Recommender Systems and Inequality in the Creator Economy. With Matt Artz

Our guest today is Matt Artz. Matt is a business and design anthropologist, consultant, author, speaker, and creator. As a creator he creates podcasts, music, and visual art. Many people will know Matt through his Anthropology in Business and Anthro to UX podcasts.

We talk about his interdisciplinary educational background — he has degrees  in Computer Information Systems, Biotechnology,  Finance and Management Information Systems, and Applied Anthropology — and Matt explains what drew him along this path.

He shares his recent realisation that he identifies primarily as a technologist ("I am still at heart a technologist. I love technology. I love playing with technology") and his conflict around the "harm that comes out of some AI, but I'm also really interested in it and to some degree kind of helping to fuel the rise of it."

This leads to us discussing — in the context of recommender systems and Google more broadly — how we are forced to identify on the internet as one thing or another, either an anthropologist, a technologist, or a creator but not all three. As Matt explains, "finding an ideal way to brand yourself on the Internet is actually very critical...it's a real challenge".

We turn next to recommender systems and his interest in how capital and algorithmic bias contribute to inequality in the creator economy, which is based on his art market research as the Head of Product & Experience for Artmatcher.  Artmatcher is a mobile app that aims to address access and inclusion issues in the art market.

The work being done on Artmatcher may lead to innovations in the way the approximately 50 million people worldwide in the Creator Economy get noticed in our "technologically-mediated world" as well as in other multi-sided markets (e.g. Uber, Airbnb) where there are multiple players. It's a model he hopes will ensure that people's "hard work really contributes to their own success".

Design anthropology is one approach to solving this challenge, Matt suggests, because it is "very interventionist, very much focused on what are we going to do to enact some kind of positive change".

As Matt says, "even if this [model] doesn't work, I do feel there's some value in just having the conversation about how can we value human behaviour and reward people for productive effort and how can we factor that back into the broader conversation of responsible tech or responsible AI?".

He recommends two books, Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice, edited by Wendy Gunn, Ton Otto, Rachel Charlotte Smith, and Media, Anthropology and Public Engagement, edited by Sarah Pink and Simone Abram.

Lastly, Matt leaves us with a hopeful note about what we can do in the face of "really hard challenges" such as climate change.

You can find Matt on his website, follow him on Twitter @MattArtzAnthro, and connect with him on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Today we are delighted to be talking to Matt Artz. 

Matt is a business and design anthropologist, consultant, author, speaker, and creator. In particular he creates podcasts, music, and visual art. Most people will know Matt through his Anthropology in Business and Anthro to UX podcasts. 

I invited him on to the show to talk about recommender systems and in particular his interest in how capital and algorithmic bias contribute to inequality in the creator economy, which is based on his art market research as the Head of Product & Experience for Artmatcher, a mobile app that aims to address access and inclusion issues in the art market. We hope you enjoy the show. 

Dawn Walter: 

So, welcome Matt. Thank you for joining us. How are you today? 

Matt Artz: [00:01:44]

Very well. Thanks Dawn. Appreciate you having me on.

Dawn Walter: [00:01:46]

Absolute pleasure. Lovely to have you. So I wanted to start with your background because you have a very interdisciplinary, educational background. So your first degree was in computer information systems, and then you did a BS in biotechnology and then an MBA in finance and management information systems, and then most recently a Masters of Science in Applied Anthropology. So there's obviously a very strong interest in technology, business and obviously anthropology. And I just wondered if you could just take us along the journey a little bit and share with us why you were drawn to each subject. And also how that's how each subject has influenced you as you've gone along as well. 

Matt Artz: [00:02:27]

Yeah. Well, so thanks again for having me on here. It's a great pleasure to be now, be on this side and enjoy with you as we get to chat a few weeks ago, from my podcast, but I'll give you a little background on that. And I will also maybe build on it just a little bit with something I've been struggling with in past almost couple weeks as I've been thinking about something but so I can, I have a paper, to go all the way back to the beginning, I have a, well to go really back to the beginning, we got a custom built home computer in 1985. So I was four years old and I mean, I've really since that age like, I mean, or shortly thereafter been very, very interested in technology, you know, I know only a few years I was taking apart new computers building all the custom computers I have always used. 

Ever since that point was always just fascinated by technology and I have a paper that my mother saved from when I was in high school in which I talk about, I'm going to start a computer business which ultimately happened and then nonetheless fast-forward, and I go to college and I knew I was going to study computers, that's what I wanted to do. And so I entered a program that was a CIS program, computer information systems, but it was also within a business program. And so I wanted to focus on both aspects because I did like technology. I mean, I love technology but I also like business I had this idea of, you know, wanting to start a business and so I was very much interested in, not just starting a business but managing technology and having that perspective. 

And so and I should point out that, I know I had some people in my life that were older than me that were into technology first. And they kind of really helped pave the path in many ways and help sort of me understand what existed out there but so I go into this program. It was great, doing what I like doing, but I also along the way learned about the biotech program, which seemed to me to merge my interest in business technology and an interest that I had in health, which is like a personal interest as well, nothing I was doing academically prior to that but just something I was passionate about and so it seemed as such a new industry that there was obviously the need for tech mean it's in the name after all but there's also going to be the need then to commercialize products, right? And so, it fits nice with the business perspective. 

