against content

I want to make my life into art, not content.

“What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art.”

-Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 1964

i. instructions

Post every day. Have a posting schedule and stay consistent. Use this trending audio now and double your views. Make sure to reply to all your comments. Engagement is key. Sharing is key. We’re noticing that users are moving their engagement to DMs. You can track where your content goes by working from the bottom of the screen up. Make content that users will want to send to each other over DM. DM me for links to this outfit. Encourage engagement by asking followers questions. This audio is about to blow up. If you get to 10k, you can join the creator’s fund. Be authentic. Post every day.

ii. content

I am looking at image of a girl stuffing her face with noodles. Her eyes are wide, her mouth replaced by the orange mass of noodle and rice cake and cheese held together by chopsticks. The video is paused, but I can hear all of its sounds: the slurping and mmms and chewing while royalty free music plays softly in the background. This is an image you do not have to look far to find online. Pretty girls stuffing their faces are one of the predominant images guaranteed to elicit interest, clicks, likes, comments.

She is making this video, she tells us, because her job is to eat unhealthy food. She is a food creator — meaning that she creates content about food, not that she is a chef. She makes this content every single day, her living a spectacle that can be distilled down to: can you believe how much this girl can eat day after day and still stay skinny?

I got an iPhone when I turned 18. They had just come out and I was moving to a big city for college, so it made sense to get a phone that also had a map and a camera and texting and the Internet on it. Back then, the social Internet was not unfamiliar for a teenager who had spent her free time on LiveJournal or YouTube hoping that no one would come down the steps to the basement to find me watching Christina Aguleria’s “Beautiful” or recording how many calories I had eaten that day for my friends on LiveJournal. The idea of putting anything about your real life on the Internet was still embarrassing. The slew of terms for people who posted their lives online — bloggers, vloggers, Instagrammers — sounded clunky and made up. No one aspired to tell people that they made video webblogs about their life.

By the mid-2010s, there was a shift. The people who posted online were now content creators or sometimes just creators, a term that had no allegiance to platform or object but was opaque enough to embody it all — the webblogs, the videos, the memes, the Instagram posts — while also implying that uploading yourself to the Internet was an inherently creative act. You weren’t just taking pictures and posting them anymore. You were creating content.

The use of the word content dates back to the 14th century, French (contenter, “satisfied”) mixed with Latin (comtener, “to hold together”). The term is slippery and imprecise, even in its origins — never quite referring to the thing itself that is held or contained. The dual use — as a noun indicating the thing contained and as a verb or adjective meaning satisfied — doesn’t escape me. If we can fill up the empty space around us, we will at last be satisfied. Isn't that always the promise?

When Susan Sontag wrote about content in her 1964 essay “Against Interpretation,” the word was just gaining traction again in our vocabularies. With more Americans going to college than ever before and the idea of a liberal arts education — in which students not only took the classes required by their major, but also had to make space in their schedule for general education courses in the sciences and humanities — reshaping the American university, a hidden world was being revealed to the hundreds of thousands of students across the country entering college classrooms.

Students were no longer being taught to merely see a film, a piece of artwork, a novel, a poem or a play. Suddenly, they were invited to look behind the artwork, to decode its hidden messages. Art, as Sontag points out in her essay, was no longer just an experience to be had, but a set of signs and signals to be interpreted. Art was the vessel for its content. A pretty jar where we trapped something that was much, much more meaningful.

And Sontag hated it, this idea of art as vessel, as something to be interpreted, forced into meaning.

I do not feel envious of this girl, the one who films everything she eats, making the same contended sighs with each bite. I do not want her life (“I get paid to eat!”) or her followers or her money. I want to know if she has enjoyed a meal in the time she has been filming herself eating and posting it online. I want to know what her mom used to make her when she was sick or what food she eats when no one is looking. But she will never tell me this. Instead, she smiles at me through the camera.

“No days off!” she says before describing to me the “viral cucumber salad” she plans to eat later that day.

iii. filter

I watch my face through a filter. I flick the filter on and then I shut it off again. I want to see how close this filter is to my real face. I think to myself: if I have to post, I’m just going to have the filter on. Who gives a shit if this isn’t my real face? This isn’t my real life anyway. Behind me, hundreds of hours of videos of women flicking filters on and off their faces, giggling and protesting and acting shocked or outraged or just demoralized, seem to play all at once. I am letting them down. I do it anyway.

