The Content Aby$$

By Joseph Blashka

My final remaining friend ducks mousily behind a tree, breath involuntarily retreating from his lungs as he searches the span of his willpower for a sliver of bravery.

“Is this the end?”

Scanning his surroundings for those monsters, those menaces, those… girls who are after him, he assumes he’s earned a moment of pause. For the time being, they’re nowhere to be seen.

An arrow flies through the air, connecting with the flesh right below his ear. He jolts in agony, exclaiming his hatred for his enemies. A wide, satisfied grin intrudes on my face as I watch him fall to the ground, bellowing and blubbering. I take in the moment with a voyeuristic satisfaction. When his body finally hits the grass, it feels as though the spectacular moment took place in slow motion, merely for my own amusement.

“CUT!” I scream.

My friend, my siblings, and the neighbors all rush over to see the new footage of our currently in-progress cul-de-sac epic “The Kid Wars: Part 1,” a gripping tale exploring an eternal conflict for popularity and supremacy. An attempt to answer definitively, once and for all, do boys really go to Jupiter to get more stupider?

As we watch the clips of my friend falling in labored agony, laughter filling the air, I’m overcome by a wave of gratitude. It’s a great day to be eleven. I rush inside to start piecing together my new movie, certain that this will be the one that blows up and pushes me into the stratosphere of internet fame and fortune.

The 2012 YouTube landscape is a haven. A sanctuary for collaboration and creativity. An idyllic community of artists and personalities pioneering a new form of expression. A promise that even you could build a following if you just give it a shot and put in the effort. This unprecedented democratization of the ability to platform couldn’t possibly go wrong, could it?

Life flashes by, fast-forwarding like a sex scene that unexpectedly pops up while watching a movie with your parents. Before I know what’s hit me, I’m in college. The hobbies that once occupied my entire essence have fallen to the wayside, lost to the merciless economy of time that plagues me every day. There doesn’t seem to be any time to create anymore.

With a moment to breathe, I plop down in my bed. Thoughtlessly, I pick up my phone and search. And scroll. And spiral.

A frat guy in a backwards snapback purses his lips for six seconds and points to a prompt proclaiming to enlighten me on the “7 Reasons She Doesn’t Like You Back.” His copy-pasted face gives way to copy-pasted text playing over the sound of lo-fi hip hop. The comments are an endless stream of denigration. I escape to the next video.

A green bell pepper decomposes over a three-minute long timelapse, degrading into dust over several months. There is no music. No commentary. I watch the entire thing.

As I continue to scroll through evanescent trends, inflammatory political “hot takes,” OnlyFans advertisements, and AI-generated marble races, I can’t help but recollect how this journey started. Weren’t online platforms supposed to be a space for art? When did it mutate into this inundation of content we have today?

My memory flashes back to the audience-less creation of my “comedy sketches.” I think of the joy I felt running around with a $30 Walmart camcorder with my friend and siblings. The countless hours gratefully spent alone in my room crafting intricate Lego stop motions. Though I had visions of grandeur and notoriety at the time, I recall those weren't what drove my willingness to create. Simply, it was something I found endlessly fun. Where is that innocent creativity now?

As I scroll further down the rabbit hole, it becomes clear it’s been swallowed whole by the modern model of content creation. A model that is designed to monetize peoples’ attention spans, predatorily reducing our innate curiosity down to segmentable consumption patterns.



What should theoretically be the most powerful and enriching tool in human history has been disfigured and tainted. It is a black hole, devouring time and emotions for profit. Still, the most disturbing part of this isn’t that capitalist executives have successfully pacified audiences. If anything, that’s to be expected. It is that the culture they bred, which rewards aggressive grabs for attention, has integrated itself into the content production ethos itself, spreading like a plague.

People have learned that there are tricks to getting more engagement, and by extension, enlarging their platform and their capability to monetize. Many drool, like subjects of a Pavlovian exam, at the opportunity to go viral. It has become a priority which many creators frame their content and their aspirations around. This is one of the ultimate failures of the current entertainment landscape.

On one hand, it is marvelous that a single short-form video can completely change someone’s life by going viral. It levels the playing fields of visibility and economic opportunity to a degree that no other system in human history has ever come close to. Yet this intoxicating possibility, so constantly dangled in front of our noses, is a convenient distraction.

Online content spheres serve only to benefit corporations that feed off the content that people create and consume. As such, what should have been an ideal opportunity for highlighting different perspectives and fostering a collaborative, diversified field of artists has been ousted for the much more lucrative model of repetitive, often plagiarized short-form placation.

If there’s one thing companies and influencers don’t want, it’s a critical audience. An audience hungry for something they haven’t seen before. An audience who seeks to challenge the status quo and ignore trends which provide little-to-no creative interpretation.

It’s why online platforms and creators aggressively market to children with hyper-colorful thumbnails and editing that rots attention spans. It’s much easier to keep an audience when you’ve already conditioned them to feel rewarded by the dopamine-hijacking abyss of endless content.

It’s why social media platforms such as “X” intentionally and irresponsibly peddle negative and hateful content to users. If you can intentionally instigate them, you can puppeteer their emotions so that they engage with more content and stay on the site longer.

I shut my eyes, shielding myself from the synthetic nightmare. I try to ground myself, focusing on my own life and feelings. Yet even in the blissful darkness behind my eyelids, lights seem to flicker and flash, as if the neverending stream of content has imprinted itself permanently within my vision.

A sort of existential dread creeps into me. I’ve already been lying here too long. I should be doing something right now. I should have been doing something this whole time. I search deep down for the motivation to begin. All that awaits me is an impatient emptiness. An emptiness which needs to be satisfied right now.

Without thinking, I grab my phone. The irony is not lost on me. I lay there, stunted.

Why am I so defenseless? Has my brain become so rotten that simply thinking about my life is too much to handle? I remember when I used to feel all the escape I needed just from climbing a tree. From daydreaming. From actually engaging with what I consumed.

Now I lay here, numb to the worlds around me, both real and digital.

There was an old adage during the golden age of YouTube. An almost platitudinal sentiment offered by every famous YouTuber when answering the question, “How do you become YouTube famous?” At the time I wished they would just spill the secret algorithmic beans.

Instead, they would always repeat, “The best way to start a YouTube channel is to make videos that you would want to watch.”

Only now do I realize how important what they were saying is.

These words remind me to ask myself what I want to make, and why I want to make it. To not be concerned with what an audience or an algorithm has to say. To be critical and progressive with my ideas. It is a universal philosophy, extending far beyond the creation of online content, and even art in general. It is a sentiment rooted in the belief that we each have a distinct voice with a distinct story to tell, and it is our responsibility to choose how or if we want to tell it to others.

Rising from my hypnotic pit of mindless procrastination, I picture myself walking down two roads. Down one, I head towards my eventual place in the universe. Down the other I traverse the vast abyss of the internet. Though these roads seemingly couldn’t be further apart, they tangle confusingly as I travel on my search for fulfillment. Signs point in conflicting directions. Highways lead to dead ends. Yet somewhere along the way, I trust these two delicate roads meet at a familiar and comfortable intersection, and it is there where I will find my purpose. ■