Tired of 15-Minute-Fame? Try 15 Seconds: Entertainment in the Era of Quick Content and Sludge Content
- Hanyu Zhang
- Feb 27, 2024
- 11 min read
Updated: Mar 4, 2024
“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”
That’s a colossal and incredibly snobbish opening statement to an article, especially from one ostensibly regarding pop culture and “boomerisms” about “Dastardly Gen Zs and their iPhones™”. Admittedly, it is about time we passed that laurel wreath of agism to the Gen Alphas, AKA the born-after-2010s. Yes. The oldest Gen Alphas will already be 13 years old by 2023 (AD, in case you’re wondering)1.
As a member of Gen Z (roughly between the late 90s to early 2010s), I believe there is no way to comment on pop culture and general society without coming off as at least somewhat didactic2. What this article will cover is something I believe to be relevant to all of us, however, a tidbit of something to keep in mind during that 2 AM doomscrolling session.
As the title may suggest, I shall try to explain the impact that modern Quick Content (that is, covering aspects of the modern age such as short-form videos, social media, and streaming) and Sludge Content (that is, carefully curated overstimulation through the former mediums) had on culture and entertainment.
So bear with me here, as we go down a quasi-rabbit hole of rant. We shall cover it with the thinnest veil of format formality, and let’s just hope whatever article comes out from this rant turns out to be clear, coherent, and maybe even competent!
Let’s start with the guy who may have ruined modern culture.
Andy War-who?
Contrary to popular belief, that “15-minute-fame” quote was most likely not by Andy Warhol, more commonly known as the guy who somehow convinced the rest of the world that a Campbell soup can is art. Some sources claim that it was coined by Swedish museum curator Pontus Hultén back in 1967, while others credit it to American photographer Nat Finkelstein, who had replied to Warhol’s comment on everybody wanting to be famous with a quip, saying “Yeah, for about 15 minutes, Andy.” Regardless, the fact that there is such an anachronistic saying attributed to him at all does indeed point to something more profound than a quote from a snob.
Weirdly enough, he was the most enigmatic person we know everything about. But “weird” was his whole shtick, so fair enough.
Andy Warhol was a pop artist. Some say he revolutionized art and knocked down the ivory tower of “fine art”, destroying the status quo as an icon and creative genius3. Others say he ruined it, a flagbearer of all that is sloppy about art in the modern age, a harbinger of talent that only serves the purpose of money laundering4. Either way, even if he had not made that statement himself, there’s a reason why it is so commonly attributed to him: It’s a quirky societal omen befitting his persona, something that sounds outlandish yet reflects a sort of attitude to art that carries over to the present day.
Perhaps, it is now true.
Quick Content: “You Just Want Attention”;“Looking For Attention~”
Welcome back to the early 21st century! The 00s (or “noughts” if you’re a hipster) ushered in a wave of dramatic changes to the world and all its 6 billion inhabitants. Let’s see… 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, SARS, a Global Recession… great stuff.
There was also the rise of the Internet.
While it and its associated technology (most notably the World Wide Web) had already been invented during the 1980s, there is no denying that it only truly exploded in popularity after Y2K6, as it eventually reached over 25% of the world’s population by the end of the decade. With it came the influx of social media, the Myspaces and Facebooks and Twitters (Let it be known that Hell shall freeze over before I ever call it “X”) that overthrew the era of blogs and chat forums. Tech giants now dominate the landscape of connection.
At some point, there came a revelation that, if anyone can create anything, why not let the users drive engagement for everyone instead?
Gone were the days of social media being a way to connect to your friends (and maybe their friends too) only, welcome to the age of content.
YouTube is one of the first examples of this to truly make it big. There were attempts for video-sharing websites long before it, but slow uploading times and god-awful compression meant that this platform format didn’t take off until YouTube hit the jackpot in 20057. The site revolutionized online video by allowing anyone to upload and share videos easily. Comments and connections take somewhat of a backseat to the actual content, which was a one-stop-shop for the creation of viral videos, including Hong Kong’s own Bus Uncle Argument, all the way back in 2006. This democratization of content creation paved the way for a long series of changes to the landscape of the Internet.
Vine, for example, with its clips limited to a seemingly pitiful 6 seconds, gave birth to yet another titanic wave of massive viral sensations. Alas, the “Internet viral” bandwagon was but an infant during this time, even into the 2010s. Vine was eventually shut down after a long, drawn-out process where it struggled to grasp a competing spot against other apps that had launched similar features after Vine’s success. As of 2023, the app is officially fully discontinued, meaning you are now unable to watch Vine videos on the website anymore, barring specific links on Twitter8 or unauthorized reuploads on YouTube. Even if the original app isn’t with us anymore, it is undeniable just how much it truly influenced modern culture.
