Social media KILLED originality

so I wrote an original letter about the phenomenon

Sep 20

This poem has twelve lines.
The twelfth line is the most important
(So stay for it). The poem’s topic 
Is financial advice. It easily might 

Have been dating tips, but the author read 
into the prevailing content trends 
And learned that people want to take 
The money first, a lover second,

To make a fortune, then make love—
The lover, then, will be more impressive.
Speaking of love, if you love this poem
Hit the heart for the algorithm.

Explanation

If it’s about anything, this poem is about my deep but inadvertent engagement with the language of social media. (Even the term “engagement” is social media speak: engagement is the thing a social media marketer measures, which includes all signals from commenting to sharing.) Deep because I spend, even as a dedicated reader, as much time mindlessly watching YouTube videos; inadvertent because, well, the engagement is mindless. If I had the willpower, I wouldn’t do it (see last week’s article for more about willpower).

Reader, I don’t watch TV. I don’t like anything, literally anything, on Netflix. Just ask my wife: when she tells me to pick a show, I spend 30 minutes looking through the catalogue, before finally choosing nothing, and going back to my book. I would only ever watch a Netflix show ironically—like, for example, in the way that I enjoy Fast and Furious. Instead I watch every video a YouTube creator has ever made. I have watched all of Internet Historian, most of Doug Demuro and Coffeezilla—and, of course, lots of junk of far poorer calibre. I genuinely think that YouTube—whose contributors deploy comparatively minuscule budgets—is better than Netflix and every other streaming provider barring, perhaps, Kanopy.

That doesn’t mean I wish my YT addiction on myself. And this is to say nothing of my Instagram addiction… indeed, I recently had to go cold turkey: I haven’t had Insta on my phone for around a month now.

All of this to say that I can speak social media. I am using the language thereof in this poem.

In the first stanza, the speaker announces that the poem has twelve lines, and exhorts the reader to “stay til the end” for the “most important” line. This is after the style of list videos that try to increase viewer retention by saving “the best” item on the list for last. (All good rankings are presented from worst to best—no one wants to hear who came in third after they’ve found out who’s first.)

The poem, you learn, is about “financial advice”—a popular online topic, everywhere presented by those woefully unqualified to give it. But, the speaker explains in stanza 2, the topic might just as easily have been dating advice. For most social media “creations,” it doesn’t matter what you pick: you just pick what’s popular. (I believe I recently heard Chris Williamson call this “audience capture.”) In the poem, “the author read / into the prevailing content trends”—that is, they just discovered what people wanted to hear before they decided what to say. They found, that is, the shortest route to being unoriginal.

Because, how could you be original if you know what people already like? If data exists on their preferences, then it is necessarily data about the past. Original art has to be created for an audience that doesn’t yet exist. Original art creates new audiences.

But where did the author learn that financial advice takes precedence over dating advice? From Scarface, of course:

“In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.”

A damning indictment of the American system by Tony Montana! Tragically, Montana died for this pessimistic philosophy, not knowing that women prefer mates with cool jobs to those with lucrative jobs—so argue David and Douglas Kenrick.

In the last two lines, the speaker invites the reader to smash the like button “for the algorithm.” Not too long ago, all YouTubers started referring to “the algorithm” in their videos. They used to just ask for likes, subscribes, etc; but recently they have started saying stuff like “please like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell: it really helps with the algorithm” as though they ‘really don’t want to ask for your like but, you know, what else can I do? It’s the algorithm, right, so I have to ask!’

Anyways please LIKE this post for the Substack algorithm and please SUBSCRIBE to Common Measure. I don’t care if you like my content, I don’t care about saying anything original, I’m just here for the likes. I write poems for the social media clout; please help me become the poetry clout lord of Substack. Thank you.