The Middleware Manifesto: A Proposal for Rebuilding American Culture

Blame tech platforms. A shift from content value to traffic value is what has destroyed the business model for nearly everything we're talking about.

Image by PIRO from Pixabay

In my last post, Why the Death of American Leadership may run through your Local Orchestra, I argued that the struggles of institutions like orchestras and newspapers aren’t a series of isolated but mounting failures but a systemic breakdown in the civic middle, the connective tissue that holds communities together.

It’s happening not only across the arts but across our political, civic and business landscape. How can you be a financially successful orchestra when the system that surrounds it is no longer set up to let it be so? You can’t tweak an organization into working when the model has failed. I worry that in attempting to diagnose the issue, the thinking is not big enough to meet the scale of the problem.

Many who read the post told me they found it depressing.

I think though, that in naming the problem, there may be the seeds of a bigger solution. And I think there’s an impending opportunity, which I will point to at the end of this post. So here’s an attempt at that bigger thinking. I’m calling it a manifesto because that’s what it needs to be. Not a lament. Not a white paper, but a declaration of what is needed.

On January 20th, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a now-famous speech at the World Economic Forum and, channeling Václav Havel, compared the rules-based international order to the rituals of a communist state, sustained not by truth but by a collective willingness to perform as if it were true. Then he named it plainly: “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition” in that order.

Our civic institutions are in the midst of a rupture. The Minnesota Orchestra reports record ticket sales alongside a $4 million structural deficit. The Met Opera slashes programming and cuts costs without really fixing what’s wrong. Newspapers in communities across America close despite bigger news readership than ever. Hospitals operate at losses even under crushing demand. Universities price out the middle class in unsustainable escalation. We keep treating these as isolated crises. They are not. They are the sound of a civic operating system failing.

You don’t recover from a climate shift. You adapt. The question, as Carney puts it, is whether we adapt by hunkering down and building higher walls or by doing something more ambitious. Before we can fix anything, we need to name what actually broke it.

For almost three decades, a handful of technology platforms have done something more destructive than competing with our institutions. They redefined what “value” means. In the old economy, value was the product; the reporting, the performance, the creative work. People paid for it because it was intrinsically worth something. But the platforms shifted value from the content to the traffic that the content generates. The “quality” of the content is irrelevant. A Beethoven symphony and a cat video are identical to the algorithm. The only question is which one generates more clicks, because clicks—not content—are what gets monetized.

As I’ve written before, this isn’t an abstract notion. Last year a Taylor Swift song placed seventh on the Billboard charts. At number six was “Vacuum Cleaner for Babies,” the sound of a vacuum cleaner parents loop to soothe infants. In a system that measures raw consumption, both are “content.” The word itself is a Silicon Valley tell. It implies that nothing has intrinsic worth until it draws attention as measured by popularity algorithms.

Those algorithms don’t measure quality or meaning, they measure volume. Worse, the streaming model that bundles everything into a subscription has severed the relationship between listener and artist. When you don’t have to choose what music to support, you stop investing financially or emotionally in what you consume. The curation that used to connect audiences to artists has been outsourced to algorithms optimized for engagement, not meaning.

This is not a story about traditional culture losing relevance. People are not turning away from shared cultural experience, they are stampeding toward it. The Eras Tour. Beyoncé. The Sphere. Immersive everything. Live events are booming at the top of the market. The Minnesota Orchestra just posted record ticket sales. The appetite for gathering around art and shared experience has never been greater. News readership has never been higher. What’s collapsing isn’t demand, it’s the infrastructure that connects that demand to anything beyond the handful of mega-brands big enough to be visible in the traffic economy. Taste hasn’t moved on, the middleware that used to connect taste to a wider world of artists and institutions has been stripped out.

That shift from content value to traffic value is what has destroyed the business model for nearly everything we’re talking about. Newspapers didn’t lose readers, they lost the ability to monetize readers, because platforms captured the advertising revenue that followed the eyeballs while bearing none of the cost of producing the journalism.

Orchestras didn’t lose audiences, they lost the ecosystem—local journalism, civic identity, education funding—that made concert-going part of community life, because none of those connective functions generate enough traffic to register in the attention economy. The platforms captured the space between creator and audience, between institution and community, and they dictate who gets access to what and on what terms.

And now AI is accelerating the logic to its endpoint. If the only thing that matters is traffic and AI can produce infinite content at zero cost, then human creation isn’t just undervalued, it’s economically irrational. The platforms aren’t just monetizing the space between institutions and their communities; they’re synthesizing replacements for both. This isn’t a market failure. It’s a value hijack.

Stuck in the Middle with You

In computing, middleware is the software layer between the user interface and the database. It doesn’t store data or display it, it translates, routes, and connects. Without it, nothing can talk to anything else. Institutions—the orchestra, the theater, the museum—are the database. The public is the user interface. What the platforms hacked is the layer in between: the newspaper that reviewed concerts, the schools that sent kids to the education programs, the businesses whose sponsorships reflected civic pride, the board members who were stewards first and patrons second. All of these connections were middleware. The traffic economy devalued all of them because none of them scaled.

