On the pernicious nature of 'content culture'
Never visit the Substack subreddit
I’m fresh from watching a YouTube video about an extraordinarily chivalrous German WW2 fighter ace. The story gave me shivers, which I’ve learned is a personal red flag. I don’t trust emotional reaction to information (de-linking the two was harder than that statement implies and I’m still ‘working’ on it).
Sure enough, the video was 90% bullshit, with a grain of truth. You can watch it yourself, if you want to waste 8 minutes of your life - or just go see the comments about how marvellous it is and how people are so glad that it wasn’t made by AI that they immediately subscribed for more.
Since embarking on creating the definitive historical archive for an overlooked WW2 unit (24th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron (Mechanized)) I’ve learned a bit about military matters and consequently developed a sixth sense for nonsense. These days I’m a citation fanatic and if there’s no source document or firsthand testimony about something, I don’t trust the stories about it.
So it was with that video and it took all of ten minutes to establish that it was just a manifestation of what I’ve come to see as ‘content culture’.
I think I made up the concept of ‘Content Culture’, so here’s a definition.
It is the making and dissemination of ‘content’ that is the raison d’être in that world, not love of a subject.
Inevitably it’s also where truth goes to die.
I’m losing count of the Facebook pages I now block for this reason. You might know it as ‘slop’.
If I’m sounding like a pompous old nitpicker who enjoys spoiling other people’s fun that’s because I am and I do enjoy it.
And the reason is that those who make it and those who form their credulous audience are disrespecting people I’ve come to deeply appreciate and admire. You come over here to Europe in December 1943 with a significant chance of dying or carrying shrapnel in your body for the rest of your life, not to mention the terrible memories that made some of ‘my’ guys hit the bottle or take their own lives afterwards, and some ‘creator’ in Sri Lanka or California makes money inventing stories about that period. If I had the skills I’d hack the lot of them and post their snivelling faces and addresses in a hall of ̶s̶h̶a̶m̶e̶ ̶ shits.