One could argue that Chinese company Bytedance’s TikTok (or Douyin), is essentially a spiritual successor to what Vine had brought. Through smart marketing strategies targeted specifically at the younger demographic - almost 40% of its users are between the age of 18-24 - it blew up almost overnight in the West as well as it did within China, capturing not only millions of users but also their undivided… attention. And that’s TikTok’s key.
The rise of short-form-videos led to an even more expansive explosion of trends and online celebrities (for example, Khaby Lame, that one dude who reacts to “life hack” videos with an exasperated face and his trademark shrug, currently with 162 million followers on Tiktok), but there are also many hidden, more sinister sides to the field of quick content production.
For one, It’s easily exploitable. Big corporations market themselves as net-savvy, and before you know it, about five million reels are using that one heaven-forsaken Burger King Whopper song (which, mind you, blew up a few months ago and is a dead trend already), and almost three of them are actually funny.
The corporate hijacking of virality also commercializes art as entertainment. This is a subject that requires its own article with more robust talking points, but the gist of it is: if a viral 15-second video only needs 15 seconds of music… then what’s the point for any commercial artist to innovate anything longer than that?
This is where Warhol’s (alleged) theory truly came to shine as a Delphic prophecy. One-hit-wonders become one-line-wonders, yet maybe the term itself is irrelevant in the modern age where anyone can have their time in the limelight if they try. Some don’t, though, and yet the spotlight ironically shines on them too.
Although, maybe even that notion is inherently elitist.
“Bad Habit”, the funky bedroom-pop hit by R&B singer/producer Steve Lacy blew up on TikTok back in summer 2022. It had reached the the point where viral clips were circulating online depicting a sold-out venue for a Steve Lacy show, where the only lyric anyone seemingly knows is the first verse: “I wish I knew, I wish I knew you wanted me…”
People were quick to criticize this practice, but perhaps wishing that an artist you adore would stay forever underground and undiscovered by the general populace is a selfish thought. The Internet, for what it’s worth, still is a realm of opportunities.
Sludge Content: “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”
Here’s a quick question: Do you regularly use or access social media? If so, do you regularly consume content from short-form videos, e.g. YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, TikTok, etc? If so, have you ever encountered a certain, specific side of those sites, now commonly dubbed “sludge content?”
For those unaware, this term refers to a certain sort of short videos that involve at least two halves: On one hand is some sort of video, perhaps a movie clip, an AI TTS reading from an r/Askreddit post, or just the most recent meme video that’s been blowing up for no discernible reason whatsoever. On the other hand is probably Subway Surfers, slime videos, or hydraulic presses crushing things, or Minecraft parkour (usually intentionally bad) — something that engages your brain without forcing it to do anything.
The worst part is? It works. You can in no way claim that it is entertaining, nor is it satisfying, nor is it educational. But it was never meant to be any of this. By capturing your attention for the next 10 seconds to a minute, the machine of content creation successfully garners one more view on its algorithm, driving it further towards popularity, so more people would see it and be ensnared in its simple yet wrongly captivating format. It’s like the effect that bad mobile ads have on you, the intentional campiness that prompts one tiny corner of your brain to tell you that this is stupid. Except now everything you scroll is skippable, and you can turn off your phone at any moment. Then why don’t you, and why don’t we?
NBS calls it “the latest form of escapism on TikTok9”, and there’s some truth to it. There are so many distractions that give you tiny iotas of dopamine, just enough so that you can pretend you’re enjoying it. It’s a literal “sludge” that turns your brain off from scroll after scroll of optimized overstimulation, and hours will be gone before you know it. There’s something to be said about a connection between the willing consumption of sludge and the doomist mindset of our generation. It’s the idea that “everyone is doing better than me, yet everyone is screwed up at the same time.” It’s the inevitable dread of a collapsing world that might have gotten us into this situation, exploited by a video format about as easy to churn out as is physically possible, something even an AI could do. Or have done already.
Some heralded it as the sign of some figurative Endtimes: human attention span in the youngest generations has now gotten so bad that they rely on total overstimulation of the brain to even feel the barest sensation of entertainment.
Alas, perhaps this is just one step in a long journey for the Internet to figure out who it is. Maybe one day we’ll all realize that this is worthless, but as long as it still drives engagement from the users, no one can do anything about it, and the companies profiting from it certainly ain’t gonna.
Michael Stephens, commonly known as VSauce, a YouTuber of eerily educational video and mildly interesting fame, mentioned in an interview with Anthony Padilla (AKA the guy from Smosh), where he talked about an alternative point of view towards this entire situation. People of ages past before cellphones and the Internet didn’t maintain unbroken eye contact with everyone whenever they spoke (or spake, if you’re really old) to one another; They watched birds, or they wandered weary eyes over newspapers. The point is, humans have always wanted distraction, and what we’re experiencing right now might not be a new trend, just human nature transported to a new medium. No one blamed the ancient Sumerians for forcing us to read in the modern age by developing the earliest writing system, so why can’t the same go for social media and content?
