Be Human, Not Content

Here is my favorite conspiracy theory as of late, and it's my favorite not just because I came up with it.

The word "content" (as a noun, in its modern sense) was popularized by Meta and other big corporations to blur the lines between ads, AI slop, and actual work created by humans.

When the internet first appeared, we shared thoughts online, wrote essays, had conversations, shot videos and sketches, published poems, kept public diaries, built weird little websites, made fan pages, uploaded songs, posted tutorials, reviewed books and movies, and so on. Back then, ads inserted by social networks or ad networks felt pretty invasive - “we insert ads between your thoughts, ideas, and updates from your friends” doesn’t exactly sound appealing, does it?

Fast forward a little, and suddenly everything we do online is filled with content - bland, shapeless, and useful mostly to advertisers and algorithms. You have to churn it out regularly just to stay relevant in the eyes of the almighty algorithm. You're no longer a writer, comedian, poet, video maker, or anything specific - you're a content creator, and everything you produce is lumped into one gray mass called UGC - user-generated content. And no one bats an eye that half your feed is either sponsored or AI-generated. It’s all just content now, why bother caring who made it or why?

Which, of course, is exactly what Meta was aiming for. They’ve got it pretty good - Instagram now feels like a mall disguised as a social network: wall-to-wall ads, AI-generated reels from content farms, and users clawing for micro-celebrity status just to sell us even more ads. They blurred the lines so well, we stopped noticing.

There is nothing more dehumanizing than the word "content". This linguistic sleight-of-hand mirrors one of history's darkest propaganda techniques. By reducing our creative expressions to bland "content," tech giants make it easier to monetize our humanity while erasing what makes us unique. The most dangerous changes to how we see reality often happen through the words we use, right before our eyes, without us even noticing.

So write, create, perform, express yourself. Be human, not content.