The War I Wage on the Word "Content"

 Content? I hate the word, as I hate Hell, all Montegues, and thee...

Is not what Tybalt said in Romeo and Juliet, but something I have said to myself on occasion, minus the Montegues part, and I don't particularly hate Benvolio either. 

Content is a word that persists in our modern lexicon. "I'm a content creator" "I like this guy's content" and "this is the content that I want to see" are very common phrases uttered on YouTube, on TikTok, on all forms of social media, and in average, everyday conversation. It is a ubiquitous word, spoken from friends, family, coworkers, and strangers. But just because it's everywhere, does not mean I welcome it.

You see, I despise the word. It's an icy, cold, black void of a term. A lifeless, corporate word created to lump the vast quantities of human creative works in to a single, BPA-lined package. It's a short hand, but a short hand that sacrifices a lot for the sack of brevity. For in making the explanation smaller, it creates a yawning chasm in which meaning and personal connection are lost.

"Content" is such a nothing word that it could apply to anything. Your favorite film? Content. Your favorite album? Content. A sack full of potatoes? Content. The cave paintings in Lascaux cave? Content. A minute long TikTok video about a woman believing that British people ate her ancestors? Content. Your niece banging pots and pans together? Content. The particular patterns your cat's urine makes in your 50-year-old thrifted carpet? Content. We all know that these are separate things in separate contexts and different significances, but that context and significance is eroded in the vat of acid that is "content."

Moreover, it's such an impersonal term. Imagine you're at a party and you've struck up a conversation with someone and ask them what they do. They respond, "I'm a content creator." Well great, what kind of "content" do you create? Vlogs? Tutorials? Art? Music? Art tutorials? Music vlogs? I understand feeling a bit gunshy about telling folks about what you do, given how many people react to students that go to art school. But, there's a roulette table spinning in my mind, but you haven't told me what color and number you've bet on. You could be smiring blood and mud on canvases and selling it for thousands of dollars for all I know. I'm not asking for your SSN, I just want to get to know you!

Especially in this time where AI can churn out complete garbage and market it as "AI content." How dare you say that the art piece a friend of mine put together to express their anxiety and depression is the same as some horribly lit, plastic-looking anime girl that some kissless philistine typed into a program? They are not the same. They shouldn't be the same. And yet under the term "content" and "content creator," my friend and Elon Musk are the same people and make the same stuff. 

I believe it's high time we ditch "content." 

A while ago, on one of my podcasts (when I still made those -_-) I championed the word "stuff maker" as an adequate replacement for the now common place term of "content creator." However, looking back on it, while the term "stuff maker," while a bit quainter than "content creator," it's still too general and too impersonal. 

So, what would I offer to do instead? It's simple really: just say what it is you do. "I'm a film maker." "I'm a painter." I'm a musician." "I'm an poet and a writer." We treat these sometimes as such lofty terms that we could never aspire to be, or that we have to do them professionally in order to earn that title, but they don't have be. Sadly, many artists throughout history have gone their whole lifetimes not finding widespread success critically or financially. But, that doesn't make them any less of an artist. They still created. They still were. 

I firmly believe that the innate desire to create, to put something forth into the world regardless of whether it will put money in your wallet or not, is not only deeply human, but one of the things that makes being a human being worthwhile. In a time where human connection and human creation is being undermined and subsumed by the avarice of soulless technocrats, I think that people creating art should be worthy of loud, joyous celebration, not deafened and buried beneath the din of corpo-crap jargon. 

So, don't tell me you're a content creator. Tell me what you make, what you put your time into, what you're passionate about, and I'll tell you the same.