Justin Tranter, a 45-year-old musician who has co-written smash hits by Chappell Roan and Justin Bieber, was annoyed. Social media, in Tranter’s view, had been overrun by music listeners (especially gay ones) acting a little too opinionated.

“What do we have to do to stop my fellow homosexuals from thinking that they are music critics just because they’re gay and have a phone?” Tranter asked on TikTok earlier this year. “You know nothing about a song. You know nothing about this industry. Just be a fan.”

The video—which Tranter later took down—seemed like yet another sign that the art of reviewing the arts was in a strange state. This year has been grim for criticism: The Associated Press stopped reviewing books; Vanity Fair winnowed its critical staff; The New York Times reassigned veteran critics to other jobs; and Chicago—the city of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel—lost its only remaining full-time print-media movie reviewer when the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips took a buyout.

A wave of recent essays has laid out the concerning implications of these developments. Social media, streaming algorithms, and AI are undermining the role that salaried experts once played. With the humanities and free speech under threat nationally, critical thinking itself can seem endangered. Pondering the things that entertain us—and what those things say about our world—requires a resource that’s in short supply: attention spans.

And yet demand for cultural commentary seems as high as it’s ever been. TikTok, Instagram, Substack, Letterboxd, and podcast apps teem with analyses of movies, books, Labubus—any cultural artifact you can think of. The music critic Anthony Fantano’s YouTube following (3.05 million) dwarfs Rolling Stone’s print subscription base (414,000 as of 2023). Even national politics now revolves around topics that would have been the provenance of cultural essayists: how to interpret a jeans ad, how to curate a museum.

As Tranter’s video reflected, the very platforms that are stealing eyes away from newspapers and magazines have created a new class of self-styled critics. With this transition, the definition of the profession is in flux. The credibility of traditional reviewers came from expertise, experience, and the imprimatur of trusted publications. Today, more and more critics pay their own bills, build their own followings, and invent their own rules. Recently, I’ve been reaching out to critics—new and old—to find out what those rules are. For better and for worse, the adage “Everyone’s a critic” no longer seems like an exaggeration.

One person who felt attacked by Tranter’s complaint was a former marketing professional living in Singapore who goes by the handle Swiftologist. The 28-year-old, whose real name is Zach Hourihane, has coiffed waves of hair and a winkingly imperious way of speaking; he’s amassed hundreds of thousands of subscribers since he began making YouTube videos, TikToks, and podcast episodes d