Content is the New American Dream
If content is king, are we the serfs?
I am sitting in my apartment staring at a tripod that I keep half assembled. I plug in little microphones that will increase the quality of the audio of my mobile recordings, their batteries eternally in need of a charge. I position myself in front of my phone and talk about an idea I had, a story or a theory, its bright shape that appeared to me in the haze of half-sleep now dull and stiff. Most likely, the video will sit in my camera roll, unwatched, for the rest of the week. Most likely, it will continue to sit there for months, if not years.
Why do I do this? If I know that I am unlikely to edit and publish a piece of content, why record the videos? Because the internet, like any previous frontier, promises that redemption is just around the corner.
If the internet is the new frontier, the content creator is the newest edition of the American Dream. It promises us the kind of freedom that has always been synonymous with western success: financial independence, creative freedom, and social appraisal—the colors and textures of a better life. It says that all of the things we want and need are just an upload away. If we have the ambition to record and share, second to anything else, we, too, can obtain a better life, and so the race to create more—to share more—began.
America has always subsisted on the promise of a better life, despite that promise often falling short. In 1862, when half of the country had been decimated after the Civil War, the government offered 160 acres to anyone willing to settle it via the Homestead Act. Roughly 400,000 families tried to settle on the land, but only 40% ever completed their claims. Between 1880 and 1920, the government refocused their efforts on those abroad, recruiting nearly 20 million Europeans with posters depicting golden streets, though the majority of them found overcrowded tenements instead. By the 1980s—amidst the economic downturn of deindustrialization, manufacturing jobs falling by the millions each year—the dream was optimized, minimized, and made available to anyone: the lottery, which spread across the entire country, was the first chance at striking free that asked for almost nothing. Though each dream appeared different, they thrived on the same conditions: when the present reality feels insufficient, magical thinking feels like the only choice. The land will be my savior. It must be better in America. This is my turn to win.
The infrastructure for the newest version of the American dream arrived quietly: YouTube in 2005, the iPhone in 2007, Instagram in 2010. For years, social media was a hobby, a creative playground for early adopters and the teenagers that grew into the internet. Creators of this time stumbled into audiences, as opposed to building them deliberately. That is until TikTok arrived in 2016 with a new kind of algorithm and a new kind of format: You watched and created not for your friends, but for anyone, and so anyone, and everyone, began creating. The dream went mass market: 162 million people in the US alone identified themselves as content creators in 2025.
Content, as defined by a Google search, is the material or subject matter contained within something. That something—over the course of twenty years—has become us. We are the content for the platform. We are vessels of unrealized opportunity filled with a million chances at a better life, the rich life, the free life, the famous life. Content is everywhere, content is everyone, content is everything we are living and not living, the daily routine of going to the gym made into a short film, the trip across the world we cannot afford, a week’s worth of activities whittled into a thirty second reel—add saturation, subtract temporal reality.
Meanwhile, the majority of content’s wealth remains with the platforms themselves. Instagram alone is valued at over $114 billion, TikTok’s ad revenue is projected to hit $54 billion by 2027, and X sits at roughly $44 billion, all while the median creator earns around $200 a month, and 96% of creators never break $100,000 a year. Yet the promise of the content creator convinces us to continue creating, a perpetual reason to produce, and an intentional one at that, considering our production is a requirement for the platforms to exist in the first place, similar to the American economy’s reliance on blue collar work. Though the infrastructure of the American economy was built by blue collar workers—the roads, the factories, the supply chains—the majority of the wealth that infrastructure generated was captured by a select few. Content creators are doing the same for the attention economy: building the feeds, producing the culture, creating the “why” behind anyone opening the app at all, while the platforms collect the majority of what that attention is worth.
If content is king, we are the serfs, and the cruelest part is that we built the castle ourselves.
Blue collar workers knew that they were workers. They were paid a wage (though often an unfair amount) and understood the relationship between their labor and someone else’s profit. In the best cases, they organized and unionized to better their circumstances. The content creator, however, is sold an entirely different story: we are entrepreneurs, we are building our own brands, the platform is a tool we are wielding, as opposed to a machine we are feeding. The value extraction of content is laundered through the language of creativity and independence, which makes it nearly impossible to resist, let alone organize against, for one cannot unionize a dream. So the majority of creators continue to perform unpaid labor on the speculation that it might eventually convert. For some, it will. For many, it will not.