Now, I have never really quite ended up working in health like in a company. Where that's all I've done though I've done a fair amount of consulting in my life in the health space and have continually sort of tried to pull on that knowledge even if my job was never something like something in a bio or pharma company, but so I did all of that. 

Towards the end of my undergraduate studies I had the opportunity to enter a business competition and I used my senior research from the biotech program, which was, I took the process of gel electrophoresis and cut the time down in half. And so, entered the business competition, filed patent for it and was thinking I would commercialize it though. Once I got into the cost of it and everything else, I did have a little fear, you know, I would been going up like against Fisher Scientific and like huge behemoths and I, you know, it didn't seem like a wise idea to me at the time. 

Concurrent to that I'm already in my Graduate Studies as I'm sort of building this business on the side and I'm doing stuff in the web space, in the digital marketing space at this point, and I'm getting my MBA in finance and investment and also sort of fulfilling all the requirements for the MIS program. So it's technically transcripted as one degree, but I fulfilled everything you need to do for two different MBA tracks. And I did that, I did the finance piece because you need to understand finance to run a business and, you know, I continued with the MIS piece because it's a sort of critical to what I'm doing, broadly speaking. 

And so while, along the graduate studies in my program, I had the fortunate opportunity to work with Dr Rex Dumdum and he, when he was doing his PhD work, his, he was doing in systems and computer information systems, as well, I forget the exact title, but something within that broad space and they're doing a lot of work on requirements to finding a software, and he was working with his advisor, who was married to an anthropologist that worked at IBM and through this kind of crazy route he learned about this sort of very humanistic approach to systems and he saw my interest in sort of, which I wasn't calling anthropology, I wasn't talking about anthropology, it wasn't coming up at all, but saw my interest was sort of infusing, you know, the special we were doing a lot of independent study and what sort of infusing that into what we were doing together and that really kind of helped shape my understanding of some things even though again, I wasn't sort of framing it as anthropology or anything, even in the human-centered design space, it wasn't any of that just yet. 

However, at that time, there was people writing about the topic in larger more mass media publications, you know, if you could maybe consider like Harvard Business Review sort of mass media, and I was kind of getting tuned into this world that existed out there, of people who are doing this kind of work of applying the social sciences to tech slowly as kind of, as I'm wrapping up the degree or shortly thereafter. 

And so, I'm starting to try and like, pull all that together and I'm working in a digital marketing company and essentially seeing that a lot of what we were doing was not really working and that is when I started is about 2009-ish, maybe 2010, and I'm starting to think what can I do that's going to pull these threads together and maybe help me sort of improve the essentially the products that were approved could hang out in the world and it still took me a number of years to kind of land in the anthropology world. 

I was looking around at different design programs, like there was like a design strategy program in San Francisco I was looking at,  there was all kinds of things. I was just tracking down every little thread that kind of connected. Eventually landed on the University of North Texas applied anthropology program where there was a focus in business anthropology, and as I later learned, a sort of distinct focus in design anthropology. The design anthropology track is not necessarily what brought me there because I had read the book Business Anthropology by Ann Jordan. And that was kind of how I found the program. 

And so I was just broadly thinking that as business anthropology, but that seemed to allow me to start pulling everything together into one interesting package. So there's this thread, of course, of sort of technology. 

And so to that end, you know, in the past, I used to refer to myself as a technologist and I dropped that some years ago, maybe around 2014 or so, but I recently interviewed Ken Banks, who I know you know, and he refers to himself as a technologist and I've been thinking about that over the last few weeks. I realized that there's this sort of tension happening in me, which I am still at heart a technologist. I love technology. I love playing with technology. I mean, I download and pay for all kinds of applications, just to try them out, just because I want to understand how they work. And I use a lot of technology in my own work, and I'm using a lot of AI in my own work, from many tools, for lots of different purposes, a lot in the creative AI space and I have this tension because I feel like on the one hand, I know that there's harm that comes out of some AI, but I'm also really interested in it and to some degree kind of helping to fuel the rise of it. 

I'm finding that I'm having a hard time negotiating that right now because I want to do work that is critical of it in the sense that we make sure to point in the right direction, but also love trying things out, even if they're potentially, because they even potentially harmful. I like trying them out of myself, right? And so I'll just leave that there and maybe give it to you to kind of answer, any ask any follow-ups from any of that.

Dawn Walter: [00:10:35]

I'd say first of all, don't fight it. I think I think you're, you know, your interest in how things things work, I think that's, you know, that's great, don't fight it. But I think you'll always come to how things work with that sort of very anthropological lens, anyway, the empathetic lens. So I think if Ken Banks calls himself technologist, then I think you've got permission to call yourself a technologist. 

