You Morons, Of Course Gatekeeping Serves A Vital Role

Lincoln Michel on How the Dreaded Gatekeepers Are Necessary to Sift Through the Culture

Dear Republic,

We continue our debate on Gatekeeping. Yesterday,

Courtney Sender

made the anti-Gatekeeper argument. Today, the Gatekeepers strike back.

-ROL

YOU MORONS, OF COURSE GATEKEEPING SERVES A VITAL ROLE

I’m not someone constitutionally inclined to side with “gatekeepers.” Nearly all the work I love—from DIY punk band and underground hip-hop to translated literature and Surrealist art—has come from countercultures outside the mainstream. But when Sam Kahn asked me if I’d be interested in writing a defense of gatekeepers for this newsletter, I said yes. Not because I think gatekeepers are inherently great. But because the alternatives have proven to be little better. And perhaps much worse.

We should first acknowledge “gatekeepers” don’t guard gates anymore. The metaphor conjures people who block access to public spaces, like dour guards at the entrance of a park deciding who gets to have a picnic that day. Perhaps this used to be the case. In decades past, one couldn’t, for example, publish a book for the general public without getting past a gauntlet of gatekeepers: agents, editors, publishers, and so on. Even a self-published author would need to get through distributors and bookstore buyers. The countercultural work I love was gatekept in this sense. Small presses and underground labels are still presses and labels, after all. Today, the gates are optional. Want to publish a book without a publisher or agent? Upload your file to the Kindle store. Want to share your visual art without a gallery? Post it on social media. Etc. In 2025, anyone with access to a laptop and WiFi can bypass all gates and share their art or content with the world.

Traditional gatekeepers still exist, but we can no longer claim they prevent access to the public. In the largest and most commercial spaces, much of their job involves chasing and recruiting already popular self-published authors, viral musicians, influential podcasters, and the like. In more literary or artistic spaces, gatekeepers function more like curators for an ever-dwindling readership. Professional critics, award judges, and establishment tastemakers—other types of gatekeeper in the eyes of many—also remain yet have never been more irrelevant. Viral TikToks and corporate marketing campaigns determine financial success far more than magazine reviews.

In many ways, the artistic freedom of this ungated culture is great. I want everyone to be able to produce and share art. I’ve personally had success self-publishing and running a newsletter. Still. Who believes we are in an era of flourishing creativity in American culture? That our films, novels, and musicians are better than ever? If you do, well, I am happy for you. Enjoy. But if you, like me, fear we’re instead trapped in a culture of endless reboots, repetitive memes, barely-edited bestsellers, and TV that is so boring it is intentionally made to be consumed in the background, then we should think about why.

There are more factors than one article can handle, but one is that the bypassing of gates has dramatically exacerbated an existing issue with art and culture: there is too much of it. There is more work put into the public sphere each day than anyone could get through in a lifetime. Take books as an example. Penguin Random House, the largest of the Big 5 American publishers, is said to publish fifteen thousand print books and seventy thousand ebooks a year. Add in the other Big 5, indie presses, university presses, and traditional publishing puts out over half-a-million titles. Self-published books surpassed 2.6 million per year before ChatGPT came onto the scene. We’re at 3 million books a year, or over 8,000 a day, before even getting to things like fan fics much less magazine articles, newsletters, blogs, and then movies, music, TikToks, theater, video games—you get the point.

Calls to “judge for yourself!” or “make up your own mind!” are nice but literally meaningless. The raw math is that we can make up our minds about only a tiny fraction filtered out of the daily global flood. A flood that is swelling exponentially as AI enables the automation of spam and slop to trick readers. The question becomes how do we filter out this ocean of work?

One way is to trust curators (or “gatekeepers”) to help you. There are many sets of curators out there. You can find ones whose tastes are aligned with yours. Maybe they’re the judges of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize or maybe they’re editors of weird presses devoted to dense translated literature. Perhaps they are downstream, friends you trust for recommendations who themselves follow the curators. Maybe it’s a critic who reviews only self-published books, filtering the good ones out of the vast Kindle Unlimited sea. But if you don’t trust some form of curators or gatekeepers, what are you left with?

Most who eschew them follow the supposed wisdom of the crowds and/or corporate algorithms—two sides of the same coin these days. They look at bestseller rankings and viral TikToks and the work “everyone is talking about.” They are the popularists, and they dominate the culture today.

There are plenty of problems with the curators, especially in the most mainstream and ossified institutions. Their taste is too safe. They follow trends. They care more about profit than art. But all these flaws are even more pronounced among the popularists. Curators tends to have at least some interest in the art forms they work in. They want to put out good and interesting work. The market has no such interests. What’s popular comes down to what appeals to the largest number of people, and thus what is most generic. Even worse, what is popular is easily manipulated by money. Whether it is self-published authors paying for reviews to rig the algorithms or brands hiring influencers to shill their work or corporations launching massive marketing campaigns, what’s popular is ruled by money not merit.

The “snobby” curators aren’t immune to money either—there is plenty of overlap between award-winning books and publicity campaigns—but there is at least a counterbalance in a sincere interest in the art form. This is especially true just outside the mainstream. In publishing, the most innovative literature today is put out by small presses. Those presses also produce virtually all the translated literature, which might cease to exist in America if they disappear. Often these presses are non-profits that rely on the funding of donors (and the NEA before the current administration) and are staffed by underpaid workers and volunteers. But they exist to put out work that would not get attention, would not even exist, if art was left to the markets and algorithms.

So far, I have been making a very defensive case for curators. “They’re the worst judges of art, except for all the others.” I want to end with a more active endorsement. Again, the metaphor of gatekeepers implies guards unfairly keeping artists out of public spaces. But curators are often integral to creating new spaces. When editors produce a literary magazine with a specific aesthetic or form a small press devoted to an overlooked genre, they aren’t walling off the commons. They aren’t gatekeeping anything. They are creating a unique space where new work can grow, and a new set of artists can thrive.

Art isn’t really created by lone geniuses in the void. Sure, a few of those exist. But mostly, innovative artists with new ideas thrive as parts of specific communities supported by, well, “gatekeepers.” Underground labels, independent magazines, DIY show spaces, small presses, and so on. These curators help create spaces for new ideas to grow. It is only later that the old guard curators and the markets catch on, if they ever do.

Most people who rail against gatekeepers probably do not really hate the idea of curators selecting work. It’s simply not possible to produce a magazine, press, gallery, label, show space, or anything else without filtering. What they take issue with are the most powerful and influential curators with their staid, establishment tastes. Fair enough. But I think we’ve seen that the markets and algorithms do not produce anything better, especially as the infinite flood of content swells each day. New styles and new ideas tend to come from new spaces. By artists, communities, and curators working together to create areas for artistic experimentation and enjoyment. This necessarily means putting up some barriers to filter out the flood. Some gates, if you will. But it does not mean preventing people with other tastes and other ideas creating their own spaces. The key, I think, is simply finding the spaces that most appeal to you—and then helping them grow however you can.

Lincoln Michel

’s newest novel, Metallic Realms, was published by Atria Books this May. His previous books are the story collection Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press) and the novel The Body Scout (Orbit). He co-founded the literary magazine Gigantic and co-edited the anthologies Gigantic Worlds, Tiny Crimes, and Tiny Nightmares. He writes the weekly Substack newsletter Counter Craft.