A specter is haunting the internet, a specter of boredom. Lurking at every turn of our algorithmic feeds, our search engine results pages, are heaps of samey, trendy content and AI slop trying to get our lizard-brain hooked while offering me little in return. But there's a strange paradox at play: we're living in an age of a great wealth of content, and the algorithms serving it so efficient at its distribution to respective niches that it shouldn't be possible to be bored. There's more content than ever, there's more content being produced than ever, and more people are making content than at any other time.
That word, content, is key to what had happened. There was a time when the gamut of human creative labor on the internet was not collectively referred to as "content", but individually (blog posts, podcasts, images, etc.). Likewise, there was a time before content marketing and content creators. That collective term is the product of processes taken place in a little over a decade (by my count) that have shaped it into a commodity.
This is not me waxing nostalgic about the before-times, when memes were memes and Flash was relevant. This is a kind of imprecise personal history that attempts to reconstruct how we got to this moment, and a little about what it means. Lastly, I suggest some ways to resist.
The birth of this phenomenon comes down to what I still consider to be a net positive: the creative act shifting towards ordinary, or as I will call it here, downstream. Starting around the mid-00s, a not particularly expensive home computer was about all one needed to record a song, make a short film, make some graphics and more. Many people did. It's how I got my start in design (beyond programming, which was already possible even decades prior). It's also how Justin Bieber got started, so I guess he and I share that. 1
The point could be made that typewriters, photocopiers and more had been available for decades at this point. So have camcorders and tape recorders. I think here a technological gap comes into play: for one, the distinction between amateurs and professionals was stark, and second the means of distribution were less available. Whereas no zine could pass for a magazine, no home recording could pass for a studio album - this was no longer true by the internet of the 2010s, where some media have have largely diminished the professional vs. amateur gap. For the second, we have the internet to thank for practically free and boundless distribution of said work.
Regardless of whether it's true or not - the prevailing sense was that some essence of the task of generating culture had shifted away from the big studios, from the hegemony and into the hands of individuals.
At this point, we, are not yet witnessing "content" as the amorphous mass known to us these days. It appears as a self-publishing renaissance, not yet immediately exploited (in the monetary sense) and commodified. That had only been a matter of time.
The second part in this equation is the formation of ecosystems that highly rewarded these independent creators (who, naturally, wanted to make a living) for the amorphous idea of content, but through twists and turns and the innate desire of capital to grow, incentivized quantity over quality.
An example here would be Google. I don't mean to single them out, but I feel like I have a good sense for the process that went on here. 2
For as long as search engines were in vogue, there were those seeking to exploit them, what's colloquially referred to as Search Engine Optimization, SEO for short. A technical job for most of its earlier years predominantly characterized by hacks (both the thing and people), black magic, and trial and error.
Google played cat-and-mouse with cheaters over the years because its business was selling ads. You cannot sell ads on a search engine that shows bad results that hacked their way to the top of course - you must reward good content that people want to find.
Eventually, a new age was born: Google plugged enough of the holes and punished those who used cheap tricks. New crawlers had been able to forgive a lot of the issues in websites from a technical perspective, and were becoming good at detecting foul play. Focus was shifting in favor of what they termed quality content.
Content is a win-win: you get traffic seemingly for free, they get something they can show ads on. And for a time it did work, and it became a golden age, arguably, for the great search engine we all fondly remember.
There are problems with this however. It turned out that gauging the quality of content on any sort of mass scale is difficult and shortcuts have to be made. Namely, systems had to be built to handle this problem. Google used textual analysis, whereas Facebook used engagement metrics, and we were off to the races again. The issue lies in these all being levers connected to a system, which exposes one important flaw: you can game the system, much the same as before. The difference is it no longer rewarded technical feats in a technical realm, but rather technical feats in the creative realm.
As the flaws of the system became more apparent (and therefore exploitable), people operating within this system were no longer wrapping text for human consumption in machine-oriented tricks and hoping to deliver it to human eyeballs, but were now in the business of writing explicitly for machines in the hopes of getting to human eyeballs.
This reversal of the usual approach was codified and turned into "organic marketing". The invention of the organic/paid marketing split is novel and extremely important, I dare say pivotal. It laid out the foundation for the thinking that given a marketing operation's budget there were two possible things one could do: buy ads (traditionally, this is what you'd do virtually exclusively), or invest in content.
In turn when marketing departments worldwide began monetizing this ecosystem, since it rewarded content - content is what they made. An immense amount of it in fact, and it became a commodity as a result. And now, as a commodity, the logic of a commodity began applying to it: originality was undercut by the much easier ripping off existing things, low-hanging fruit in the form of listicles (that Google can extract and proudly show above the results), and other maladies affecting content today.
I'm not trying to single out Google here. Facebook (now Meta), Twitter (now X) and others were making much of the same moves: rewarding organic content to leverage ads by way of different levers that fed into "algorithmic selection" (be it in a feed, or as a response to a query). It makes little difference whether it was "engagement" or amorphous text analysis techniques the end result is the same: anything you were making had to be pitched just so they captured enough human attention and enough computer attention. 3
"Content creators" didn't come about for a while. My theory is that it didn't quite come about until at least the commodification cycle reached a certain fever pitch. Google ngram viewer shows that the period of 2019-2020 was when it really took off which squares with my understanding as well. When I think back to eight years ago when I was a fledgling designer and got my first in-person introductions to the tech scene I don't think we used the word "content" in the same way. And certainly a "content creator" was not a person or a job title back then, not yet at least. "Blogger" vaguely was, as a kind of semi-amateur version of "journalist". "Vlog" and "vlogger" had a brief moment, but that wasn't a job title. "Podcaster" was just picking up steam around then, but the industry only began to notice them around the 2019-2020 mark (Gimlet Media was famously acquired for a staggering $230 million in 2019).
