Abstract Paul Chan examines the concept of “content” as it has come to dominate contemporary cultural production, tracing its implications for art, expression, and human flourishing in the age of generative AI and the attention economy. Chan begins by observing the flattening effect of the term “content,” which collapses distinctions between artistic forms and privileges scalability and immediacy over quality and meaning. Drawing on traditional understandings of the distinction between form and content—from Plato's notions of mimesis and methexis to Adorno's conception of form as sedimented content—Chan maps the historical tensions between expression that endures and expression that is consumed in the moment. He then turns to Marx's “Fragment on Machines” and the concept of the general intellect to argue that what Marx failed to anticipate was the capacity of capital to exploit free time itself, converting leisure and attention into unwitting labor. Through the lens of the attention economy, Chan likens content to plastic: infinitely reproducible, derivative, and environmentally corrosive. The essay concludes by juxtaposing the current unprecedented proliferation of content—much of it AI-generated—against simultaneous political attacks on knowledge institutions, suggesting that the two phenomena are not contradictory but complementary symptoms of the same cultural crisis. Chan ultimately poses the question of whether art can still resist being mere content, and what is at stake in that resistance.
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