Don't Put Your Content in a Box

Put it in a series of loops

The other day our podcast producer asked my friend and collaborator Max where our forthcoming podcast episodes (!) should be uploaded. 

“Oh, probably just on the website,” said Max. 

It was then that I found myself stepping in to disagree, explaining something I had previously only ever half-articulated to myself: one should never put content in a “box.”

By content I mean the stuff we consume on the internet, the stuff that platforms are hosting, basically. 

And by a box, well, there’s a reason one’s own website is a bad place for content. A simple website is a bit like a box. You pop a bunch of stuff in a box, someone can go look in there for a limited number of things, and then they’re done. It is finite, it is not dynamic. (There’s only so much to do in my sock drawer.) A box does not lead you on to further similar things to look at automatically, so as to keep you going. It does not become an addictive habit, so you return regularly and see content as it is produced. 

Nearly all websites for personal companies and small endeavours are “boxes”, and they have to be - there’s only a certain amount of content any individual group or person can produce, and thus only so much keeping the listener or viewer poking around before they go do something else. 

In contrast, social media sites are an endless, winding, dizzying, addictive series of loops. You start with one and you’re off, on a literally never-ending scroll or binge session, where one piece of content leads you seamlessly to another. And nowadays these loops aren’t just algorithmic, they’re also social: we are likely to spend a huge amount of time simply watching reels sent to us by our friends, who indicate, with their recommendations, that they know us so well, and who want to feel seen when we respond to their recommendation. There’s a social pressure on us to keep looping, even if we don’t feel it as pressure. Now that they’ve sent us something, we’ll likely send something back, especially since the phone always suggests we do so. The result, of course, is that you are “never done” in a system of loops, the way you are in a box. 

So from a purely strategic point of view, if you want to make content and get people to watch it, you want to move all your content out of “boxes” and onto these looping systems. ¹

To think about content as a system of loops helps explain why influencing and microcontent are such huge parts of the internet right now. When you are making higher-production and/or finite content, like a 4-part television series or a single panel talk, you put a lot of effort to only end up with four “units”, more or less; only four things to toss into the system of loops. If one does well, you can’t make use of that data and make similar things easily, because you’d have to get the panel or the film crew back together. If you’re an influencer, however, you can more or less make an endless number of tiny, low-qual pieces, waiting for some to “take off”, adjusting as you go to what people like, keeping your audience returning to you again and again, building a relationship with their followers along the way, and building your own profile up in the algorithm. 

You get the idea by now. Simply plopping even very good content somewhere is no good; what gets rewarded these days is clickable, scrollable and especially shareable content, stuff that makes you want to connect with other people by sharing it, stuff that is bite-sized generally and easy to produce continuously, stuff that circulates forever in loops. 

None of which, of course, necessarily makes for good content in any subjective aesthetic sense. In Kate Eichorn’s book on content, she provides the example of the “instagram egg”, a photo of an egg that was, for some time, the most popular post on instagram. It was, quite literally, just a picture of an egg, but clearly people had fun sending it to one another to get it more likes, hoping to bring it to number one via a series of loops. 

As long as there is even the briefest moment of enjoyment and the urge to share, content continues to loop, which is, from the usual content-creation point of view, a success. 

If content lives in loops, however, it’s worth asking what keeps those loops going, psychically. Certainly the social element keeps it going to a degree: I open the app to see what my friends shared with me. I then forward some of those things to other people, who then open their app, look at what I’ve sent, and send me things, etc, probably until we all die.

But this isn’t all that’s keeping us in loops. The other thing about scrolling platforms is that they function, neuroscientifically, by keeping us mostly disappointed. Most successful apps rely on the psychological principle of intermittent reinforcement, which is the way human beings (not to mention rats, pigeons, and a great number of other creatures as curious as ourselves) expend the most effort towards a goal when they receive a reward from this task only at irregular intervals. When it comes to app design, this means that if you get the same satisfaction from opening an app every time, you are actually less likely to check it regularly (you roughly know what experience awaits, after all, and can always do it later). In contrast, if, when opening an app, you sometimes see that a dull high school acquaintance has had another child and sometimes receive fantastic gossip, you will check that app all the time. In an age of push notifications, the same principle leads us not just to open particular apps but to constantly check the phone itself. (Americans do this about 144 times a day). Once one gets in the habit, it sticks. Indeed, anything that keeps one in the habit of checking apps is highly beneficial for their designers; this is partially why temporary content, like instagram stories, are so beneficial to platforms: their fleeting nature keeps people in the habit of checking, checking, checking.  

