The King is Dead
EPISODE 056: THE KING IS DEAD
In 1996 Bill Gates wrote an article entitled Content is King for the Microsoft website. This premise has proven prophetic. And yet no one seemed to stop and ask what kind of King. If content is king at all, it's not a good king and it serves no one but itself. I think we can do better in our art-making. I think the true king, if there is one at all, is connection and engagement and I was thinking maybe we should talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
In Shakespeare's play King Lear, an aging king with an eye on retirement decides to divide his kingdom amongst his three daughters, the largest portions of which will go to the daughter who loves him the most. This sets in motion a series of plots and subplots that spin more and more out of control until the stage is littered with corpses and almost everyone is dead, including the king himself. This is very Will Shakespeare, a man who gave a lot of thought, and ink, to the killing of kings.
In Julius Caesar, the king of Rome, though they didn't use that word, dies in a pool of blood in the Roman Senate, killed by his colleagues, but ostensibly by his ambition and arrogance.
Hamlet is set into motion by the killing of the king, Hamlet's father, and it ends with the death of, well, pretty much everyone, including both the usurping king, Claudius, and the future King, Hamlet himself.
Macbeth is entirely about the murder of Scotland's King Duncan, and the subsequent deaths of those who plotted to take his crown, specifically Macbeth and his ruthless wife.
In Richard III, Richard kills pretty much everyone who stands in the way of him becoming king, then Richard himself is killed in battle but not before yelling, "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!" which has got to be about the worst deal ever offered. Given what we know about Shakespeare's kings, you can keep your kingdom, man. I'd rather have my horse.
Shakespeare had much to say about the subject of kingship, most of it pretty dim if the amount of blood he wrote onto his stages is any indication. So now fast forward almost exactly 400 years to another William: William Henry Gates III, which is the full given name of technologist and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The year was 1996 and Gates had just written an essay in which he predicted the rise of the importance of 'content' in the new internet age, driven by advertising dollars, and built on the promise of attracting wider audiences for those who created that content. The article was titled Content is King.
What’s this got to do with you and your creative life? I’m David duChemin and this is episode 56 of A Beautiful Anarchy, let’s talk about it.
Music / Intro
One of the concerns that seemed to keep William Shakespeare up at night, and constantly employing regicide to move his plots forward, was concern about how kings come up short, fail those they deign to rule, and at the extreme, encourage conformity, punish rebellion, and have a tendency to go full-tyrant at the slightest threat to their rule. In other words, Shakespeare–if only he'd had access to the comment section on the Microsoft website where Bill Gates' published his Content is King essay–might very likely have said, "Ok, maybe, but what kind of king?"
That was the question Shakespeare seemed troubled by. Not only the issue of legitimacy, not merely that they were kings, but what they did as king: what was the fruit of their reign, and did they serve, really, anyone but themselves?
Content might indeed be king–though I'm not so sure its claim to the throne is legitimate, nor for how long its reign will last–but is it a good king? And does it serve us, or does it demand that we serve it. Who exists for whom, I wonder.
I'm going off-script here and there's always a chance that means my carefully built metaphor will go entirely off the rails too, but my God do I hate the word 'content'. It gets used to describe all manner of things from emailed newsletters, to YouTube videos, posts on social, blogs, and a hundred variants of Huffington Post articles promising 3 Life-Changing Ways to Cook a Turnip, and in many of these cases I think 'content' is probably the best that could be said about them. It's filler and fluff. Life hacks for problems no one is trying to solve, and slideshows of child stars who haven't crossed our minds or TV screens in decades, but the headlines promise we just won't believe what they look like now! Good grief.
If I didn't have such respect for jesters, I would say content is not a king but a fool. Jesters existed not only to entertain but to speak truth to power, to help kings and queens see their blind spots. Content most certainly serves no role of such importance or relevance.
So where am I going with this? What's got my knickers in such a twist that I would risk your attention and trust with an old-fashioned rant?
Content, if it is king, is a usurper, and my heart breaks a little bit every time I hear a legitimately creative person talk about their art as 'content', or their job as a 'content creator.' And yes, there is, with me, always the very real chance that I'm just splitting hairs over words, but it's not the words I'm concerned about. It's the idea, the paradigm, and ultimately: you. If you are a creator of almost anything and you have an online presence of any kind, there's a better-than-good chance this touches on both what influences your art-making and the art you make, and I want to urge you to be suspicious of content and the assertion that it is king of anything, least of all you.
The world does not hunger for content. No one is sitting around thinking, 'man, I sure could go for some content right now.' What we hunger for is connection. We hunger to laugh and feel deeply, to have our thoughts engaged. We long to have real problems solved. We want, many of us, calm and serenity, depth and substance. Where content has succeeded is not in giving us these things, but in giving us a substitute for them. Instantly. Without cost. And seemingly without end.
