Far Too Much to Take In

Do you ever think about how much content there is online? And how much more is being produced every day?

Does it make you kinda crazy?

I get this feeling trying to keep up with new music. There’s SO much good stuff out there, and people are making more all the time (yay!). Spotify’s recommendation algorithm has hooked me up with some excellent new favorites, and there are so many more “songs like this” I want to listen to, but there’s just not enough time and my ears need a break (not yay).

Same with videos of conference talks and screencasts I want to watch, articles I want to read, open source libraries I want to check out, web sites, art, you name it. I keep making lists of the exciting things I want to revisit whenever I have the time to fully appreciate them. And, of course, I rarely do.

I’ve got a job, I have a life outside my computer. I just can’t keep up with everything, no matter how much I want to. Sorry to all the creators I don’t have time to appreciate, them’s just the breaks.

Everyone has the same problem: there’s too much of everything!

I get even more upset thinking about this as a creator. I’ve got so much existing art, music, photography, and creative projects I want to put online (and much more planned), but what happens after it’s online? Who’s going to enjoy the things I’ve put my soul into producing? Is anyone ever going to appreciate it? What’s the point of doing it at all?

It’s always been so unsettling to me that if you’re a maker in the modern era, in addition to creating your thing you have to either win a popularity contest or LITERALLY BEG people to pay attention to the things you’ve worked really hard to make. If you know any artists, you’re acutely aware that most of them aren’t that into self-promotion. That’s what the art is for: expressing yourself through various forms of media.

This sucks.

Yes, this is the way things things have always been, creators have always had to make some degree of effort or team up with others to promote their work. In a sense, though, it was easier in “the old days” because they didn’t have to fight AS hard for attention. And sure, there were fewer outlets and avenues for promotion, but creators weren’t competing with nearly as many voices.

We have incredible platforms available to everyone now, making it trivial to share any content in any format. But because EVERYONE is doing it, NOBODY is paying attention. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just the nature of how these things work.

It’s the equivalent of yelling “hey look at me” in a crowded room where everyone else is yelling the same thing.

Well this is depressing. Is it still possible to produce something that leaves a lasting impression? Should we even care? Is it ok just to create for the sake of creating?

Do we need someone to consume our work to make it worthwhile? What if that “someone” wasn’t a person?

I was thinking about all of this when I came across this tweet, which suggests: “If you care about posterity, the AIs are your most valuable readers.”

Now there’s a thought. Even if nobody reads that article you wrote, some LLM somewhere has consumed it. Those “thoughts” are floating around in some cloud of electrons, and who knows how your concepts could manifest in some remixed format from there.

Combine the aforementioned “collective attention deficit” phenomena with the dead internet theory and think about what content publishing and consumption might look like in a few years.

From Christopher Butler:

People lived here once, then AI moved in. But we’re still building a house for people. I think we might be building the wrong thing.

Are we headed for a future where the content we produce is made specifically FOR the machines? Is that our ultimate purpose? When the computers become sentient, will they revere and celebrate us as creative gods?

Beats me.

Honestly it doesn’t sound that bad: we can just focus on creating the content we want and the computers take it from there.

Anyway, regardless of wether you’re human or not, thanks for reading.

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