Break the Story and Escape the Container: Douglas Rushkoff on Content’s Promise and Pitfalls
Increasingly, terms like “storytelling” and “narrative” have become buzzwords across marketing, design, entertainment, and other fields that create content for evolving social media markets. Everything is storytelling today.
But if content can only exist within a container, who owns and shapes these containers? How do these power brokers wield control over a world shaped by digital capitalism?
Exploring the promise and problems of content and its containers, Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist who coined the term “viral media,” sat down to discuss the dangers of storytelling in the wrong hands, whether content can be art, and how content can connect human souls.
Jake Yuzna
How do you define content?
Douglas Rushkoff
It’s squirrely, isn’t it? I started to think deeply about content after reading Marshall McLuhan for the first time when I was young, and tripped out for a few years on his concept of “the medium is the message.” In a nutshell, McLuhan’s concept is that the medium which communicates a message or idea is more impactful than the message itself.
It gets trickier with content today. “What is the medium and what is the message?” gets less clear because, usually, something is considered content when a medium frames it. But content can be a medium, too. For instance, what is the content of a play? The language. But, then, the content of television is that play, and the content of the Internet is that television. So, what is the content of A.I.? It’s us.
The thing you think of being content might be someone else’s medium. That is part of what the postmodernists were really getting at and doing. Their style of war was, “I’m making you my content. No, I’m making you my content.” On and on. More and more meta. Layering the content within a container and that container within another container. This is partially due to how digital tools have made repurposing of messages and mediums so much easier. How hard is it to copy a television clip or copy and paste a paragraph compared to a few decades ago?
This change started much earlier, though. For instance, capitalism and finance also turn value into someone else’s content. For example, the craftspeople who make things and trade or sell them to one another are using a direct, peer-to-peer value system. Now, if you are a big aristocrat and want to make money and don’t want to work, you look around and say, “How can I make those people and all their value exchange the content of my empire?”
How do you do that? By owning the operating system on which they trade. You create a central currency you control instead of letting the people who make things trade directly. These makers must borrow money from your bank in order to have a transaction. That transaction becomes part of my bank’s portfolio. The trade has become the content of my bank.
Next, you make any trades that don’t use your currency illegal. Now you own the container and control how the content can exist within it. The container gives the content shape.
This is precisely what happened in our history. Kings created chartered monopolies so that the governing power had to designate you as an official company for you to be able to conduct any business. Before that, a craftsperson would make things and trade them directly, but now they’re employees of His Majesty’s Royal Shoe Company or His Majesty’s Royal Jelly Company. When you’re an employee, you are the content of the company.
"You need to go the level above that to be rich."
DR
It is essential to always consider the container as much as the content within it because of the potential for exploitation. The exploitation could be in a good way, like where someone distributes your content further than you could. But even then, considering that relationship is vital.
Recently, I was talking about this with someone, and they said, “You are kind of famous, right? So, why aren’t you rich?” This person was from the world of finance, stocks, investments, and that sort of thing. He said, “It’s because you have a shtetl mentality. You make something, and then you sell it. You write a book and then try to sell it. You need to go the level above that to be rich. You need to own the system that creates and puts the book out into the world.”
For me, content today is loaded with issues of money, power, and exploitation. The silver lining is that content is also what the system owners are afraid of. It holds a power more human than commerce. Because what is content in the end? It is a connection between human beings. When you look at a Van Gogh painting, do you think, “How is my retina responding to the paint colors on this canvas?” No, of course not.
You’re relating to the person who created that painting. What did they think when they made those weird stars and haystacks? What were they going through in their life? Do I have those same feelings? You are relating to that person through their content.
"Content is the container for the human soul to transmit to someone else’s human soul."
DR
Right now, I’m rereading James Joyce’s Ulysses. When reading that book, there is a moment when you can feel James Joyce speaking to you directly. His soul can touch your soul through this content, right? That’s what content is. It’s the way to connect human beings to others.
