The Lure of the Content Industrial Complex

When our first two kids were young, I had the great misfortune (in an momentary act of errant parental desperation, most likely) of stumbling upon "Ryan's Toy Review" on YouTube. They were instantly hooked and for me it was hate at first sight. "Why go through the effort of playing with your own toys, when you can watch some annoying kid on TV do it for you?" 

With over 48 billion views, and $30M a year in revenue, you could say this 10 year old "kidfluencer" (and his parents) have found their niche. None of it was enriching, but it was enrapturing. My wife and I had a few moments of parental peace, my kids had something to hold their attention for "free", the star of the show got to play with toys from sponsors for the camera, and his parents added a bucketful of zeros to their checking account. 

The thought of putting my kids on Youtube for public consumption is abhorrent to me. But for some families looking to cash in on their normal, everyday lives in the "Creator Economy," 

"Everything is content. The family has hired a video editor, a scriptwriter, and an assistant for Ramneek. The family is so popular that the kids often get recognized by fans at malls, and their classmates keep sending fan texts during online school. The family has received requests for selfies and autographs while sitting in their car at traffic signals. During a holiday, they were followed by a couple for more than 300 kilometers, from Mussoorie to Amritsar, to get a photograph for their child.

“Other families are very boring, they are always bored,” Anaanya said, “but we have something to do; we can make videos all day long.”

While this particular family was in India, American social media "influencers" looking to merge their real lives with their online personas are in no short supply. It seems like a dream life of sponsored products, travel, and remote, free-lance work that entreupeneurial Millenials are simply capitalizing on by hacking algorithms and churning out a seemingly endless supply of consumable content for an audience hungry for distraction.

Like those who used to flock to resource-rich coal and oil industrial sections of the country, a 19th century gold-rush, a 20th century "green"-rush (legalized cannabis), or even an opportune interview on Dr. Phil, sometimes you have to just ride the wave for all it's worth while it's cresting. While the content is "free" for viewers, the cost for these high-profile video producers can be steep:

"Mostly, though, he sees the extreme precarity that courses through every person, every thought, every action that occurs in the house. “Several times throughout my trip, I think I can see the toll this takes on them, a kind of pallid desperation that flickers across their faces,” he writes. “At one point, Brandon [one of the influencers] comes over and says, ‘The scary thing is you never know how long this is going to last, and I think that’s what eats a lot of us at night. It’s like, What’s next? How long can we entertain everyone for? How long before no one cares, and what if your life was worth nothing?’”

Just as those arriving at Staten Island eagerly sought to assimilate into American culture during the early 20th century waves of immigration, some Catholics today have asked themselves with regards to this use of modern media "why not us too?" Cashing in on YouTube monetization may not be their motivation; instead, they may see it as a golden opportunity to spread the Gospel and advance the Faith in a godless culture hungry for Truth. 

But in general, from what I have seen with the likes of figures my age like Brian Holdsworth, Matt Fradd, and other well-meaning Catholics, it happens something like this: You're working a full-time job, making some videos for fun on the side--either apologetics, interviews, or just musings on a variety of topics. You start to get some views, build some traction, and gain some subs.

Eventually, like all side hustle free-lancers and moonlighters, there are so many hours in a day and buoyed by the positive feedback of your viewers, you weigh the choice: "is God calling me to leave my job and dive in head first to this "thing?" Maybe the world needs what I have to give!" And so, after prayer and discernment, you cut the corporate cord and devote yourself full-time to producing high-quality monologues, booking guests for interviews, and addressing the pressing issues of the day in a digital format for the world to, well...

Consume. 

 My brother, who until recently had a semi-long tenure at Apple, used to lament that the personal satisfaction of completing a breakthrough project was superseded by deflation at the relentless corporate need to immediately move onto the next project. As Stringer Bell used to say in The Wire, you have to "move that product." 

At some point, you realize you are on now on a hamster wheel that is not so easy to get off of, churning out "product" (content) for an insatiable audience with a precariously short attention span interested not in deep pondering or gestating reflectively, but simply in being distracted in the moment from what's in front of them.