I named this podcast, and the book before it, A Beautiful Anarchy, because I believe that there is a spirit of defiance that is necessarily part of the truly creative life. Creativity is an act of rebellion against the status quo, against apathy and boredom, against the many things in life that drown the spark that is the best and most human in us. It's a holding out for something better than the ersatz meaning, or substance, offered by 'content'.
Content, like lousy kings everywhere, is self-serving. It's just there for itself. Content is not a giving but a taking. It feeds off our attention, generating advertising dollars for others, dulling our senses. It's hypnotic. So-called content is not often created from our deepest places, so it doesn't speak to those deeper places in others. It requires no vulnerability, no soul. It barely seems to require spell-checking.
The big question as we engage in our creative work is: can we do better? Are we making something that is more than the creative equivalent of junk food? Are we happy contributing to a world that is simultaneously filling with content and yet so hungry for substance? Are we more concerned, on any given day, about finding inspiration than about creating that which will inspire others? Is it possible we've become so concerned with cranking out content to fill the appetites of the bored and the distracted that we've forgotten what it feels like to make connections and fill the hearts of the lonely and the minds of the curious?
We live and work, many of us, in a context that has believed for over 25 years that content is king and while the perceived external pressure to keep creating new work has probably always been somewhat unavoidable, especially for those who want to be relevant to a larger audience, I think it's helpful to remember that what we put into the world, the quality of it, is much more important than that we put it into the world. There is some real validity to the notion of 'publish or perish' but not if what we publish or ship is merely noise. Yet another photograph made to fill a hole. Yet another article to say what has already been said. More YouTube videos that say nothing at all. Products no one really needs, just empty calories to be consumed.
I don't know about you, and I know I risk sounding like a snob on this one–maybe I am–but I don't want my work consumed. I want it to be experienced. This is the change in thinking that I'm hoping to instigate with this episode. A shift from bowing to the pressure to make content for consumption to something better: connection.
Content is noise. Connection is signal.
Content is bait. Connection is a gift.
Content is made to be consumed, quickly replaced by yet more content. Connection is to be experienced, to engage the hearts and minds of those who encounter what we make.
Content is temporary. Connection builds legacy.
Content is disposable and recyclable. It's made with minimum effort because it needs to be scalable and repeatable. Connection is a slow-burn and is often never repeated in the same way, and it's almost never scalable.
At the risk of doubling-down on looking like a snob, I think there is a difference between content-creation and art-making. And though I don't want to be the one that tells you where that line between the two might be, I have a suspicion you yourself will know if you're asking yourself the question.
Content needs to neither challenge nor offend. Its goals are not to awaken us but to make us lazy and hungry for more content.
Creating content requires no heart, no soul, no vulnerability on the part of the creator. It's easy because, frankly, our expectations are pretty low. As far as consumption goes, content just needs to taste sweet. It need not have any value beyond that. Maybe that's why I'm so bent out of shape over this. We've got these astonishing abilities and urges to be creative and to make things that solve real problems, create real sparks, make real connections and deep human experiences, things that make us feel more alive both in the making and in the experiencing of the thing, and I think the content-is-king paradigm has us consuming what is increasingly sweet, and easy, and of no value, and in turn making more of the same.
Where art-making is concerned, where it matters that we make a difference, that we create legacy, or even just make the things that make us truly come alive, I think we can do more than the filling of a bucket, which is what content really is. Two-thousand years ago the philosopher Plutarch gave as good a reminder as I've read from anyone since when he said that the mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled. Content-creation does the former. Art-making does the latter, both for those who experience it and find connection there, and for those who refuse to give up on the belief that what we make can always be better, deeper, more authentic, substantial and filled with wonder.
What we make might end up in the same places–online or otherwise–and I'm not saying that it can't, or shouldn't, find its way to YouTube or social or whatever new digital spaces are coming down the pike. Of course it can. I'm just wondering if we should be more concerned about whether it finds its way, ultimately, into the hearts and imaginations of others, whether it originates in those places within ourselves, and what we need to do to make not content, but connection. Not filler but fire.
Thank you so much for listening. I'm honoured to be a part of your creative life, however small. If this podcast makes a difference to you I'd be so grateful if you gave it a review on your podcast app if it allows you to do so, or to share it with those you think might find some encouragement in it. And if you're not already receiving it, I'd love to send you On The Make, which is like an emailed version of this podcast, sent out on the one week in four that this podcast takes a break. Just go to StartUglyBook.com scroll to the bottom and tell me where to send it. Thanks again for being part of this. We'll talk soon. Until then, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0