You get what you pay for

Comedy musician Kyle Gordon has done it again. He followed up his massive 2023 viral song “Planet Of The Bass” with another huge social hit, “Mr. Jambo,” a Paul Simon Graceland parody that he flew to South Africa to film a video for. “I funded it all myself. So knock on wood I’ll make even a fraction of it back,” he recently told Vulture.

“Mr. Jambo” and its budget puts Gordon in a league with other creator-comedians like Druski who are spending huge amounts of money on professional-level production to make social videos. Druski said back in May that he spent $100,000 on an Instagram video about church pastors. In both Gordon’s “Mr. Jambo” video and Druski’s pastor video, the comedians basically shot a TV-quality sketch and then shoehorned it into a framing device meant for social platforms. For “Mr. Jambo,” the thumbnail reads, “no one: / white guys when they go to Africa:” And in the case of Druski’s video, it has a fake Snapchat bar across it that reads, “Why did I come to this Mega Church? 😂” Which, regardless of how funny these videos are, is, frankly, weird.

It’s as if the ambitions — and expectations — of a certain class of millennial content creator have begun to burst out of the limitations long imposed on them by social feeds. And the awkwardness of it is fascinating. Especially when you juxtapose it against the newfound success of Gen Z creators like Kane Parsons and Curry Barker, who have been awarded the luxury of no longer having to worry about squeezing a professionally-shot film into a clickable grid thumbnail.

I point out the generational designations of the creators listed above because I think it’s crucial for understanding what’s currently happening. The long 2010s may be finally coming to an end, but we are still feeling the effects of the decade of lost millennial creative labor. Older content creators still have to cobble up their own resources to make professional-looking content, and hope it does well enough on feeds to recoup losses, while younger creators can leapfrog that game entirely. And in the case of millennial creators like poor ol’ Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach that are big enough to take a swing at Hollywood, they have to do it 100% on their own, only to get removed from box office charts and shunned from the industry as their reward. And if you really want to see this divide, boot up Netflix and scroll to the podcast section. Gen X and Gen Z get to make and star in TV shows and movies, but for most of the millennial internet long-haulers, they merely graduated to a new set of golden handcuffs and now just get to make more, largely disposable, digital content.

When I say that the 2010s were a decade of lost millennial creative labor, I am largely referring to a unique post-recession rebound starting around 2012 when a whole lot of corporations and venture capitalists were willing to spend money on internet content. Yes, there were blogs and websites and YouTube videos before that, but up until then they had been treated as something secondary and less important to real media — stuff on TV and in theaters and physical newspapers and magazines. Then Facebook went public, acquired Instagram, and overhauled the mobile News Feed. That same year, YouTube drastically changed the way its algorithm worked and Twitter acquired Vine and launched multimedia preview cards. Which meant that by the end of 2012, the internet had mostly transitioned from thing you read on a computer to something you increasingly looked at or watched on a phone.

And all the millennials that jumped over to digital media companies and social platforms — because that’s simply where the money and attention was at the time — spent a lot of time and energy making content that, 10 years on, basically doesn’t exist anymore. And I mean this quite literally in the case of all the essays, short stories, magazine features, comics, and other written works have been lost to digital rot. But the stuff that you can still find, if you dig deep enough in an archive, has very little legacy, if any, because much of it was meant to game and algorithm or news cycle that no longer exists. For instance, take a few seconds and watch the first “Shit Girls Say” video from 2011. It’s patient zero for the premise-based, contextless, feed-agnostic, clip-filled, quick-edited comedy that Gordon and Druski are both still doing and also, clearly, chaffing against 15 years later. Do you remember “Shit Girls Say”? If you saw it, did you ever think about it again? It has 21 million views. Can you honestly say it means anything now to anyone whatsoever?

There’s been a question hanging over the amorphous blob of platforms, media formats, and personalities we now call “entertainment” since COVID. And it’s question more average people are asking with more intensity than ever. And it’s actually a fairly simple one: Why do things feel worse now? Why do good TV shows, good movies, good songs feel so rare? Why does everything feel so stale and so boring? And I think the lost millennial decade has a lot to do with it. Making art, making culture, has always involved some sort of dark deal with the infernal machinery of capital, but the rise of big tech and venture capital in the early 2010s changed the terms of the deal. Culture stopped being something the consumer paid for and cultural industries became kindling for digital furnaces that only wanted to monetize our data anyways. An entire generation of young creatives were paid to dump terabytes of posts and videos in a black hole, trying to entertain users long enough to be surveilled and train AI. And not only do they have nothing to show for it professionally, they have nothing to show for it creatively, as well.

And so, ultimately, I think the answer to the question “why do things feel worse now?” is also quite simple: You always get what you pay for.