What I did actually want to follow up on was this this interest in business because I know that when we had our conversation you also kind of interested in entrepreneurship and I wondered where that came from for you, was you was it your father, your mother or grandfather, or something? There's a thread there that I would just like to sort of. 

Matt Artz: [00:11:19]

So I'm not a hundred percent. Sure. I mean, my parents are wonderful hard-working people but. yeah, they went to work for companies. When I wanted to start businesses. They thought it was crazy. I mean, I actually started we're not going back. I was doing things like shovelling snow. I was always going around the neighborhood and doing chores for people to earn money and, you know, loaning out money, you know, like a little bank and always doing things from from a relatively young age. And actually I have to give my father credit for that, I would loan him money even though he didn't need the money, I'm sure he was just teaching me like how to loan out money, you know, but it obviously taught me to sort of the value of banking, and you know and sort of managing money. And so I guess there's that certainly from my father but my parents did think I was crazy when I wanted to start businesses and I actually chose to start my first like real business during the collapse of 2008/2009 era, I mean like really like in the midst of it, decided I would leave the digital marketing firm I worked at and go out on my own because again, I kind of saw what we were doing wasn't working and I wanted to take another approach. 

I wasn't saying it was anthropologically driven or anything like that. I just felt I could do better and wanted to take like a much more kind of humanist approach to that. And so, you know, I don't know where that started, it's been there since I was young but I would guess what it gets back to you is my main passion in life is creating stuff. And putting it out into the world and business is a form of creating, right. I mean, there is like companies who say they do business design, even like, you know, we frame some of our services as that as over the years and but like frog, you know, famously IDEO famously, right, they get into the concept of designing business models. 

And I've always looked at creating as like, you know, the thing that, it’s the thing that stimulates me the most and so coming up with the idea of a business, bringing it into creation and trying to kind of grow it has always been of interest to me and why I still work in the entrepreneurial environment. I'm working for somebody else right now, but I still have always stayed in that space, instead of going to a large corporation where I know, there's you know, there's interesting opportunities as well, but I like the idea of starting and building things and just bringing whatever it is, whether it's music podcast, technology, products, you name it. I just like in businesses, I just like creating.

Dawn Walter: [00:13:43]

I wanted to go back as well to your point that you know, you're struggling with this technologist. And you're very passionate about anthropology in a lot of work that you're doing, you know, your podcast, your website is all very much about, you know, showcasing the value of anthropology. So I wonder why you struggle? Does it matter that you have to put yourself in one category or the other? Can you not be an anthropological technologist?

Matt Artz: [00:14:10]

Sure, it's a great question and I um, I mean you can but as before we got it started recording we had the brief conversation about, you know, about show notes and putting them in and how that impacts search engines and the reality is is today and this is related to recommender conversation, right, so much of what we do is, you know, or so much of what we kind of interact with and consume is framed through the lens of recommender systems, and in particular, Google and quite frankly, Google can’t understand when you do more than one thing as a person, right, so, if you search for me in Google, maybe not in the UK but in the US you're going to get a knowledge panel that comes up on the right side of the screen that says I'm a musician. Now, which is funny because I'm not really. It's just so, you know, I have a couple songs out there and it's something I do because I love, but it's not what I do. 

But, in many ways, the way we sort of, get framed out on the internet, which is how we get business, which is how, you know, we sort of network today, just how we get invited to maybe speak at things. So much of it is actually framed around like an identity and the system sort of understanding you as an entity and they can generally at this point only make sense of one entity, you know, when there's too many it gets kind of confused. 

So finding out an ideal way to brand yourself on the internet is actually very critical, you know, it's different when you're in person and you can have like a conversation and say well, I'm an anthropologist who works in UX and product management and on the side, I create podcasts and use it, you know, you can have a nice back and forth about that. You can't do that on the internet, and this comes up a lot in some of the meetups we have in New York and just other people like, you know, and just conferences, and when we're talking with people about how do you identify, do you identify as an anthropologist as UX researcher, you know, and those are good conversations, but what also else isn't being said, is, you know, for the sake of how it portrays on the internet, you can only really identify as one thing at this time. 

You'll find it with, you know, like, if you were to look at, I don't know, maybe Steven Pinker, right. Again, he's going to be listed as one thing say in Google although he's produced so much content in his life and has done so many different things as as an academic, a scholar etc. And so there is a need to sort of find a way to wrap that all up and communicate it. I know, I know you have the interesting communication, right? And so how do you sort of package that all in a cohesive way? 

And that's kind of what I struggle with and that's why you see if anybody was ever look at my website in any kind of frequency, you would see that I'm always toying with that because I'm always literally running tests to see what's working, and what's not and you know, it's all about in many ways helping to get the word out about anthropology. But whether it's running tests on the podcast, running tests on like the way the site is structured to get the content out there, it's a real challenge and you know, so that's a long-winded way of saying that I think you can be more than one thing, but in the world, in the technologically mediated world we live in, we also have other other things to contend with ultimately.

Dawn Walter: [00:17:16]

I love that sort of ‘framed by Google’. You have to have one identity and I was thinking, you know, you and I will understand this as anthropologists, it depends on the context how you identify.

