Is Content in the Room with us right now?
when content is everywhere and nowhere
In the past year I’ve been coming across a new category of messaging over and over again. Essentially: “How to make money (subtext: and get rich fast!) by writing online.”
For anyone coming from the journo or literary world, this is a curious and, at the same time, bizarre sorcery of a message. Because for every post-graduate who’s laboured away in academia for 10 or so years only to find themselves utterly unemployable, and every journalist toiling for weeks on end over an article that will be compensated with 150EUR (if they’re lucky!), there is, allegedly, a whole new category of individuals that have figured out how to make a lot more money writing online. This premise of learning how to make money online has also taken over Substack, leading some of the more romantically inclined to pray for relief from this onslaught: “please can we not turn this platform into a circle of writers who teach writers who teach writers… how to make money writing?”
Writing to make money is a curious proposition. Because writing in itself is not traditionally, historically, and certainly not perceptually, associated with the end goal of tapping into wealth — quite the contrary. Unless you’re J.K. Rowling, Stephen King or Sally Rooney, or one of the other big names whose books are displayed in every bookstore, being a writer is associated with toil, endless rejection, and very low pay (if you’re getting paid at all). So when I hear someone describe themselves as a writer I usually think one of two things. Either: lucky you, living your best trust fund baby life, and writing despite not earning any money, or — what have you written to feel that you have earned the right to identify yourself as such? And: if you’re actually making money writing, then where, what, and for whom on earth are you writing?
But the truth is that writing has shape shifted so far from its traditional format over the past decades, that it has become a mouldable Play-Doh harnessed by online media for a wide range of purposes. This very specific type of ubiquitous writing became known as content.
Everything is content!
When I started out in journalism — and I promise this won’t turn into a, “BACK IN MY TIME” drag — there was still quite a clear line between journo/literary and commerce, with the occasional bickering between the writers in the advertorial departments and the O.G. self-proclaimed “unbiased” journalists at the newsdesk.
You could, of course, also be writing “commercially” — usually as a copywriter in advertising, branding or marketing agencies, in PR or communications, or for the myriad e-commerce platforms that were popping up in the mid-2000s, where you’d tweak product descriptions and review SEOs optimisations. But then I witnessed something interesting.
With social platforms flooding every inch of human existence, a new trend seeped into brands’ online presence: “storytelling” and “authenticity” became the new currency. In true meta fashion, by the 2010s you’d be more likely to hear talk about “authentic storytelling” than actual stories told. “Storyteller” became a serious job title, and its function? Well, to bridge the gap between writing, business and commerce.
Then, in what felt like an overnight move, storytelling became “content”, and content became so dominant that it was proclaimed “king”. Ironically, “Content is King” was not coined by some digital agency hotshots, but by Bill Gates, in an essay from… 1996! It low-key breaks my heart to imagine Bill Gates, the ultimate nerd, witnessing some loud, obnoxious marketing kids getting worked up about something he anticipated nearly two decades ago.
But before we could catch our breath and make sense of how best to engage with the amount of data that was being generated every second through social media, marketers started shouting the new motto of this storyteller world: “Everything is content!”
Things moved fast.
Everything is content marked the beginning of a new economics of online media: social commerce. If consumers were once considered passive receivers of marketing tactics, they were now actively contributing through what is, at the end of the day, user generated content. Social media clearly played a major part in this shift, but so did the last decade of the ZIRP growth-at-all-costs start-up era, and its impact on creativity and writing, fixation on growth-hacking and the cult of entrepreneurship. Paul Jun has a great piece on this specific topic in his Substack.
Online content traditionally refers to a range of media products that include videos, stills, and, lastly, words. Content can be aesthetic, satirical, journalistic, confessional, motivational — and more often than not, voyeuristic. But the mushrooming of start-ups and start-up founders generated a new type of spoken and written content which I’d argue makes up a big chunk of what “content” is expected to be today, and that is:
quantifiable
optimised for consensus
predictable
bullet-point (see what I’m doing?)
driven by KPIs
geared towards lead generation and last but not least,
reputation building.
Content that mirrors the same content and the same audience backwards and forwards, in a never-ending loop.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game
When all content starts becoming the same, the challenge of commanding attention becomes paramount. In a world overflowing with entrepreneurs, how can that be done? Cue the birth of Linkedin’s confessional post. When Linkedin-ers realised that values, personal experiences, and, well, portraits, can be sold for attention, the phenomenon began rearing its (decidedly ugly) head, marking Linkedin’s transition towards peak commodified personality culture.
