every blight that afflicts our present culture can be rooted in this loathsome word, 'content'. how can anyone self-describe the flower of their creative spirit, their Geist, their humanity - as content - and not die a million deaths? and why have we need for 'content' at all? to stultify us, to drive us to consume, a stifling torrent of arbitrary self-reference, like insulation foam sprayed from a paint gun, expanding tumerously between the hours of wake and sleep. phone by bedside table. content dawn til dusk. video content youtube doc video essay. song content music drop new content deluxe new release. content man on content app looks for content woman. swipe. swipe. the content does not improve. content food new content deal new cuisine content new menu deal. content job produces content. new content needed by friday. content sport new content twice the sport and twice the content race on saturday play on thursday wear the hat content shirt content. content on the whiteboard at the metro station. brainstormed and written at five each morning. fifteen million impressions on the web. when I hear the word 'content' I reach for my gun, or I would, if I had the energy
Sometimes a work is such utter rubbish that there is nothing else to call it, other than content.
when someone says "content" they just mean "my job." they don't think their geist is being expressed at all. it is what it is.
As an elder millennial I want to point out that we, as the last generation who tried to major in humanities, graduated into a job market in which the only way we could apply our skills was to do hack writing for a pittance and hope that someone involved had the SEO skills to drive enough traffic to satisfy the actual clients (microadvertisers). The English major class of '09 got paid $15 a day to write /content/ and that was the best option around by a country mile. Unless you were a young person during the recession, you have no idea what we were driven to do.
People need money to live. Can't get around it. The endless slop is more of a symptom of the rot, but I do agree it's an accelerant.
The flip side of the original post is that this is something we by and large actively ask for. Content is not something solely being done to us, it is something we request in ever increasing helpings. If the creation mill is the feed then we're eager little geese with our throats open to the lavage. That's why there's no money in it, if people were asking for the flower of the creative spirit you could earn money putting yours out there
I am sceptical of the extent to which we 'ask' for anything in our modern economies. More like, the manner in which we live is dictated to us by corporations. Either that or we opt out of consumer society and try and eek out some sort of hermetic existence, entirely alienated from everyone around us. Which is hardly any better.
>>635 >>637 Everyone bears responsibility for oneself, but there is a lot of effort in painting shit in gold. Just look at most of the food sold nowadays. Most of it is not actual food, just a combination of fat+sugar+caffeine; it's pornographic food, a series of close-ups of potent ingredients. Coming from a country with a proper mean BMI (as in: a candy is a weekly treat), I understand that if you grow up around this, you lose all sense of normalcy and it can take a lifetime to correct. >Which is hardly any better. How come?
>>644 I agree with you. The fast food / fast content equivalence is very obvious and has been drawn since at least the 1980s, but is also in many ways correct. My point is that besides the inherent inertial difficulty of living a lifestyle that cuts against the grain of society and culture, there are also substantial social downsides. When the people around you live off chicken nuggets and tiktok, choosing not to consume these things can be isolating. People will regard it as contrarianism at best or holier-than-thou righteousness at worst. Congrats on living in a country that is not obscenely addicted to ultra-processed foods (I am also in this lucky position), but I would guess that the same is not true of people's media diets. Not watching the current netflix slop-de-jour can not only make it hard to connect with other people, but can actually antagonise them. You can find yourself in the weird position of having to debase yourself - 'oh I don't watch that, but don't worry, I waste my life too!' - or else people will think you are claiming superiority. The interesting thing about slop is that everyone with three brain cells to rub together knows deep down that it's slop. But that understanding is often buried very deep under various strata of cope. Even gesturing towards the existence of this buried knowledge can make people feel like you're sticking a spade into their psyche.
>>645 Honestly, there is an art to be your own man/woman. Choosing to cut off what you know to be bad (despite everyone around you acting like it is good) is just the first step. The second one is to not preach, then not even justify yourself (with time, you can eventually lose that urge to debase yourself), and at some point you realise you're not even part of slop-related conversations (yet you still are among people immersed in it; it's like you emit some sort of anti-slop radiations, people don't even talk about it when you're there). I believe in the "live by example" principle, and I (now) find that it works eventually: you get rid of the slop, then you get rid of the mental slop (you stop expecting people to ask you about your relationship with it), and eventually, you stop finding yourself in the vicinity of slop. Then, time passes, and one day someone tells you : Oh, I gave up this or that, when I saw that you made it work, I realize it was possible. This takes years, but it is everything: just by existing according to your principles, you gave someone (and yourself) some room to be themselves, and they didn't even know it was there. And this works because of the buried knowledge you mention. You can act as a living reminder of it. (slop is a ridiculous word. I think you'll get my point nevertheless)
>>647 this phenomena is really quite an experience. it's almost like you've carved your own reality surgically around others. you are explicitly asking to be removed from some social element by being unable to speak on the subject. truthfully, we can't create our own reality. but that doesn't mean we can't craft and shape what reality already exists around us.
