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

Response-ability.Tech

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.