Everything Beautiful Is Becoming Content

I was at the South Congress HEB on a Saturday, buying one avocado and a six-pack of the seltzer I hate but keep buying because the labels match my kitchen, when a woman in a pale pink tennis skirt at the next self-checkout photographed her groceries before she bagged them. Not for a recipe. Not for an unboxing. Not for a sponsor. Just arranging an organic lemon and a tub of Greek yogurt and a pack of those cracker things that cost nine dollars a box, taking the picture, putting them in the bag, doing the next one. I stood there with my avocado and thought: oh, the grocery run is content now. When exactly did we vote on that. Did I miss the email.

I told Paula about it on the walk home, and she laughed for a long time and then said, “have you looked at your own feed lately,” which was mean, but also fair. I scrolled back. Out of my last twenty posts, three were drawings. Seventeen were photographs of drawings-in-progress, arranged on a desk, styled, with my cat Margaux in the frame, with a coffee cup in the frame, with a pencil placed just so. I was also the woman in the pink tennis skirt. I just photographed a different product. My product was process. My product was a simulation of a working artist, and the working artist was, in fact, me, except that the me who was actually working had become a separate entity from the me who made the posts, and the posts paid more. That is the thing I keep trying to write around, and it is also the thing I am currently doing.

So here is the essay, the one I have been circling for a month.

The word flipped

Content used to mean what was inside a thing. Contents of a drawer. Contents of a letter. Contents of a cabinet. The Latin is contentus, “contained,” and the word, until recently, described the relationship between a container and a thing, which meant the word required there to be a container and a thing; two separate categories, the wrapper and the stuff in the wrapper.

Then, between roughly 2012 and 2015 (I will not die on the exact year, but I will die on the range), the word flipped. Content no longer meant what was inside the container. It meant the thing itself.

Now the matcha is content. Now the painting is content. Now my drawing of Margaux asleep on my laptop is content. There is no longer a distinction between the object and the photograph-of-the-object-optimized-for-the-feed. If the thing can’t be photographed, it hasn’t quite happened yet. The container ate the thing.

This is not a minor etymology complaint. This is the semantic shift of our working lifetime, and nobody marked the moment because the moment was distributed across ten million tiny UI changes: Instagram’s move to square, the introduction of the scrollable grid, the rise of the reel, the death of the caption in favor of the hook, the rewrite of every creative’s Substack bio to say “multidisciplinary storyteller.” The grinder installed itself quietly, and by the time we noticed, we were already inside it.

What the grinder actually removes

I’ve been rereading Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld for the third time this year, because I am a person who rereads, deal with it, and the line I keep underlining is the one where he writes that the algorithm doesn’t hate art, it’s indifferent to it, which is worse, because indifference doesn’t have to argue. Indifference just lets the thing die of inattention.

That line is correct and also, I think, only half the picture. The other half is that the algorithm has quietly rewritten what counts as art in the first place. Art-shaped content is now privileged over art itself, because art-shaped content is legible at thumbnail size, scorable with a fifteen-second audio loop, and survives the scroll. Art is sometimes none of those things, stubbornly. Art is sometimes the kind of object where the point is that you had to stand in front of it for longer than three seconds to understand it. That object no longer reads at scale. That object, algorithmically, is indistinguishable from a blank frame.

So the grinder doesn’t just flatten art; it replaces the criteria by which we recognize art, and replaces them with criteria optimized for the grinder’s own metabolism. What it removes is:

The pausing part. The slowness, the friction, the physical necessity of a body looking at a thing for longer than the scroll interval.
The boredom part. The day-three boredom of a hard project where the boredom itself turns out to be the door into the next phase of the work. The grinder does not let you be bored in public; you’re expected to be “working on your craft” in a way that photographs well.
The uncontainable part. The detail that is too specific, too personal, too weirdly idiosyncratic to read at thumbnail size, which was historically the exact detail that made the piece itself.

Taken together, what the grinder removes is what we used to call authorship. The signature. The residue of a specific person having lived a specific life before producing this object. Replace it with something optimized and you get, I’d argue, the visual equivalent of an airport Marriott lobby: competent, scaled, spotless, emotionally inert.

The client who wanted “references but AI”

I’ll tell you a specific story, because this isn’t theory, it’s my actual invoicing spreadsheet.

A former client I will not name emailed me last week asking if I could generate “five on-brand aesthetic references” for her wellness brand. I wrote back asking what she meant, because I assumed she meant a mood board, the thing I have built for her and many other clients for years. She wrote back: “Yes but AI.”

I sat with it for an embarrassing amount of time. Long enough that Franz the fish did two full loops of his bowl. Then I wrote “I don’t do that,” and she wrote back a single thumbs-up emoji, and I understood immediately that I was not getting this work. Which, on paper, is fine. She was paying four hundred dollars. Six months ago she was paying $2,400 for the same thing, because six months ago the deliverable was “a mood board made by a person who had actually looked at things,” and now it is “a mood board that looks like the output of a model.” The work pays less. The work has to be machine-shaped. And if I refuse both, she will hire somebody who won’t, because somebody always will.

