Just so we're all clear, "gatekeeping" is the act of controlling or limiting access to something valuable, whether that’s information, opportunities, resources or cultural spaces. The social psychologist Kurt Lewin first defined gatekeeping theory way back in 1943. And, until relatively recently, “gatekeeping” was most often used derogatorily, especially in fashion.

Writing in Highsnobiety, Eugene Rabkin notes:

“Fashion has always been the great illusion maker. It ostensibly champions democratisation while trading on exclusivity. It nods enthusiastically to demands for inclusivity with token gestures. Fashion gatekeepers keep the gates tightly shut, promulgating the you-can’t-sit-with-us mindset. It does its best to maintain the status quo.”

Now, though, we find ourselves living in the age of discoverability. Largely thanks to the internet, we have the ability to bypass elitist institutional gatekeepers such as Anna Wintour to figure out what we like for ourselves, engaging with culture on our own terms. And, sticking with fashion for a second, there are even young content creators like William Lasry making “no more gatekeeping” their entire motto.

But living in the age of discoverability has introduced its own set of problems. Discoverability has largely been facilitated by big tech and, by extension, their recommendation algorithms. Over the past decade, tech platforms have come to dictate taste at scale, flattening culture by algorithmic means. Instead of helping us discover new niches, the algorithm feeds us things that are already popular. The result of this is blanding, the age of average, or whatever you want to call it; cultural midocracy where everything looks the same, from our interiors and cafes to the cars that we drive. (For an excellent essay in the New Yorker covering this topic, read here.)

In the past few years, the way we use the word “gatekeeping” has been changing – used most frequently when referring to keeping insider information to yourself instead of throwing it online; in the face of endless algorithmic recommendations, to express the decision not to recommend.

Emerging out of this sea of sameness is what is being increasingly referred to as the “taste economy”. The core premise is that, for at least the past 10 years, taste couldn’t be monetised. But moving forwards, taste will be monetised. The idea that human generated, nuanced, expert word-of-mouth recommendations will provide a much needed antidote to the algorithm. Brands that cultivate taste and build worlds through curation such as Perfectly Imperfect will win in this new paradigm. 

As such, gatekeeping brings with it a whole new meaning these days. We wanted to interrogate what it means to different people in a recent FORUM we hosted with:

WATCH RECORDING

We kicked off with a poll simply asking whether gatekeeping was good or bad for culture:

Below are some key quotes, edited and condensed for clarity:

Charlie: A gate shuts as well as opens. A gatekeeper includes as well as excludes. 

Ruby: The gatekeeper is the reminder that culture requires labour and that access is not a right, it must be earned. What we understand to be culture is the result of arduous labour from creators, artists, writers, bloggers, photographers, the audience members who show up. The internet has flattened, or made hardly visible, the labour that goes into making culture. 

Daisy: We’re not talking about gatekeeping any more when it comes to creation and production – with AI, that ship has sailed. We cannot go back. Everyone can create. And with distribution, you can’t tell people to stop using social media to stop promoting their work. But nobody has a right to distribution, and it cannot ever be fully democratised. The ability to accumulate attention is a scarce resource. AI cannot simulate attention. In some ways, then, gatekeeping is an inherent restriction of the human brain, and I think the fact we can only pay attention to a limited number of things is what makes us human and, to that extent, gatekeeping makes us human, and will always be part of culture. 

Charlie: When I first started thinking about this topic when I was invited into this forum, the first place I went was to my experience in style and fashion magazines. And I started thinking about the strange artefact of the scene photo – party pictures, and so on. Which was recently brought back by Charlie XCX photographed by Cobrasnake, the talismanic naughties photographer. And I started thinking about the ways the scene photo or party photo both displays the scene in a way that allows access to the scene – you can see a party you weren’t at – but it also removes you from that scene. You weren’t there. We’ve seen a strange resurgence of this kind of content and it is, in a lot of ways, quite an antiquated form of the cultural stack.

Ruby: Fashion is interesting because, for a long time, there was a lot of gatekeeping around production. It was really hard to know where the good factories were and where to get stuff made. Virgil Abloh decided to not only be a maker and designer but also an educator of his own public. And it’s a good question – should that education be the responsibility of the artist? Or should it be the responsibility of educational or artistic institutions? Virgil approached this head on; a beautiful synthesis of a maker as well as an audience builder. He inhabited a unique position as a speaker, artist and designer. It will be a bit of time before we have someone else at all of those intersections. 

Charlie: Virgil Abloh is a really great example of an anti-gatekeeper. He would almost shockingly at times tell audiences and fans how you do this; this is how you print a shirt, this is how you market a shirt. In doing so he created a public. And a public isn’t something which just exists. It is created and manifested in some ways. 

Daisy: Where the public sometimes goes rogue is thinking that a level of proximity is owed that actually isn’t. Even if your proximity to the artist is very far out, from the distribution of their work you can get closer by showing up repeatedly to events, understanding their references, educating yourself and maybe getting closer to the artist eventually, to the point when you have earned into being an earlier consumer of new things from them. But either way, how close you get is, and should be, in the artist’s power. The artist decides, “You can get my vinyl early if you are in my fan club for a certain amount of time.” Or not. Or fuck you, you know. And I think both are very valid. It’s not a choice for the public to make. 

Ruby: The role of the brand manager or the CMO is essentially the tight rope exercise of creating hype versus not falling in the sea of overexposure. 

Charlie: If I had a gun to my head, in the weirdest hold up of all time, I would say gatekeeping is bad for culture. I don’t quite believe that entirely, but I think that culture exists through activation and culture has a potentiality that circulation can unlock in beautiful and manifold ways. 

Daisy: Some questions have come up around class and race, and that’s absolutely right, but I like to think we have been talking more about discernment, not discrimination, when it comes to gatekeeping. A lot of what people call gatekeeping is actually discrimination, keeping talented people out of power. But I think gatekeeping, on the other hand, is a good thing.

Ruby: In a world where content may drown art and creation, where culture is seemingly being replaced by content, it is becoming more and more important to erect jumpable gates around culture to protect it from usurpers, sycophants and people who simply want to extract value from content and not give back. To put it simply, the gatekeepers role is to make sure creative and cultural collaboration is mutualist and not parasitical. 

We ended the session with another poll, same question as before. And the conclusion? Contrary to popular opinion, maybe gatekeeping isn’t so bad after all.


And in the spirit of sharing and opening the gates, here’s a short reading list if you wanted to dig into this SEED further:

SEED #8283
DATE 17.12.24
PLANTED BY PROTEIN
CONTRIBUTORS RUBY JUSTICE THELOT, DAISY ALIOTO, CHARLIE ROBIN JONES, JOANNA LOWRY