These days everyone’s asking me about A.I. creating content, ChatGPT- and A.I.-created images and all of that. But what is A.I. actually making? It might be neural stimulation, but it’s not content. Content is the container for the human soul to transmit to someone else’s human soul. There is an attempt to trick us into thinking media is content, but it isn’t always. You need media to communicate ideas, energy, or a soul from one human to another.
"They’re absolutely correct that they don’t make art."
JY
Do you think content can ever escape its containers? Can the humanistic connection between people avoid the exploitative relationship to its container?
DR
The interactions between artists and audiences can happen outside the container and are super vital. Often, they are discovered by the container and quickly subsumed by it. For instance, in the 1950s and ’60s, kids got guitars, made bands in their garages, started playing for each other, and created a rock-and-roll revolution. They made their own spaces and festivals in the middle of nowhere.
This all existed outside of the record companies and corporations. You’d go to a point on a map where you’d meet a bus that brought you to a music show in the desert. People weren’t making money, or at least that wasn’t the goal. Within six months, it feels like a company will sell a version of this phenomenon at the mall. It is how you end up with Coachella.
With digital production making everything move so much faster, the larger economic powers will quickly imitate these kinds of content or subsume it entirely. It’s hard to escape. Rave culture and grunge were some of the last times things could escape the container they were supposed to exist within. Nirvana became the biggest band in America despite their efforts not to be a part of that system, that container. Anyone can create content outside of its container, even if they don’t realize they are doing it: Get your own instruments and amps, find a nightclub or other space, and put on a show. The financial precariousness of that endeavor keeps it off the radar of those who control the containers.
JY
Today, it can feel like the term “content creator” describes those who utilize their resources to market other company’s products or market themselves as a product. Younger and younger generations are increasingly conditioned to pay for the opportunity to spend their energies marketing for companies. Can content creators be something else?
DR
I think it boils down to your objective. What are you trying to achieve? Are you an artist or working in marketing or entertainment? Those are all different, and the difference is important.
Very few of the people creating entertainment on social media channels in the hope of gaining celebrity and influence see themselves as artists. They’re absolutely correct that they don’t make art. An artist is attempting to reveal social constructions. That’s not the point of something like TikTok, where the goal is to come up with a novel dance move or joke that will spread to the largest audience possible. You try to grow your audience until a company like Taco Bell asks to do a collab with them. There’s no pretense that it’s not a commercial medium. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. It is the marketplace.
It is people competing to star in self-made commercials for companies. I don’t disdain it, but I don’t confuse it with art. Artists are willing to sacrifice a lot to reveal people’s souls, connect us, and dispel the myths of sacred truths of our sick culture.
JY
Are the barriers between artists and commercial marketers blurring?
DR
There has been a relationship between artists and advertising since at least the turn of the century. The tools we have today have maybe just made it more visible.
For instance, when I was coming up, many of us would temp for ad agencies to make money while we did our art. I don’t think I’m revealing any industry secrets here, but a community of 20 or 25 people in the early and mid-1990s in NYC did freelance work for all of the major ad agencies. These ad agencies looked to us as a sort of cultural brain trust and would bring us in to help create a pitch for Dell Computers or someone like that. One agency even printed a fake business card for me when I was a part of client pitch meetings. I would be their head of strategy or something like that for about an hour during these meetings.
We were applying very similar skills to making advertising that we used to create art. We leveraged our understanding of culture—the emotional, political, and psychological trigger points—and applied it to marketing.
It was the same kind of craft; the difference lies in the intention. Why are you tweaking or exposing a vulnerability in society? An artist usually has some intention of learning or disruption that reveals something about the human condition—shaking the audience awake one way or another. In contrast, the advertiser or marketer uses the same data or information about the audience to direct their behavior.
