Content Creator

Nobody should voluntarily call themselves that.

“Content” is the language of people on the distribution side of things. If you look at something like a 19th century newspaper it’s mostly a logistics exercise. Sure you may think of just back issues on microfilm in national archives or something like that, but the actual business was not the journalism; it was printing, distributing and ultimately selling a folded-up bunch of big sheets of paper to a large number of buyers at regular intervals.

It turns out this is only actually a viable business if those pages contain something that people are willing to pay some amount of money to read, hence: “content”!

Print and other mass media have changed substantially in the past 150 years, but this part hasn’t changed: “content” is what the people who build and run the logistics side call what gets distributed.

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that, mind. I even happen to be one of those people, having spent pretty much my entire professional life so far on “content pipelines” in one form or another.

But that language is your hint right there. Staying in the pipeline metaphor, the way I interact with content in my day job as a kind of undifferentiated sludge with mildly caustic characteristics that has an alarming tendency to gum up, corrode and spring leaks in pipes that I’m supposed to keep in working order. But that doesn’t mean that the people creating said content™ should think of it in the same terms.

Humans breathe in air and breathe our slightly warmer air that we sometimes even vibrate on the way out for our own reasons, but you wouldn’t call a trained singer a “hot air creator” to their face, would you? What is this faux-technical overly-detached nonsense?

If you’re talking about someone else, “content creator” has the feel of “I couldn’t even be bothered to figure out what it is this person makes”, and if you’re talking about your own work, then you’re either fully alienated from your own creative output, or you’re unthinkingly adopting the vantage of someone who views your work as fundamentally fungible and interchangeable.

And again, this viewpoint is not inherently bad. For example, in my day job, if some texture makes the data cooking pipeline hiccup, I truly do not care about what that image is supposed to mean in the context of a larger work or whatever. (I rarely even look at the things, it’s mostly a matter of metadata and processing flags being set.) As a “content pipeline plumber”, the nature of the job is that I engage with most of the art I see in my job not at all, or only superficially.

But if you’re the one making it, then – fuck no (speaking as someone who has also made, and continues to privately make, art on his own). “Content creator” is just not an acceptable self-descriptor. Have some self-respect for crying out loud. If your work is so heterodox as to defy any easy categorization, all the better. You make “strange experimental art” or whatever. But “content”, please no.