Conclusion: “We Gon’ Be Alright”... For Now
Oh, problems related to the online world are rampant, that’s for sure. As we speak, toxicity boils in almost every online community, some radical to the point of self-destructiveness. Cyberbullying is still only recognized to a limited extent. Heck, there are men out there who fancy themselves a Greek-letter label, thinking it makes them more of a “macho womanizer”, whatever that means. The Internet is far from perfect, and it’s by all means still in its adolescence, the quirky rebellious teenage “it’s NOT a phase, ma!” era, and the reaches of post-capitalist commercialization is just its newest experiment. It might stay around for the time being, but life still goes on, does it not?
Quick Content and Sludge Content are scary to think about, for sure. There are terrifying pitfalls to everything, but maybe that’s why we are drawn to it so much. We can’t deny the fact that we’re living in a digitized society where what you see and read are all optimized. To snap yourself out of a social media loop is intentionally designed to be as hard as possible. So some of us embrace that trap, along with the general Gen-Z mentality that this world is but one moment away from being utterly screwed.
Things could be different, you know. Acknowledging the existence of these problems is already a substantial step towards solving them. Or maybe we could let it play out, and see how we as a society develop from there, who knows? That’s the beauty of our world now.
The Internet was once the wild frontier, and everyone was in their own foreigner’s land. Not anymore. It is now time to come and accept the fact that we had figured out the rules of this game long ago, even if the rules make about as much sense as Mao or Calvinball. Change is a dreadful thing for the most part, and there is no telling how humanity will manage itself. The implications of quick and sludge content are still too complex to be predicted quite yet. But in the end, as I’d like to hope, humanity will prevail. We’ll get used to it, and we’ll move on, for better or for worse. Who knows, maybe we do know what we’re doing.
Footnotes:
1 Don’t try to think too hard about it, just like how you shouldn’t think too hard about how kids in 1st/2nd grade had spent most, if not the entirety of their consciousnesses in COVID. How’s that scoliosis of yours feeling?
2 As in, to come off as patronizing.
3 (Israel, 2013) “Succeeding virtually single-handedly...in resurrecting from near-extinction that endangered species of grand-style portraiture of people important, glamorous, or notorious enough—whether statesmen, actresses, or wealthy patrons of the arts—to deserve to leave their human traces in the history of painting.”
4 (Wallace-Wells, 2009) “...And to laud Warhol as a prophet of the saturated media culture we inhabit today is to apportion praise according to the perverse logic of our era, by which we lionize the first person to do anything, even a bad thing.”
5 There are also, of course, the cases to be made about allegations of workplace abuse, plagiarism, and his general “pretentious artist” character, but that’s neither here nor there, and I’d really like to finish writing this article within my lifetime thankyouverymuch.
6In case you’re wondering, no, the world did not end via massive date-resetting bug when the millennium rolled around, for obvious reasons.
7 There’s a really interesting story about how YouTube came to be because of the infamous 2004 Superbowl Half-time Show incident with a certain Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson, but that’s maybe a tale for another day.
8 NOT X.
9 (Uwa, 2023) “On the consumer side, part of sludge content's appeal is its escapist nature. The videos are rife with distractions… “It functions as something playful, that can take your mind off things, and doesn’t require you to dive deep,” said Andreas Schellewald, a doctoral researcher of social media at Goldsmiths, University of London. “You can sit there and watch things unfold in front of your eyes.”
Works Cited
Israel, M. (2013). 10 Reasons Why Andy Warhol Matters | Artsy. [online] Artsy. Available at: https://www.artsy.net/article/matthew-10-reasons-why-andy-warhol-matters [Accessed 20 Oct. 2023].
Jones, J. (2012). Andy Warhol: the case against. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2012/jun/20/andy-warhol-case-against-art [Accessed 17 Oct. 2023].
Nuwer, R. (2014). Andy Warhol Probably Never Said His Celebrated ‘Fifteen Minutes of Fame’ Line. [online] Smithsonian Magazine. Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/andy-warhol-probably-never-said-his-celebrated-fame-line-180950456/ [Accessed 16 Oct. 2023].
Revolver (2021). Revolver Gallery. [online] Revolver Gallery. Available at: https://revolverwarholgallery.com/all-about-andy-warhol-person-vs-persona/ [Accessed 18 Oct. 2023].
Uwa Ede-Osifo (2023). ‘Sludge content’ is the latest form of escapism on TikTok. [online] NBC News. Available at: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/sludge-content-tiktok-escapism-rcna77037 [Accessed 21 Oct. 2023].
Wallace-Wells, D. (2009). Andy Warhol Is Soooo Overrated. [online] Newsweek. Available at: https://www.newsweek.com/andy-warhol-soooo-overrated-75779 [Accessed 20 Oct. 2023].
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