lots of AI talk these days, and with it a real dialectical opposition emerging between people who think that the word "content"1 sucks meaning out of the works of art that are in fact a main source of meaning in their lives and people who can't think of anything better than to get endless content with which to block out the anxious thoughts that would otherwise trouble them
and generally the people i like are more on the first side than on the second side. but i will admit to a lifelong struggle with facing up to things that cause me anxiety and not just reading a 600 page sci-fi book in one sitting about it. so i have sympathy for the second view, although given i just framed it as "a lifelong struggle" it's not like i have unbounded approval for it.
but! a thing i am fascinated by and have been fascinated by for a long time is the aesthetics & emotional feeling of seeing a rich stream of content passing by, each with a dense context but passing by too fast for that context to be fully appreciated. just the feeling of staring into the swirling abyss. i understand kids on TikTok are currently calling this "corecore"? and i'm not saying this is a good feeling, or that it is the way i want everything to be - i understand that it is basically a bad way to live, but... it feels weird in a way that has consistently fascinated me. it's a particular kind of sensory overload.
anyway, you don't need AI to get this feeling, I'm sure you didn't need the internet to get this feeling (for an attempt at rendering it in prose pre-Internet, see John Brunner's Stand On Zanzibar), but i do think it is a specific and interesting kind of feeling, and i do think it is something a lot of people are interested in & want to play with, and i think that can often be forgotten in the rush to condemn it as A Terrible Future We Will All Be Doomed To Forever Unless We're Careful.
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in defence of the word "content": it is a useful and precise word to use when talking about business models, because the business models for making different kinds of content online look very similar. much more similar than, say, the business model of selling books in a bookshop is to selling ebooks on Kindle. "but i dislike that we can only talk about culture via a discussion of money", i hear you say, which... yeah, sometimes i feel like that too. but more often i wish people did talk about money, because ignoring it does not mean it ignores you
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all of The Fast & The Furious movies, played at once
