Literally 2 Cents About Content!

As we approach the 30th anniversary of its release, Alex and Liz look back quasi-fondly at the Nintendo 64, including: Its historical place, as the first Nintendo console to debut during Japan's Lost Decades and after the Cold War. Why it was so difficult to develop for, even for seasoned software shops. How it was in retrospect a failed attempt at what the Nintendo Switch ultimately achieved: a t...

Alex and Liz discuss only some of the works of linguist, philosopher, and academic David Golumbia, including:  The Cultural Logic of Computation (2009) The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism (2016) Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology (2024) Technology and Silicon Valley are often associated with left-leaning politics. Still, various causes (SOPA/PI...

Alex and Liz talk about the Glassdoor reviews of their old employer, touch upon the depravity of working for an SEO content mill, and compare monopoly and monopsony. The classic Popula article about working at this very content mill . What is monopsony? Liz's site Alex's blog

Alex and Liz take a look at Kate Manne's 2024 book, Unshrinking: How to face fatphobia . Along the way, they examine some of the key assumptions that drive widespread fatphobia in contemporary society, what the point of weight loss is supposed to be, the history of hazardous weight-loss treatments, and how Manne's book intersects with other publications by Ragen Chastain, Abigail C. Saguy, Paul Ca...

Liz and Alex talk about streaming, why its business model is so lousy compared to cable, the social aspects of watching TV vs the isolation of streaming, how sports holds linear TV together, and why it feels more sustainable to support individual creators than to pay for a bundle. Liz's website Alex's blog How the Criterion Channel works The failed promise of binge TV The life and death of Hollywo...

Liz and Alex lay into their most despised words from the content mill industry, from "dynamic content" and "content management system" to "optimize" and "authentic." Also covered: video game DLC (that's "downloadable content," remember!), store brand sodas, and the 1990s web. Liz's site Alex's blog The “and yet you participate in society” cartoon Mastodon post on “data” Rob Horning blog

Alex and Liz dig their claws into "AI," this time focusing on some recent hype-y conferences Liz attended in Chicago and Las Vegas. We also look at cyberlibertarianism, the difficulties that LLMs have with ambiguity (and why making them better at this could paradoxically make them worse overall), the costs associated with producing cutting-edge work, and the embedded biases of AI. Alex's blog Liz'...

Alex and Liz talk about what really makes digital content different from physical and analog equivalents, and what distinctive ideological concepts—"everything's binary, monopolies are good, technology itself is the agent, users should be treated with hostility"— are uniquely embodied by it. And even though everything digital seems ethereal and immaterial, it requires tremendous amounts of real re...

Alex and Liz talk about the hottest topic out there—"AI," or "artificial intelligence" (quotes because we're a little skeptical of it being in any way "intelligent"), with a look at some recent essays that explore whether "AI" is agent or tool, its problematic uses in higher education, why Silicon Valley is so intent on building things ("AI" or otherwise) that they'd read about or seen in sci-fi (...

Alex and Liz talk about their time at the content mill, how it was all about ghost writing, what techniques they honed by doing that (such as learning how to easily add 100-200 superfluous words to any article's intro), and how that overall experience influenced their personal writing. Liz talks about self-publishing her book and Alex talks about the histories and features of various blogging plat...

Alex and Liz talk about Mastodon, the open social network that uses a federated design that works somewhat similarly to email. We also explain ActivityPub, the W3C-sanctioned protocol that underpins Mastodon and other services such as Pixelfed. Ever wondered what an "API" is? Curious about what Facebook was like in 2004? We've got you covered on these questions and others! Alex’s site: content-lab...

Alex and Liz talk about Jenny Odell's "How to Do Nothing," this time focusing on how information overload and context collapse make it difficult to do what you want to do. We also make a brief detour into "This is Water" (and its roots in "Infinite Jest"), discuss the toxicity of fandom, and how even works widely seen as "great" in a moment (your Booth Tarkingtons of the world, essentially) quickl...

Alex and Liz look at "How to do Nothing" by Jenny Odell, talk about Twitter, TikTok, and Mastodon and their respective effects on our mental health, and even spin out a hot take on David Foster Wallace's legendary 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College. Liz’s blog: Lizmakesstuff.com Adam Kotsko’s stunning blog post, “The Moral Cost of Capitalism”: https://itself.blog/2023/02/28/the-moral-cost-...

Liz and Alex dive deep into Mark Fisher's seminal 2009 surprise best seller, "Capitalist Realism." Topics explored include how society individualizes mental illness, why there's this widespread conception of "gritty" content as somehow "realer" than non-gritty equivalents, and how our ironic distance from capitalism allows us to participate in it—even when we know it's bad. Liz’s website: lizmakes...

Alex and Liz talk about the coping strategies they witnessed from their managers at the content mill. Interested in doing the work of your direct reports for them? Want to work with clients who don't respond to emails for months? Wondering if you can get away with some games of StarCraft in between client calls? We give you the SEO content mill manager job spec covering all of that. We also touch...

Liz’s website: lizmakesstuff.com Left Anchor: https://www.leftanchor.com Strunk and White’s Macho Grammar Club: https://www.thedailybeast.com/strunk-and-whites-macho-grammar-club Neil Patel, who doesn’t read: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ny-times-bestselling-author-torn-145614266.html Get full access to The Content Lab at www.content-lab.agency/subscribe

Alex and Liz talk about the one topic you can never ever write about at content mills. Also included are two on-air readings of archetypal content mill content, except we break that taboo and write about He Who Shall Not Be Named. Liz’s website: lizmakesstuff.com Alex’s “Here’s what “content” from a content mill looks like” post: https://toosolid.substack.com/p/heres-what-content-from-a-content Th...

Alex and Liz talk about algorithms and how they select and serve content, with an extended riff on an academic paper about bureaucracy (don't worry! we make it easy to understand). Also, if you've ever wondered what recursion is, we've got you covered with a simple definition and some basic examples. Liz’s website: lizmakesstuff.com Essay “The concept of algorithm as an interpretative key of moder...

Alex and Liz talk about IMDb What to Watch, a new app for trying to find that one pearl in the sea of "endless streaming content," through gamification. Will it work? We’re skeptical. And wasn't consuming content supposed to be fun at some point? The thing is: When there's too much to watch, everyone falls back on their preexisting favorites, or gets trapped in a loop of algorithmic selection and...

Welcome to Literally 2 Cents About Content!, the podcast about what it’s like to write thousands of words per day for literally two cents per word! In our first episode, Alex tells Elizabeth all about the origins of the content industry, what the word and concept of “content” really means, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the role of the (in)famous Microsoft founder in presaging (and creating!) the in...