contentification

this is content about Content and that makes me feel discontent sometimes

An unsettling trend I’ve noticed is musicians and also other creatives making TikToks and Instagram Reels where they acknowledge that they’re at the whims of “the algorithm” (I put this in quotes because we talk about it like it’s a petty and ubiquitous god and I feel weird about it) and feel forced to post to be able to promote their art.

Ella Jane, an indie pop artist I vaguely follow (vaguely as in my friend once said “she seems like exactly the type of furious indie girl you’d love” and then I listened to “nothing else i could do” and enjoyed it), recently posted this TikTok/Reel in her car.

We all know this is embarrassing as fuck, to sit in our little cars and be like “here’s my song… if you like Trader Joe’s and Phoebe Bridgers and oat milk lattes and Taylor Swift and you’re a little sad and a little gay and you wanna have a little dance then listen to Ella Jane!”

She points out that the market is oversaturated and that people are tired of musicians promoting their music… but musicians still, maybe especially now, need to promote their music and are pressured to try to go viral.

I’ve also run into this sad Instagram Reel audio asking people to hit “copy link” regardless of whether they actually plan to share it in the hopes of boosting artists’ posts. I hate that people who want to make art are forced to double as influencers, to beg for engagement in increasingly desperate ways. Like Ella Jane’s TikTok notes, I don’t know what happens now that a lot of the tactics to go viral that used to work have become common practice.

Offering little tidbits of their lives as Content and silly little TikToks aren’t panning out like they used to. My fear is that the next territory for monetization is friendship or companionship with people you have a parasocial relationship with vis-a-vis Fletcher offering spots on a vacation where you get to hang out and take shots with her or an AI-based escalation of those weird celebrity text lines that seem to just be a slightly cuter push to collect phone numbers. I guess this is not unlike some Patreon tiers for creators and only slightly creepier than meet and greets. The difference in my head is that meet and greets feel like the fan is paying for the privilege to meet the celebrity, while paying to be on vacation with Fletcher feels like a situation where the fan may feel far more entitled, which scares me.

This pressure for artists to pre-package their art to follow existing market trends or aesthetics or cores sucks, to say the least. It reeks of the type of innovation that capitalism favors—minor tweaks on something that already did well in the market, and online it involves the algorithmic reinforcement of existing consumer behaviors with little to no room for real originality or creativity. If you’re not sure what I’m referring to, consider how many remakes and reboots are all over TV and film.

I don’t want any musician to feel forced or pressured to create music that is a faint echo of an amalgamation of Lana Del Rey and Phoebe Bridgers because that’s “what works.” I don’t want any musician to feel like they need to pump out 15 seconds of optimized highly produced music purely with the hopes of becoming a trending audio. They should be allowed to be their own musician. 

Music discovery becoming so algorithm-driven, just as other content discovery is, is leading to a deadening homogenization. It’s boring and suffocating to be served another middling, ambiently pleasant but wholly unremarkable song, and I don’t think that is the artist’s fault as much as it is the market’s. 

Art should be weird and doesn’t need to have mass appeal to deserve to exist. Importantly, art should be able to be weird and not have mass appeal and the artist should still be able to afford to make it without being the heir to a small fortune.

We’re also all tired of seeing artists promoting themselves and making themselves clowns for the sake of engagement because everyone else is being a clown too. We are tired of being sold things but also often the ones selling things, or ourselves. People making zero cents of profit from their social media behavior still have this impulse to post like an influencer. We joke about “sponsored content” and mock the refrain “like, comment, and subscribe!” but sometimes it feels like it comes with a “haha… jk… unless?” The New York Times covered this behavior in the context of Gen Z, interviewing a number of pre-influencer influencers who set up their Amazon storefronts and list an email for brand inquiries in case someday a brand does inquire.

I know that being an influencer can be seen as an easy additional way to make money, and I don’t fault people for being interested in the prospect. At a time of inflation and economic precarity for many people and jobs worsening in quality, there is certainly a sense of scramble and bleak girlbossery. Acquire multiple streams of income so you’ll be safe(r) if you’re laid off. Turn your hobbies into side hustles and maybe you’ll be able to cover your living expenses confidently. There’s even the pyramid-schemey industry of influencers whose primary content is teaching you how to be an influencer.

