Fuck the content

From celebrity endorsements on television to influencers, the transition was fairly natural. The medium changed, but we already knew the mechanism from commercial TV: programmes, sometimes quite interesting ones, whose job was to keep people entertained between one ad and the next.

The word content fits this mechanism perfectly, because it says everything and nothing. Humour, politics, research, a tutorial, a recipe or an opinion: once it's in the feed, it's content. A word neutral enough to contain anything and, perhaps for that very reason, empty enough to say very little. We produce content, and what does that mean, exactly? No idea. Or perhaps the word is almost too honest: it doesn't matter what's in it, as long as it's contentable.

Social media is getting enshittified and, along the way, it has helped enshittify a fair bit of the internet too. It has plenty of competition, to be fair. Searching for something increasingly means wading through ads, sponsored results, pages optimised to be found and content produced to intercept other content. Into all this we send our agents, roaming around to search, read and summarise for us. As infrastructure, the internet works beautifully. As somewhere to spend a little time, sometimes less so.

Let's be clear: we have an Instagram account too, a half-dead Facebook page, we used to have Twitter and we also have LinkedIn on life support. We use them rarely and badly, but we have them: nobody is pure, nor is anyone trying to be.

Still, we miss part of what the internet used to be for us: somewhere people published things simply because they thought they were worth sharing. Blogs, reviews, points of view, personal pages. They haven't disappeared, but much of what once had a place of its own has ended up inside platforms and feeds, between an invitation to subscribe and a notification to enable.

Yes, there's a certain amount of nostalgia involved. We're old enough to indulge in it, and remember enough to know the internet was never a pure place. We still like the idea of having a place of our own again, where we can leave things that people can find without following us, signing up or arriving at the right moment.

That's why we decided to start a blog, on a random schedule: when we have something to say, we write it. If you feel like it, drop by and read; if not, no problem. We don't want to chase you with emails, notifications or promises of unmissable updates. Maybe one day a search, or a prompt, will take a wrong turn and you'll stumble upon this Time Capsule, and that's fine too.

We'll probably talk about data, because we spend quite a lot of time surrounded by it. But also about the research we do for our projects, which often ends up in a folder, the thoughts that come up while preparing our talks, conversations in the studio and things we find and feel are worth sharing. Not necessarily to reach a conclusion, and not because everything has to be useful.

Maybe it's simply a way of giving back to the internet a small part of what the internet gives to our work.

So, fuck the content. Not because we don't want to produce any, which would be rather ridiculous, but because we'd like to try publishing things before they turn into content and, in our own small way, keep thinking of the internet as a place, rather than just infrastructure.