Middleware is not the same as the institutional middle. I’m suggesting we need to reinvest in the connective layers, organizations and relationships whose primary function is to link communities rather than to produce. The middleware doesn’t play the concert. It creates the conditions under which the concert matters to the community.

Rebuilding the middleware is essential but it is not enough if we don’t also dismantle the structures that destroyed it. You can’t regrow connective tissue in an ecosystem that’s still being strip-mined. Here are some ideas:

• Enforce antitrust again. We once understood that monopoly control threatened democracy. We broke up Standard Oil and AT&T. We regulated broadcast networks as public trusts. But the tech platforms now exercise greater monopoly control over the distribution of information and culture than any of those entities ever did: Google over search, Meta over social distribution, Apple and Google over app stores, Amazon over the marketplace. When a handful of companies controls how culture reaches audience, the audience is no longer the public, it’s the product.

• End the liability free ride. Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act gave platforms immunity from liability for content they host. This may have been sensible in 1996 when the internet was essentially bulletin boards of content, but it’s indefensible now that platforms are the dominant distributors of news and culture, and whose algorithms actively shape what gets seen (and not). Platforms themselves are fine if they’re merely carriers. But when they algorithmically determine what’s seen and what isn’t, they should bear obligations comparable to publishers, including contributing to the civic infrastructure their distribution depends on.

• Mandate fair exchange. If you profit from distributing someone else’s work, you owe them something. This should extend to cultural institutions, to creators, and to AI training data. If a model is trained on an orchestra’s recordings or a newspaper’s reporting, compensation and consent ought to be part of doing business, not courtesies.

• Make the algorithms transparent. Platforms determine what gets seen. Their algorithms systematically suppress the slow, the local, the nuanced, and the complex in favor of the viral, the outrageous, and the simple. This is not a neutral technical choice, it is a value system imposed on culture, and it is invisible to the public. One could even say anti-art. Algorithmic transparency requiring platforms to disclose how content is ranked and surfaced ought to be a precondition for any honest marketplace of ideas or culture.

So what to do?

We build alternative systems of value not defined by traffic, measuring success by what gets connected—people to one other, institutions to the communities they serve—not by what goes viral. The building and gathering is the product, the performance is the occasion. Art as a process rather than a product.

We invest in the glue. The middleware—the critic, the community liaison, the education partnership, the festival that convenes rather than just programs—is chronically underfunded because it doesn’t generate sufficient attentional traffic. What funders are really investing in is civic cohesion, the capacity of a community to talk to itself. Fund and invest in what builds that.

The new middleware must be porous, able to form coalitions and re-form them around new ideas and problems. Carney’s “variable geometry” applied to civic life. An orchestra that partners with a health system this year and a public library next year is acting as middleware, even if it still plays Beethoven on Saturday night.

This is already happening all over the country. The Ojai Music Festival (which I know well) thrives by weaving international artistic ambition into a hyper-local community through education, year-round partnerships, and a structure designed for yearly cycles of renewal. The Wallace Foundation’s Cultural Sustainability initiative channels funding to small community organizations, middleware funding middleware. Curation platforms are performing the narrating function newspapers once did. These are examples of prototypes. They need protection, investment, and the civic will to scale them.

An Enormous Opportunity Right Now

Here’s the paradox: the current political assault on institutions may be the best thing that ever happened to the case for rebuilding them. For decades, the erosion of the civic middle has been a creeping encroachment. The middleware dissolved so gradually that people didn’t notice what they’d lost, only that public life felt thinner and angrier. Silent erosion doesn’t generate political will for reform.

What’s happening now is not silent. The shuttering of the Kennedy Center, the DOGE-style demolition of federal agencies, the defunding of public media, the open contempt for expertise, this is demolition, not erosion, and the demolition is flashing red lights. For the first time in a generation, millions of Americans are asking: what do institutions actually do? What happens when they’re gone? The infrastructure is made visible.

The civic immune response: the protests, the legal challenges, the coalitions forming across sectors that never talked to each other, is raw right now, but it’s real and growing. The Trump disruption, layered onto the tech disruption, has made the invisible visible. This is the moment when the argument for middleware isn’t abstraction and becomes actionable.

But civic will is perishable. The energy of this moment will either be channeled into building new connective structures and dismantling the monopolies that destroyed the old ones, or it will dissipate into the kind of atomized outrage the platforms feed on.

In my last post I wrote that we have “the vocabulary of the network—outrage, likes, viral hits—but we have lost the grammar that institutions provide.”

Middleware is that grammar. It is what allows the soprano’s high C to matter beyond the concert hall because a critic writes about it, a kid in the education program picks up a violin, a board member connects it to the city’s identity and fights for the funding. That chain of meaning is the middleware we need to rebuild.