Matt Artz: [00:17:27]

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, and just to that point, like, when I show up at, you know, anthropology conferences, of course, I generally would identify as an anthropologist, but when I go into a lot of business meetings, I don't know if I'm in a, if I'm in a run-of-the-mill business meeting, especially new meeting, where nobody knows me yet, I'm not going to say I'm an anthropologist typically, because it, you know, we know, most people don't fully grasp what that means. And so it has, you could argue, little value in that context where something like, you know, product manager, user experience researcher makes much more sense. 

Dawn Walter: [00:17:56]

The reason we're here today and that was almost a nice segue there, we're here to talk about recommender systems and in particular, your interest in how capital, as per Bourdieu’s social theory, and algorithmic bias contribute to inequality in the creator economy, and I know that you've written a paper and you gave a talk at this year's Why the world needs anthropologists on the subject. So I'd love for you to just summarize the issue and your central argument, for our listeners, and we can start talking about that. 

Matt Artz: [00:18:24]

Sure. Yeah. Thanks for the question. So. Well, my interest grows out of my personal life, which is, I produce a lot of content again, music podcasts, you know, blog, I have videos. Some of the podcasts are videos on YouTube, right? So I have content all over the place and I've been producing content for years. I've produced music going back to early 2000s and most most that's never been released. 

But nonetheless, I mean, I've been always sort of producing content and putting out in various formats. And, you know, I've realized over the years that even in my, just anecdotally, you know, and I work in tech, so, I mean, I have a sense of how this stuff works. It's not just like it, some anecdotal observation. But I mean, I have spent my life working in the digital marketing space as well. So I have a fair sense of how content can kind of get picked up and moved around on the internet and some things that work and some things that don't work. 

And then I most recently had the opportunity to start working on Artmatcher and Artmatcher is a product that we are building internally at the company I work for. So technically the company I work for is called Cloudshadow, we’re a venture resources firm, we provide consulting and business, kind of technology services, and, you know, that could just be fee-for-service, but we also might take a investment stake in interest in a company that we're doing work with or we also build our own products at times. We built an energy platform years ago and exited from that. And we're now building this product, Artmatcher, in the art space. 

A lot of us in our company are creative, people who are kind of at the intersection of creative and tech. A lot of us are musicians. The founder is very interested in art, I'm very interested in the visual arts. And so this is a nice ideal project for us to get into. And as I was getting into that, the task was really, like for me as the research product manager on the team, was really to figure out what can we do in this space. We know, we like it. We know that there are problems. We don't understand them well, but what can we do? 

And so, you know, I then went out and I'm doing this research and that's various forms of research, that's primary research, you know, with humans, gallerists, you know, artists, buyers or collectors as they are kind of frequently called in the art world, which seems a little little posh but nonetheless, you know, various stakeholders in the art space, and looking at literature and doing, you know, broad market research, and like the literature is academic literature, it's looking at other patents, it's a really wide breadth of, you know, what we're taking in consideration and go by going through that process, talking to people, by looking at the literature, it became sort of increasingly clear that most artists and even galleries in the mid-market who don't have capital, be that sort of economic or social or even, you know, sort of cultural in the sense of maybe, like, you know, some sort of credentials if you will, even if that credential is just like having had a show at X gallery or, you know, in such museum, if you want to look at it that way. 

But you know, those people without capital generally just sort of exist in this mid-market, they don't sell much, they try to put their work up on all these existing marketplaces, you know, digital marketplaces, which, of course, recommender systems come in to, and we'll get to that in just a second. But so, they put their work up on there again, whether they’re gallery artists and they don't really sell. If they don't have the money to advertise, or if they don't have the money, whether that's advertising kind of online or offline, or if they don't have like the relationships to kind of, you know, to leverage their network to get known, they just kind of exist in this space, they put it out there and most would say they never sell anything. 

And so, what you kind of see is people on the bottom end of the market or selling things for, you know, hundred dollars or whatever on Etsy or here, there, they sell of course, not everybody. But they, you know, that kind of work sells. And of course, the high end of the market, which has brand recognition, blue-chip, quote-unquote, artists, and galleries that have that kind of work, do fine. You know, Banksy just sold what was at 18 million dollars yesterday for the, you know, the shredded piece. 

So, you know, all that does well enough for sure, but it's everybody in the middle that seemed to really struggle and I heard stories about how like, you know, gallery that's kind of in this mid-market space was talking about how he had an artist you really had no, you know, no name recognition at that point in time, but his parents had money. And so they spent money to get coverage. And, you know, now he's like a little darling of his local art market, you know, and it's a market that's big enough and important enough that now this person is living off of their art which before, you know, just was not happening. And so you see these stories of, you know, if you have the right connections, if you have the money to do to again to kind of run ads, or to get press, whatever, maybe you can sort of make your way along, but, of course, there's all those sort of disempowered people at the outside, at the extremes, many of which sort of reflects the inequalities in society already who have a very difficult time breaking into the market.

