The Content Wheel
Babe wake up new 'banned books' consumption dropped
Content.
Information.
Influencer.
Content creator.
The content mill is endless today. This essay is content. It’s a kind of marketing jargon that has become accepted and common place. People don’t call themselves thinkers anymore they call themselves “content creators”. I heard this phrase many times on Milleniyule this year. An unusual and interesting self categorization that is driven largely by the advertising and marketing industry that funds most of the online still. There is a constant stream of content blaring at you from every screen in your life and from every device. You browse Twitter you read content. You listen to a podcast on your commute, you listen to content. There is a never ending supply of it. We are literally drowning in content to consume and people have digested it further and further down. TikTok and Instagram reels are said to have wrought havoc on peoples ability to maintain attention. You read stories of grown men asking their AI LLM chatbots on their phone about everything, that too is really just a content generation device.
If anything the problem has never been about content itself but about the time to digest the content and think about it seriously. This is why I hold some skepticism of a new project announced:
It is trivial to make the obvious critique here but I’ll do it anyway. If your attention span is too cooked to read the books what makes you think you’ll do better listening to them?
This isn’t an entirely flippant take. Matt Damon just recently talked about the demands Netflix was making of him and the movie producers around this.
“The standard way to make an action movie that we learned was, you usually have three set pieces — one in the first act, one in the second, one in the third,” Damon explained. “You spend most of your money on that one in the third act. That’s your finale. And now they’re like, ‘Can we get a big one in the first five minutes? We want people to stay.’”
He added that the streamer pushes for a framing that reiterates “the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.”
“It’s going to really start to infringe on how we’re telling these stories,” Damon predicted.
If you’re blaming X for ruining your ability to read books something suggests that you might still be browsing X whilst you listen to your new based book. Maybe you’ll listen to it whilst you do something else. I mean I know I do this. I listen to podcasts whilst doing chores or whilst working out. Everyone listens to something driving 95% of the time I’d wager. The attention split problem is real and a known one. You simply aren’t going to retain all that information in the same way as when you deliberately listen or read a book. Our minds hop, our attention shifts. It’s natural, and exacerbated terribly by the short form digital intoxication of the phone. People talk about over stimulation but that’s bullshit. Half the reason everyone is content to live in beige bland houses is because we’re always looking at our phones which offer visual stimulation that interior design used to do.
To make it painfully clear I’m not criticizing people for half paying attention. That is ok but it does mean I am selective about what podcast plays in the background versus if I actually want to listen to something. I have my doubts that anyone truly just sits and listens to a podcast as if they were sitting in front of the wireless in the 1930s.
The follow up Tweet suggests they’ll be trying to get actual banned books to be read. All in favor of that of course but it doesn’t fundamentally change the difficulty of access. The difficulty of access is one thing but actually reading it is another. Personally I think reading lists are a bit silly. You should pursue topics that interest you and sometimes lists are a great way to find that but part of the joy of being in a physical second hand book store is finding historical gems that never make it onto edgy reading lists. I guarantee you at least 20% of the banned books reading list is some variation of Jews Bad/Holocaust Denial. How many of those do you exactly need to listen to? As an aside a fair few on Kulak’s list are more practical minded tactics ones that you’d struggle to find useful if just available as audio. The need to underline, or share passages or revisit sections in practical books that teach you something is impossible to replace if you are listening to it. Same for any book with charts or diagrams or pictures.
Look I hope this succeeds but I think people are kidding themselves if they aren’t just turning such books into relatively mindless content that will be fundamentally passively consumed. When people talk about their attention being shot I think they are really saying the lack any intentionality. Again I’m not here in a glass house throwing stones, it’s something I’ve encountered on normie food instagram. It’s easy to scroll through interesting food content but it’s passive. Very few people I think ever make the thing they are spending 30 seconds to a minute watching. Most content consumed today is largely lacking in intentionality. Reading in general seems to demonstrated real intentionality. It’s one reason the AI summaries are so fake and gay, it asks you to gloss things in a kind of passive consumptive way that defines so much of modern life. We’re deep into the band-aid phase of everything now. Patching things up versus addressing the problems.
If you do want to try and tackle your own attention deficit I would recommend the book HyperFocus by Chris Bailey. Yes you have to read it, you have you want to change. Fundamentally you live the life you deserve through your actions. If you actually wanted to read banned books you already would have. Everything else is a content algorithm that you’re just along for the ride on. If you’re still reading this thanks for coming along on this one.