Content’s biggest danger, however, is not that it is a lottery that requires effort. It is not even its inequitable design. It is that it contaminates our expectations: of ourselves, of art, of time.
The rectangle floods our face with light and shows us a prettier life, a funnier life, a life with more of everything we want and less of everything we are required to do (nobody films themselves applying for jobs or going to the dentist). The reduction is where the magic happens, for all content is a compression of its source. Creators stitch three weeks of life into three minutes of action, reducing the complex nature of time into short bursts of gratification. Content erases the mundanity from living, the way a feathered chicken is torn from its carcass and scrubbed into a palatable slab of meat, so that we are convinced that we might be served our dinner without ever needing to cook, if only we became content creators ourselves.
The number of times I have heard friends, strangers, and family ponder aloud what their lives might be like if they broadcast them on social media is not a coincidence. In a world where American employers cut over a million jobs in 2025 alone (the highest since the pandemic) and where only 18% of workers report being genuinely satisfied with their jobs, who can blame my generation for contemplating an easy escape? Of course, creating content is not “easy.” Nor is it, for many people, an “escape.” It requires time, consistency, and, most importantly, an innate desire to create something designed for a platform in the first place. Hence why so many people begin filming a hundred videos, only to quit before editing any of the footage (guilty).
It is obvious when someone creates something without the innate desire to create, which often lends towards awkward clips or unpolished posts. When I see this kind of content, or consider creating it myself, the first word that comes to mind is: Why? What is the purpose of what we are making? What is the purpose of what we are watching? Do we really need to see a behind-the-scenes look into every single person’s life?
The answer is no, but if it is fun, then why not? Perhaps that is the only requirement: whether or not we are having fun. It is a simple conclusion that I wish were true, though it is inaccurate, for almost anyone who wishes to create a living off of anything creative or entrepreneurial is required to make content, despite its measure of fun. Writers, directors, musicians, business owners, the list goes on: in order to be seen, you need to post. In order to sell your services, you need an audience to sell to. In order to reach a wider audience, you need to pay Meta an advertising fee.
In a recent conversation with a writing group, a friend of mine complained about the modern process of querying a book. She had sent her manuscript to a prospective agent, and in return, received a single question: What platforms was she on, and how many followers did she have?
The gatekeepers of literary art, the people deciding which voices are amplified, are now routinely using a metric invented by ad-tech companies to make their decisions. If they are going to make a blind bet, it is better that the bet has one million followers as opposed to 159. This is understandable, but makes the requirement no less upsetting, for in the platform-centric world we now live in, what comes first: the art or the audience?
We need an audience to get the deal, but we need the deal to have time to build the audience in the first place. The trick, of course, is inheriting the luxury of time, money, or attention through chance. The algorithm, like anything else, rewards prior advantage. If we come without it, then we best have the stamina to build without question, creating and posting for years with no guarantee at the end of it. Stamina is, in the end, the requirement of any successful content creator.
It is, however, not the only requirement. The algorithms do not just demand our time, they demand that we begin thinking in their language, to organize our lives by their logic. When I see trending videos, I often find myself taking inventory: What are the story beats? Should I make that with my own voice? How could I do the same thing but different, in order to amass a similar response? If I had an original idea to create something, something that was genuinely mine, it quickly feels naive in comparison to the inventory at hand, not quite shaped for the feed.
In creating content, we put our own creativity under surveillance. We audition our ideas, no longer asking “is this interesting” or “is this honest,” but “will this perform?” In seeking freedom and independence, we enslave ourselves to the algorithms.
I say all of this as I sit here writing content, despite the fact that I, too, am bored of Substack, a platform that seems to be growing towards the same tropes as the others (“Here’s how to improve engagement on Substack!” “Here’s how I grew my newsletter to 10K!”). I am bored of thinking of things to write, bored of writing for the sake of sharing something every other week, bored of hearing my own voice (even if it is just in my head), because I feel that, at some point, I am forcing myself to find things to say—because the internet requires us to speak constantly.
Perhaps this is just self-doubt. Or the creator’s curse that has plagued every generation of writers, artists, and makers, a crippling relationship with a blank page, one that borders codependency (because we shrivel up and become depressed if we do not write ourselves from one place to another) and unwarranted hate (because a blank page has no agency, emotion or thought, so what is there, really, to hate?). Or perhaps this is a yearning to get out of my own head, my own body, my own perspective, because I feel like the default of my generation—more specifically, the generation defined by the internet—is to be obsessed with our own heads, bodies, and perspectives: hundreds of thousands of people with a Substack, writing about similar things.
