19 Comments

Almost two years later, this rings even more true. The only good option is to make something that *makes* people sit up and take notice. So hard but worthwhile.

Expand full comment

Thank you for this beautiful article!

Expand full comment

My pleasure, Sathya. The next one will be out in a few hours. Cheers.

Expand full comment

You wrote this before I got the chance to. Damn you. Now I can’t write it because it’ll be worse than yours and we’ll go down the spiralling hole of content land.

Expand full comment

Haha. Great minds think alike. So I don’t know why you and I have both had this same idea but there you go.

That being said I would like you to write something on your ‘destroy the audience’ concept, or whatever the phrase is...

Expand full comment

I just made my Wednesday Audio about it but I may write about it tomorrow too.

Expand full comment

I saw that when I logged in to my email about 3 minutes after sending you that message. Will give it a listen. But yeah, it's an idea that would proably reward being written about too.

Expand full comment

Thank you, Tom! This is very thought-provoking for me both as an audience and a creator. So, allow me an incoherent couple of words...

As a writer, this possible convergence into a niche worries me and calms me down at the same time. Maybe I am not at the point when I want to double down on something? I have got that freedom to throw any nonsense I want but haven't got a big audience (yet?). Maybe once you get an audience you get responsibilities. It's human relationships after all. Not family-like but it creates certain demand for what you are good at.

This is the point when it's easy to slip down and stagnate, right? But does the audience forces an artist to stagnate and be comfortable with repertoire? Or does the artist just becomes lazy seeing that things "already work"? Looking at many people, writers, bands, etc I follow I can say that both can be true. But as you said, if we, as an audience, responsible for the "height of the bar", for the demand we create. "You get what you pay attention to." is very true, and I believe money is secondary and price rarely matters if you are intended to "consume" something.

> "You will soon possess the mental bandwidth (and desire) to take in the greatest novels and music ever written. Which will doubly reinforce just how bad ‘content’ is."

This really works. I noticed that when I decided to cut down consumption of 'content'.

One thing I would argue is how A/B testing works. Testing randomly is a bad strategy, it's inefficient because of both the time and money you spend on creating this nonsense. So it's more than just a grid search for what works (if there's an intention to do it well). Although the general idea is true - finding what's the most efficient.

Anyway, thanks for a great read (again).

Sincerely your weekly assembly attendee,

John

Expand full comment

I think in many ways the audience and artist relationship is about managing expectations. The audience do have a certain idea of who you are and what you are about and you can end up playing into that and therefore ‘nicheing down’ too narrowly.

The artists who seem to escape that dynamic are the ones who cultivate a reputation for changeability. To use the cliched example, everyone expected the late David Bowie to do something completely different every few years/ albums and so he was free to do what he wanted while still being consistent. The opposite is AC/DC or various metal bands who are painted into a corner.

Me personally, I try to go to some lengths to puncture my own knowledge/ authority so I am free to explore without having to be definitive. I can play with whatever idea because after all what do I know? This is working well for the moment. I will revise it if I feel trapped and stagnant. Only time will tell...

Expand full comment

Bowie - AC/DC is a great example. In fact, it's true for many experimental and progressive rock bands I know. People don't expect to get the same stuff from the (although there are some who do, weird folks who complain that "progressive band isn't the same anymore / the grass was greener").

I think you've been executing well whatever strategy you have (or not executing any strategy). I have a certain expectation and there are definitely themes that weave throughout many of your essays, but despite that, I don't know what I get on the next Sunday. But what I do know is I won't get the same thing worded differently. This is great, by the way, and I love it, especially knowing there is a vague connection to previous essays which I often have to discover during reading.

Expand full comment

Very satisfying to read this, John. Thanks. And for what it’s worth your own work is going from strength to strength. I never miss an issue.

Expand full comment

Thank you very much! I'm still experimenting, so, we'll see how it's gonna go 🤞

Expand full comment

I "get" that bettering the art is bettering its audience as well, though this is no easy task.

Currently these essays, together with some ordinary life boring problems, inspired me to stay off of the Contentland since march. God, it's been great, I am not complaining. And I did notice many, many improvements in my taste for this thing called ~art and my audience performance...

But sometimes it gets lonely.

