There was a moment, in the eerie quiet of the first lockdown, when a hopeful narrative began to form. It was whispered in Zoom meetings, proclaimed in broadsheet think-pieces, and echoed in the sudden, desperate cheerfulness of institutional newsletters. The year 2020, we were told, would be a great reset. The pandemic, by shuttering the galleries, silencing the theatres, and grounding the rock bands, would force a radical reimagining of culture. A new, more democratic, more innovative, and more diverse landscape would bloom in the ruins of the old world.
What a load of rubbish.
Viewed from the cold, sober light of the present day, that narrative reveals itself for what it was: a comforting lie we told ourselves whilst the foundations of our creative life were being systematically dismantled. The thesis is a simple and brutal one. The great creative reset of 2020 never happened. Instead of birthing a new Eden, the pandemic acted as a powerful accelerant, pouring fuel on the three most destructive fires already raging in the British cultural industries: the atomisation of the audience, the homogenising tyranny of the algorithm, and the corporate commodification of social dissent. What we were left with was not a renaissance, but a profound and lasting impoverishment.
The most visible change, celebrated at the time as a triumph of ingenuity, was the great migration online. With our bodies confined to our homes, our consciousness floated free in the digital ether. We were, according to Ofcom, spending over four hours a day online, mainlining culture through the IV drip of streaming services, social media, and gaming platforms. The hopeful narrative saw this as a new form of public square. But it was nothing of the sort. It was a mass retreat into private, algorithmically-curated solitary confinement.
The Ghost Audience
Culture is, or should be, a communal act. It is the shared gasp in a darkened cinema, the collective roar at a festival, the subtle, shifting energy in a packed gallery. It is the friction of bodies and ideas in a shared space. The digital culture of 2020 replaced this with an ersatz, frictionless substitute. The virtual concert, like the Together at Home event, was not a shared experience; it was millions of individual experiences, happening simultaneously. The audience was a ghost audience, its presence inferred through a scrolling comment feed but never truly felt.
This atomisation had a catastrophic effect on British artists. A musician can survive on the memory of applause, but they cannot pay their rent with it. The complex ecosystem of small venues, skilled technicians, tour managers, and merchandise sellers – the very bedrock of our world-beating live music scene – was not just paused; it was decimated. In its place, the streaming giants, who had already been gutting the value of recorded music for a decade, tightened their grip. Artists were reduced to being content creators for platforms that paid them a pittance, forced into a desperate new role as social media personalities to stay relevant. The pandemic didn’t create this problem, but it damn well near perfected it.
The hopeful will point to the nimble pivots, the lockdown-born creations like the comedy series Staged. I confess, I watched Staged and found it charming, a clever and witty response to an impossible situation. But it was a life raft, not a new type of ship. It was a testament to the resilience of its creators, certainly, but its format was dictated entirely by the limitations of the pandemic. It was not an innovation; it was a compromise. The legacy of 2020 is not that we found new ways to make art, but that we accepted inferior facsimiles of the real thing and allowed tech companies to become the unassailable gatekeepers of our entire cultural life.
The Curated Conscience
The second great promise of the reset was that it would usher in a new era of diversity and representation. The global shockwave of the Black Lives Matter movement, coinciding with the pandemic, forced a long-overdue reckoning within Britain’s creative industries. The statistics were, and remain, appalling. The conversation was urgent and necessary. But what happened next was a masterclass in corporate absorption.
Instead of genuine, structural change, what we got was a flurry of diversity schemes, black-square Instagram posts, and hastily commissioned content designed to signal virtue. Dissent was not engaged with; it was greenlit. The raw, righteous anger of a social movement was processed through the risk-averse, box-ticking machinery of the creative industries and turned into a product. It became a new genre, a new marketing demographic. The industry learned to perform wokeness with the same cynical efficiency it had previously used to sell us soap powder.
Perhaps I’m being too cynical, but this process served to defang the very movements it claimed to champion. A genuinely radical film about racial injustice is one that challenges the viewer and the structures of power. A film commissioned by a streaming service to fill a ‘diversity’ slot in its content library is, by its very nature, a compromised and domesticated object. Its radicalism is pre-approved. Its edges have been sanded down to make it palatable for a global subscriber base. The algorithm, which rewards familiarity and abhors genuine disruption, ensures that even our revolutions will be comfortably formulaic.
This is the grim synthesis of our age: the logic of the algorithm has merged with the performance of social justice. Both are about pattern recognition and risk mitigation. Both serve to flatten complex realities into predictable, consumable packages. The legacy of 2020 is a creative landscape where it is easier than ever to find content that affirms your identity, but harder than ever to find art that genuinely challenges it.
The pandemic provided the perfect cover for this cultural consolidation. As independent arts organisations folded and freelancers were cast adrift, the monolithic tech platforms and established media giants grew stronger, their vast resources allowing them to weather the storm and absorb the wreckage. They got away with it. They emerged from the crisis not just unscathed, but more powerful and more deeply entrenched in the fabric of our lives than ever before. We were promised a wildflower meadow of diverse, independent creation. What grew back was a tough, invasive monoculture, nourished by data and designed for addiction. The great reset was, in the end, just a reboot of a system that was already failing us.
