by Gus Mitchell
(Read Pt. 1)
If there has been a decline in many parts of our culture in the last several years, and if we are increasingly bored by the infinitude of content offered us in exchange, then the blurring of art and content has a lot to do with it.
Increasingly, both societally and culturally, we can process only information, or as Mark Zuckerberg put it, via “information flow.” In the world of culture, this translates to awards, lists and listings, rankings, ratings, returns, engagement, traffic, clicks, likes, shares, subscriptions, metrics, algorithms, data, numbers. Mass culture is now nothing other than the content we feed into this nexus of informational processing.
But only imagination can transfigure information, reify it, make us feel it, make it mean or do something.
To return to that etymological ramble from last time, content in adjectival form is a feeling of a “fullness”, that feeling which Shakespeare associated with the “heart’s content.” But content, in this sense, and capitalism, are incompatible. In Capitalism and Desire, Todd McGowan writes that “those who are not continually seeking new objects of desire”, or those who “content themselves with outmoded objects and recognize the satisfaction embodied in the object’s failure to realize their desire…are not good consumers or producers” of the commodities that capitalism produces to fill the sense of emptiness it inculcates.
This emptiness, say Marx and Debord, stems partly from the erasure of real social relations with each other and with the world, the flattening of “the spectator’s consciousness, imprisoned in a flattened universe, bound by the screen of the spectacle.” The most common interpretation of Marshall McLuhan’s saying –– “the medium is the message” –– runs that the medium of communication determines (and thus is at least as important as) what is communicated.
In the light of today’s fallen digital world, it seems more apt to interpret McLuhan, as we interpret Zuckerberg (“I just want to facilitate information flow”) –– at the most blandly literal level. This can be achieved by a simple reversal and substitution of terms: the message (the content) is the medium –– the social network, platform, device –– because it transmits to us, before everything else, the desire (the necessity) of remaining tethered to it. And so, it also “aims at nothing other than itself.”
The dissolve of distinction between art with content certainly seems to be the direction in which the streaming giants want to steer us. Last year, HBO Max had to publicly apologise for their “accidentally” lumping together all the individual credits of writers, producers, directors, and other individuals behind the camera, as simply “Creators.” Warner Bros. Discovery (which now owns Max) blamed a technical mishap, but it shows just how wide the gulf between boardroom and writers-room has become. One significant factor for many in the WGA Strike was the use to which studios wish to put AI in coming years. AI-created shows would be the logical conclusion to the algorithmizing of viewing habits, reboot-franchise content models, and an ever more exclusive focus on the bottom line –– all that’s left is to dispense with troublesome human inputs entirely. Quantifiably reliable content, delivered to the consumer at the lowest possible cost.
Bo Burnham’s Inside (the best thing by far to have come out of the pandemic) recognized as nothing else yet has the compromised position of the artist turned reluctant “content creator”. In one of the comedy special’s best skits, Burnham (holding an unacknowledged knife throughout) delivers a grinningly dead-eyed monologue straight to an imagined YouTube camera: “I work really hard to bring you guys high quality content that you’ll enjoy. So, if you are enjoying it…keep watching, cause there’s a lot more content where that came from.”
Of course, there are also legions of artists, nowhere near Burnham’s profile, kidnapped by the ceaseless production-consumption cycles and the influencer’s curation of self and audience –– the “engagement” paradigm. Perhaps this is why “curation” is another mot du jour. The sheer pressures of production and self-promotion crowd out the space where originality can take root. Meanwhile, for the consumer, rejecting the algorithm requires precious time –– anxiously sifting through digital space to “curate” a way out of the overwhelming, ever-increasing tide of shit. (Or else default to the model of preference-reinforcing, vibes-based, passive consumption.) In both cases, the work of “curation” is the antithesis of the original artistic impulse: spontaneity, genuine absorption, surrendering to an aesthetic engagement.
Everything about content’s ceaseless flow presses us towards the skimming mindset, to demand the nub and the quick, consume and move on lest we fall behind. How can culture – or even information, for that matter – sink into us, hang around and fill us up, change us, when everything is only ever a turn of the treadmill toward something else? The porous ephemerality of online hours –– am I working, am I looking for information, am I being entertained, am I seeking intellectual or emotional nourishment, all, or none of these at any one moment? –– is mirrored in the fleeting bittiness of content itself. You listen to a podcast or consume three videos in quick succession (mind and ears sieve-like) in the morning and cannot repeat a word of their contents by the evening.
In many ways, the universal addiction of today is an addiction to information in all senses, information for its own sake. (Video, podcast, articles, or pieces, constant, barely listened to Spotify wallpaper our waking hours, but the following day we can’t recall a thing any of them contained.) The constant availability of content anywhere and everywhere fosters a kind of passivity which negates digestion.
This core feature of content –– indigestibility from insubstantiality –– isn’t a novel observation, but it does help explain why content is a word beloved by executives and, increasingly, a kind of subtle pejorative in the wider culture. We know that we’re swapping empty calories for any chance at more nourishing vegetables, but we can’t seem to stop either. To some extent, the language is already adapting to grasp this understanding of content’s implications. Now, when I hear someone describe something as “great content” I know that it translates to something like: ‘this might be embarrassing dreck, but it’s fun, or, at least, funny.”
For more and more people (corporate-speak hasn’t quite caught up to this yet) the wisdom in the vernacular has already degraded “content” into an insult. (Even when used by those same corporates, content’s inherent emptiness is increasingly betraying itself anyway. At the latest Cop Conference, where the meat industry had a heavy presence, DeSmog reported on the lobby’s push for “positive livestock content” to be presented to delegates.)
Content is anything and everything that fills the ever-emptying void, refills and then fills it again. The void is threefold. It is the limitless and frictionless medium of the internet itself and its attendant platforms and devices. There is the inescapable emptiness of content itself, a void from a glut. Finally, there is the void growing inside us, made in the image of both.
Artists across all media speak of a successful piece of work as a harmony of form and content. Whatever meaning the work has, in fact, is this symbiosis. A painter, a filmmaker, a composer, chooses or finds for themselves a certain set of limitations, which become the starting point for the world of each work. Most artists will also affirm the necessity of constraint in some form, the limiting of infinite possibility as in itself generative of their creativity. In other words, to finally come around to content the verb, artists content themselves. They must strive to express, aware that their expression can only ever be a part, a fraction, a nutshell in infinite space.
But that part, as any attentive listener, viewer or reader will attest, so often seems to contain a complete fullness of meaning.