The Who Cares Era ⇥ dansinker.com
Hanif Abdurraqib, in one of his excellent Instagram mini-essays the other week, wrote about the rise of content that’s designed to be consumed while doing something else. In Hanif’s case, he was writing about Time Machine, his incredible 90 minute deep dive into The Fugees’ seminal album The Score. Released in 2021, Hanif marveled at the budget, time, and effort that went into crafting the two-part 90 minute podcast and how, today, there’s no way it would have happened.
He’s right. Nobody’s funding that kind of work right now, because nobody cares.
(It’s worth pointing out that Hanif wrote this using Stories, a system that erased it 24 hours later. Another victim of the Who Cares Era.)
This does not seem like it is a brand new feeling. It is plausible that one could create a Paul Fairie-esque collection of similar complaints throughout history — of art created only for commerce’s sake; of shallow media intended for brief consumption instead of a lasting impression.
I think it is more useful to de-emphasize the “era” part of Sinker’s criticism, and to instead consider how carelessness creeps in. Sarah Wynn-Williams published “Careless People” earlier this year. I wrote in April about Perplexity’s carelessness of ethics and privacy. Perhaps both of these examples are better described as corrosion or corruption. What Sinker is describing is more like cultural and societal ennui.
The user isn’t the customer. And they’re not the product either. The real product is behavioral optimization — metrics on a dashboard. The paying customer is somewhere else entirely, and the “content” is just a means to nudge behavior and juice KPIs.
There have always been measures for success, but the ability to relentlessly optimize for them is a fairly new phenomenon. Plenty of films and plays are created by reverse-engineering the tropes favoured by award committees, but they still need to be good in order to draw an audience.
Update: A lack of care is, in part, downstream of other forces (previously linked).