I'm not really sure where all this is coming from but it is a percolation of thoughts i've been having about how captialism, social media, and the world transform little actions of creativity into something bland and dull. i'm calling it contentification - which is the process of turning something into "content" - basically something that's been compressed into a snapshot - a post, a video, a picture for the sake of consumption by totally random people. contentification is essential for the modern day because it's sellable. someone who produces good posts, videos, photos, etc can sell things. they can extract money from others. they have a parasocial clout. they become a source for content. but i think at the end of the day, content is tiny and limited. i think that there are so many beautiful and incredible things in the world that get destroyed or lost contentification and the perspective that contentification enforces. ok, so that's the vague thesis that i want to discuss more deeply, but what is contentification anyways? what are things before they become content? and how does contentification change those things? i think that pre-content (things that can be contentized but have not being) tend to be experiences, concepts, aesthetics, or sensabilities that are processed, not as an independant entity, but as part of a whole. They exist in a contextful way and there's an awareness that the context can't be seperated from any specific detail. all the details come together and connect to other things across the various vector spaces of perception in a continous way. This is a little abstract so i'll give a few examples. Consider the song Happy Birthday. Happy Birthday is a song that has done a really delightful job of avoiding a significant degree of contentization. Happy Birthday doesn't have a key, or a tempo, or chord progression, or even reliable words. People can mess up the melody (and often do). People can switch out whatever words that they want and the context will tell people that they are still singing happy birthday. Happy birthday doesn't have a definition - the volume of things "Happy Birthday" can be spans an infinite spectrum. There are versions of happy birthday that are more contentifized - marilyn monroe singing happy birthday to JFK, youtube versions of happy birthday, etc, but everyone understands that those specific versions are not happy birthday and everyone understands that no "contentified" version of happy birthday will be "Happy Birthday". Another example might be an inside joke. I think inside jokes form very naturally and very readily to most people, but there's a clear detail to it that's focused on the people you share the joke with and the sense of belonging you have with the people you share the inside joke with. It's not just about the raw humor of the joke - it's about the connection you have with people you care about. This can readily be seen in how jokes spread - when an inside joke extends beyond the in-group, there's a natural feeling - "oh, it's over.", "oh, it's not funny anymore". The worst thing that can happen to an inside joke is the contentifization of that joke - where that joke becomes a product to be traded for money, attention, or clout. A great example of this is troy and abed's handshake and how it was painted as this massive tragedy when pierce made troy do that handshake with him. I think there's a visceral and clear relatability - something special has been tainted or tarnished. Here's another example - good software. i think it's easy for a lot of people to consider software or a codebase as being soemthing that is quality on it's own, but I simply don't think that's true. take any major software company and I think if someone were to buy the entire codebase of that software company, they will not have bought even half of that company's value. the software is built with a particular awareness of its relationship with its users, its owners and its developers. software that works great in the hands of one company can be completely useless in the hands of a completely different set of people. building a company (or building any type of organization) is so much more about the complex system in which that organization exists than any products it sells. Software developers should know this intrinsically - it's our job to distinguish between the contexts in which certain design patterns are good and certain things are bad. Our jobs are not around creating content - a package of code ready to be spread and deployed willy-nilly, rather our jobs are consistently around gathering information, building up mental models and choosing between interdependancies. I think, in general, pre-content is anything nice and/or valuable that we can't simply post or tweet online. we can't simply and easily share pre-content - it's too big and too connected to other things. of course, that doesn't stop people from trying. content is product. content is a means to survive. content is something you can sell, that you can develop metrics around that you can show to other people and it's valuable to convince people that content can provide the same things that pre-content can. Thus, the contentification of pre-content. I'll give an example of how pre-content might become content. I made friends with a group of music producers back in 2018 maybe and we would hang out and get together to work on beats. I think that these sessions were always super fun. In retrospect, I can see why - there was an incredible comraderie. We were working on songs in ableton, but when one person added anything, everyone else would crack jokes about it, throw in their opinions and ideas, compliment, laugh, and build off of everyone else's energy. We took one of those songs and we decided to contentify it. We compressed that entire experience into an mp3 and we shared it around. We found, surprisingly, that no one else got it. we'd play it for people and none of the depth or insight was there - all they heard was a flat track. that great experience had become content - devoid of the energy and the delight that we all had when we were putting it together. This example is valuable because it exemplifies two of the primary aspects of contentification, separation and medium conversion (or recording). Separation refers to lines being drawn between what will eventually become the content vs the things its connected to. it's the process of removing context or separating the "content" from the context that it was created in. to me, this part of the process often means separating things from the things that made them good. the other part of the process is medium conversion. it's the process of taking a vague, abstract experience. concept or feeling and trying to convert it into a different format, like words, or music, or art. I don't personally think that this is bad by itself, but I do think that people often mistake the map for the territory. For example, i think that when movements become commodified, like punk, people start thinking that punk is about a particular look or a particular group of clothes, while i think that most punks would agree that punk is about a mentality, or an ethos. I think that this is dangerous because I think that when this mental shift happens, people end up missing out on huge, positive aspects of pre-content. if people see punk clothing and think that's all that there is to punk, i honestly think that they're depriving themselves of a massive part of the punk experience. Obviously, it's beneficial to corporations and capitalists to convince us of this lie - this misunderstanding fills their pockets - but I think it's valuable for us to understand that these processes strip pre-content of their depth, beauty and magic. We can look beyond the shallow compression that art and experiences undergo to pop up on our social media feeds and get and participate in some much larger and more beautiful.