Content Creation: A Marathon Where Nothing, Not Even You, Endures

Photo by Richard Bell on Unsplash

If you haven’t got the memo yet, this is dystopia, and it’s worsening by the day. Neoliberalism requires us to believe there is a rational off-ramp from all of this — genocide in Gaza, war with Iran, the starvation blockade of Cuba, a perpetual cost-of-living crisis, the environment dying, the monetisation of every human interaction, and the gulagification of peaceful protest.

We want to believe that somewhere ahead there is a deus ex machina of good sense that will transform Trump’s stream-of-consciousness funeral oration for society into a wedding march. That somehow we can vote our way out of this.

That’s not happening.

The people who insist the system can still be reformed — politicians, corporate news journalists, and the comfortably off income earners — all have a great deal of skin in the neoliberal game. They want us to believe that a system so metastasised with corruption and nihilism can be reformed through incremental adjustments — a tweak here, a regulation there, a slightly kinder rhetoric from the same political class that engineered the crisis in the first place.

But neoliberalism was designed precisely to eliminate the margins where people once survived.

Older social systems, for all their injustices, still contained spaces where people could subsist — extended families, strong unions, affordable housing, public institutions that functioned as buffers against catastrophe.

Neoliberalism engineered society to remove those margins. What remains are sharp edges where people perish.

The digital economy mirrors this brutal logic because the billionaires who own it didn’t want a thousand renaissances to bloom from it; instead, they made content creators like nineteenth-century factory workers, chained to a 24/7 production cycle.

Substack is a good example. For the profit of its major shareholders, it has transformed content creators into participants in something akin to a dance marathon during the Great Depression.

Any time I publish on Substack, the 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, based on a 1935 novel, flashes before me. It tells the story of people trying to survive and find hope in dance marathons during a time of economic collapse. These marathons enriched the organisers far more than the participants.

I saw the movie once at the cinema with my parents when I was very young. What stayed with me was how strongly they identified with the financial desperation portrayed by the characters. They had lived it, so it was cut into them like tree rings marking drought in a forest. They also thought that because it was the 1970s, the Welfare State was forever.

The rule for a 1930s dance marathon — like being a content creator for Substack or any other platform — is simple: keep producing or collapse from exhaustion. As the old saying in academia goes, “publish or perish.”

The result is a tidal wave of content. Most of it, mine included, is produced when it is too fresh off the vine. It doesn’t have the time or the leisure to mature in thought or style. Now I compensate for that by recycling and improving essays that were first filed under the deadline of economic necessity.

Posts by Substack creators increasingly resemble white noise in people’s inboxes. So much content is pushed out every day that it produces vast digital slush piles — newsletters that sit unopened, buried beneath newer ones, or quietly filtered into spam and junk folders.

A recent Pew Research study found that 62% of subscribers don’t read the newsletters they sign up for.

And who can blame them?

Content, content, content. It’s hard enough trying to keep up with your own thoughts, let alone the interior monologues of Substack creators.

Social media platforms now resemble the crowded cobbled streets of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — packed with the discordant cries of street hawkers selling wares that most people cannot afford or do not need.

Somehow we all became barrow boys, and I don’t think any of us intended that. But the system and its algorithms are controlled by billionaires. They control everyone’s ability to live well or not live well in a way that primitive people thought their gods controlled the wind, the sun, the weather, the tides, and a good harvest. Except in this case, unlike gods of ancient myths, the billionaires really do control everything, except their own mortality.

Yet even though I know the game is rigged, like in those dance marathons of the Great Depression, I keep producing, you keep producing, and everyone else keeps producing — performing, hawking bits of ourselves. We hope we are the ones who survive until the last dance so we can earn enough to enter another marathon.

However, all of us will eventually collapse under the strain of endless, breathless production. Someone else will step forward onto the digital dance floor.

After all, they shoot horses, don’t they?

Thank you for reading and supporting my Substack.

Your support helps keep me housed and allows me to keep Harry Leslie Smith’s legacy alive.

Living with cancer and lung disease makes life more challenging, especially during this cost-of-living crisis. Every bit of support goes a long way. Below, I’ve included a tip jar. It helps pay the rent and keeps a candle burning for The Harry’s Last Stand Project.

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📚 A Legacy Nearly Complete

Over the last 18 months, I’ve worked to complete my dad’s The Green and Pleasant Land, the unfinished history of his generation’s youth that Harry left behind.

The manuscript is now complete, apart from a few minor edits. It traces his life from his birth in the Barnsley slums in 1923 to Labour’s landslide victory in the general election of July 1945, and the birth of Britain’s Welfare State. It will be going to publishers in the first week of September.