Hi!
For The Stranger earlier this month, Chase Hutchinson interviewed the new owner of the Pacific Science Center’s Boeing IMAX—the only true IMAX screen in the state of Washington. The interview contains two absolutely baffling quotes in one brutal paragraph:
“We weren’t looking to operate a theater,” said Sevart in an extensive interview with The Stranger. Instead of being a theater for movies, Sevart described the space as now being a place where they’ll show various “content” that will be determined more in the future.
Funnily enough, I was working at The Stranger when someone first referred to my writing as “content” in 2014. Shortly after the bosses bought analytics software to track the performance of our pieces, three of the paper’s leadership team started to use the word “content” around the office.
At first, they used the word ironically, literally throwing air quotes around it and speaking in an exaggerated voice to let us know they were joking. “I look forward to reading your ‘content’ this week,” they’d say to me in an emotionless robot cadence, followed by a forced chuckle and a pair of waggling eyebrows.
Like most of the ugliest tendencies, the joke soon became serious and the three men started to use the word content sincerely and without the air quotes. The jokey voice disappeared. They started to plan content strategy. They discussed how the tone of our content needed to change, and how we needed to pivot to different kinds of content in order to attract larger audiences to our arts coverage. Shortly after they started to implement their content makeover, I left the paper.
(Here is where I place an IMPORTANT CAVEAT that all three of the men I mentioned in this story have not worked at The Stranger for a very long time. You should definitely support The Stranger in its current form because it’s an outlet for good journalists like Chase who deeply care about the city and its arts scene. Those three pieces of garbage who used to work there can go piss up a rope, wherever they are.)
Anyway, I deeply regret not pushing back on “content” when it first started appearing. In fact, I think we all should have treated people calling writing, video, and art “content” as though they just released the loudest, smelliest fart imaginable. We should not have tolerated the loosening of language, the death of specificity, the financialization of art. We should have fought back, and we should have fought hard.
Because looking back, that early-2010s funneling of journalism and video and audio essays and movies and TV shows into the beige, formless packaging of “content” really paved the way for the dawn of AI slop that we’ve seen in the last three years. When everything is just content to smash into the frameworks of streaming video and the endless gutters of a news website and a streaming music queue, why not just hire the robots to do that work?
Why pay the exorbitant cost to show a movie on your IMAX screen when the balance sheet doesn’t recognize the difference between an expensive Christopher Nolan epic and a free AI slop stream of glossy nature scenes? After all, it’s all just content, baby.
I’ve Been Writing
For the Pitchfork Economics podcast, Goldy and I interviewed Columbia professors Kate Andrias and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez about their report, Democratic Abundance: An Abundance That Works for Workers. It’s about how the political concept popularized by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance suspiciously leaves out working Americans from many of the benefits. When Abundance centers on letting CEOs build big projects, where do workers fit in?
I’ve Been Reading
I brought a visiting friend to the wondrous Peter Miller Books in Pioneer Square this month—I wrote about the shop a few years ago—and I bought a stack of books that I’ll be writing about in this section for a few newsletters to come. If you haven’t read Peter Miller’s How to Wash the Dishes, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s exactly what the title promises—a little book explaining how Peter Miller washes dishes, illuminated by his delightful prose. Even though it does very explicitly detail every single step of washing a load of dishes, I’d argue that the book is more about finding joy in work and taking pleasure in getting the details just right. It’s a treasure.
Vigdis Hjorth’s Repetition is a novel about a young Norwegian girl’s sexual awakening, which happens to arrive just as Norway’s long, dark winter approaches. Appropriately, it’s a dark book with short meditative passages about the loneliness of youth and the pain of abuse. It’s beautiful and brief and very difficult to get through.
The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park by Michiko Aoyama is a collection of stories about people who learn that a pink hippo statue in a city park seemingly heals anyone who touches it. Like many of the books in the current trend of gentle Japanese sci-fi stories, this one gets a little repetitive and wears out its welcome early.
You’ve probably heard of Kate Folk’s novel Sky Daddy. It’s about a woman who is sexually attracted to planes. She fantasizes about one day dying in a plane crash, which she describes as being “chosen” by the plane as its bride. I enjoy provocative literary fiction and this was a very entertaining novel from an unforgettable perspective. Though I was annoyed that the protagonist works as a content moderator for a social media network. There have been too many novels in the last five years centering around content moderators—I’ve read at least three—and the concept is stale and overdone, not to mention outdated.
Money Walks
A couple of weeks ago, I did the Wealth Walk, a theatrical walking tour by Seattle-area theater group The Feast. The premise combines three of my most closely held interests—city walks, income inequality, and Seattle history. I don’t want to give too much away, but I will say that the Walk cleverly invites you to count your steps to dimensionalize income inequality and the passage of time, transforming a two-hour walk around the Mount Baker neighborhood and Rainier Valley into a meditation on wealth and power and who gets what and why.
I walk through the Mount Baker neighborhood often on my Saturday walks, and the Wealth Walk excavated pieces of local history that I’m glad to know—interesting things, uplifting things, shameful things. I’ll never be able to look at the area in quite the same way again.
To allay any fears you may have: while there is audience participation, it’s not uncomfortable or awkward—and I say that as someone who nearly fainted with embarrassment when a Teatro ZinZanni actor tried to flirt with me during a show.
The Wealth Walk is continuing through June 7th, and I’d say it’s definitely worth the ticket price if your interests overlap with any two of the three that I listed above. And I think it’s worth noting that the ticket pricing system is clever and on-point: They request that you pay about what you earn in one hour’s work.
That’s all for this issue. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in June for the last issue before the longest day of the year. Take care of yourself.
Paul