But something strange begins to happen the more I appear online with this face that is mostly my face but a little bit different. Slowly, I begin to expect that when I look in the mirror, I will look like her. My mental image of myself begins to degrade. I no longer understand my face as what it is. I understand it as something slightly different than what it is, something I can change to create the conditions that will sustain attention online.

I want you to pay attention here. I need you to post this. To quote it. To circulate it and share it with your followers and their followers ad infinitum. This is the important part: Content is degradation.

Think of leaving something in a jar for too long. Without air, cut off from the world, the contents of the jar will begin to rot. We have created such a vacuum on the social Internet, each screen a little window into which we can watch (and experience) the slow degradation of human behavior and relations and emotions. I swipe past an influencer on her way to Disney in a hurricane and I feel nothing. I swipe past a family whose house has been destroyed and I feel nothing. I swipe past some girls doing a dance and I feel nothing. This was not how it used to be.

Everything on the Internet trends towards entropy and decay. We have a new word for this thanks to novelist Cory Doctorow: enshittification. We’ve built digital Pantheons and let them slip into ruin, he argues. Platforms we once thought would be there forever, now hollowed out by bots and memes and strings of code that barely make sense anymore.

Doctorow writes and talks about platforms and users, but I have a suspicion that the same is true of content. When I was younger, I used to make zines, which are shitty, self-published little books where you can write about anything and feel about anything and think about anything and then take it to a photocopier and print it off and give it to your friends. I heard about a comic strip that was so popular that people Xeroxed it forever, and with each copy that was made, the image slowly degraded, becoming less and less legible. This is a material example of what happens online with content. See a dance, do the dance do the dance do the dance do the dance. See the clickbait do the clickbait do the clickbait do the clickbait do the clickbait. Until it means nothing anymore.

As enshittification happens to content, if we view still view that making of content as making, as creating, then it’s no longer just the code that’s going to degrade. It’s our behavior, our feelings, our interactions with one another.

My face is my face and then it’s not. I’m starting to lose an understanding of what I really look like. Enshittification of the self, I guess.

iv. language

I’ve spent most of my life trying to find the right words, and using the wrong ones has always cost me dearly.

For those who make content for a living, the wrong words cost them, too. There is an entire dictionary of words you cannot say online now, but no one knows how to find it. They can only tell if they’ve stumbled across the wrong word by view counts declining, demonetization, shadowbanning. And so, they’ve created their own language, twisted ours to sneak past the algorithm so they can keep making money, keep their viewers engaged.

Unalived. Grape. SA-ed. Corn. Seggs. Panini press.

This is the decay.

v. feedback loop

Do you remember when all the girls got sick? They started twitching and snapping and whistling and hitting themselves and swearing at the sky or their boyfriends en mass. This was only a year or two ago.

In 2021, girls started showing up in doctor’s offices displaying tics similar to those in patients suffering from Tourette syndrome. These teenage girls did not have Tourettes themselves, but they were spending hours watching other teenagers online whistle and swear and hit and tic on TikTok. The users on TikTok got hundreds of thousands of views for displaying their tics online. And with the views came attention and money and social capital. Unable to control the urge to imitate, the girls watching began to tic themselves.

It would be too easy to say the girls who adopted the tics they consumed online were just doing it for attention. Consumption had led to compulsion, the phantom of a disorder they didn’t have. And for the girls making the content, they found themselves in a difficult position because displaying their tics online as consumable content was making them money, helping them find community, helping them feel like they belonged for once. All that is hard to let go of.

Blurring the boundaries between living and consuming in this way transfigures every part of our lives — the tragedy, the hardship, the joy — into something to be watched and commented upon. Imitated but never empathized with. The doctors treating the tic-ing girls back in 2021 found that the more time they spent off of social media, the less severe their tics. When they stopped consuming tic content altogether, the tics stopped.

Turning our life into content, all the complexity of being human becomes something other viewers can tune in and tune out from at will. This became clear to me this past week, as another hurricane swept through Florida and I anxiously watched people on TikTok livestream the storm. My feed became an endless scroll of people telling me why they couldn’t leave, why they refused to leave, what the storm surge would be like. I watched women take their children to Disneyworld, their faces set against the storm with a determination that is uniquely American. We will have a good time no matter what. This is our moment.

