Dr. Boli is well aware that taking this principle too seriously would extinguish his celebrated Magazine, but he has never been one to let a foolish consistency stand in the way of telling other people what to do.
As regular readers are aware, Dr. Boli has been building an index verborum prohibitorum: a list of words we are not allowed to use anymore in serious discourse. The penalty for violations—that is, for using these words in serious discourse—is that Dr. Boli will not take you seriously.
Today we find it necessary to prohibit the word content, as it is applied to publications on the Internet.
Immediately Dr. Boli hears the protests from Web designers: We can’t get along without that word. How do you expect us to describe that stuff we pour into our design?
When you cannot imagine doing without a word in your profession, that might be a sign that you ought to get rid of it. It often means that the word has become a substitute for thought rather than an expression of thought.
Our usual reason for placing a word on the Index is that it has lost all meaning. In the case of “content,” however, we have a word that is actively pernicious, not just void of meaning. The word “content” both describes and—more importantly—creates a certain assumption about the things we publish on line.
Our longtime correspondent Charles Louis de Secondcat, Baron de la Breed et de Montemeow, gave us a good example the other day when he went looking for information about dryer sheets. A Maytag site told his Lordship that “Dryer sheets balance the positive and negative electrons in your fabrics that cause them to stick together.” You may look up “Electron” in Wikipedia if that does not strike you as a little bit off.
We went looking for information, but what we found was content. That is, we found a page where some meaningless blather superficially related to the subject was poured into a container to fill a certain amount of screen space. And the meaningless blather was there because the word “content” dictated what was to be on the page. If we are thinking rationally, we ask ourselves, “What information do we have that people need, and how can we give it to them in the best and most useful form?” But if we have the word “content” stuck in our heads, then we ask, “How can we fill up this empty space with words?”
In the current state of our technology, the easiest way to fill a page with words is by telling an AI bot to do it. The AI bot will then scour the Internet for the information it needs, and it will find mostly articles written by other AI bots. This is arguably an improvement over the state of the art five years ago, when the easiest way to fill a page with words was to steal an article from somewhere else and use article-spinning software to change all the words into synonyms. At least now our slop is grammatically defensible. But it is still slop.
This idea of “content” is what drives much of the rapid adoption of AI. If you think in terms of “stories” or “history” or “cooking” or “advice,” or whatever it is you like to write about, then the reason you are writing is because you have something to say. But if you think in terms of “content,” then writing is happening because there is a vessel that looks empty until it is filled with words. If you had something to say, it would not be empty. But you have nothing to say, so you instruct a bot to fill the vessel. It could also be filled with a repeating pattern from a William Morris wallpaper design, but then it would not attract suckers who are looking for information and find our “content” instead.
We live in a strange world where there is money to be made by the appearance of information. People are looking for information all the time. If they think we have it, they will visit our page, and then we can sell advertising space. That gives us a strong motivation to create pages that will lure the information-hunters, even if we have no information to give them. We create a page to trap those people who are desperately longing to know what dryer sheets really do, and then, having created the page, we need words to make it look like information. What the words say is almost immaterial.
If you are stuck in that business model, then of course you will need content. But Dr. Boli will not take you or your content seriously.
For the rest of us, though, the word content is now prohibited. Instead, we must say what we mean by picking another word that describes what kind of information it is we have to offer. Do we have a story to tell? Do we have a picture to show? Even the nearly meaningless word “article” is preferable, because it does not create the subconscious assumption that the vessel is the important thing, and the writing or picture or video is just what fills the beautiful vessel.
Therefore, by the mighty power of not caring what people think of him, Dr. Boli declares that, henceforth, the use of the word content to describe written matter, videos, audio files, pictures, and other such publications is prohibited.