Content. How I hate, despise, revile that word. It is an all-encapsulating word that manages to refer to nothing at all. It never referred to anything in specific at all. Vague, senseless, meaningless content. Millions of people on Earth today say they are "Content creators". I can only ask. What do you provide? The stonemason makes his bricks. The blacksmith his iron. But the 'content creator'? What does the content creator make? Content. For whom? He does not know. He has never met these people, will never meet them. They watch and they care for what has no care put into it and cannot care for them.
Then, you must say. The same must go for other media, for the artist. Billions watch and care for their television series, their films, their games, what are oftentimes a true example of the wisdom of the crowd. A well-written series is done by a man who knows what he is doing. Who had a vision and turns it into reality from his own skill, his talent, through which he produces art. Who would I be, who would you be, to reduce someone's life's work to "content"? Even to lower forms of art, such as the ephemeral, the printed word, journalism, would you consider putting your life at risk to show the world what you feel they must see "creating content"? It is not art; almost certainly not. But it is not "content".
The "content creator". He who adds such little to the earth that he cannot give back what he took from it. He who demands the time and attention of millions of the bored and unguided for only his own personal gain. He appears suddenly without warning. Assaults you with his presence and asserts himself as the center of attention. And for his forceful intrusion into your life often finds himself with the same wealth as someone who had taken years and put their life's work into making the art they wanted to see. And when it has come to that? Why do you even try?
What point is there to creating beautiful art and mastering your craft and through belief alone willing your ideas into existence, when these men who have not had one thought in their heads their whole lives turn on their phone cameras, say a couple words, and turn the world's collective head for a month? I believe it was something along the lines of eight figures for saying "hawk tuah". A lewd joke. One that doesn't even fulfil any requirements of a joke. It is not subversive, it has no punchline, it is simply there. For this, the wretch who unleashed it unto us has become a multimillionaire.
It is the get-rich-quick scheme of the masses. They sell a little piece of their dignity at a time, become just as loud and obnoxious as the rest, for unimaginable gain, and unimaginable ephemerality. The leeches on society, knowing that they have the option to. It is as if we barely have a choice in the matter. I cannot help but feel as if this is a silent noticing that few have come to speak out for because it is so inherently obvious. It can be described so succinctly, "what do you make".
I cannot eat "content". I cannot sleep in "content", build with it, save a life with it. I cannot hold "content" in my arms and tell it how much I care. "Content" does not come out of my tap. The priests at the church do not write "content". Twenty years from now nobody will remember what some fool believed. They will remember the art of their time, and the time before it. Their names will be forgotten, their fates resigned to the occasional recognition as the "guy from the thing". And perhaps they will know that this is what they wasted. Seconds, minutes, hours, that could have been used to anything else; preparing a meal, having a conversation, telling their family they loved them. Time they will never get back, that they will never be able to return to. In place lies only content.
There was more that I wished to say, how the "content creator" makes more for the sake of more. There was no necessity, no hole in the market for them to enter. But there is endless advertiser money to encourage it, to make sure that you do anything but. Alas. Eventually you will run out of words to say on the topic, one man can only express so much on his own whims, his instant ideas, that which manifests into his mind and dissipates just after it is written. Yet I fail here to properly express the minutiae of my point, how exactly it is encouraged and fed into and how it all links back. There would come a point where I would eventually have forgotten some of my original points and begun writing in circles. So I must unfortunately and abruptly end here.
I'd like to thank you for bothering to read this. A stream of consciousness is a special thing, and frankly I love when it happens, it's always something interesting I have to write down.
