Literally 2 Cents About Content!
Literally 2 Cents About Content! is a podcast about content mills and the broader concept of labeling all creative work ”content.” Why do we call everything anyone produces ”content”? How does this ”content” frame affect us as content consumers? And what types of conditions do content creators labor under? Check out Liz’s website at https://lizmakesstuff.com and Alex’s site at www.content-lab.agency
Episodes
Liz and Alex talk about streaming, why its business model is so lousy compared to cable, the social aspects of watching TV vs the isolation of streaming, how sports holds linear TV together, and why it feels more sustainable to support individual creators than to pay for a bundle.
Liz and Alex lay into their most despised words from the content mill industry, from "dynamic content" and "content management system" to "optimize" and "authentic." Also covered: video game DLC (that's "downloadable content," remember!), store brand sodas, and the 1990s web.
Alex and Liz dig their claws into "AI," this time focusing on some recent hype-y conferences Liz attended in Chicago and Las Vegas. We also look at cyberlibertarianism, the difficulties that LLMs have with ambiguity (and why making them better at this could paradoxically make them worse overall), the costs associated with producing cutting-edge work, and the embedded biases of AI.
...Alex and Liz talk about what really makes digital content different from physical and analog equivalents, and what distinctive ideological concepts—"everything's binary, monopolies are good, technology itself is the agent, users should be treated with hostility"— are uniquely embodied by it.
And even though everything digital seems ethereal and immaterial, it requires tremendous amounts of real resources—water, electricity, space—b...
Alex and Liz talk about the hottest topic out there—"AI," or "artificial intelligence" (quotes because we're a little skeptical of it being in any way "intelligent"), with a look at some recent essays that explore whether "AI" is agent or tool, its problematic uses in higher education, why Silicon Valley is so intent on building things ("AI" or otherwise) that they'd read about or seen in sci-fi (while also of course acting as if b...
Alex and Liz talk about their time at the content mill, how it was all about ghost writing, what techniques they honed by doing that (such as learning how to easily add 100-200 superfluous words to any article's intro), and how that overall experience influenced their personal writing. Liz talks about self-publishing her book and Alex talks about the histories and features of various blogging platforms.
Alex and Liz talk about Mastodon, the open social network that uses a federated design that works somewhat similarly to email. We also explain ActivityPub, the W3C-sanctioned protocol that underpins Mastodon and other services such as Pixelfed. Ever wondered what an "API" is? Curious about what Facebook was like in 2004? We've got you covered on these questions and others!
Alex’s site: content-lab.agency
Liz’s site: lizmakesstuff.c...
Alex and Liz talk about Jenny Odell's "How to Do Nothing," this time focusing on how information overload and context collapse make it difficult to do what you want to do. We also make a brief detour into "This is Water" (and its roots in "Infinite Jest"), discuss the toxicity of fandom, and how even works widely seen as "great" in a moment (your Booth Tarkingtons of the world, essentially) quickly fade from popular memory.
Get ...Alex and Liz look at "How to do Nothing" by Jenny Odell, talk about Twitter, TikTok, and Mastodon and their respective effects on our mental health, and even spin out a hot take on David Foster Wallace's legendary 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College.
Liz’s blog: Lizmakesstuff.com
Adam Kotsko’s stunning blog post, “The Moral Cost of Capitalism”: https://itself.blog/2023/02/28/the-moral-cost-of-capitalism/
David Foster Wallace...
Liz and Alex dive deep into Mark Fisher's seminal 2009 surprise best seller, "Capitalist Realism." Topics explored include how society individualizes mental illness, why there's this widespread conception of "gritty" content as somehow "realer" than non-gritty equivalents, and how our ironic distance from capitalism allows us to participate in it—even when we know it's bad.
Liz’s website: lizmakesstuff.com
Get full access to The...Alex and Liz talk about the coping strategies they witnessed from their managers at the content mill. Interested in doing the work of your direct reports for them? Want to work with clients who don't respond to emails for months? Wondering if you can get away with some games of StarCraft in between client calls? We give you the SEO content mill manager job spec covering all of that. We also touch upon how every "health" client at a...
Liz’s website: lizmakesstuff.com
Left Anchor: https://www.leftanchor.com
Strunk and White’s Macho Grammar Club: https://www.thedailybeast.com/strunk-and-whites-macho-grammar-club
Neil Patel, who doesn’t read: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ny-times-bestselling-author-torn-145614266.html
Get full access to The Content Lab at www.content-lab.agency/subscribeAlex and Liz talk about the one topic you can never ever write about at content mills. Also included are two on-air readings of archetypal content mill content, except we break that taboo and write about He Who Shall Not Be Named.
Liz’s website: lizmakesstuff.com
Alex’s “Here’s what “content” from a content mill looks like” post: https://toosolid.substack.com/p/heres-what-content-from-a-content
The legendary “knife alien” tweet: t...
Alex and Liz talk about algorithms and how they select and serve content, with an extended riff on an academic paper about bureaucracy (don't worry! we make it easy to understand). Also, if you've ever wondered what recursion is, we've got you covered with a simple definition and some basic examples.
Liz’s website: lizmakesstuff.com
Essay “The concept of algorithm as an interpretative key of modern rationality” (view-only; no PDF d...
Alex and Liz talk about IMDb What to Watch, a new app for trying to find that one pearl in the sea of "endless streaming content," through gamification. Will it work? We’re skeptical. And wasn't consuming content supposed to be fun at some point? The thing is: When there's too much to watch, everyone falls back on their preexisting favorites, or gets trapped in a loop of algorithmic selection and decision anxiety. We also examine h...
Welcome to Literally 2 Cents About Content!, the podcast about what it’s like to write thousands of words per day for literally two cents per word! In our first episode, Alex tells Elizabeth all about the origins of the content industry, what the word and concept of “content” really means, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the role of the (in)famous Microsoft founder in presaging (and creating!) the industry itself. We have so much cont...
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