We’ve handed over the keys to our culture to Silicon Valley

When my nine-yearold says the word “radio” she waggles her fingers in the air to put speech marks around it. As if it’s a thing that doesn’t really exist: something people once believed in, like Christianity or the four humours, but which now seems comically unlikely. I noticed this the other day, when we had a little tussle about whether to play pop music or Radio 4 in the kitchen. “You people!” she chuckled indulgently. “With your ‘radio’.”

One reason for this disbelief may be that we have no actual radios in our house. Like 33 per cent of UK households (an amazing statistic, considering the technology only launched five years ago), we have voice-activated smart speakers instead. The two need not be mutually exclusive, of course. You can ask Alexa to play whatever you like, including thousands of radio stations from across the world. But it’s a different beast, culturally. An actual radio – a box with antennae and a limited range of options, from which burbles a series of familiar voices – is something you can really get to know.

I sometimes worry that my children are growing up in a country with limitless cultural choice, but not much real culture at all. The digital revolution is creating a vast, pan-global but essentially American civilisation. We get our news from Facebook, arguments from Twitter, television from Netflix, shopping from Amazon, and now “audio content” from one of the three Silicon Valley robots who dominate the UK’S voice assistant market: Siri (Apple), Alexa (Amazon), and Google Assistant. These robots are characterless, but not neutral. Their algorithms decide which search results we get served. According to a new Governmentcommissioned report, some UK broadcasters are concerned that their radio stations are being downgraded by digital voice assistants, while others appear to get bumped up through paid promotion. Quite apart from these dark machinations, there’s a danger that British radio stations will simply get lost in the blizzard of content. This has already happened to BBC TV, which is almost invisible to the children of the Netflix and Youtube generation.

American culture was already dominant when I was a child. But the cultural infrastructure was still British, which meant we got to see and hear plenty of ourselves. It wasn’t always edifying: mediocrities abounded, then as now. But they were our mediocrities. Representation matters, as the social justice warriors say. You have to see it to be it!

Although Britain still produces world-class actors, directors and musicians, increasingly they go through the digital mincer of the streaming services and come out… not quite American, perhaps, but Amer-ish. Glossy and Californian, like Adele. Or transatlantically vague, like the cast and set of

Sex Education.

The best and most surprising TV show I’ve seen for ages is the BBC comedy

Alma’s Not Normal. It’s surprising not just because it manages to wring laughter from unlikely material – prostitution, heroin addiction and a childhood in care – but also because everything about it feels so British, from the Bolton accents to the grimy pebbledash and even the litter caught in the grassy verges. Another surprising thing: although the pilot episode won a Bafta, there hasn’t been much social media buzz about it. But perhaps that is inevitable. As long as our algorithms are made in Silicon Valley, our culture will be too. follow