The funny thing is that many advertisers are frustrated filmmakers and artists. They try to convince themselves that advertisements are art. They even created these awards, the Clios. Usually, those who are good at creating art are bad at making advertising. They’ll create these artistic advertisements that don’t sell the product. But ultimately, you’re right. The danger is deceiving oneself into thinking that the messaging you’re doing on behalf of their artist-self is loud enough or effective enough to be worth pairing with the message they’re sending on the marketer’s behalf. Take Dove Soap as an example. Dove Soap ads do more good for capitalism than celebrating different body types.
"Marxists don’t use metaphor stories"
JY
Since we both have backgrounds in film, I was curious how you feel about this new trend in marketing and design to use terms like “storytelling” and “narratives.” Is this something new or just buzzwords used to repackage what marketing is always doing?
DR
Since I’ve been around, the term “storytelling” has come around a few times. Saying things like, “We need a new narrative.” Usually, this pops up when all signs point to things going poorly in society. If reality is not working, just say, “We need a new story for what is happening here.”
This kind of magical thinking is a part of America’s DNA. It’s that Frank Baum [author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz] philosophy of “just click your heels together.” Prosperity gospel from Norman Vincent Peale right through [to] Trump. If you build it, they will come. If we can believe it, we can make it.
It is the American tradition to try to put a more optimistic spin on things. We’re not seeing the end of the world; it just looks like the end of the world. If you came upon a woman giving birth and knew nothing about what was happening, you might think she was dying. But she’s giving birth to life. Apply that to the state of ecology. It might look like all these species have gone extinct, topsoil has eroded, and plastic is in the stomach of all the fish, but it is just rebirth—a new human age. We’re just the larvae for the next stage of human evolution.
This is the tech-bro storyline right now, right? We are just the larvae of this species, and the rich are about to sprout their wings and move off to other planets. The death of you, your family, and all living things on earth is repackaged in a new story—a story of a better future filled with hope.
These stories use ideology to create a container for how people construct their reality and understanding of the world. Take the fascist story wherein things were better in the past. They take out the negative aspects of history, like the lynching of Black people, and focus on the parts of the story that support the narrative they want to believe in.
For all their problems, Marxists don’t use metaphor stories. Marxists use history, what actually happened, to construct their narratives. This can be limiting because you don’t have what capitalism offers—possibilities we haven’t yet imagined. The capitalist story is of forward-looking innovation and doesn’t use the past to judge the future.
Fascists use metaphor—“The cheetah killing the gazelle is just part of nature.” That story is good for the cheetah and bad for the gazelle. It teaches us to accept suffering as a normal part of the world. Metaphor can lead to really dangerous places because one can use a metaphor to change something’s meaning into anything one wants.
JY
You’ve used the term “sense makers” in the past when discussing those who are trying to shape ideologies today. What are they?
DR
Sense-making is the process through which we create new narratives to disconnect from whatever’s actually going on.
There are some really smart cis white male intellectuals who are, in their well-meaning way, trying to serve as spiritual and intellectual leaders of humanity as we undergo these significant transitions. They say that their understanding of systems theory and ability to do pattern recognition gives them unique insight into the series of unfolding crises befalling humanity right now, what they call the meta crisis.
Many blogs, webcasts, podcasts, and other media are made today that aim to help guide the confused and the wandering toward sense. I get annoyed with them because they’re not doing rigorous work. (laughs)
The lengthy, abstract, and fractal explanations often leave many people disoriented and confused. Instead, these sense makers give calming stories: Buy these nutrients or sign up for my course. (laughs)
I don’t think they realize it, but they’re following the same business model as The Secret or any number of New Age gurus of the past few decades. Take [Jesuit priest and paleontologist] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the Omega Point, where everything in the cosmos is headed to singularity, where it becomes a unified whole. Atoms become molecules, molecules become cells, cells become organisms, and organisms become cultures. When the cultures are combined on a planetary level, the great Gaia collective mind is formed, an unimaginably different meta-organism.