See, I feel like I am deprived of the appropiate means to "share" (sorry, I did'nt find a proper term to describe this another probably acient dynamic) something I like because I sense that people are only looking to what is down the path of their feeds or what is following the sides of their stories.

In an attempt to try and do so, I could manage to go back into the Way of Social Media, only to share what I became passionate about. I just don't know if anyone who is connected with me there will bother to look it up by themselves (since I won't be everyday in my stories displaying ~nuggets of it).

But I guess that's how we all got here anyway. Or at least, for those who don't know The Commonplace, that's how "we" are not "there" anymore.

And maybe a ton of people are still looking for a way out, in the back of their minds. It's just that the tip of the iceberg hasn't appeared to them yet, at surface... Maybe not even for me - because in the end maybe it's a path you go on to explore in depth, rather than a view to look for in a matter of seconds, distant of the actual scenery where the real party is happening.

But if it is so, I can only hope to always get invited.

Expand full comment

On the subject of vicious circles, I think that dynamic is very much in play when it comes to social media and loneliness.

While participating in social media, your participation in the real world diminishes- by definition. But being a simulacra of a social encounter it doesn’t satisfy by itself and so like nutrition-free junk food we take it in more and more trying to gain sustenance from it in a way it can never provide. Neurochemically, the notification dopamine spikes lead to desensitisation and a general adhedonic flattening. Life is dull because we have become dulled. But the real viciousness comes when we leave Contentland and go out into the world and see that most of our contemporaries are now phone zombies and so we feel very alone, because in many ways we are.

This dynamic is at the foundation of this weeks piece and also is an underlying theme for most of the preceding ones. It’s also why I created my discord group as a human scale and demetricated alternative to social media nonsense. It’s as close as I can see to a solution, or at least a path that points towards that. It’s a halfway house, as it were.

(And seeing as you are a premium subscriber, you are always welcome to swing by. I can send you an invite if you need one.)

Anyway, thank you for this very thoughtful comment and thanks as always for reading.

Cheers,

Tom.

Expand full comment

I applaud your virtuous attempt at improving the general state of affairs when it comes to content. While there are clear merits to your argument against the deprecation of artistic quality, it misses out on one very important point.

Art is, and always will remain, subjective. Imagine a song by an artist you can’t bear listening to if your life depended on it. Even that song can be on someone’s list of all-time-greats and every time they hear it playing, it makes their knees buckle and gives them goosebumps.

The general standard has actually risen with time, but so has the access and distribution to content in general. Not all content is created with an artistic intent, but the algorithms of the internet pipelines are not sophisticated enough to discern that yet.

Expand full comment

Subjectivity in art is one thing, but I think I have a fairly good eye for artistic *effort*. And whether it’s to my taste or not, the vast, vast majority of art I encounter is low effort and a cynical money grab as far as I can tell.

Although that being said this piece was ‘inspired’ by a particularly demoralising trip to YouTube where the trending pages plus the subsequent ads (which all penetrated my generally watertight adblocking setup) gave me a particularly bleak view of contemporary culture and creativity.

So I could be dead wrong of course. And the tepid reaction to this thus far tells me I am either wrong or I am correct in a way that makes people uncomfortable.

But in what should probably be my sign of for all of these I should just say ‘but hey, what do I know?’

Thanks for stopping by Sid, it’s appreciated.

Expand full comment

Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you that there is indeed a lot of low effort cynical money grab content out there and we should try to steer clear of it.

But I also realise that this is an access and distribution problem, not a taste problem. When everyone has access to the same tools and opportunities, avoiding the lower rung of content is not an easy task. Especially when the platforms that enable these creators are using behaviour modification techniques to try and get us addicted to the act of mindless consumption.

Expand full comment

The behaviour modification aspect is a big part of it. Huge. You either use these tactics knowing that what they make your art into is beneath you or you stick to your guns and more than likely remain obscure as a result. Or you spend a lot of mental energy trying to navigate a middle ground that you can live with.

New course on how I pull this off dropping soon. 9 left. 8 left.

(I joke but if I made a course on how to self-promote a novel it would probably generate me more cash than a novel itself. As a metaphor this is the quandary of the present in a nutshell)

Expand full comment

‘For whom does the notification bell toll? It tolls for thee’ ~@PaulPublisher

Expand full comment