Literally 2 Cents About Content!
Literally 2 Cents About Content! is a podcast about mass content production and the broader concept of labeling all creative work ”content.” Why do we call everything anyone produces ”content”? How does this ”content” frame affect us as content consumers? And what types of conditions do content creators labor under? Check out Liz’s website at https://lizmakesstuff.com and Alex’s site at www.content-lab.agency
Episodes
As we approach the 30th anniversary of its release, Alex and Liz look back quasi-fondly at the Nintendo 64, including:
- Its historical place, as the first Nintendo console to debut during Japan's Lost Decades and after the Cold War.
- Why it was so difficult to develop for, even for seasoned software shops.
- How it was in retrospect a failed attempt at what the Nintendo Switch ultimately achieved: a technical breakthrough that ran...
Alex and Liz discuss only some of the works of linguist, philosopher, and academic David Golumbia, including:
- The Cultural Logic of Computation (2009)
- The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism (2016)
- Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology (2024)
Technology and Silicon Valley are often associated with left-leaning politics. Still, various causes (SOPA/PIPA discourse, inter...
Alex and Liz talk about the Glassdoor reviews of their old employer, touch upon the challenges of working for an SEO content shop, and compare monopoly and monopsony.
Alex and Liz take a look at Kate Manne's 2024 book, Unshrinking: How to face fatphobia. Along the way, they examine some of the key assumptions that drive widespread fatphobia in contemporary society, what the point of weight loss is supposed to be, the history of hazardous weight-loss treatments, and how Manne's book intersects with other publications by Ragen Chastain, Abigail C. Saguy, Paul Campos, and Paul Ernsberger.
Liz and Alex talk about streaming, why its business model is so lousy compared to cable, the social aspects of watching TV vs the isolation of streaming, how sports holds linear TV together, and why it feels more sustainable to support individual creators than to pay for a bundle.
Liz and Alex lay into their most disliked words from the content industry, from "dynamic content" and "content management system" to "optimize" and "authentic." Also covered: video game DLC (that's "downloadable content," remember!), store brand sodas, and the 1990s web.
Alex and Liz dig their claws into "AI," this time focusing on some recent hype-y conferences Liz attended in Chicago and Las Vegas. We also look at cyberlibertarianism, the difficulties that LLMs have with ambiguity (and why making them better at this could paradoxically make them worse overall), the costs associated with producing cutting-edge work, and the embedded biases of AI.
Alex and Liz talk about what really makes digital content different from physical and analog equivalents, and what distinctive ideological concepts—"everything's binary, monopolies are good, technology itself is the agent, users should be treated with hostility"— are uniquely embodied by it.
And even though everything digital seems ethereal and immaterial, it requires tremendous amounts of real resources—water, el...
Alex and Liz talk about the hottest topic out there—"AI," or "artificial intelligence" (quotes because we're a little skeptical of it being in any way "intelligent"), with a look at some recent essays that explore whether "AI" is agent or tool, its problematic uses in higher education, why Silicon Valley is so intent on building things ("AI" or otherwise) that they'd read about or seen in sci-fi (while also of course acting a...
Alex and Liz talk about their time at the content agency, how it was all about ghost writing, what techniques they honed by doing that (such as learning how to easily add 100-200 superfluous words to any article's intro), and how that overall experience influenced their personal writing. Liz talks about self-publishing her book and Alex talks about the histories and features of various blogging platforms.
Alex and Liz talk about Mastodon, the open social network that uses a federated design that works somewhat similarly to email. We also explain ActivityPub, the W3C-sanctioned protocol that underpins Mastodon and other services such as Pixelfed. Ever wondered what an "API" is? Curious about what Facebook was like in 2004? We've got you covered on these questions and others!
Alex’s site: content-lab.agency
Liz’s site: liz...
Alex and Liz talk about Jenny Odell's "How to Do Nothing," this time focusing on how information overload and context collapse make it difficult to do what you want to do. We also make a brief detour into "This is Water" (and its roots in "Infinite Jest"), discuss the toxicity of fandom, and how even works widely seen as "great" in a moment (your Booth Tarkingtons of the world, essentially) quickly fade from popular memory.
Get ...Alex and Liz look at "How to do Nothing" by Jenny Odell, talk about Twitter, TikTok, and Mastodon and their respective effects on our mental health, and even spin out a hot take on David Foster Wallace's legendary 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College.
Liz’s blog: Lizmakesstuff.com
Adam Kotsko’s stunning blog post, “The Moral Cost of Capitalism”: https://itself.blog/2023/02/28/the-moral-cost-of-capitali...
Liz and Alex dive deep into Mark Fisher's seminal 2009 surprise best seller, "Capitalist Realism." Topics explored include how society individualizes mental illness, why there's this widespread conception of "gritty" content as somehow "realer" than non-gritty equivalents, and how our ironic distance from capitalism allows us to participate in it—even when we know it's bad.
Liz’s website: lizmakesstuff.com
Get full a...Alex and Liz talk about the coping strategies they witnessed from their managers at the content agency. Interested in doing the work of your direct reports for them? Want to work with clients who don't respond to emails for months? Wondering if you can get away with some games of StarCraft in between client calls? We give you the SEO content shop manager job spec covering all of that. We also touch upon how every "health" client at...
Liz’s website: lizmakesstuff.com
Left Anchor: https://www.leftanchor.com
Strunk and White’s Macho Grammar Club: https://www.thedailybeast.com/strunk-and-whites-macho-grammar-club
Neil Patel, who doesn’t read: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ny-times-bestselling-author-torn-145614266.html
Get full access to The Content Lab at www.content-lab.agency/subscribeAlex and Liz talk about the one topic you can never ever write about at content shops. Also included are two on-air readings of archetypal mass-produced content, except we break that taboo and write about He Who Shall Not Be Named.
Liz’s website: lizmakesstuff.com
Alex’s “Here’s what “content” from a content mill looks like” post: https://toosolid.substack.com/p/heres-what-content-from-a-co...
Alex and Liz talk about algorithms and how they select and serve content, with an extended riff on an academic paper about bureaucracy (don't worry! we make it easy to understand). Also, if you've ever wondered what recursion is, we've got you covered with a simple definition and some basic examples.
Liz’s website: lizmakesstuff.com
Essay “The concept of algorithm as an interpretative key of modern rationality” (v...
Alex and Liz talk about IMDb What to Watch, a new app for trying to find that one pearl in the sea of "endless streaming content," through gamification. Will it work? We’re skeptical. And wasn't consuming content supposed to be fun at some point? The thing is: When there's too much to watch, everyone falls back on their preexisting favorites, or gets trapped in a loop of algorithmic selection and decision anxiety. We also exa...
Welcome to Literally 2 Cents About Content!, the podcast about what it’s like to write thousands of words per day for literally two cents per word! In our first episode, Alex tells Elizabeth all about the origins of the content industry, what the word and concept of “content” really means, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the role of the (in)famous Microsoft founder in presaging (and creating!) the industry itself. We...
Popular Podcasts
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. Clay Travis and Buck Sexton tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and current events with intelligence and humor. From the border crisis, to the madness of cancel culture and far-left missteps, Clay and Buck guide listeners through the latest headlines and hot topics with fun and entertaining conversations and opinions.