The Content Producer's Lament: An Introductory Statement
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Obviously, I’m not getting paid to write this essay. I’m an “editorial associate,” so almost all meaningful experiences in my life occur when I’m not being paid. As the professional content creator’s life unwinds from post to post, block to block, tweet to tweet, content grinds the phenomenological utility of creation into a fine powder. This is a heavy burden to bear for the 21st-century liberal arts intelligentsia. After the writer spends a long day of writing listicles, it gets progressively harder to write or read for pleasure. The artist whose life has been condensed into drawing simplistic caricatures feels less compelled to produce artwork.
This email newsletter is for those conscripted into the content mines. I’m talking about editorial associates, copywriters, news assistants, article marketing specialists, social media managers, freelancers, graphic designers, content managers, legal assistants, technical writers, and brand photographers. Perhaps you are reading this in between dreaming of graduate school or publishing a book. Maybe you are feeling bad about your role in the relentless push toward commodity fetishization. There’s a good chance you are just bored. Welcome.
I’ve often heard my friends tell me, “I can’t fathom how you find the time and effort to write on the side.” A comment like this makes me sound like a prolific author. I am not. My extraneous writing barely reaches 1,000 words per week, but even this minor contribution to something outside of work seems abnormal. Considering how much I could be writing every day, spending two hours per week devoted to college basketball blogs seems like a drop in the bucket. This newsletter is a platform designed so I can practice writing more often, not some distillation of writing that I’m already doing.
My friends find my limited out-of-work contributions surprising because they are so burned about by writing that they often cannot bear to tap out a new sentence. Frankly, it’s really hard because these content jobs are often really draining and onerous. While I will say that not every content producer dislikes their job, at the end of the day, unless you are among the lucky few that can live off being “public intellectuals,” streaming television acolytes, YouTube/Twitch stars, or big-time journalists, your creative energy is being warped by circumstance. We are not getting paid to simply say or do whatever you want. We are living and dying by what the market demands, and that eats away at our souls just a little bit. If you find yourself scraping and clawing for moments to display a sense of individual freedom at your day job, then this newsletter is hopefully something you can care about.
Don’t act surprised; the thanklessness of content production is hardly a novel concept. You knew that before you walked in the door of your freshman dorm room. You’ve had family members and stuffy relatives express disappointment that you aren’t in STEM/business/finance. Maybe you considered applying to law school to brush them off. I’m sure some of you diverted yourselves into teaching. Some of y’all got hired at Deloitte anyway, and I honestly can’t begrudge you in this marketplace. We took the job because NPR and The Washington Post didn’t look at our CVs. We took the job because the LinkedIn connection your university swore would be there wasn’t there. We took the job because there must be someone to produce the vast mountains of Content humans love. We took the job because there was a debt that needed to be serviced. We took the job because becoming Jia Tolentino is pretty freakin’ hard. We took the job because a life without work is no life at all, and it’s better to have a quarter-life than dawdle en Purgatorio in Newport Beach, California or Danbury, Connecticut.
One of the core philosophical texts of the 21st-century Content Producer is undoubtedly the 1853 short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” by Herman Melville. I read this in an English class at some point, but I didn’t really understand it until I became a scrivener myself. There are many interpretations of this famous text, but for the Content Producer, any analysis need not go beyond face value. We are all Bartleby. We all wish we could be as brave as Bartleby. At 4 p.m. on Wednesday, there is often nothing more we want in the world to tell our bosses: “I would prefer not to.”
I’m obsessed with this exchange in the story:
“Why, how now? What next?” Exclaimed I, “do no more writing?”
“No more.”
“And what is the reason?”
“Do you not see the reason for yourself,” he indifferently replied.
That caustic, embittered response is the cry of all Content Producers. Do you not see the piles of awful comments social media people must sort through? Do you not see the online reviews that must be processed? Do you not see that this fucking SEO description I wrote has no value to me whatsoever? Why do you think I care about this product description or your revenue goals that will never trickle down to my Venmo account? As Melville reveals in “Bartleby,” the people that run your company DO NOT care how degrading and boring this work is. The private equity people that purchase publications and art outlets DO NOT care about individual expression. They cannot conceive of what it means to have your passion and life force funneled into a carton and shoved onto the Internet on some garbage-ass CMS. They will never understand because they haven’t had to do Content on a regular basis. If it does not involve convincing the masses to keep the aspidistra flying while wealth is vacuumed into offshore bank accounts, it does not matter.
And yet, many of us don’t revolt. Why not? Well, Melville has the answer. He intentionally does a poor job of characterizing Bartleby’s sheer desperation, showing the reader how our capitalist bosses handle revolt. His coworkers hate him and try to get him kicked out. Society shuns him. Everyone in the story cannot understand that Bartleby’s animalistic desire is to stop producing mindless content. It’s scary. Thus, when I get completely burnt out every 48 hours, I drink another Nitro cold brew and start pushing the boulder up the mountain.
This paradox is what made the recent Deadspin revolt so inspiring. Faced with the prospect of becoming content stooges, they resigned en masse and said, “I would prefer not to” in a series of coordinated tweets. And yet, it’s also extremely depressing that many young people didn’t even get the chance to write about what they want. They’ve already had to come to grips with life and stop as media companies and newspapers have been torn to pieces. I’m one of them, and I am not brave enough to be Bartleby or the Deadspin staff, at least not yet. Maybe this newsletter is my way of making amends.
The other core text of the 21st-century Content Writer is “On Self-Respect” by Joan Didion.
“…innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself,” she writes in the opening sentence. For a card-carrying member of the generation that persistently bathes in the unending fear that one’s own existence might be poisonous thanks to the shadow of climate change, the 2008 financial crisis, and the War on Terror, the innocence of liking myself is hard to come by. To address this, I wanted to start a newsletter. On The Content Producer’s Lament, you will find many attempts to be as earnest and delusional as possible. You will find many articles highlighting the beauty and chaos of various sporting events. I promise there will be blurbs about Big Thief, running, tennis, and random observations. There will also be earnest discussions of the nightmare this world is descending into. For anyone who cares enough to read, I will try to write. Longer pieces will also eventually appear at Forget the Protocol, my nice-looking blog that hasn’t been updated in months.
Thanks!