And so that's, you know, all people but especially people of color have historically been left out of the mainstream art market, of course, that's even, you know, it's across all the sort of intersection of dividing lines, gender, you name it. And so we're looking at that and starting to sort of ask ourselves, well, what could we do different? And so the general business model here is to connect people, to focus on relationships, to focus on trust, and to connect people, not to be a marketplace, we’re not interested in trying to, you know, be a bigger better marketplace per se. In fact, we have completely left the marketplace out.

We're really just interested in trying to, how can we bring people together to really focus on what's important about all this, which is, you know, the experience of connecting within the art world, the experience of building business relationships that are grounded in trust and sort of reciprocal exchange, because again, like the research was just constantly pointing out that most gallerists, when we talk to people you can tell that the business relationship is very frequently strained between those partners. Gallerists basically feel that artists can’t get their stuff together and artists just want to produce art and can't find galleries who really want to help them. 

But of course, there's people out there who are willing to kind of work together in good ways and could find ways, you know, to work together in good ways. And so that's what we're really trying to focus on is the human aspect of that. And so we're going to bring an education component in but to kind of come back to now the recommender system. 

So if we're going to get into this space and if we're going to recommend art, ultimately we're going to use recommender system because it's sort, you know, it's just not efficient to just sort of present, an unordered list of content and make people just randomly sort of move through it, right? I mean if you know, if Google just did that and you couldn't search and find something that was relevant it would be near useless at this point in time with how many websites exist, and other forms of media. 

So you need to use a recommender system, but a recommender system then implies an algorithm that is going to make recommendations based upon some criteria. And then the question then becomes how to do that well. And when you look at the existing literature, what you generally see is that there is oftentimes like a “rich gets richer” scenario, and so, you can almost trace this back to the academic world and there's an effect called the “Matthew effect” that was coined to sort of describe how, you know, academics who are getting citations have a tendency to perform better over time. 

And citations are essentially just links, they are the equivalent of links to two websites, right? I mean, that's where Google literally took the business model from.  The whole idea comes from like, you know, the concept of citations and they just transferred into your website is linking to another at someone implies that they trust you and then they push page rank to you and, you know, 23 years later we're still here with page rank, that's never gone away. Just by all the other things they've brought into their algorithm and their algorithm actually works quite well compared to other sites for lots of reasons, that we could get into if you want. But they so you need to use recommender systems. 

But the question again, is, how do you do it well when you might have limited forms of information to work from, so, in the case of art, what do you have, you have a title, you have a description, you have some other metadata like, you know, the genre, if you will, style, you know, it's not a ton necessarily. So, you know, the modern form is to use like on most sites today is to use machine learning based models, content-based models and collaborative filtering, where you're looking at again, similarities between content or you're looking at, you know, similarities between what users do. 

So, if, you know, if user 1 looks at, you know, A and B and user 2 looks at B and C, right, then you might recommend A and C to each other say, you know, in a very simplistic example, that's all fine and well. Except it doesn't handle new content or new users very well at all, to the degree that some new content may never get recommended and that's what I often see in Spotify, like, you know, when I put music out there, if I don't do anything to get people listening to it, it doesn't get any traction at all from their algorithm. 

And so, what does that, that results in again people going out to pay for ads on Facebook to push traffic results in, people paying to get on playlist and all kinds of other things. So, again you need capital or you need relationships to get covered on blogs because Spotify is known to look at blogs for press about artists to see, you know, and use that as a signal. But again, that takes relationships, right, it takes capital. So, you know, having looked at all this literature, pulling all this together, we're sitting there asking ourselves, how could we do this potentially different, and to try and make it fair? And that's, that's really the question for us.

Dawn Walter: [00:28:34]

So, we're talking specifically about the art market and I wanted to know, you talk, you're talking about the mid-market section. How big is that? Because you do talk about how big the Creator economy is. So, is there a, do you have in a kind of idea of how many kind of people what that mid-market is worth? 

Matt Artz: [00:28:51]

Well, so the Creator economy, I, you know, I quote an estimate that comes from a venture firm that says it's around 50 million people. But the Creator economy doesn't necessarily map to like the mid-market of the art market. And so my research with Artmatcher is obviously squarely focused on the art market and what we see there and, I forget a lot of the numbers at the moment, but the number of people in the mid market is is quite large, is the largest sector, but of course, it's a very small percentage of the dollar value. 

Most of the dollars is on is in the quote-unquote blue chip market, you know, if a painting is selling for well 16 million plus 2 million net Christie's, I think it was yesterday, you know, that's that obviously consumes the bulk of the dollars, but the the vast number of people are in the mid market and so, so, I don't know that figure but then the Creator economy of, which is estimated 50 million worldwide is, I know I'm sort of extending the Artmatcher research to now come to look more broadly at the Creator economy because recommender systems play a role in both, but arguably the Creator economy is much bigger. 