The problem with this kind of thinking is it takes people’s attention off conditions on the ground and towards this fantasy fractal Omega thing. How am I treating this woman in my life right now? How am I engaged with the planet? You don’t have to worry about that because the ends justify the means.
"a kind of schizophrenia"
JY
There is an argument that storytelling is intrinsic to the human condition because storytelling is the material we use to construct reality. Do you subscribe to that school of thought?
DR
I don’t know that it’s a new story we need, but a new story structure. The narrative you and I were taught at American Film Institute, the three-act structure, is basically a male orgasm curve—excitation, climax, and sleep. It rests on the idea that everybody’s yearning for the climax so we can sleep.
Searching for new story structures is what first made me interested in the Internet and fantasy roleplaying. Fantasy roleplaying is what James Carse would call an infinite game where there is no ending. This is the opposite of a finite game that requires an ending to the game where there are winners and losers. That is a very capitalist story: the enlightened and the vanquished. This is a narrative structure we have to break. It is not a new story. It is a new way of relating to story and narrative.
JY
Is there also a danger in the manipulation of these infinite games? I think of examples like QAnon, where the strategies of LARPing [Live Action Role Playing] and ARGs [Alternate Reality Games] are utilized for political and social power.
DR
This is what I was writing about in Present Shock, how the entirety of the Internet functions like a video game. The Internet is not like television or film that relies on the traditional story arc. Instead, these mediums rely on the audience being active and connecting the dots. The Internet allows us to track pieces of information down and then connect them through meaning, just like in video games, where you need to find something that will enable you to move on to the next goal. Find the key to open the door and advance to the next level. You play that same game when you’re using the Internet. It conditions you to keep making cause-and-effect connections with everything you encounter, no matter if there really was a connection in the first place.
I called it factual noise, a kind of schizophrenia where one seeks out similarities in disparate things and then creates meaning that wasn’t there. This has always been a part of how conspiracy theories function. You are trying to make sense of a scary and senseless world by constructing a narrative that creates meaning.
For instance, maybe on the same day a cell tower went up in Atlanta, a person set their car on fire in Texas. Are these two events connected by anything other than happening around the same time? No. But when you are conditioned to find patterns among random pieces of information, like in a video game or the Internet, you construct a narrative of causality. Take the conspiracy theory that 5G towers created Covid-19. The Covid crisis and the 5G towers were happening around the same time, so they must have a cause-and-effect relationship, right? It’s gamer behavior.
Don’t forget who created these games, primarily white cis males. When video games and the Internet began, they were refuges for cis white heterosexual men. When this group saw gaming become more populated by women, trans people, and others, they went ballistic. We got Gamergate. Steve Bannon saw in Gamergate a ready population, an army of Internet trolls that he could easily steer from the misogyny of Gamergate to the misogyny of Trump. It was a rather brilliant sort of [Joseph] Goebbels-like move, to utilize an army of content creators who would produce and disseminate propaganda for free. He took advantage of the factual noise to create a new narrative that served his purposes.
It worked, and it works to this day. Look at Elon Musk and others. They use storytelling’s ability to create meaning out of independent phenomena to exploit and gather power. By making the person create that story on their own, using the video-game mentality, that person becomes more invested in the story being true.
JY
It often feels like we are living in the hangover of the 20th century. It is clear the world has changed dramatically since the last century, but we lack the language to communicate those changes. In some ways, people in the circles of Bannon and Musk have been clever in developing new stories that resonate with life now.
DR
Exactly. If you’re living in the shopping mall, the anchor store becomes your way of orienting yourself. The bathrooms are to the right of Macy’s. (laughs)
JY
That perspective becomes more than just second nature; it’s the framework through which one understands everything.
DR
Right. The maps are not the territory. All of these things are social constructions that are not real. We’re driving ourselves off a cliff because we’re showing our allegiance to them instead of [to] each other. Art was supposed to wake people up from that.
“Keynote Speaker.” What the fuck is that?"
