0003 – Who Makes The Map, Makes Us

What does the dramatic rise of the TikTok “Content House” mean for architecture and domesticity?



The year 2020 will always be remembered as a fundamentally transformative year. Exactly how permanent the rapidly adopted new patterns of work and domestic life will prove to be is difficult to gauge, but a return to old norms currently seems unlikely. Digital communication, already the structural core of our everyday lives in the pre-pandemic world, has become for some the primary form of social and professional interaction. Our new “distributed” working lives have fractured the head office across a thousand sofas, spare bedrooms, and kitchen tables.



At the same time, for a generation of content creators rapidly professionalizing across Twitch streams, YouTube videos, and Discord servers, home has become the stage, studio, and media distribution center, and the definition of what a house is for has suddenly become hotly contested.



Our recent societal-wide, cultural beta-test has provided conditions where radical ideas can quickly become future norms, and so the recent explosion in popularity of TikTok, its “content houses,” and their occupants might require deeper consideration&#8230;



The full essay The Content House: The New Cottage Industry Of Platform Inhabitation is available via Strelka Magazine: <a href="https://strelkamag.com/en/article/content-house" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://strelkamag.com/en/article/content-house</a>

0002 – The Content House

0001 – Orange Moscow (Notes on a City Changing Colour)

My name is Christopher Burman, I&#8217;m a designer and artist from London. You can find out a bit more about the projects I&#8217;ve worked on <a href="https://www.burman.work/">here</a>. 



While writing has always been an important personal tool, to date I&#8217;ve haven&#8217;t made a serious effort to share much, in part due to a wicked and contradictory mix of shyness, perfectionism, laziness &#8211; and worse still &#8211; an increasing reflexiveness about the value of even producing &#8220;content&#8221; at all.



To escape the clutches of this cycle, I&#8217;m aiming to publish more of this writing in a rapid and direct way, under the guise of this, a new project: <a href="http://fulfilment-centre.burman.work">Fulfillment Centre</a>



In the broadest strokes, the aim of Fulfilment Centre to think more clearly about experience and meaning of near-future infrastructures and technological systems, especially with respect to sensory perception, machine intelligence and the decarbonisation of cities.



While ostensibly these subjects might appear only loosely connected, I&#8217;m increasingly of the view that they are highly interdependent and to reflect on any of them requires taking a pretty wide view encompassing all of them. 



My default setting is normally to relate to the world by making and design things, usually exploring sensory, spatial and computational systems. However creative agency appears more than ever at the mercy of exactly how rapid and uneven developments in these fields actually are. The bits of writing that will make up <a href="http://fulfilment-centre.burman.work">Fulfilment Centre</a> are perhaps best understood as personal fields notes on doing these things, as the philosophical and physical terrain around us shifts so rapidly.











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<h2>Preamble: Notes On Getting Started</h2>



I&#8217;ve been on the verge of launching a writing project several times over recent years but hesitation has always grabbed the wheel. The mind-killer&nbsp;fear&nbsp;and distraction, teaming up with a furious circulation of subject matter.



Space emerged over the last 18 months, primarily from both a deliberate retreat from social media and a curious &#8211; and at times worrying &#8211; lack of in-bound email. With the churning of the world recently on pause, silences both uncomfortable and fulfilling become more expansive.



One concern in particular, gnawing away for several years previously, became quickly more urgent. Broadly, that the methods and rhythms of absorbing knowledge about the world and it&#8217;s future, were generally muddying rather than clarifying the picture, despite the urgency of those near future questions. A uncomfortable storm of firm signals gradually distorting into noise, flavour without texture, comprehension without structure.



Perhaps the effect perhaps of too long spent drinking straight from the firehose but online life sometimes has quality of a factory line churning out &#8216;actually quite meaningful&#8216; things, unable to sustain longer term value in the face of over saturation and over stimulation. Threads that are as vital, brutal and succinct as they are tangential to everyday lived experience. Like a pig hunting for truffles in the forest though, perhaps nothing is ultimately unsatisfying or nutritionally irrelevant as actually finding them.



In one spiritual or intellectual way, this maybe have always been the case but it&#8217;s still worth acknowledge the strangeness of living at a time that demands brandishing a Swiss army knife of cognitive techniques simply to manage the deluge. Exerting whatever guidance you have over your own conscious attention now seems like a primary life skill, and certainly not one I have mastered. This is not a lament about the perils of the internet age however. It is still very much possible to access forms of knowledge that previously lay hidden or protected, most of all through social media itself. Alongside rampant mania, paranoia and polarisation is serious expertise, research and the hot gas that ignites the irresistible red hot glow of the media ecosystem as a whole.



What I currently sense however is that any attempt to contend with these forces is more than ever a social exercise, requiring active participation. Most helpful of all is to acknowledge such deep confusion, not least the absurdity of information overload itself being motivation for yet more online content.



Alongside this another motivation also lingers. One reasonable definition of fully reaching adulthood is the passing of enough time and distance to recognise in people you once knew, significant and definitive change in their world view. In part because it also illustrates that you, yourself have can and have likely changed too, but also that the mental models we all use to process the world are fungible and at times structurally unsound. Realising that our own perceptions and the proverbial &#8216;grip&#8217; on reality is perhaps only temporary is of course a force for both humility, and for me a powerful motivation to act in the moment, to produce, to work.



In fact it seems that the speed at which such internal models can be melted down and reformed is accelerating. People who we once knew, and might have presumed to be more firmly tethered to one particular version of reality, are able to jump more quickly between ships. At once our social circles are appear alive with political and social reconsideration swirling alongside a sudden embrace of darkly unstable paranoia.



We may also simply be more aware of these rapid fluctuations of course &#8211; in the past they would have been largely invisible outside of interactions bounded by much smaller communities but I tend to think that performance of our online lives is proving to be self-reinforcing.



My tendency is always towards optimism, after all better to have a plastic mind, capable of continuously adapting that one that slowly rusts into inflexibility as cognitive scientists might previously have believed. How we adapt to the era mass connectivity is perhaps just the next stage of the human project. It&#8217;s pertinent though to recall Kurt Vonnegut&#8217;s, evergreen line &#8211; &#8216;We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be&#8216;. Now as equally true of what we pretend to read, to know, to watch.



Ultimately though, while you can probably pretend to think, you can&#8217;t really pretend to publish writing. Which takes us to the paradoxical conclusion &#8211; output is the only way through, even or perhaps especially, at a time of maximal noise. It is in this spirit that I wanted to give more time and space to writing, specifically on the subject I am most confused about, but more importantly to share directly with friends, including those I have perhaps yet to met. My initial strategy is simply not to be boring. Feel free to point out (politely) if I do not meet this standard.

0003

Who Makes The Map, Makes Us

0002

The Content House

0001

Orange Moscow (Notes on a City Changing Colour)

0000

Introducing… Fulfilment Centre