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Sorry, a long comment. I think you make some persuasive points, here, but I am also struck by the extent to which the internet creates the feeling of formlessness on a macro level, while being pretty rigidly beholden to form in its particulars.

Streaming platforms are the way they are because streaming has become its own form, one that encourages people to interact with storytelling in a particular way—by bingeing it, but with the endless possibility of repetition. That's what makes it different from the pre-DVD shows that weren't create with the expectation of repetition, and the prestige dramas fans could re-watch obsessively if they shelled out for the box set. Social media seems very similar: posts are ephemeral, but they can easily be preserved for posterity if they are sufficiently insightful or outrageous.

In the case of both streaming and social media, the formal pressures all but guarantee endless mimicry, because real originality is time-consuming, the payoff is relatively small, and the risk of missing the mark and producing a billion dollar flop or becoming the character of the day can have pretty serious negative consequences. I'm convinced this is why so much of twitter/instagram just seems to be the same kind of thing repeated endlessly (the arguments, the poses, the outrage, the meme format of the day). As much as streaming and posting promise a limitless horizon of possibility—you can do anything you want! Infinite types of content are theoretically available!—we end up with a fairly narrow range of options because only certain types of content work well within the form.

I think this is what Viktor Shklovsky, good materialist that he was, understood about the form/content question, even if he went a little too far in disregarding content sometimes: the artistic form you are using determines the kinds of things you can say, so if you want to be revolutionary in content, you have to be revolutionary in form first.

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Sep 2, 2022·edited Sep 3, 2022Liked by John Ganz

This is great, and aligns with a lot of what I've been thinking about lately. You make this observation implicitly at the end, but the only thing I'd add to the piece is that this formlessness *very much is the point* for a lot of the creators and purveyors of this new "content." Form is, at its essence, a boundary line which delineates what a thing is from what it is not. This sort of limit is antithetical to the spirit of capital accumulation, which requires constant, never-ending growth, and so of course form is the first thing to go when culture becomes totally subordinate to finance.

I know that this argument is a bit obvious, a bit too much like a pretentious restatement of the "what were a bunch of hedge fund managers with the rights to Ghostbusters gonna do-- NOT make a reboot?" take, but I do think it's worth thinking about these problems in a more systemic way. Borrowing from McLuhan's now-cliche thesis that "the medium is the message," what sorts of thoughts, values, and aesthetics does a culture imbibe when so much of its dominant media is unashamedly formless *by design?*

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the first word that occurred to me was “rhetoric” as well. the reverse of the challenge posed by quintillian: how do you ensure high formal quality can inescapably only deliver truth? the problem that question poses has never properly been resolved ofc, and requires a high level of sensitivity to rhetorical modes, or formal modes. is formal awareness perceived as elitist and a likely constraint on… a word that goes with content in media… consumption.

i wonder if there’s a question of the comparative cheapness of platforms. to pay attention to form is expensive, and can require an awareness of the platform or medium on which something is going to be shown (the commercial mechanics of SVoD plotting are different from linear tv plotting). a focus on content is *comparatively* cheap in that it can adapt to platforms due to a relative lack of emphasis on form.

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founding
Feb 18, 2021Liked by John Ganz

Reminds me of Albert Hirschman's book "Rhetoric of Reaction." It's been perversity, futility, and jeopardy since the 50's (at least). And also, this is a great way to frame Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet- excessive content with no form will inevitably lead to failure and unhappiness. Or today, just more content.

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Feb 18, 2021Liked by John Ganz

wonderful piece, thank you!

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'But things can have unpleasing or clumsy or confounding forms, because they are carelessly put together.'

'because no one can even recognize when they have shifted or become incoherent or self-contradictory.'

I'm not sure if I even believe there is a distinction here. These things sound all bound up, and what you're describing like...an aspect of content, or a recurring feature or trope of it. But maybe that's just another way of saying what you just said? I'm not sure. It's just that you started by pitting them against each other, and this (I think?) tripped me up.

Aside from this distinction, I don't know if I buy the proposed implication—that people don't recognize how arguments shift (don't they?) just sounds like how arguments tend to be, because people are not perfectly rational, have blind spots, etc. Why do you think they aren't trained to recognize recurring structures or tropes? This seems like a thing you intuit, and then choose whether to pay attention to or care about or not, right? But it's easier to understand how motivated reasoning and just desire for conflict debase online debates rather than the fact that they have recurrent features that (you claim) people aren't paying enough attention to does so.

Like, I think I understand how lack of care or attention to form generates subpar or by-the-numbers culture. The example of trilogies was great, I thought (...because I actually understood it) because two most recent examples of these were so poorly paced (among other things) for that structure. But I'm not sure what the structure of a superior debate would be, and why privileging making an argument work well within such a structure would free us from going around in circles.

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