Content

by Kate Eichhorn

When nearly everyone in the United States and around the world was being asked to shelter in place at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020, Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis held a press conference to address what he perceived to be a serious problem—the lack of new content. “People have been starved for content,” he said. “We haven’t had a lot of new content since the beginning of March . . . we need to support content, especially sports.”

However, DeSantis didn’t simply claim that we were witnessing an unprecedented decline in content. He also claimed that content should be viewed as an essential service—something vital to Floridians’ health and wellness—for psychological reasons.

As someone who happened to be finishing a book about content at the time of DeSantis’s press conference, I was also left with a few additional questions. How could DeSantis claim that we’ve never before had a period of modern history with so little content when the concept of content is itself relatively recent? What turn of events had led an elected government official to view content production as essential—something essential enough to be prioritized alongside access to food or health services? And how could something so ambiguously defined and misunderstood be positioned as vital to our ability to carry on in the face of adversity?

The rise of the content industry is the ultimate expression of neoliberalism. Under the logic of neoliberalism, everything—politics, desire, sociality, art, culture, and so on—is reduced to mere nodes in the market economy.