Content: A Postmortem* | October | MIT Press (opens in new tab)

Paul Chan examines the concept of “content” as it has come to dominate contemporary cultural production, tracing its implications for art, expression, and human flourishing in the age of generative AI and the attention economy. Chan begins by observing the flattening effect of the term “content,” which collapses distinctions between artistic forms and privileges scalability and immediacy over quality and meaning. Drawing on traditional understandings of the distinction between form and conten...