There is another kind of cultural executive who prefers hoodies to tweed. He talks about innovation, disruption, and “serving fans,” and he likes to say he runs a tech company, not a studio. On paper, he oversees a streaming service. In practice, he runs a private ministry of culture.

In the old model, studios made films and series, distributors delivered them, and audiences decided. In the new model, power moved “from studios to platforms, from creators to algorithms, and from broadcasters to digital ecosystems.” Platforms sit at the center of the value chain. They license or own catalogs, commission originals, set the rules of monetization, and, critically, control discovery through recommendation engines. A recent analysis of the Netflix–Warner Bros. deal spells it out: once a platform owns vast IP catalogues and its own production units, it can channel revenue toward internally produced content and “govern the entire creator–user–partner ecosystem.”

Executives in this position do not merely greenlight shows. They decide who can be seen.

Algorithm culture as cultural policy

On the surface, there is a reassuring democracy to it. Anyone can subscribe. The home page is “personalized.” If viewers don’t like something, they can just scroll. Underneath, the levers are less romantic.

Platform researchers note that “platforms now control discovery via algorithms, monetisation via revenue‑sharing rules, and production via acquisitions and originals,” while users “negotiate unknowingly by feeding the data systems that shape their own recommendations.” Industry surveys for 2026 predict that control of discovery will move even further “up the stack,” away from individual apps and toward operating systems, interface layers, and AI viewing assistants that decide which tiles you see before you even enter Netflix or Disney+. In other words, the gate is moving behind the gate.

This is what one critic calls “algorithm culture”: platforms don’t just host content; they “sort it, rank it, surface it, hide it. They decide what appears first.” That decision is a policy choice, even if no parliament voted on it.

Inequality with a cosmopolitan face

Streaming executives like to say the platforms have made culture more diverse. There is some truth to that. A 2025 study of streaming platforms and cultural consumption finds that using platforms increases the diversity and cosmopolitanism of what people watch, especially for TV shows. But the same study notes that the effect is socially uneven: higher‑status users are more likely to use streaming, benefit more from the increased diversity, and convert that cosmopolitanism into “better life outcomes.”

In other words, the platforms do not create filter bubbles so much as they widen cultural inequalities. They expand the menu for people who were already well placed to order from it. For everyone else, the algorithm offers more of what their data says they already like: a smooth, pacifying loop in which “discovery happens through feeds, bundles, and algorithms that subtly influence what content gains visibility and what fades away.”

From the executive suite, this looks like success. From the bottom, it looks like being softly herded.

Streaming as software, not cinema

The executives have started saying the quiet part aloud. “Entertainment is a software industry now; we might as well get good at it,” one ad‑tech leader told Variety in early 2026. The big strategic questions are no longer about auteurs versus genre, but about churn, ad tiers, and whether to pour money into sports rights or free ad‑supported streaming (FAST) channels. Youth audiences treat TikTok and YouTube as their primary television; streaming services scramble to imitate short‑form pacing and vertical formats to stay relevant.

The culture‑sector executive, in this environment, behaves less like a studio head and more like a product manager. Shows are “content bundles.” Release strategies are “experiments.” Whole series disappear from catalogs for tax reasons. The algorithm quietly rewrites the canon based on what keeps people subscribed, not on what might be worth remembering.

From a distance, this can still be sold as creative risk‑taking in a new medium. Up close, it looks like ordinary software optimization, except the A/B tests are being run on the symbolic diet of entire populations.

How this links back to books

Streaming executives and big publishing executives are working different ends of the same problem.

On the book side, conglomerate publishers have turned “serious thought” into a managed asset class, and then discovered that a single bulk retailer can decide books are too fiddly to stock. On the screen side, streaming platforms have turned moving images into a software business, and then discovered that the real gatekeepers are drifting further up the stack, into AI recommendation layers and operating systems they don’t fully control.

In both cases, the people who talk most loudly about culture are the ones furthest from the points where culture quietly appears and disappears. I have been close enough to both to see the pattern: executives narrate strategy, warehouses and home screens decide reality.