>>647 >>648 I believe this can happen in a tight friendship group. If you're talking about four or five close friends who see each other multiple times a week for years on end, certainly it is possible for even one person to augment the social culture. But when it comes to larger, looser groups, like co-workers, sports teams, hobby groups, etc., I think you would need to have an unusual amount of charisma and social capital to achieve this. Again, I don't dispute that it's possible. But the idea that it happens almost as a certainty if you simply perform unconsciousness of commodity media for a long enough time seems far-fetched. Also, don't you think this can backfire? If you misjudge your social capital you just come off as a sperg who is unable to talk about anything other than your own interests, or even worse, people conclude you're deliberately being haughty and pretentious.
>>649 i've found that the trick to not coming off as a sperg because you can't talk about football is to simply not demean football. that's really the trick, actually. but the idea isn't to necessarily click with these kinds of people, but to be friendly so they introduce you to their other "weird" friends. i think it takes a while, but if you maximise relationships with these sort of people with whom you just immediately mesh and who aren't staring endlessly into the spectacle then you can build it steadily over time. because i've sent letters, responded to texts, said hello, i can just visit friends in other cities and immediately be in some scene that's not just the river north equivalent
>>651 I don't disagree. But not demeaning football means at least entertaining the conversation about football, which is somewhat at odds with the strategy of signalling indifference which was suggested above. In fairness to football I think it can hardly be lumped in with the worst excesses of popular culture and mass media. I don't know which football you're talking about specifically but in any case, I think a deep and sincere passion for sport is actually a pretty healthy interest for someone to have. Sport is a very fine part of human culture and someone who is able to sit down and properly watch a whole football game (that is to say, without checking twitter or bet365) probably has less tech-induced brainrot than 85% of the population.
>>652 hah, i was just using football as a stand-in. truthfully, i don't think its possible to get through life without having conversations you didn't want to be in. not without being a complete shut-in. someone walks up to you and says something like "Thomas McDavelport got moved teams again," you can say, "oh, I hadn't heard" and this guy is gonna yap about mcdavelport and then now he's +1 affection for you and all that stuff. highly recommend the "wait, can you tell me about that?" people love gabbing.
>>653 Yeah you're not wrong. You can actually be pretty socially deficient but so long as you're able to summon a bit of genuine interest in the things that people want to talk to you about they'll still have a good opinion of you by and large. There's also the reciprocity principle. Everyone at some point in their lives will find themselves burning to talk about something that may be of pretty niche interest to those around them, and if you're in that situation it's nice if people are willing to humour you. Obviously I'm not suggesting to deliberately bore people. But unless you're Oscar Wilde you can't always be the font of sparkling wit and insight.
>>649 >But the idea that it happens almost as a certainty if you simply perform unconsciousness of commodity media for a long enough time seems far-fetched. I have seen it work in various social settings, but it takes time. And more importantly: converting others is not the point. The point is to live your life according to your principles. If you're respectful of others, they'll tend to be respectful of you and what they might see as quirks. But too much concern about others means you'll never get rid of the slop, since you're not ready to lose the interest of the people attached to it. I don't care if I come off as a..., why would I care about the opinion of people that live very different lives from mine? >Also, don't you think this can backfire? Everything has a cost, but thinking you can have it all and never have to make an eliminating choice is much more costly in my experience. At that point, this is just conformity by fear of missed opportunities; actual Buridan's ass life. >>653 It's not about not having the conversation, rather, having someone explaining it to you from the start. I'm polite. If my coworker starts talking about that tv guy latest tabloid news, I say nothing, if she keeps talking at me, I ask "who is he?" (and not "who?" - this is not a defiant, higher-than-thou question; I like her, she talks about it, I'm curious). By doing so, you establish that no one has to pretend to know that tv guy, you remind everyone we are not in a world where knowing that guy is a necessity. And then she has to explain in detail and it looks like your 14yo self explaining a meme to your grandmother or to your teacher; there is no substance to it, so the conversation fizzles, and the topic changes. (And sometimes there is substance to it - the coworker is moved by this or that because it reminds her of that episode of her life, and then we talk about her etc.) In short: treat people like children telling you about the latest news from the playground. You only care because it involves the child, and you're polite, but you have your own life, this doesn't concern you.