We now have two things: certain culture gaps have closed, and a healthy (in the economical sense) ecosystem that's eating up the now commodified content. Into this flammable mess of an ecosystem came the lit match that would set this dumpster aflame: advancements in neural nets brought about LLMs and image generators to the masses.
What happens if content is perceived valuable and is highly rewarded, but suddenly becomes extremely cheap to make and, at first glance, indistinguishable from the valuable human-generated equivalent? You get seemingly infinite amounts of low-quality, low-effort, barely vetted bits of it slathered across the world wide web.
It's fine to use new tools. I'll probably let a language model read this article before I publish it4, even, but this needs to be said: LLMs are not substitutes for human creativity. They are statistical models. They eat a lot of words and produce seemingly intelligent output (what my middlest brother terms "information-shaped bullshit"). What they don't do (or, rarely do) is produce something genuinely surprising, that is - something that isn't a variation of a statistical average, sanitized, homogenous middle ground of the entire internet it has swallowed previously.
This machine-content was fun for a while. In the first couple of weeks after its launch, I tried running all sorts of things through ChatGPT. I had a blast generating a Seinfeld monolog about World War I. Same with MidJourney - my God, I have spent hours generating pictures of dogs going on a space mission (they have returned safely). The novelty soon wore off, leaving me with a middle-of-the-road style that became painfully evident. Also, keep in mind - the ideas were my own, and those were the entertaining bit, really. The execution was secondary. This too, betrays this commodity logic of content in this ecosystem: it almost didn't matter.
These tools have infiltrated the content ecosystem thoroughly and in no time at all, and into places where they're unwelcome. If you're a marketer who has to expound on the benefits of an accounting product just so it can be found on Google - would you not just put it through ChatGPT? 5 Nowadays, I'm willing to bet probably about half of all content on commercial blogs is LLM bullshit that nobody reads (no offense). Facebook I am told is rife with "shrimp Jesus" machine-generated images. There are machine-generated podcasts. This dystopia is getting boring.
This happened over a year ago and I thought it was ridiculous, and basically not worth doing. It feels like almost half of LinkedIn at this point though (no offense to LinkedIn but also what the hell, LinkedIn).
Welcome to the great bore: we watched content being birthed, become king, sell out and become boring. We're living in a boring dystopia. But what happens after "peak content" now that ouroboros has in fact consumed itself? I'm not clairvoyant and concrete predictions are not my thing. What I can say is that we should mount a resistance as individuals.
Actual human creative labor now comes at a premium, more so than ever before. As much as you can, avoid pouring your creative efforts into the low-effort high-reward content meat grinder, especially for free. I don't have to put the stuff I make (for free) on any social media website to make their numbers go up, so I try to avoid it.
Speaking of a premium on creative labor - if what somebody has to say matters, they wouldn't have taken shortcuts by generating it. Conversely, when it doesn't, they will take shortcuts by generating it. This has caused the distinct middle of the road style of "AI" to become the new stock photography, ever signaling a lack of actual importance and nothing to be said. This is a silver lining: we can learn to recognize it. Being able to recognize this trash is an important aspect of media literacy as a result. I call upon all of us to take responsibility and tune out and disengage at even a whiff of what seems like "AI-generated" imagery or text. Likewise on the creation side: if what you have to say matters, you should probably do it yourself.
With "feeds" being overrun with low-effort algo-oriented nothing-burgers, taking algorithms out of the equation in favor of agency in what you want to see/hear/read yourself is becoming an act of resistance within the context of the internet. Refuse to take algo-generated suggestions at face value. Read, get your own context, and decide for yourself. The algo is not your friend, and its suggestions are first and foremost there for financial exploitation of your eyeballs. It doesn't mean it might not have good suggestions (it often does), but engaging with it critically is now a responsibility.
We owe ourselves more than this dreck that's floating around. Even at the cost of being bored.
I, being a millennial in the generational zodiac, still remember a time before the ubiquity of the internet. And indeed I spent a lot of my childhood being thoroughly bored and having mostly the thoughts in my own head to keep me entertained.
This is inconceivable to us nowadays. We're so used to being entertained that we cannot fathom being without a constant stream of stuff. I am here to tell you that not only you can (you get used to it), but given the choice between being bored, and watching videos where a text-to-speech voice narrates a 4chan thread overlaid over a video of Subway Surfer - I'm at this point going to choose boredom.
The parallel here isn't precisely true. It was his mother who posted videos on YouTube, who were then picked up by a talent hunter. That said, I do address this later so do read on. ↩
Might be worth mentioning: SEO-people and marketing departments in general were the target audience for the things I was building for a number of years (until lately). Both at Google but especially later at Similarweb where I was deep in the SEO ecosystem. I got to see how the sausage is made from both sides, to a degree. ↩
The same was happening on the publisher side of things to some degree. The "news ecosystem" is too focused on engagement metrics. This is destructive in many (and different) ways, but that's a rant on the state of journalism which I won't get into. ↩
I did and it wasn't too useful. Oh well. ↩
Depressing anecdote follows. A certain professional contact wanted to publish a book to hand it out for free, in exchange for leads (emails, really). They were not a talented writer by any capacity, I inquired as to how they were going to accomplish this, to which they replied, "I just ask ChatGPT to write it one chapter at a time". This book ended up being "published" as far as I know. ↩