Pressured by quantity and algorithms, there is no shame as to what might constitute the content of said post. “Here’s an embarrassing confession,” begin some of these posts, then proceeding to confess something that is not remotely embarrassing, and that I am embarrassed to be writing about now. Linkedin peaked for me when the first post preview on my feed read, “If you have to eat shit, don’t nibble.”— alas, a post about resilience.
Like natural-born sales people, they are ready to broach any topic that will capture their audience’s attention for a few seconds, and reiterate. The logic of pushing content today has the primary intention of successfully colonising the Venn diagram of attention, business intention, and self-promotion. Operating in the same framework as ZIRP start-ups, it’s set out to do a lot of nothing, hoping that in the process something will hit the right nerve.
The commodification of “Self” writing
The pressure of having a constant online presence has turned everyone into a writer — but of course, not everyone is one. It’s only fitting, then, that this became the “gap in the market” targeted by the proliferation of generative AI and ChatGPT content providers. Timing wise, the opportunistic alignment is excellent, leading to this very moment, both terrifying and interesting: the commodification of writing.
Where’s the problem? God knows I wish I had had something like ChatGPT when I had to do months on end of quantitative research back in university. But it’s not the writing of complex scientific lab results or longitudinal sociological studies or reviewing qualitative research that’s being commodified. No, there is a new kind of writing about the self that’s being commodified in a very specific way.
What we’re seeing is a way of writing that mirrors a certain human profile back to itself, more efficient, more sterile, more devoid of meaning with every rendition. It reminds me of a scene in Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent (2015) where the Amazonian shaman, upon seeing a photograph of himself for the first time, tells the German ethnographer: “He’s a chullachaqui. He looks just like you, but he’s empty, hollow.” If a decade ago brands were desperate to show up online in the most human way (to talk like humans, storytell like humans), it seems that the human is now striving to show up as a chullachaqui, a hollow brand of themselves.
Iconic French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard said that we are living in the ecstasy of communication, which means we have become both the coder and the decoder: in essence, we’ve become our own terminal. It’s easy to see modern “content” in this way: endless quantities of the (Consensus optimised! Predictable! Lead-generating!) content which we want and don’t want; which keeps coming at us because we apparently want it, whilst more deeply, we seem to be losing touch with what it is that we actually want.
Everything we put out, we reflect back to ourselves. We are ultimately suffocated by the excess of all this, and its accumulation. Baudrillard stated (long before he could witness the scale of social media!) that "We (will) wear ourselves out feeding this ghost of a representation of ourselves. We are overwhelmed by this pretension." Sound familiar?
There is, of course, a lot of great writing — and there is still good content, too. Knowledge creators such as Ana Andjelic, Lenny Rachitsky and Alec Leach for instance are producing meaningful work that aims to inform and motivate rather than simply exist for the sake of existing, alongside many journalists and writers on platforms like this one. Meaningful content, just as meaningful writing, defines itself by straying away from the obvious, the relatable, the sentimental, the accommodating, even the inspiring — all tactics employed in marketing. Meaningful content demands something more from the reader: our full presence, and, well, our intellect.
Content is, in fact, in the room with us, right now. Even when we aren’t in a room, it’s there – almost everywhere we look. But the blending of the online, the personal, and the consumerist has made content as we used to understand it a shell of itself — a proverbial glass dome, with its seeming transparency and interactivity, in fact reflecting everything back to itself.
Some call this the age of (media) convergence. Others, like NYU professor Clay Shirky, “the new cultural logic emerging out of 21st century media chaos.” And who makes money out of this chaos?
I have bad news. It’s most certainly not you, my friend. Certainly not the writers, the journalists, the content managers. Not the social media copywriters, the SEO optimisers, the PRists. Statistically, not even the grand majority of start-up founders, despite all that peddling. But put something of worth and meaning out there in the world, and you might just crack the system.
If you’re keen, some things to read, to digest:
Baudrillard, Jean (2005). The intelligence of evil or the lucidity pact. New York: BERG, available here.
Baudrillard, Jean & Violeau, Jean-Louis (1965). The Ecstasy of Communication. Semiotext(E).
Castells, Manuel (2001). The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press
McLuhan, Marshall, Fiore, Quentin (1967). The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Random House
Mead, Rebecca (2014) The Scourge of “Relatability" in New Yorker, available here.
So insightful, Ana! For a while, I got caught up in confessional writing, mainly on LinkedIn. But over time, it started resonating with me less and less as I began asking myself: Why do I want to write this? For whom am I writing? What is the purpose of my writing? I'm not a writer or a journalist, just someone who occasionally enjoys playing with words and creating content. Your article made me feel humble. Thank you!