We know now more than we possibly could have a decade ago the psychological toll of being an influencer at any scale—everything in your life becomes flattened into potential capital-C Content. Content as in “any media that can pass in front of somebody’s eyes and drags it all down to the lowest common denominator: something that will engage a user for a period of time,” as Charlie Warzel put it in The Atlantic. It’s even wilder that we are now enacting that ethos whether or not the Content production is a job. We are the consumers, the producers, the snake eating itself.

I’ve seen Marshall McLuhan’s famous adage, “The medium is the message” applied to social media more often in terms of Twitter and politics than Instagram and culture. His theory was about television, and how the advent of the television fundamentally reshaped society because of how it changed our consumption of media. Television as a medium inherently requires a focus on image, and encourages passive viewing. It is a medium for entertainment, and even the news and serious subjects are viewed through that lens. In school, I was taught that televised presidential debate helped to set JFK up for victory in 1960, his charisma and good looks outshining a sweaty and gruff Nixon. But does being a handsome guy indicate very much about your ability to govern the United States?

Instagram is, of course, also an image-focused platform that does to our personal lives what television did to politics. It makes it Content. 

As the medium through which many of us consume the news, entertainment, and friend life updates in no particular order, it has become increasingly challenging to feel appropriately scaled reactions (or sometimes any reaction at all). The emotional whiplash is tricky. To quote Jia Tolentino in Trick Mirror, “The internet was dramatically increasing our ability to know about things, while our ability to change things stayed the same, or possibly shrank right in front of us.”

The influencer economy is heavily dictated by quantitative stats: views, likes, reposts, conversion rates. There are a limited set of options for responding to a piece of Content. Like it, don’t like it. Share it, don’t share it. I guess you’re permitted a slightly wider range of emotions if you still use Facebook or you scroll LinkedIn. Suffice to say, this is an extremely narrow array of responses, and I worry that over time I can feel myself defaulting to evaluating media in these simplistic terms. I only need to think for a few seconds to double-tap something. I’ve had to make a really intentional effort over the past few years to critically consider what I like and dislike, to continue to have more complex opinions that involve holding multiple ideas at once instead of calling things “interesting” or absorbing the opinions from other peoples’ reviews.

Engaging with everything as Content on Instagram prioritizes the tenuous, freighted concept of likeability first and foremost. I have to like the person to want to hear their take, listen to their music, look at their art, accept their recommendation, which really reinforces the whole everyone-is-an-influencer vibe. 

I can see how it could be argued as democratizing compared to traditional gatekept celebrity and tastemaker roles, but it feels democratizing the way that TikTok has supposedly democratized virality by “randomly” boosting tiny accounts. It makes creators increasingly dependent on trying to game the algorithm to keep their numbers up and reach people, and TikTok’s content moderation is its own can of worms.

I don’t like being trapped in here. I feel so stuck on social media, but the people who run these platforms know that and so feel fine degrading the experience further and further so they can sell more ads. It’s difficult to balance the idea of having the agency to leave with the knowledge that there are still sometimes benefits from being on social media.

I don’t totally trust myself to make predictions, but I am personally really worried about what art gets to get made and supported in the current ecosystem and what opportunities exist for artists. I think that Patreons and Substacks and the like make sense but I just cannot shell out $5/month for every person whose content I consume and enjoy. That model especially doesn’t work for music. 

Executives shouldn’t get to rake in nine-figure salaries while making dumb choices (or even if they make fine choices). That’s why members of the Writer’s Guild of America (and potentially soon the Screen Actors Guild) are striking. I don’t for a second believe that the proliferation of AI will ever make human-made art obsolete, but it can flood the market with a lot of mediocre or worse than mediocre Content and drive down the understood market value of Content. At that point, I wonder if people could ever end up opting out of the Content culture en masse. What does that look like? Can we figure out something else to do all the time? Worse, everything just goes on like this, awaiting a breaking point or an imagined savior when everything has been breaking for a long time and unfortunately savior-ing is a group project.

---

Content (not derogatory lol)

RIP Gimlet Media, it was built to end this way

Everything I learn about Mr. Beast scares me!

Good motivations maybe matter

An inability to deal with the limits of art being a part of the art fuels the Content spew. On tech, I was hoping maybe the Apple Vision Pro goggles could just fade out in Google Glass joke form but this episode of Hard Fork made me question that

The suburbs are a breeding ground for fascism. Public libraries as the last public place. If anyone wants to learn German and move to Vienna with me….

If Joan Didion saw the final unraveling, where are we now??? Living in the echoes of the music nostalgia-industrial complex

Chappell Roan on repeat recently