With your mortgage payments dependent on algorithms and clicks, reshares, and monetization, stepping off the wheel isn't a simple affair. Steve Skojec's recent disillusionment and leaving of One Peter Five (and the Faith) and Patrick Coffin's foray into--well, whatever it is he is foraying into these days--first queued me into this idea that maybe you shouldn't leave your day job as  a lay Catholic. For one thing, 

"YouTube brain, from the perspective of the YouTuber as opposed to the viewer, is what happens when you are both creatively and financially subject to the whims of other people’s attention spans for years at a time, weighed down by neverending demand for more content for dwindling returns."

Though I have toyed with the idea of starting a YouTube channel myself, my perspective lies squarely with that of "the viewer." And the crest of my interest in watching episodes of Pints With Aquinas or Sensus Fidelium has, I think, already peaked. Youtube is the only thing I have left--no Facebook, Twitter, (I wouldn't even know what to do on TikTok), but even that is waning. Like many people, I suspect, I've grown tired of content. After years of doing late night lines of digital dopamine here and there, I don't want to cross the line into full-blown addict. And so when it comes to consuming content, I've largely just...stopped.

For the content creator putting food on the table with each new upload, this is a startling and truly frightening prospect. If clicks=dollars, what do you do when you have a seven year gap in your resume aside from being a Catholic YouTuber if this "thing" doesn't work anymore? The kids still need shoes, tuition still needs to be paid. You are knee-deep in this thing now, but the interest just isn't there anymore from those pumping up your sub list. You're trapped. Sure, you could up the ante into more and more sensationalist topics to gain more fringey followers, but it's a wagered risk that may or may not pay off. And even that has diminishing returns. And I think this is about the point where a faithful, good-hearted, well-meaning Catholic in the dark night of his soul, sitting before his spare-room studio camera might stare into the lens and ask himself, "What have I done...and what do I do now?"

Personally, I think figures like Brian and Matt are creative, insightful guys with good, honest hearts; I would love to sit down with them for a beer or a scotch over a campfire. I just wonder if perhaps they are unwitting victims in this digital-zeitgeist-sausage-machine--the Content Industrial Complex (CIC)--age; Years from now, they are either going to have to pivot into the Next Catholic Thing, or will wake up and just push the hamster wheel off the table and starting filling out applications at the local Home Depot. At one point I was slightly envious of what they had going; but I'm not sure they would share that sentiment in their heart of hearts. I think subconsciously they are feeling the grind, halfway through the tunnel of Catholic manhood, with a long way still to go. 

Maybe it's my risk-averse nature, but I'm glad I never forayed into this on-line landscape of YouTube channels and attaining some kind of Catholic Influencer status; personally, I like working a normal secular job and being relatively anonymous. Does the world really have to hear what I have to say? And if it does, do I really need a full-time monetized channel to say it? Maybe I can just live my life in real time, and put my lamp on a hill for free to light the way for others.

The bigger question at hand, though, is if as Catholics we are all just as guilty of simply consuming product, consuming content (religious or otherwise), in the age of digital addiction and leaving spent-whore corpses by the side of the road in our wake? Is there a case to be made that we are the proverbial sweat-shop sneaker buyers...robbing our families of the attention they need from us through mindless Facebook scrolling, unwittingly feeding the vainglory of emerging TikTok stars, or fueling the digital rage of Twitter rabble-rousers by our digital content gluttony and addiction to distraction? 

Does the world need the Truth of the Gospel? Yes. Does it need the redemptive power of Jesus Christ and the life-giving Sacraments of His Church? Again, yes. Do we need more artfully-created Word on Fire, or personally-contrite hearts on fire? The jury may be out and only the future will tell if we've capitalized on a golden ticket bearing the fruits of repentence, or if we've all been taken for a ride on a questionable digital experiment that has only fed our addiction and left us as hungry and distracted as when we started.