Really, really THIS.
Calling the art you make “content” — whatever’s actually going to happen to it — reduces it instantly to the status of “something someone else’s going to sell for more than the creator’s going to be paid for it.” It reduces you to being a mere element in somebody else’s so-called business plan.
“Art” is an old, old word. It means—reaching back in time—any made thing (the ancient root-word “artifice” meant to point up what human beings made on purpose instead of something the world shaped by accident). Good, bad, or indifferent, it’s what a human mind made, using whatever ancient or modern tool you can imagine. Art doesn’t have to be GREAT to qualify for the term. It just has to be made, by a living being: for pleasure, to work through pain, idly or with huge intent, for fun or seriously, to illuminate vast subjects or just to jerk the world around for a few minutes.
The “content” term and framing attempts to reduce your creation to something meant inevitably to be bought and sold: a mere product, a commodity, a cheap thin thing that’ll wear out and leave whoever engages with it wanting something better (but always somehow cheaper). The pushers of the “content” concept want you to think of what you’ve invented in the numinous silences of your head—the bitter, the joyous, the anguished, the glorious—as something worthless unless it can be sold off in bulk: packaged like sausage, containered like cottage cheese.
The entities (hard to call them “people” at the corporate level, poor things) who want to sell your output, don’t want to remunerate you decently for it. After all, that might give customers the idea that fellow humans deserving of acknowledgement—not the vast non-living organisms we now call companies—were responsible for the passion and emotion in the art you buy every day… and for which the corporations pay the individual humans responsible for the “content” the very lowest price possible.
What you can do about this: Demand noisily that the creators responsible for art be treated like creatives, worthy of their hire.
What we who create can do: Keep doing it, in hopes that the world catches up with what we’re at.
Be art, and don’t let them make you “content.”
