Our inability to be content
Above is the first part of a poem by Rae Armantrout, from Itself (2015). It jumped out at me because I came across it while I was reading Kate Eichhorn's book, Content, which attempts to define what "content" has come to mean in contemporary media. The term content is useful, it turns out, because its abstraction makes it flexible. It refers to how different media have all become functionally the same under conditions of ubiquitous connectivity (i.e. content is the result of 1990s "convergence culture"); the rise of "content" signifies in some respects the growing indifference to form. Content signifies multiple possibilities for what it might be, as well as the fact that those differences no longer matter.
Of course, content in Armantrout's poem also demands to be read as having several simultaneous meanings, its multiple connotations implicating and denying one another. "What do we like best / about ourselves? / Our inability / to be content" could be read as a self-satisfaction in both being perpetually discontented and in evading commodification, not becoming a mere representation of oneself to oneself. In other words, we are most satisfied with ourselves when we can't make ourselves into our own content.
But at the same time, that is a fantasy in the form of a stunted consciousness (in itself without being for itself). Read another way, those lines also imply that we are most satisfied with our dissatisfaction, an untenable contradiction that places the whole feeling under suspicion. The poem's next phrase calls out this "restlessness" and associates it with both potentiality and wagering — "a chip / not yet cashed in." That suggests we've already reified ourselves in our own minds as part of our self-regard, recognized ourselves as valuable only insofar as we're ready to be realized as content, ready to eventually sell out in a gamble we know we're just as likely to lose.
Content, as Eichhorn describes it, is characterized not only by its commoditized form (something made to be circulated, exchanged — something intrinsically transactional) but how it is shaped by an expectation of superfluity. "Content" is made with the knowledge that it will be pre-sorted, and its scheduled obsolescence is guaranteed before it's made. It's optimized for machine readability first and foremost, so that its circulation can keep up with the scale and capacity of the networks it fills. To make ourselves content means being legible in the same way, not only to machines but ultimately to other people consuming and making content at the rate the platforms insist on. (Chronological feeds are not fast enough; they need to be augmented with "recommended content" to make the "content experience" always consist of oversaturation.)
Eichhorn offers the concept of "content capital" to help explain how and why content gets produced; it's positioned as a counterpoint to Bourdieu's "cultural capital." One can accumulate "capital" by being a content poster who acquires a reputation, and unlike other cultural fields, the field of "posting" is still relatively open, Eichhorn claims.
Unlike cultural capital, which people acquire only through their education, travel, and access to culture and cultural institutions or venues (e.g., galleries, museums, orchestral performances, etc.), content capital is more easily acquired. You can, after all, acquire a great deal of content capital without paying for an expensive education at a private boarding school, purchasing season tickets to the opera, or spending thousands of dollars on plane tickets to visit foreign locations around the world. One builds up one’s content capital simply by hanging out online and, more precisely, by posting content that garners a response and, in turn, leads to more followers and more content.
If it were ever true that one could simply "hang out online" and accrue capital of any sort, it is not the case anymore. (Hanging out online seems more like a form of work disguised as a form of entrepreneurship.) In fact, you'll get lots of "content capital" if you already have cultural capital and are rich enough to travel, go to boarding school, or participate in experiences that are perceived to be exclusive or expensive. Precisely because the field of content production is so heavily metricized and tracked and monetized, it quickly exacerbates asymmetrical opportunities, "network effects," and returns to scale. "Content capital" — if it is "capital" in any sense — can't be characterized as distributed through an open lottery.
But to be honest, I don't know if I even understand the use of "capital" in this kind of context anymore. Content capital seems like a redundancy (content, as a form that circulates to create value, simply is capital?), or a category error (content is a commodity, not a form of capital). Do wage workers have "time capital"? Content creators are independent contractors who, to the extent that they are still making "content" and not something more specific, depend on platforms for whatever reputational value they have. It may be that they start to have their own capital only when they can leave content behind.