JY
Do you think younger generations who grew up with social media and digital production have more difficulty separating their sense of identity from capitalism? Children and teenagers are gaining an understanding of branding at earlier and earlier ages. They are taught how to build personal brands through the content they create. Has the capitalist-marketing mindset gotten into our water supply?
DR
This all probably started around the time Abraham Lincoln was president, when corporations were given the rights of human beings. From that moment on, people began acting more like corporations, too.
I think of the musical from the 1970s, A Chorus Line, which starts with the actors lined up on stage for an audition. Each actor holds their 8-by-10 glossy headshot photo in front of their face as they sing “Who am I anyway? Am I my resume?” It was a novel idea back then to consider what forms who an actor is. Is it their list of professional accomplishments? The mediated image they’ve made to present who they think people want them to be? What about the person behind all of that?
That is everybody’s experience today. When you use Instagram or LinkedIn, you ask yourself, “What job do I put first? What do I call myself? Global strategist? Keynote speaker?” People on LinkedIn list their job as “Keynote Speaker.” What the fuck is that? What are you actually?
We went from subjects under the monarchy to citizens under democracy, consumers under capitalism, and brands in our current digital capitalism.
JY
What caused this shift?
DR
I think Facebook was the turning point because Facebook was the first place that made you define yourself by what books, movies, and other products you liked. This was because Facebook’s business model was selling your consumer profile to brands. That was the original purpose. Facebook put in a lot of effort to turn people from friends and communities into affinity groups because affinity groups are easier for marketing purposes. Ford Motors or McDonald’s knows how to market to an affinity group.
There was another switch when Facebook and Instagram started focusing on the number of followers and likes you had. They transformed your social activity into a metric for engagement. It made complete sense from a marketing and capitalist perspective. Your identity was now formed out of the products you liked, but your value was based on your success as a marketing tool. That was the transformation from a consumer to an influencer.
That is the insidious thing about it. The container controls your ability to live in digital capitalism. You are required to become a product or a brand to get a job, make money, and live.
JY
I often look at the root of the words we use to name something. “Content” derives from the Latin contentus, which means to be contained or enclosed within something. In the 14th century, content also developed the second meaning of a feeling of satisfaction—having the desire limited to present enjoyments. To be content.
So much of what is called content today is like a cultural potato chip. It seems like food but gives no actual nourishment. Instead, it was designed with the right balance of fat, sugar, and salt to keep you eating indefinitely, just like an endless scroll. There is the appearance of consuming information, but we are left still hungry. If we were content, we wouldn’t need to consume anymore.
DR
They wouldn’t get addicted to it because they would get fulfilled. In some, the endless scroll is anti-content because there’s really nothing there.
JY
Is there any hope?
DR
The hope I have comes from how human beings have souls and how we love. When push comes to shove, we find a way to use any medium at our disposal to connect with one another and find love. Content can be any message or idea. It can be friendship, solidarity, and mutuality.
The sumac tree finds a way to push through the pavement of New York City and come up through the sidewalk. Human beings are so social. We have such a deep need to connect with one another that we can fight off any incursions. We have always needed to share our souls with one another. Any and all mediums can do that.▪︎
This article is part of the series Content and Its Discontents that explores what content is and who controls the containers.
Named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His twenty books include the just-published Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, as well as the recent Team Human, based on his podcast, and the bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus. He also made the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. His book Coercion won the Marshall McLuhan Award, and the Media Ecology Association honored him with the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.
Rushkoff’s work explores how different technological environments change our relationship to narrative, money, power, and one another. He coined such concepts as “viral media,” “screenagers,” and “social currency,” and has been a leading voice for applying digital media toward social and economic justice. He serves as a research fellow of the Institute for the Future, and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens, where he is a Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics. He is a columnist for Medium, and his novels and comics, Ecstasy Club, A.D.D, and Aleister & Adolf, are all being developed for the screen.
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