With my latest book, Move Slowly and Build Bridge, complete, Goal 2 of this blog is completed, as well. Goal 2 was a big reason I started this blog. I wanted to write a book about FOSS in an open way, and I think I achieved that with my book about Mastodon and the fediverse. But now I need a new goal.

Enter Goal 3: write another book. Today, I took a big step towards that goal.

I just got done giving an opening keynote at the 2026 Editors Conference in lovely Halifax, Nova Scotia. My talk is the debut of a new book, tentatively titled The Age of Content: How We've Been Compelled to Fulfill the Needs of Media Machines. Earlier this month, I signed a contract with Polity Press to write the book. So that's going to be my major focus over the next few months.

As I've proposed it, the book will focus on the creation of the figure of the "content creator," using that as a window into broader media practices. The work thus builds on previous scholarship in influencer studies (e.g., Hund, Duffy, Abidin, Bollmer and Guinness), communication (e.g., Andrejevic, Eichhorn), and philosophy (e.g., Baudrillard, Vallor).

Here's a snippet from my proposal:

The most pressing problem of contemporary media is not AI generation. Nor is it digitization, or informationization. The most pressing problem is contentification. Content creation is the dominant sector of media today. Many people want to become content creators. How-to guides, online courses, and even university programs promise to teach people how to create content. Major media companies, like Paramount and Netflix, bid to purchase other companies to build ever-larger archives of content. Corporate social media fosters content creation. The promise of hypervalorization lures many people into content creation. But something important is missing.

The Age of Content argues that the concept of “content creators” eliminates aesthetic and ethical considerations normally associated with creative acts and artistry. This elimination is not done by displacement but by containment. “Content creator” is a concept that contains all previous forms of creativity: music, art, writing, film. Content creation becomes a steel box, locking out not only unauthorized uses, but also ethics or aesthetics. As a result, we are awash in “content” with no critical language to parse it – we are simply asked to consume it.

Informed by rigorous research, this book offers a genealogy of an idea. The concept of “content creators” was purpose-built in the 1990s by large media corporations to describe the containerization and commodification of creativity in a global media environment. That content would be locked through intellectual property regulations and technical impediments, ensuring both the profitability of large media corporations as well as the subservience of artists to those companies. The rise of Web 2.0 and “user-generated content” in the 2000s shifted the attention to a different container: corporate social media. While this disrupted legacy media, it followed the same path: content creators became individual influencers who react to algorithms to maintain user attention.

This in turn leads to our current moment: the conceit that machines can create consumable content. Today’s generative AI has been trained on the output of content creators and promises to finally relieve humans of having to create. The result of our content age is a world awash in content with no meaning, rhythmically appearing, demanding constant attention, offering no time to reflect, and undermining democratic deliberation. Because we lack a critical language for content creation, the age of content is a period in which only oligarchs can thrive.

As with any book project, it will no doubt evolve. I will tag those posts with Goal 3. Watch this space for my thoughts -- my previous post on Susan Sontag and generative AI is directly related to this project!