Every post is bait. — In the good old days, a (good) piece of writing used to be a nicely packaged, well-organized (or aesthetically pleasing) thought. The writer exported (a version of) it from their mind, and the reader imported (a version of) it into theirs. These days, however, writing means not much more and not much less than content generation. People mainly write to grow an audience, grab attention, sell. The reader is the fish; what they write is bait. There’s nothing after the bait for the poor reader. He’s been fished; next, he’ll be fried and eaten.
Writing is advertisement — In view of the fact that “good” writing is now measured by the number of purchases, subscriptions, followers, comments, and likes one gains, it can be said that all posts are advertisements. All content generation belongs to marketing, whose survival depends on ROI, and whose return on ad spend must, sooner or later, exceed 100%. Every word, every image, every frame, every idea now belongs to — or is governed by the mechanisms of — the culture industry. Every post is a (self-)branding activity… although sometimes they come disguised as philosophy, literature, or art.
It’s a puddle, not an ocean — Depth and all of its close relatives are sacrificed on the altar of marketing. At best, there’s the appearance or the promise of depth. When you come to dive deeper, however, you’re always disappointed by how shallow the water is. The water barely reaches your knees, and the children have pissed in it. Just because you cannot see the seafloor, it doesn’t mean the water’s deep.
A following of fools. — To succeed in this day and age, one’s work better not address intelligent individuals. Since there are so few of them, converting intelligent individuals into paying clients is often an unprofitable endeavor, especially on the internet, even if their conversion sometimes means bigger ticket sizes. One must evoke Schopenhauer’s insult here but use it as a tip: “He who writes for fools always finds a large public.” And since, in our time, the larger your audience, the better, this means, from a financial standpoint, you’d be a fool if you didn’t write for fools.
Engagement farming. — Online, there are two types of posts: the type that is written to farm engagement, the type that isn’t. Unfortunately, a large majority of the posts fall into the former type, where one expresses what’s expected to be liked (or receive comments). One must ask himself, “Am I moving the audience, or does the audience move me?” In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes something close to this. He says, “How small is the importance of followers we first grasp when we have ceased to be the followers of our followers.” In our times, this means that, even if one has a large number of followers, it’s better to post as if he has none, risking the number of followers to drop. (Unfortunately, the world works the other way: people post more of what already works.)
Everyone is stupider than you. — In one of his essays, Italo Calvino writes that “literature must presuppose a public that is more cultured, and more cultured than the writer himself.” Content generation, as we saw, does the opposite. To get views and shares, it must constantly presuppose a public that knows nothing. It must consider everyone stupid. The more advanced the piece, the smaller the reward. (Think of a bell curve. The worst writers and the best writers get the least engagement. Why? Because good writing is no longer considered good, it gets the same results as bad writing. The algorithm loves mediocre content with good hooks.) That is why there’s barely any literature in literary novels these days. The main goal of publishing houses is to sell, and the main aim for writers is also to sell, and since to sell means writing for a large public… well? It means you better write for fools and explain everything like they’re twelve. To presuppose a public that is less cultured, and less cultured than the writer himself, then, is the way to success. And, therefore, the way to success is… anti-literature.
Something to say. — To write in good style, says Schopenhauer, you need to have something to say first. And to have something to say, you need to have spent time thinking. Unfortunately, the Content Generation Generation (CGG) writes for the sake of writing — or, more precisely, the CGG generates content for the sake of generating content and, of course, to eventually sell something. There are no traces of thinking anywhere, and most of the things one comes across online are recycled mediocrity. Writers only pretend to be saying important things. It’s all performative thinking and pretense. Schopenhauer writes: “For example, I have just read in a new book: ‘I have not written so as to increase the number of existing books.’ This says the opposite of what the writer intended, and is moreover nonsense.”
This post was originally published on my Substack on November 9, 2026, under the title “Why Everything You Read Online is Bait (Including This Title)“.