And you know, when you have 50 million people worldwide who want to make a living off of their content which basically implies at least in the US, right, no healthcare, no, you know sort of company-sponsored savings account, you know, for anybody, who wants to do that in the US they have serious considerations to make with, to the extent of their, their future and how they're going to retire and have health care, you know, even in the present. And so, you know, I'm sort of jumping off from Artmatcher and personally looking at the Creator economy in a bigger sense because I feel like one, being in it but two, also because of the size of it that there's a really critical need to figure out, how can we get those people essentially more views and put that content in front of more people who will really like it. 

And so that's, you know, for Artmatcher, it's a question of just strictly in the art space, what can we do to address the mid-market and building on that, for me personally, it's a question of how could we apply some of those learnings to the broader market to help people like myself who will want to do this. And so that's kind of my two focuses right now. 

Dawn Walter: [00:31:10]

So what have you learned so far? I know in your paper you touched on design anthropology as one approach to kind of fixing this problem. I don't know if you want to go down that road now and if we do talk about design anthropology, it might be worth kind of explaining what that is versus what anthropology is. 

Matt Artz: [00:31:28]

Yeah. So, you know, design anthropology is one of those things that it's not even a term that is a an agreed-upon term in any of like, there's institutions out there that like, disambiguate academic disciplines, like, Microsoft research even like say for just one example has like a definition of anthropology and papers can be tagged anthropology and like from an entity sense. Design anthropology, business anthropology, digital anthropology, cyborg anthropology, technology anthropology. None of them exist in that way. They are talked about in the academic space, but they have never been taken up from any of these sort of large bodies that say okay, this is an actual thing, like as a concept and so to that end, there is no one definition, you would argue that even with anthropology there's no one definition, certainly not of culture. 

But what you see from the literature of design anthropology, is that it, you know, it of course, is grounded in the past, that's grounded, you know, grows out of cultural anthropology, certainly grounded in, you know, culture and observing the past, being critical, But then it intentionally sort of orientates itself into, really kind of into the present and most importantly, maybe into the future in that it's for many, at least for me, very interventionist, very much focused on what are we going to do to enact some kind of positive change. So, you know, names like Sarah Pink and Wendy Gunn, of course, you're doing like, you know, the vast amount of wonderful work in this space, but if there's many others who I just don't have the time to name, but the orientation there is really towards future, creating, intervening and ideally, of course, in positive ways. 

And so that is the sort of orientation I take and it goes back to again, entrepreneurship, you know, wanting to create. I have never had an interest, and it's why I went to an applied anthropology program, in just sort of critiquing the past more or less, and here's my paper, I'm done with it, do what you will. To me that's just completely inadequate. I appreciate all like, you know, everything that comes out of the critical space and that critiques all of it, but I want to use that to then enact change. 

And so design anthropology for me is the orientation that most resonates and it's not to say that I'm not interested in, you know, in the techniques of digital anthropology or, you know, the sort of other sub-disciplines of business anthropology such as organizational behavior, and consumer behavior, and marketing, all those things, but it's to say that I really want to enact change and so using the sort of, putting on the cap of design anthropology and thinking through with that lens, it sort of then implies a few things for me, which is co-creation, you know, intervention ultimately, so co-creating in terms of participatory research and participatory design. 

And so, you know, our research process while in many ways I'm leading it and conducting, you know, the bulk of it, it is co-created with a team that involves, you know, myself, you know, serial entrepreneur, people in the arts space, various stakeholders from the art space, other people from finance, you know, engineers, etc. And we're working on what is it that we want to understand. And then we're going out and we're designing together and to, you know, kind of create the solutions and we do that broadly in our organization, but it's especially on, you know, for on Artmatcher where it's our own product and we can really take the approach we like. 

And so that's to me, you know, the kind of the essence of design anthropology and why I'm using it. And so what that has translated to, again sort of co-creating the research agenda, co-creating the day actual designs that are coming out of it, and the designs are you know, as I think Steve Jobs said, it's not necessarily how it looks, it’s how it functions, right? So the function of all this is critical to us. And so certainly, they'll be, you know, there's user experience when everybody here designs they typically think of UX today, and there is sort of that aspect of producing visual artefacts that are going to be the, you know, the interface that people interact with and that's going to create a total experience. 

But it is also the brand and it is also the messaging. And it's also the intellectual property, you know, I wrote a patent file that based upon the model that we're going to use for the recommender system. It's all of those things, right? So, we're co-creating all of that together, designing that all together, so that we position ourselves in a market to do something, a little different to have, you know, a unique identity, to have something that hopefully can protect us intellectually, from an IT perspective, you know, against people who want to come into our space. And so that's, you know, in a broad way, how I'm trying to apply design anthropology. 

 Dawn Walter: [00:36:22]

So the art world. You've picked a really kind of interesting world to kind of try this out on anyway, because the art world's very elitist in a way that the music world isn't, you've got, isn't it? you've got so many different genres in in music and you can sort of pick and choose what you feel like listening to. Whereas, with art it’s very much, you know, you've got the gatekeepers which the curators, you know, the museum directors and people like that and galleries, that you you sort of have those those people in music but not quite to that sort of elitist degree. So I think once you've got your model worked out, you could probably transfer that to the music scene. Do you think is that kind of the idea or? 

