Patagonia released a film called “The Shitthropocene: Welcome to the Age of Cheap Crap,” which is about exactly what it sounds like — how our world is filling with more and more low-quality stuff that lasts about two seconds before heading to a landfill. Most notably, clothing.
Many of us have heard of or even thought long about this predicament. It’s one of the powerful stories that brands like Patagonia and American Giant have been telling for years. At its core, this is a story about quality.
It’s also about preservation.
I believe this Shitthropocene is making its way to every corner of our lives. Relevant to business and work, it’s happening by way of content and social platforms. It eeks into our inboxes. Fills our phone screens. Takes a crap on our daily thoughts.
This is in part because of AI making it easier than ever to pump generated content out into the world. This is in part because spending more time online adds more and more bricks to our cognitive load, effectively making us stupider, and making it harder to not go back for more. This is in part because it’s remarkably easy to spread things around that we’ve not verified, thought about, or, in many cases even read beyond the headline or first few sentences — sending that cognitive load on down the line to others in our network.
The Shitthropocene is polluting our feeds, and, even more dangerously, is polluting our thoughts and stealing our time.
Time we could instead spend creatively solving real-world problems that get bigger every year. (Skyrocketing housing costs, anyone?)
Time we could spend innovating around things that help humanity flourish, rather than just shrink back to the role of the catcher, or the button pusher at the helm of machines more complex and, at some point, more intelligent than us.
The more we allow the Shitthropocene of content into our day, into our purview, into our thoughts and feelings, the more we become inferior to the machines.
We’ve reached peak information overload. Peak too many opinions, not all of which are equally informed or thoughtful. Peak too much inaccuracy. Too much samesy. Too many agendas. Too many templates. Too much too much.
If we have any desire to maintain an edge, we are likely to enter preservation mode, and soon.
This means, collectively, we stop caring about any of it. (I’m already there.) Where we realize who is controlling who, and what we give up by consuming all the content that’s available (or even a portion of it). The algorithms are in charge of what we see, what we think, what we feel, and therefore what we produce in our work. That is no way to live, if you ask me.
And so more of us will leave the platforms that shove content we didn’t ask for down our throats 24/7. Spend a month away and it’s easy to see where the brain rot started, where it comes from, and what it does to original thinking. (“Brain rot” is what my kids call what happens after watching pointless, copied, formula-laden, uninspired, mind-numbing content for far too long.)
Where does that leave the marketer who bet their business on social?
If marketing is content and content is marketing (or whatever this spinning top is), then what?
We should think about that. Because right now, hitching our marketing and brand building to content creation on social media feels a bit like hitching our sails to a rusted out Ford Pinto that’s about to run out of gas on a desert highway. Maybe it’ll take us out of state. But aren’t we trying to go further?
Maybe it’s time to divert attention back away from the machine that hijacked everything over the last 20 years. What value can we add in a content Shitthropocene? It’s likely not by shoveling more and more cheap clothes on top of a smoldering landfill.
