios still control Hollywood.
Four subscription platforms account for two-thirds of home movie streaming.
Three major record labels own most of the hit songs.
Five publishers account for 80% of the US book market.
Just one company controls 60% plus of the US audiobook business.
Etc. etc.
During this same period, print media collapsed—thousands of newspapers and magazines simply disappeared. Online media survived, but just two companies (Alphabet and Meta) now swallow up most of the ad revenues.
And here’s where it gets even worse. If an indie media outlet wants to attract some of this ad money, it needs to reach readers—but it relies on those same two companies for access. To compete with Google you need help from Google.
It’s a mystery to me why this is legal. But it is.
Google is already squeezing digital publishers like they’re mangoes at a Jamba Juice. Publishers have already lost 25% of their traffic from Google, and fear that number might soon reach 60%.
The concentration of power at Google is mind-blowing. It controls around 90% of search traffic. All that total connectivity we envisioned in the early days of the web is mostly reliant on this one company.
You can try to bypass it with apps. But guess what? Two companies control most of the app store business—and one of them is (again) Google.
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Can you see what’s happened? Power in the digital world is even more concentrated than in the real world.
Just one company controls around 40% of online shopping. Two companies control two-thirds of US music streaming. The same is true elsewhere on line. Because of network effects, no new entrant can compete effectively against the dominant incumbents.
If you take the CEOs of all these businesses—in movies, books, media, etc.—you could fit them in single school bus, with seats left over.
We are talking about fifty people, maybe even fewer. That’s because there’s so much overlap. The CEO of Google alone is a key decision maker for search, apps, videos, music, podcasts, and much more. The same is true of Amazon, Apple, and Meta. They have their fingers in every pie, and an insatiable appetite for more.
The story gets even worse. If you look at the background of these fifty people, you find that most of them lack experience or credibility in arts and culture. They are technocrats or administrators. There’s no evidence that they love music or books or paintings—or anything except their share price and pay checks.
“Fifty people control everything in the culture….but they don’t love art or creativity or beauty. They don’t believe in genius—except when talking about themselves.”
But they get to decide almost everything in the culture sphere. And they’re incentivized to make decisions out of financial self-interest, totally divorced from aesthetic concerns.
This is even worse than the patrons of earlier eras. Wealthy patrons who supported Michelangelo and Bach weren’t trying to make profits. They were in pursuit of artistic greatness. They were willing to lose money on the transaction—because their goal was eternal fame. And only magnificent works of art could deliver that.
That was still true until recently, even in the United States. Broadway shows were financed by people who typically lost a lot of money—but wanted a taste of greatness. Many indie record labels and movie projects got funded for the same reason. The people who wrote the checks loved the art form.
By comparison, Bezos and Musk and Zuckerberg are crass upstarts. They will destroy the culture just to pad their already bloated bank accounts.
This is the reality. Fifty people control everything in the culture—and they are (for the most part) the worst kind of people. Unlike the collectors and dealers Wolfe surveyed, they don’t love art or creativity or beauty.
They don’t believe in genius—except when talking about themselves.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Life exists outside of the dominant platforms. And indie voices still have options.
Substack, Patreon, and Bandcamp give artists around 90% of revenues and total creative control. And other indie channels are in development with similar plans to support creators.
These alternative channels exist for music, writing, film, and other creative idioms. They deserve our support. They need our support.
This is the new counterculture. This is the new resistance. This is our path to liberation.
But in the year 2026, our counterculture is still weak and vulnerable. It could easily get erased by those 50 people in power. (Just consider Apple’s attempt to grab 30% of app-based Substack subscription payments—more than Substack gets itself. We’re fortunate that a court ruling intervened.)
Every dollar that shifts from the 50 technocrats to these indie operators is another small victory. And if the audience really cares about art and culture—and I believe it does—this will eventually turn into a larger victory.
My hope is that the alternative vibe from the counterculture will be much stronger in 2027 or 2028. Maybe we will have a more level playing field by then. Maybe indie voices will find it easier to reach an audience and have an impact.
But we’re not there yet.
2026 will be a struggle. The legacy institutions and tech platforms are consolidating, and this gives them more power. It’s reassuring to see how poorly they exercise that power—churning out reboots and retreads. (If they were smarter, the culture would suffer even more.) Their mistakes offer an opportunity for the outsider.
And the next new thing always comes from the outside. The culture stagnates without fresh infusions from the fringe.
This year we need to keep that fringe alive. We need to help it on the indie platforms and the indie labels and the indie cinemas and indie galleries and indie media outlets.
But that requires action from us, both as creators and members of an informed audience—those fifty culture elites in positions of power couldn’t care less. They’re too busy looking at the share price.
This is the defining tension in the culture ecosystem. On one side, we have consolidation of power among a tiny number of elite insiders. On the other, we hear clamoring outsiders with their alternative voices and independent perspectives.
This tension will intensify. And we will track it closely at The Honest Broker. So stay tuned.
No mention of the reason for this state of affairs -- lack of anti-trust enforcement.
Google was declared an illegal monopolist but paid no real penalty. Apple and Google collect a 30% toll charge on every app purchased on their stores. Microsoft buys Activision Blizzard to the cheers of fanboys -- and promptly does what it promised not to do: fire thousands and raise prices. As Cory Doctorow has pointed out, the only guaranteed outcome is enshittification.
When you have no bar to how big a corporation can get, you are telling every small competitor with better ideas to cash in their chips, sell out and leave. No one can beat the big guys, so why even bother?
Consumers don't realize what they are losing and content themselves with a tolerable status quo, even as tech bros scheme and deal behind the scenes to lock up more and more of human existence. And it's a leading reason why we have an AI bubble, instead of real innovation (see Ed Zitron).
If we don't challenge the tech giants with regulation through actual legislation, nothing will change. We are lobsters in a supermarket tank. Our pincers are bound with elastic bands. We can barely distinguish the looming tech lords shopping for our data beyond the glass. But make no mistake, we are on the menu.
…fight culture with culture…create community, embrace those around you and those that embrace you…seek/make/be local art…just because they make tools doesn’t mean you have to use them or be one…peace and alohahaha…