Matt Artz: [00:37:05]

Yeah, that's my hope. So the patent is written broadly, I mean, it's focused on art and it you know, that needs to be descriptive enough so that the average, the common person, where I forget how the, at least the United States patent and trademark office, defines it, can sort of take it and rebuild it if they wanted to license it and you know, and do the same thing, so it needs to be specific. 

And so it's specific in the art space but it's broadly written in its description to talk about double-sided, or actually more so, multi-sided markets and particularly in the cultural market space. But so a multi-sided market would be, you know, Uber, Airbnb, right, anything that brings together, multiple players, the art space, which brings together buyers, gallerists, artists. Those are all multi-sided markets. Many are two-sided but you know, you could have more sides in that for sure. And then what is kind of quote unquote in the literature often times called cultural markets, which probably many listening might challenge that term from the anthropological background, but the quote unquote cultural markets are books, movies, music, etc., right. And so it has applicability to both of those the way it's designed. 

And the intention here is really to allow people to influence the model through their participation in a way that's not done in the past. So in the past, you know, obviously your likes, your watches, whatever, you know, those, those interactions whatever they may be, however they’re termed in a different system, a follow, a retweet, whatever it is, right, all of those are signals essentially, and those are fine, but most people sort of stop there. The question is, for us, and all this needs to be proven out, can you leverage, ultimately what I'm calling, sort of like the behavioral capital of every single participant, to reward them in some way, right? Can their hard work really contribute to their own success, like going back to like, you know, principles of how we think, you know, like, you know, and that, you know, going back to like almost like the entrepreneurial kind of early days where everybody produce something, you know, can your hard work, really contribute and help you get further along than it typically helps you in like say a modern corporation. 

It's kind of the question, it's you know, maybe a little bit little hopeful or you know, harking back to kind of like conceptions of, you know, you know of people who want to put in the effort and what they could get out of that in earlier days of like, you know, the American Dream and things like that, and maybe it calls on some of the that those sort of tropes if you will. But we do think that people, that their effort and their participation is valuable, not to then turn around and run an ad platform and monetize their attention. 

We don't intend to put in advertising any kind of third party advertising where we’re sort of essentially reselling their behavior in that way, you know, but can you just use that behavior to create a model that allows you to influence it. So if I was to put my music in Spotify, what could I do in that platform that would actually allow me to get seen. Today it's nothing. I just have to hope that, you know, that their algorithm picks it up and plays it for other people. It's kind of ridiculous, you know, other than of course going offline and spending money, which is a often against their terms of service, right, they don't want you spending money, I don't even think on ads, I could be wrong about that. But I don't think they want you spending money on Facebook ads to push traffic, even though everybody does it. They don't want you paying anybody to be put on a playlist, you know, they don't want you paying blogs to, you know, to get, you know, they don't want your distorting the signals in anyway, so what am I supposed to do? Just hope that the algorithm is fond of my name or something ridiculous. 

And so it's kind of, you know, it's very challenging and I imagine, you know, for anybody who's like, you know, an academic who is maybe self-publishing a book, like Ken’s publishing his, right? I mean, he's gonna have the same challenges. If he's not working his network, or advertising, or doing something like that takes money and time, how offline he has, no way of influencing it within say, Amazon, you know, other than Amazon has some text in there so you have more of an opportunity to kind of leverage like more classic SEO practices. You have, you know, whereas in the media space though like in Spotify you have a title of a song, you have very little. So that's kind of the challenge and that's what we're trying to do. We'll see, gotta test it out, but that's what we're working on.

Dawn Walter: [00:41:50]

So how far along on your journey are you and do you know any other people are kind of working on this, the same sort of thing as you, are there any many working in this space? 

Matt Artz: [00:41:59]

Well, so from an intellectual property perspective in the US we did file something that we certainly believe to be novel. There's nothing in like, you know, I'm being a little vague here because it's not yet visible on the United States patent and trademark office website, you know, I did an exhaustive search and can't find anybody doing what we're doing, especially combining sort of like is the certain elements that we’re combining in this way. So we do think that is novel, we have the basic. 

So where are we in the process is we now have the app in the store, US only, iOS Apple only in the US, Android will be rolling out in about a month. And so we'll be going international, not completely international, but we'll be going to essentially the key art markets in about a month, ahead of a big sort of December release for us down at Art Basel in Miami. And we have the basics of the recommender system that everybody has today. 

So, sort of normal implementation and then now the next phase is to sort of customize that and build out on top of it, you know what we plan to do to augment that and to essentially tamper down some of the kind of runaway consequences of a lot of models, or this Rich gets Richer, or, you know, any of those, however, it's framed, you know, the try to tamper down, some of those sort of negative outcomes that you frequently see, and do that by incorporating our model of behavior and sort of factoring that back in as something that is essentially weighted more than just algorithm, you know, then just the sort of the can doubt algorithms that exist today. 

Dawn Walter: [00:43:38]

It's really exciting. I look forward to seeing what happens with that. 