That is not to say that writing something similar to someone else negates the value of the writing itself. Writing is a practice, a religion, and I think the majority of the value of what is written in the world resides in the act of that person writing, as opposed to the content of the writing itself, considering there is more writing we never see than there is the writing we read, in that Julie writing down that she hates her abusive partner and wants something better for herself, three pages of imagining what that better looks like and encouraging herself to do it, to leave, is more valuable than every post I have ever published on Sleepover.
Maybe what I yearn for is simply more honesty, more play, half-finished products that paint living as a dynamic, subjective thing, as opposed to curated pieces of content that are designed to be clicked, to be read, to be liked and shared and thus eventually reused by hundreds of people in similar ways, the lack of originality dimming our collective consciousness into embers of recycled insight. Maybe what I yearn for is less content in general, because why must we all brand ourselves and identify a niche? Why should we expect anyone to listen to us, and why should we listen to anyone else? The people who will hold us in difficult times and attend our funerals at the end of it all are not our subscribers, but our friends, our family, and our neighbors—the ones we know in real life.
And yet here we are creating, expressing ourselves in convenient formats so that we might be seen by people we will most likely never meet, scrolling through content made by other people we will, too, most likely never meet, supplying our attention as consumers, our time as creators, and our energy as a collective population to behemoth corporations that take the trifecta and turn it into profit. We give ourselves over to the platforms in the hopes that they will give us something in return. And despite the majority of us never receiving much, we continue to create—not, I think, because we are gullible to the hand that feeds us, but because the act of making gives us something a platform never could.
Skepticism and burnout. Nihilism and self-doubt. Both arrive when we create not for ourselves, but for the figurative other. The audience we don’t yet have. The readers we think we need in order to feel heard, the viewers we think we need in order to feel seen. In the context of a platform, it is easy to focus on the relationship between creator and audience, since the act of “posting” entails sharing something with the world. But the most important relationship in any creative act has never been between the creator and the audience. It has always been between the creator and themselves.
When we create, we process. When we process, we learn. And as we learn, we begin to know not just a subject or a theory, but a part of ourselves. The psychologist James Pennebaker spent decades studying this connection, finding that people who wrote about difficult experiences showed measurable improvements in their psychological and physical health. Other studies, too, have shown that self-documenting leads to similar benefits. Putting experience into language, photographs, or a sequence of videos forces us to organize that experience, to hold it at a distance, so that we might see it clearly for the first time.
When I write about an idea with the goal of understanding it, a part of me opens up. I find flow. When I write with the goal of having what I have written reach more and more people, the opposite happens. I freeze.
Perhaps the wrong turn is not the desire to be seen, but who we yearn to be seen by. Somewhere between the MySpace era and the TikTok era, we replaced the desire to be known by people who matter to us with the desire to be watched by people we will never meet. We stopped making things to laugh at with our friends and started making them for strangers. The audience became infinite and, in becoming infinite, it became empty.
We all create to be seen. By who? Mostly, ourselves. When we sit down to make something, we are searching for pieces of understanding that might bring us closer to a self that feels true, a presence that feels whole. This is the only thing that a platform can neither give nor take away, and it is, perhaps, the only thing that keeps us in the mode of creation, despite any measure of reward. The reality, of course, is that we want both: the self-realization and the reward. While some may argue that self-realization is reward enough, the are real financial demands that the world enforces, so it is only natural that we want what we create to not only feed our souls, but our stomachs. It is, and always has been, the struggle of the artist.
Hence: The tripod still half-assembled in the corner of my room. The microphones, now dead, sitting atop my desk. And the shape of my body and the sound of my voice, at some point this weekend, most likely recording another video. Attempting at finding an audience. Attempting at finding a reward.
I do not know how to want less than I want, how to make something without wondering what the outcome might be. That is to say: I am human. I suspect that no creative person knows how to do this, that the best we can do is remind ourselves, every now and then, who we are creating for, and to try, on many occasions—some successful, some not—to find our way back to ourselves. ☷
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With love,
Your favorite capybara ☼ AKA Travis Zane
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