This is the economic half of the content-is-art problem. Taste, as a market, is being repriced in real time. The middle of every creative market is collapsing; not because machines are better than humans at creative judgment, but because clients have been retrained to accept a different deliverable and call it equivalent. The deliverable has changed. The work has changed. The pay has changed. The person doing the work is still expected to show up as if none of it has.

Authenticity is now a Canva template

A brand-strategist friend (not Paula; someone else; her name is Jess and she is the less-together one of my friend group by a significant margin) told me, without a shred of irony, that her firm now considers “authenticity” a visual system. Authenticity is a palette, she explained. Authenticity has a kerning spec. Authenticity is producible via Canva template and deployable as the background for a LinkedIn carousel titled “the year I rediscovered my values.”

I laughed. Jess did not. That was the more disturbing part of the conversation.

I am not inventing any of this. That is an actual sentence that was said out loud at a consulting firm inside a WeWork, and I think about it often, because it is the purest possible distillation of the content-is-art problem. Authenticity used to describe a relationship between a thing and its origin; a thing was authentic if it came from a specific source, had a specific history, was not a copy. Now authenticity is a palette. Now authenticity is a template. Now authenticity is something you can buy a license to and apply to any product to make the product read authentic at thumbnail size. The word has been detached from its referent and re-attached to a visual system that simulates the referent, which is exactly the move the word content underwent a decade earlier. Same playbook. Different word.

This is not an anti-template essay

I use templates. Templates are how working designers make rent, eat food that isn’t curbside HEB, and occasionally take a day off. I am not a purist about tools, and I am not romantic about suffering for one’s craft.

What I’m against is a specific move that has taken over the design economy in the last three years: the move where taste gets outsourced wholesale to a swipe file, where the swipe file becomes the client’s expectation, where the designer’s job becomes “please produce a believable simulation of the swipe file,” where originality is a liability because the client doesn’t recognize it. That is not a template. That is a hostage situation with a Pinterest board.

The designer in that arrangement isn’t making anything. She’s re-assembling the average. She’s serving the algorithm’s taste back to a client who has internalized the algorithm’s taste. The thing she produces is a second-generation copy of the algorithm’s current favorite shapes, which means by the time it ships, it’s already six months behind whatever the algorithm has moved on to. The work is disposable by design, which means her career is disposable by design.

Somebody has to say this out loud. I guess it’s going to be me, at 2am, while my cat decides which of my feet to ruin.

What still resists

Here is the part of the essay I actually care about. Beauty is not disappearing, I don’t think. It’s getting processed, which is different. It is being re-shaped into a form that can travel through a feed and survive. And everything that can’t be reshaped is quietly being de-classified as beauty, because the grinder’s metabolism is not designed to handle it.

But the resistant material is still there. You just have to know how to notice it. I’ve started keeping a list on my phone of things that are, for me, un-contentable; things that refuse to be cropped, styled, and scored. The list looks like this, and I am not editing it before I paste:

Austin light in the forty minutes before a thunderstorm; the weird green-yellow one.
The chirping sound Margaux makes just before he fails to catch a moth. A small, interrogative chirp, as if he is asking himself a question about his own competence.
Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” read aloud to a friend who just got dumped. No filter, no sound design, no visual, just a voice in a room and two people not looking at each other directly.
The first time you see a painting you’ve only ever seen reproductions of, at actual scale; the way your body has to recalibrate to the physical presence of the object.
A used paperback highlighted by somebody before you, and you find yourself in quiet disagreement with them in the margins.
My grandmother’s sewing scissors. They make a specific sound. It is not the TikTok sound.
The two hours of drawing where you realize you’ve been humming the same three notes the whole time.
A real conversation where neither person has thier phone anywhere near them.
The day-three boredom on a hard project; the specific kind where the boredom is the breakthrough; the kind where staying bored long enough is the only way the thing opens.

These are all things that resist the grinder. None of them are cropable. None of them carry a thumbnail. None of them have a cover image or a hook or a hashtag. They are, by the logic of the current internet, almost nothing. And they are (as it turns out, and as I keep discovering) the whole reason I’m in this business at all. They are the opposite of content. They are also the stuff the work was always secretly about.

Practical, because I can’t end without it

If you make things for a living, the maneuver I would suggest is this: build two categories of output. One for the feed, one for the record. The feed version is content; shape it for the grinder, don’t fight the grinder on its own turf, get paid. The record version is the thing you make for yourself and your people, which never sees the feed, which is built for the kind of attention the feed can’t process. The record version is what you will be known for in ten years, if you’re known at all. It is also the only version that will make the feed version feel worth doing at all.

This is not romantic. It’s a survival strategy from somebody who has both a mortgage and a brain that cares too much about practical writing, to give you an idea of how annoying my professional life is. Taste is a moat. The record is a moat. The thing you make while nobody is watching is a moat. Those moats are more valuable now than they have ever been, precisely because the grinder’s output is flooding every other available surface.

A week has gone since the grocery store. I have made no content. I have made a list. I have reread a 1977 Sontag essay and been, as usual, flattened by it. I have sat with Margaux on my feet and Franz doing whatever Franz does, and I have let both of them be beautiful in the specific way they are beautiful, which is low-resolution, slightly irritating, and unphotographable.

I don’t feel better. I feel slightly more real. Those turn out to be different things, and more real is the one that matters.