500 Hours of Mind-pumping Action
500 Hours of Mind-pumping Action
It's a new year, and shortly after the Christmas period I found myself the recipient of an Amazon gift card. Since I've been trying to read more, it seemed a good idea to spend my gift card on some books. But what to buy? I thought it a fun little experiment to ask an LLM to recommend me books, based on ones I've read in the past.
The LLM's recommendations were fine – even uninterestingly so. What really struck me instead was the LLM's use of language; the way the recommendations were framed. One of the books I've recently read was a fantasy novel of considerable length; the LLM took this to mean that I favour long books – books with plenty of 'content', one of those nü-web words which have drawn some mockery in recent years.
In truth, I have never felt particularly drawn to long books. I am, in fact, an impatient 'consumer'. I like to engage in creative works which respect my time. There is something very satisfying to me about a concise work that does what it wants to do in the exact amount of time it needs to do it. I do not want for long things, but that does not mean that long things are necessarily bad; a more classically-minded fantasy author, for example, might deliberately take the time to demonstrate what life is like in their imagined world, to set a particular tone, to allow the reader to become engrossed in the mood. That being said, would it not be barbaric to proudly print the page count on the front of a novel? To advertise it as having plenty of 'content'? I have since found that some avid readers of genre fiction do discuss novels in this way. There are, in fact, people who long for plenty of content.
I first became aware of the word content being used in this way through spending time online. Whether you're making YouTube videos, games, amateur porn, or essays/articles like the one you're reading just now, it has become very ordinary to talk about these works as content; pure entertainment; moderately diverting shapes, colours, and sounds to 'put on in the background'.
If there was only one word to describe the time in which we live, it would be lonely. The Zeitgeist of the 20th century was families isolating themselves behind white picket fences; suspicious neighbours peering from behind curtains; lazy teenagers glued to TV screens; nations divided by walls. Through the innovations of the internet, the cheap personal computer, and the smartphone, the 21st century has brought forth a brave new world of human atomisation. More and more people are living alone in small spaces, and more and more people are working from home1. While we work from home, we need something to occupy the position of the chatty co-worker; here now is a niche in the 21st-century economy into which online content can easily slot.
The podcast and the YouTube video are among the crowning contributions of the online revolution. We have neither the time nor the energy to read; content allows us to instead passively listen. Content delivers to the consumer a person talking in their ear for hours, about whatever they want, available whenever they need. Content is the perfect product for the digital age; it is substitute social interaction, on-demand; it is the opiate for the isolated 21st-century human.
But not all commodities are cut from the same cloth. What sets one content apart from another? Is it the fine prose of the video essayist, the engaging dialogue of the podcasters? Perhaps it's the relevancy of the discussion topic – temporally relevant, maybe, but perhaps also relevant to the consumer's interests? No, I think we all know what sets one content apart from another: its quantity. Runtime is the most sought-after property of any video or podcast; algorithms and consumers alike favour content that lasts longer. It is widely understood that frequent uploaders, and uploaders of long content, will receive an 'algorithmic boost'. The ideal content creator, then, is someone who uploads hour-long content, every single day, 365.25 days a year. This naturally led us to the abject deprecation of the so-called 'video essay', through plagiarism and gratuitous third-party editing – a phenomenon which has already been discussed some years before I put these words to paper.
The mindset of the content algorithm can be seen in producers outside the medium of internet video and audio. Todd Howard has long cited the influence of 'player-generated content' when discussing the success of Fallout 4 and Skyrim. To Todd, the success of his games lies not in their story, their gameplay, nor their art direction. No; to Todd Howard, the success of Fallout 4 lies solely in its capacity for encouraging the consumer to make more stuff, more content for other consumers to consume. Todd Howard's perfect game is not a creative work which delivers a defined and intentional experience; Todd Howard's perfect game is a product with a self-sustaining, cross-generational shelf-life, allowing for multiple sale runs over the years as new game consoles and storefronts replace older ones.
The economic trends which birthed today's online content scene go back ten, maybe fifteen years. When Skyrim was first released, PewDiePie had not yet reached a million subscribers, and the idea of a 'career YouTuber' was widely scoffed at. So how is it that we arrived where we are now, where game designers chase the dream of 'forever games', where it has become ordinary and colloquial to refer to creative works as 'content', where even literature is now thought of as mere entertainment-substance to be 'consumed'? Is this good, is this bad? Should I care?
The truth is: the internet did not invent this usage of the word content. Reference to creative works collectively as 'content' has been corporate jargon for a long time2. I find it fascinating, then, that this language has become colloquial; the language of the corporate has become the language of the real. This is an ordinary and expected process; the mode of production will always influence the culture of a given society. Capitalism makes of us each our own CEO; for as long as art is made to be sold, we will always understand it as content, a substance with an exchange value, a product with a price tag. This is the world that was built for us.
Footnotes
1. Which is ultimately good, I think. I do not care for office buildings, nor the indolent landlords that own them.
2. I already mentioned Todd Howard; you may also notice figures like Bob Iger and Reed Hastings referring to their companies' products as 'content'. This is not nouveau internet jargon imposed on CEOs from below; rather, this is the language of capitalism – the corporate world has always referred to creative works in this cold, generalising way.
Comments
Post a Comment