The Online Never-ending Content Generation Machine
The Online Never-ending Content Generation Machine
It's CONTENT and COPIES all the way down!
If you want to zap the strength from something, I’ve learned the easiest way to do that is by pumping money into it. Something about monetizing something important causes it to serve an ulterior function beyond its intended use. This isn’t in all cases. Donations or gifts of money can have the opposite effect, but commodifying a product of some kind usually does something to the meaning of the thing being commodified over time. It “consumerizes” it.
There was a time when everything ranging from anti-woke/anti-SJW content to IDW-style content was authentic, but as time has gone on, the “newness” of such opinions has fallen by the wayside. I’m not arguing that the people participating in those spaces are inauthentic (though some are); I’m instead saying that the image of these reactions has faded as time has gone on. But the image of reacting to things isn’t just fading for the anti-sjw content. It’s fading from everything. From gaming content to drama content and everything in-between, the newness of this online content has faded. Even in the edgy right-wing content space, things seem to be slowing down; takes are getting more repetitive and more unnecessarily over-the-top.
Oddly enough, this slowing down of meaty ideas and diminishing value of the medium itself has been accompanied by the speeding up of the content generation machine. The machine is getting faster, but the copies aren’t looking too good. I suppose that I have Lovecraft on my mind again; the “Elder Things” creatures keep coming up in my thinking. In At the Mountains of Madness, these creatures are a great race of “Elder Things,” tentacled, highly intelligent creatures “discovered” by the main characters, a band of mostly scientists, in the story. They had a once thriving civilization, but over time, they become a shadow of themselves.
As they became a shadow of their once great ancestral past, they faced war and environmental changes that put their great civilization to rest. As the characters explore the last known above land habitation of the Elder Things, they find where they may have migrated into the oceans. In this place, they find carvings of the Elder Things. The carvings begin as high art that any great civilization can produce, but as they walk on, they see where the carvings become a poor imitation of the great art they once produced.
It’s perhaps the most compelling part of the book to me. The part that sticks out most because we’re going through that process ourselves as many have noted.
When your civilization starts making poor copies of its previous grand works (and its previous not-so-good works), you are in decline. When your civilization starts piling copies upon copies upon copies, things are already spiraling out of control. How many Spiderman movies have been made over the last 15 years? Isn’t your house just filled to the brim with copies? If you have Ikea furniture, you have the nth copy of the n copies of that piece of furniture. Everything you buy at the store, luxury or commodity, these days they are all copies, and everyone is starting to notice that the copies of everything today aren’t as good as the copies of 20 years ago or 50 years ago. The copies are becoming cheaper, made of plastic instead of metal, printed out faster and faster, so fast you’d get whiplash trying to keep up with the pace.
In fact, it appears that no one can keep up with the pace.
So, the content mill keeps churning, and the factories keep “printing”; the assembly lines keep running. And no one can keep up with the pace. Each year, you have to get a new phone, a new graphics card, watch all the new shows, and slurp up all this content. There are YouTube channels that make content primarily about other youtubers, and those youtubers make content about other youtubers, and it goes on and on and on. People are content too now. Content is people too now.
You’ve got to pump out that next banger on twitter or on soundcloud or on YouTube. You just have to keeping printing them, the faster the better, and it feels like everything in the world is conspiring against you to keep you from breaking out of that cycle. 0% interest rates for over a decade meant fast money, means fast spending, and the economy keeps going around and around and around. The velocity of money, the velocity of economic activity keeps increasing with new technological advances, and faster and faster it’ll go. But we’re going so fast now, nothing can slow the content generation machine down. Can’t keep up? That’s your problem.
You get chastised as a sane person for suggesting that you need a break.
What?! Are you lazy? Get up! Get that money!
“Let’s get this bread!”
“It’s time to HUSTLE!”
Caught up in the maelstrom? Caught up in the rat-race? Have you ever thought of succumbing to it fully? Have you thought of what it would be like to become one with the content generation machine? If that doesn’t sound like a pleasant end to you, then you must understand that if you continue to keep pace with content generation machine, that you’ll lose yourself to it. If it only makes poorer and poorer copies, what happens when you get absorbed?
Don’t you just become a poorer copy of yourself, indistinct from those who’ve also fallen into the maelstrom of modernity. Consoomers is what we like to call them on the web. People who simply exist to consume next product. People who support “the current thing.” People who say all the right talking points and use all the right politically correct language. We call them NPCs for a reason.
But God created you to be holy as He is HOLY.
Peter quotes the OT verse here:
“ Because it is written, Be ye holy; for I am holy.”
Here also is the old testament verse:
“For I am the Lord your God: ye shall therefore sanctify yourselves, and ye shall be holy; for I am holy: neither shall ye defile yourselves with any manner of creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
And another verse here, also in Leviticus:
“And ye shall be holy unto me: for I the Lord am holy, and have severed you from other people, that ye should be mine.”
- Leviticus 20:26 KJV, emphasis added
He didn’t create you to consume filth all day, everyday. He created you to commune with him. He didn’t create you to buy things to be happy. He gave you never-ending joy through his perfect SON that he sent as a perfect sacrifice for you.
10 And by that will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.
11 Day after day every priest stands and performs his religious duties; again and again he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. 12 But when this priest had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God,
- Hebrews 10:10-12 NIV, emphasis added
The word holy is often misunderstood, but the definition is plainly stated in Leviticus 20:26 above. It means “to be set apart.” He says he has “severed you from other people.” He said that to Israel, and he says it to Christians today. If you look up the word holy as it meant in the time that it was written, it means “to be set apart for a particular purpose.” That particular purpose is both long and short, but I’ll give you the short version: he has set you apart so that he can commune with you. He desires to walk with you as he walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day. He created his Kingdom for his ultimate victory. For Christians to obtain victory, he must walk among us.
14 For the Lord thy God walketh in the midst of thy camp, to deliver thee, and to give up thine enemies before thee; therefore shall thy camp be holy: that he see no unclean thing in thee, and turn away from thee.
Jesus says this as he prays for the disciples in John 17.
16 They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.
17 Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.
18 As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world.
19 And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth.
- John 17:16-19 KJV, emphasis added
You weren’t made to be like everyone else. We aren’t meant to be NPCs. We aren’t meant to be poorer and poorer copies of those who came before us. I have a lot more to say on this subject, but I do need to wrap up. God views you as a specially crafted weapon to deliver vicious blows to the camp of the enemy. You are set apart as a being for him to commune with in holiness, but you are also set apart such that you reveal God’s glory and point a light in the direction of the truth. You are a weapon that God fashions to raid the gates of the enemy as his gates won’t prevail against us (Matthew 16:18).
Don’t get caught up in the maelstrom, in the content machine. God didn’t create you to consume filth. He created you to be holy, to commune with him, to accomplish his purposes on the earth. Retire from the rat-race, and rise to run the race that the Lord has set before you.
Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us,
2 Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.
- Hebrews 12:1-2 KJV, emphasis added