Matt Artz: [00:43:41]

Yeah. Let's do. We hope it works, of course, as in everything in technology, you have to put out their test, research, do more work, you know, learn from it, and tweak, but we're encouraged by the idea and even if this doesn't work, I do feel as if there's some value in just having the conversation about, how can we, you know, bring in, how can we value human behavior and reward people for, you know, productive effort and how can we factor that back into the broader conversation of responsible tech or responsible AI? So that we’re ultimately enabling humans, right?

I mean, like something like, say DeepMind, I mean, I'm kind of getting off base in some sense, but like DeepMind or particularly AlphaFold, which is now basically releasing the 3D. structure of all human proteins, I mean that's a wonderful thing, right? That's going to enable us to, I mean, it could be used for bad, of course as any tech, but it's going to enable us to to, you know, approach disease and even maybe wellness in a different way. Wonderful, but you know, on the flip side, if there's an algorithm or recommender system, that is the gatekeeper to our knowledge, whether that's, you know, Google searches, whether that's jobs on LinkedIn, whether that's, you know, how you get a credit card. 

Like Data and Society recently published a report on all the ways that algorithms are impacting poverty, you know, from bank loans to credit cards to, you know, to jobs. They have a serious impact on the disempowered. And so while there's wonderful things that are going to come out of AI, I'm very much concerned and how can we make sure that they enable us as a tool, which is all they are, and not the end in itself, versus, you know, be as a lot of, quite frankly, it's like a lot of engineers think that it is the end goal and that it in and of itself, it has value. But to me, it only has value if it enables us. And so I'm hoping then, I can kind of take my work and extend it into figuring out how can like, in the recommender space, can we, can we add value and for any academics listening out there, I mean, there's even touches on, you know, journal articles and how they get found, how books in libraries get found as more libraries hide the books in the basement, and all you're searching for it on a computer, but then you don't have that serendipitous find of what's next to it on the shelf right. So, all that stuff factors in here.

Dawn Walter: [00:45:55]

Thank you for bringing in that the fact that it's about responsible tech. And also the fact that, you know, as you said in your paper, you know, technology exists to enable humans, not the other way around. And I think that's a really important to keep remembering that and I, and I think that's why you are a technologist and you are an anthropologist because you bring those two things together. You don't just sort of design something, and then, oh that's it, put out to the world, you obviously thinking very carefully and deliberately about the thing that you're creating and making and putting out in the world which is, which is wonderful. 

Just wanted to know if what, my typical last kind of question is, whether you had any recommendations for books, for reading, any kind of reading that you'd recommend to people in this, who are interested in this space, whether it's recommender systems, or the Creator economy or even design anthropology. 

Matt Artz: [00:46:41]

So I would go with maybe stuff from the from design anthropology because of, I think, then you could apply it to everything else, right? You can apply that model of understanding, critiquing, understanding and then how do we do something about it. And so yeah, the famous book by Wendy Gunn, which has design anthropology in the title, but also other work by particularly the Sarah Pink. I'm very fond of so like her work on digital ethnography is very interesting. She has one that's on either media or public anthropology, I forget the exact title, but I think that's also important because you know for all the social science scientists out there listening to this podcast, which I know there's many, to me it's not about just critiquing in the academic sense, but we also got to get the message out in the mass media way. 

I think you can have one body of research that goes into all avenues, right? So it can go into journal articles, it could turn into a book but it can also be, you know, a podcast like this. It can also of course, be TED talks and you know, conference presentations, both industry and academic, and so Sarah Pink’s book, you know, is a particularly interesting read because I think we need to do more to get the word out in a clear and compelling way. Not just, you know, in a way that is so obscure and just unapproachable that nobody wants to read it or see it, you know, and so I would also encourage that book, besides the design anthropology literature, to think about how can we really help convey our message to a broader audience? 

Dawn Walter: [00:48:11]

Thanks Matt, because you're you're very passionate about moving beyond critical analysis to create change. So that's wonderful. So thank you for that reading list. Is there anything you want to say before we go. Is there anything, any kind of any encouragement you want to give to either your fellow technologists and your fellow anthropologists?

Matt Artz: [00:48:31]

I guess I would say, well one it's really interesting time, right? There's a lot of great work that we all get to do right now. We have great challenges in front of us, you know, the planet, climate change, AI, automation, you know, those are wonderful, those are really hard challenges that we need to think through critically about but there are also wonderful opportunities to maybe do something really important in our life that not only is, you know, about the work we put out but over really also about future generations.

And, you know, the overall sustainability from an ecological sense to an economic sense. And so I think it's not necessarily a time to be scared, but it's a time to work hard, right? We, you know, these are problems we can't solve, but we need to be dedicated. And maybe most importantly, we need to work together, which is another thing design anthropology really embodies. All these problems are, all these big socio-technical problems are just too large for us to tackle by ourselves. We need to work together, co-create as teams.

Dawn Walter: [00:49:29]

That's a lovely note to end on, thank you so much Matt. It's been lovely talking to you today.

Matt Artz: [00:49:34]

Really enjoyed it likewise, appreciate it very much.