The Hall of Content Mirrors
The Hall of Content Mirrors
What does it sound like when the content bubble bursts?
What will it sound like when the content bubble bursts?
The Silicon Valley Bank collapse has only led to a louder and louder cacophony of voices, and drawn attention away from the spiritual emptiness and moral confusion of most people in the business world—especially the venture capitalists who helped create the problem in the first place.
One of the most prominent VC’s—who was loudest on Twitter these past couple of weeks—told me with a straight face, at the peak of the crypto and “Series A” bubble: “It’s just math, and the math works.” This was in the context of me expressing skepticism about the Tiger model. He saw absolutely no reason why the run he was on could not continue. He even seemed to relish how easy it was. He was winning at math.
Maybe he was talking about math in a zero-interest rate environment.
This person, like many other extremely wealthy VC’s, tellingly pivoted to building a huge media presence during the pandemic in a kind of Audience Grift, moving strangely in concert with about a couple dozen other similar types, building a huge following and pumping out content to serve some utilitarian purpose. When there is nothing valuable left to invest in, these people invested in themselves—creating Hot Take content as a way to distract from the declining quality of the deal-flow, perhaps. And hey: at least when it all comes crashing down, they’ll have 623,721 Twitter followers and a bunch of YouTube subscriptions and podcast downloads to show for it. These people are not stupid.
The content bubble extends beyond Substacks and podcasts.
One of the worst purveyor’s of content in the world, PornHub (which is, ironically, owned by a company called “MindGeek”) was just purchased by a private equity firm named—even more ironically—Ethical Capital Partners. ECP says it is looking for more acquisition opportunities where it can exercise “principled ethical leadership.”
Language is losing all meaning, and humanity has been eclipsed. Who can wonder why we’re in a meaning crisis when a private equity firm can put out a press release touting their moral virtue after buying a website that is ruining young children’s lives—and plenty of marriages—in order to invest in its growth? All of the bullshit talk about the importance of the “content moderation tools” that MindGeek has developed is simply to distract you from the main thing that the company does: it’s a porn factory.
Taleb points out a simple rule of finance that I have found holds in many other places as well:
An example: my general rule is that there is an inverse correlation between how aggressively a brand or movement markets itself as Christian and the veracity and depth of soul of the people behind it.
The content game has simply gotten out of control. But in the words of that dishonest VC that I spoke to last year, it just works in a thin culture, one flattened out by technology, where content is the last thing left. It is the Last Law: Thou Shalt Create Content.
And it’s not just any content that sells. It’s fast, mimetic content. The “Careers” page of a popular new Substack, Pirate Wires, lists the following requirement for an editorial position. Nobody is even trying to hide the strategy. It’s out there in the open for anyone to adopt.
The Matthew Yglesias effect is real. People have learned that in order to grow their subscriber base the fastest, they simply need to stay tethered to the news cycle and pump out as much content as possible. And who cares if it’s bad? People will forget about it soon anyway, so inundated as they are with the flood of content that comes washing over them daily. And for the creators, money can cover a multitude of pricks from the conscience.
There is not a breaking story that doesn’t happen in which someone somewhere does not reach out to ask me to “record a pod” about it. Why? My overriding desire when something confusing happens in the world or in my life is to go sit alone in the candlelit nave of my church for an hour. Or a week. And there are many things that I’d like to sit there for a year first, pondering, before I have anything worthwhile to say. If I ever will.
I’m certainly not arguing that understanding is not important. It is. But the attempt at understanding is not being accompanied by, or led by, contemplation. The entire world is conspiring to take that away from us.
I once thought that when the content bubble pops it would sound like a war. In the absence of pseudo-dialogue, we are left with the will to power. There will be violence. But maybe that’s wrong.
Some may argue that this content bubble need not ever pop at all. The advent of Large Language Models and other things will just continue to produce more, and we will get increasingly good at filtering for quality. My question is simply why. What is the purpose of all of this? To what end?
The purpose is salvation. Everyone wants to save themselves from something. What has surprised me so much, though, is the extent to which “feeling saved” has come to be associated with “knowing the latest” thing or hearing the best take, whether it’s the efficacy of ice baths or a tech bro’s latest treatise on geo-politics.
I now believe that when the content bubble bursts, it will sound like a lonely person crying alone, weeping over lost time and love.
These past two weeks I have heard a whimpering dog in our neighborhood, in the middle of our city. He has been stuck outside 24/7 during rain, cold, even snow. He is crying constantly. I can hear him even with my airpods in and my Spotify list playing. I can hear him even now.
The room where my home office is—in the back of our house—seems to be one of the only places in the entire neighborhood where I can hear him. The acoustics of the place make it extremely difficult to even know from which direction that poor dog’s cries are coming from.
The backyards of all of the other homes here are blocked off with huge brick walls and fences that you can’t see through. I’ve went out and walked around searching for him at least a half dozen times. I still have not found him.
But I’m getting close. I think I know where he is now, but it’s in a place inaccessible except through the front door of a housing complex on an adjacent street. I can’t see into the backyard as well as I need to confirm that my suspicion is right.
But once again I have an incarnate reality, something or someone real, reminding me of what I must do. Drawing me back to the real. This dog, in some way, has become the symbol of everything that I think is important today.
Even the disciplined and distant admiration
For thousands who obviously want nothing
Becomes just a dowdy illness. These have their moderate success;
They exist in the vanishing hour.
But somewhere always, nowhere particularly unusual,
Almost anywhere in the landscape of water and houses,
His crying competing unsuccessfully with the cry
Of the traffic or the birds, is always standing
The one who needs you, that terrified
Imaginative child who only knows you
As what the uncles call a lie,
But knows he has to be the future and that only
The meek inherit the earth, and is neither
Charming, successful, nor a crowd;
Alone among the noise and policies of summer,
His weeping climbs towards your life like a vocation.
From W.H. Auden’s, “Like a Vocation”
I will find him.
In our current culture, I often feel like the most rebellious thing that I can say is "I don't feel the need to share my opinion on that." I only have expertise in three topics: professional basketball, American poetry since 1950, and Native American life, culture, and politics. Other than that, I'm only a student.
when a culture turns its system of formal accusation into a social ritual for generating its political unity it sets in motion a pattern very similar to the crucifixion.