We check and check and check our notifications because we don’t know whether they are going to report that there’s a sale on electronics, that the pope is dead, or that our crush has messaged us. We check because we’re uncertain, even though we’re certainly mostly going to be disappointed. Functionally, the possible disappointment keeps us interested as much as the occasional high. As writer Jia Tolentino put it  “it is essential that social media is mostly unsatisfying. That is what keeps us scrolling, scrolling, pressing our lever over and over in the hope of getting some fleeting sensation - some momentary flush of recognition, flattery, or rage.”

In other words another thing that content loops can help explain is why there’s so much bad content (or just mediocre content). For what works well for social media and content platforms is to have a bunch of mediocre stuff and then occasionally stuff that’s really great. This is part of what keeps people scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, hunting for the true gems as we once did for nuts and berries, occasionally rewarded and excited and often a bit bummed out. (But also: on autopilot in our hunt. Tim Wu has noted that technologies that appear designed to increase our agency over what we consume often have the opposite effect, so that we mostly use the remote control to flick through channels without thinking, or scroll without really pausing to consider each option).

The bad content is not on the app by accident. It’s there to fill out your search, to keep you slightly bored. No wonder that everyone is encouraged to make content, then, and not just consume it: even their bad content adds value. Everyday people, and even micro-influencers who are not very good, do wonders for plumping up the platform so there’s enough to scroll through and the bigger stars really shine. 

There’s a psychic cost to this technological-psychological structure of our lives, of course. Last month, the writer Sophie K. Rosa wrote “my phone and diary have become deeply hated and loved objects; they enable intimacy, in a sense, just as they degrade it. I would like to throw both objects in the Thames..” I feel similarly, about nearly everything related to London and modern life, with its constant scheduling and notifications. But I specifically noticed her description of both loving and hating the objects with which we necessarily navigate our social world. I wonder what it does to us to reside on platforms, and with devices, that rely on our continual disappointment to function, and thus require us to love and hate the device or platform as we experience disappointment and excitement over and over again.

In Kleinian psychoanalysis, the immature subject is one that cannot handle their own ambivalence, especially about other people. The suggestion is that this problem with ambivalence begins in childhood, and that the child cannot psychically compute that the same mother who enforces bedtime is the one who provides them with food and cuddles, so they “split” the mother into two, imagining they have a “good mother” and a “bad mother” (or, famously put, they think of that same mother as a “good breast” and a “bad breast”). This is painful enough when one is two, presumably, but Klein theorised that many of us do this when we grow up too, which can help explain why many people see their significant others either as perfect and wonderful or horrible, in turns (or just trying asking someone about their recent ex…). One doesn’t have to take psychoanalytic terms literally to see the point: when someone or something intermittently gives us what we want, we can become a little bonkers, unable to see them clearly, or fix our own position in the world. This is especially and painfully true if we are somewhat forced to rely on them, as children are with their mothers, as employees must with their bosses, or, sadly, many do with romantic partners. And this ambivalent, reliant, state is precisely the way consumers of content relate to content “loops” like TikTok, Instagram, Twitter (okay, “X”) and so on - these platforms not only loop us around in never-ending content cycles, but they also rely on our ambivalence, our disappointment and ongoing hope that we might find something better, our ability to love and hate the platform and the object in turns. If we were to design a machine meant to engineer us to long for people and things that will mostly let us down, and to spend all of our time and mental space on that aspect of life, we probably could not have done better than to engineer these platforms as they are.

Klein suggested the mature position for adults to arrive at is the “depressive position”, the position which truly understands (and it is a bit depressing) that good mom and bad mom are the same person, just some flawed lady, that all the people and things we’re going to rely on have both bad and good, that we can never really have one without the other. I think Klein is right about our parents and our lovers and our friends. They will disappoint and enthrall in turns and we must live with this consciously to love them well. I don’t know if we should settle for full depressive realism about our devices, however. We do not need to love them as they are. I’d rather see a few good things and close the phone than scroll and scroll with longing. 

But, since I only work in content production, and don’t get to control the big companies, I don’t have any say over all that. All I can advise anyone who makes content is to not lose the game they’re forced to play: don’t put that content in a box. Put it in a disappointing, addictive series of loops.

1.  As ever, I am not claiming originality here; two especially influential theorists who have made this point in their own ways are Jodi Dean and Kate Eichorn.