In the comments, viewers fretted. I’ll come back to see if you live, they wrote. I’ll come back in the morning to check on you. There’s, like, 20 people on social media that I’m watching to see if they survive.

vi. garden

In my dreams, I am an old woman tending to her garden. I let my garden go to shit this summer, weeds crawling up to choke the lilac bushes someone planted here before me, so that’s why I know it’s a dream. But like me, the old woman has long hair that’s unwieldy and often tangled. Like me, she is always looking at the world with some degree of skepticism. She doesn’t fully trust what’s out there, but she’s content to tend to her own little corner.

The garden as a metaphor is very persuasive when we’re talking about the social Internet. Gardens give us the illusion that nature is something we can control and prune and make into something beautiful by our standards. I think we want to believe the social Internet is the same. That with a little tenderness, a little curation, a little attention, we can get it to grow the way we want. The problems we’re having right now — AI, enshittification, the commodification of crisis — these are all just weeds to be cut back.

But there is no apt metaphor for what the social Internet is doing to us. We are not in a garden like I am in my dreams. We are in a place where entertainment has become the living and those human qualities that were once beyond commodification — attention, creativity, empathy, to name a few — are now capital.

When I was 18, the same year I got my first iPhone, I worked at a bookshop. I would bike through the cornfields to get there, my satchel balanced on my hip. That summer, I was reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, a novel that is infamously long and difficult and fragmented but which a lot of cute boys I had met online and in person seemed to like. I carried it with me, all 1,000 or so pages, as I biked back and forth from work to home.

In the novel, there is this film called “the Entertainment” that unfurls before the viewer, stretching towards infinity. Viewers of “the Entertainment” become so enraptured with it that they forget everything else. They forget to eat and live. They forget to hug their family. They forget and then they decay and then they die.

The summer I read Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace killed himself. He had been told by a doctor to get off his antidepressant and when he tried to get back on it, it didn’t work anymore. In remembering him, critics and scholars and other writers cast him as an extremely earnest, troubled person, a writer who had looked too closely at our modern world and had maybe paid the price for doing so. It’s more romantic to look at life and death this way, I think. But really, as a writer, that is just our job. We have to look at the world and be honest about what we see.

My face for the algorithm. My language for the content. My body for likes. My empathy for monetization. Under these conditions, I can’t promise you much. But I’ll keep coming back for you in the morning. I’ll check your pulse. I’ll try, as best as I can, to help you keep living.

Thank you thank you thank you for reading! It really does mean everything to me to have found readers who engage with my long form writing. This essay has been on my mind for forever and I appreciate the space to share it. All the images are pictures of fangirls screaming at The Beatles and Elvis concerts. I was looking at them while researching something for my book and for some reason they just felt appropriate for this essay.

As usual, I wanna shout out the essays on here and elsewhere that got me thinking about all this. Some of these essays I’ve been carrying in my chest for years, so if you haven’t read them, I highly encourage you to go seek them out.

Essays from elsewhere:

• Ofc, “Against Interpretation” by Susan Sontag was my main inspo. I read this essay years and years ago in college and didn’t understand a word of it because I was blacked out on mental illness with no medication. I’m grateful I got the opportunity to re-read it in a saner state.

• “E Unibus Plural: Television and U.S. Fiction” by my fellow pisces David Foster Wallace has been a forever re-read, always on my mind type of essay that I’ll never get tired of. Every time I go on the Internet, I think: What would DFW think of all this shit?

• Finally, “Always Be Optimizing” by Jia Tolentino. Literally anything Tolentino writes I will eat that shit up.

Essays from Substack:

• philomena marie
  ’s “I Am Not an Internet Cultural Critic,” about the entropy of internet criticism, was really the essay that got me started thinking about all this. Philomena is a phenomenal writer and every one of her pieces is worth reading, but this one will stay with me forever.

• “The machine in the garden” by

  Emily Sundberg
  got a lot of attention here on Substack over the summer for its cutting analysis of Substack’s enshittifcation.

• If you want a tender and sweet history lesson about a precursor to the social Internet, you must read my writer twin flame

  krys
  ’s “on community memory” right now! This very instant!

Ok if you made it this far, you really are a real one! I am taking a break for the next month to go to Japan but I might have a few paid subscriber posts (including maybe a diary of my Japan travels??) on deck for while I’m away, so if you like what you see here and you want to support my writing, you can always upgrade or consider subscribing for all my free stuff! Love you all <3