I have a beef with “content”

Apple, really stepped into it, when it made an iPad advertisement that essentially showed all creativity (and creative effort) being crushed and compacted into a thin piece of glass. It was a tone-deaf move from a company, that has always relied on (and portrayed itself as an ally of creatives. Last week, Daniel Ek, chief executive of Spotify shared a post on Twitter, that felt equally tone-deaf.

I would argue, that the cost of creating content is not close to zero. Even with AI and automation, there is a price — chips, computers, energy, and even software are not free. If you somehow overlook that assertion, I would say, that describing “creative output” as “content” is not the right framework to use, especially for someone presiding over such a large creative media platform.

If I was a creative, especially, a musician, I would likely take umbrage, because making “content” means there is no difference real difference between “AI Slop” and Neil Young’s music.

As I argued in a 2019 article:

“Content” is the black hole of the Internet. Incredibly well-produced videos, all sorts of songs, and articulate blog posts — they are all “content.” Are short stories “content”? I hope not, since that is one of the most soul-destroying of words, used to strip a creation of its creative effort.

You can tell a lot about a person and how they think about their work based on whether or not they use “content” to describe what they do. A photographer who says that he is creating “content” for his YouTube channel is nothing more than a marketer churning out fodder to fill the proverbial Internet airwaves with marketing noise.

When you use phrases like “short shelf life” and “long shelf life,” you are looking at everything through the lens of content. As I have argued earlier, “content relates to how the Internet has evolved into a highly quantifiable entity.”

Short shelf life, to put it in Spotify terms probably means something that has a few plays today and then vanishes. And long shelf life is something that keeps on giving — Beatles, Rolling Stones, and The Queen.

The “Shelf Life” as a value metric doesn’t and shouldn’t be applied to Marcus Aurelius and stoicism. Because after all, if you use that same argument, then even Vedas or other holy books are “content.” When in the end they are more than content — they are ideas, concepts, and philosophies that have survived time, and have been adapted and adopted.

This quantification of everything that occurs in the Internet means that creating “content” is almost unavoidable. But words matter, and we can choose which ones we use to talk about what we produce and the things we admire and cherish. I encounter so much imaginative work on the web, and I guess I just can’t help but be peeved when I hear it discussed (often by the creators themselves) as if it is essentially marketing copy.

Updated: On June 2nd, 2024, Daniel posted an update to Twitter, explaining and elaborating on his original comment. I think this is a step in the right direction. Obviously, I would love to see not only him, but others to actually take a moment to distinguish between “slop” and “superb” and refrain from using “content” as a catch all.

The Problem With “Content”  

June 2, 2024. San Francisco