"Everything is content." That's the underlying premise of our current digital culture. Each moment may be captured and re-purposed for consumption by others. This has consequences—most of which we won't get into here. But one we will get into is the particular gaslighting it sets up.
If "everything is content" then one's value is coupled to creation. To one's ability to generate and package up remarkable moments. Unfortunately, most people neither want to nor are able to create at a high level and sustainably over time. Thus, we're compelled to think: a minority creates and is superior whilst the majority consumes and is worth less.
For most, this bistable, consume-or-create paradigm is okay. For others—a good 10% of people online—it's not. They want a new default. They want to opt out of this particular game. So they look for an alternative. An alternative best described by Bo Burnham:
They say it’s like the ‘me’ generation. It’s not. The arrogance is taught, or it was cultivated. It’s self-conscious. That’s what it is. It’s conscious of self. Social media - it’s just the market’s answer to a generation that demanded to perform so the market said, 'here - perform. Perform everything to each other, all the time for no reason.' It’s prison - its horrific. It’s performer and audience melded together. What do we want more than to lie in our bed at the end of the day and just watch our life as a satisfied audience member. I know very little about anything. But what I do know is that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.
This segment of people online that don't buy in to the "consume-or-create" choice attempt to "live life without an audience". But that's difficult when tools for third places don't really exist and when every act in the digital sphere is architected to further pressurise the gradient between consumption and creation.
Even enlightened consumption is subtly appropriated by the consume-or-create paradigm. Most tools-for-thought, most indie publishing apps, most personal knowledge management systems, most curation-focused products make an assumption: surely, ultimately, the aim must be to ascend to creatorhood. No one would be foolish enough to expend time and energy and tangible resources saving, sharing and searching without an eventual endgame that involved the conversion of that expenditure into some form of audience from which value can be siphoned.
In the current paradigm, if you're not assembling an audience then you're accepting a role as a part of one. Or, more likely, as one piece of many different audiences. Right now, "to live your life without an audience" is still to accede the existence of audiences as supra-organising features in the digital landscape. In the coming paradigm, however, that acceptance is being challenged. An anti-audience stance is emerging.
To be anti-audience is to deny that audiences are a first principle of digital culture at all. To be anti-audience is to refute the idea that the monopolisation of the many's attention by the few is a precondition of "winning". It is to acknowledge an organic upper bound on one's reach and influence. It is to hold to the conviction that one can exhibit curiosity and engage more deeply without an accompanying pressure to build an asset.
There's nothing wrong with audiences—either building them or being amongst them. They are a core part of social dynamics, after all. Yet their prevalence and salience in our culture has intensified to the point where everything is audience-orientated, and where this orientation is pushed as an immutable law of contemporary being. It isn't. Audiences, as we know them, are novel social constructs, not fundamental elements of existence.
To be anti-audience is not to refute their impact but to put the concept of an audience back in its place—which is somewhere less than the most important thing in digital culture.
