I’ve been thinking recently about how the content ecosystem (see also: The Content Era) doesn’t select for excellence, originality, or charisma. Rather, it selects for a kind of mysterious X-factor: watchability. Watchability is the sticky quality that some things have, that capability of being attractive in the loosest sense of the word, even when they aren’t pleasant, or enriching, or good. It’s not the same as talent, and it certainly isn’t the same as intelligence. It’s affective, fluid, and temporary. It’s vibe over virtuosity, presence as currency.

Think of it like the old saying about someone with a good voice: “I could listen to them read the phone book,” taken to its logical market conclusion. What makes it worthwhile to watch someone else play a video game, or do the dishes, or “react” to someone else’s art? Their watchability.

Make no mistake, this shift is nothing new– it’s been with us for as long as the mass media, and it’s not going away. But what makes the shift interesting is how its veneer of neutrality intersects with market and platform dynamics. Algorithms, in the way that they “surface” content, do so based not on value, but on watchability. A sharp argument that takes time to unfold and unpack is rendered invisible (literally) by a fast-cut interpretation from someone more inherently watchable.

In order to flourish, the platform system centralizes us toward competing on watchability. It’s part of how experts become explainers, explainers become entertainers, and entertainers become brands. We are incentivized at every step to contort ourselves into our most visible and dramatic selves, to perform for others, to take our most intimate moments public, to feed every available part of ourselves into the gristle mill to see if these might be our two weeks. The alternative is a kind of cold void of indifference, the loneliness we all know too well. “The only thing worse than being talked about,” said Oscar Wilde, “is not being talked about.”

I’ve never trusted watchability. It can be the mark of the truly talented, but very often it’s the mark of the grifter, the hollow argument, the flash in the pan. None of this is meant to be a moral panic about the influencer, or the media, or what we value. It’s about what happens to our collective attention span when we reward creators not for the content of what they say or do, but for how said content compels and fascinates us. Moment after moment we are reinforced in our belief that the delivery is the message, that legibility is intelligence, that ease signals capacity.

At scale, this goes nowhere good. Our institutions, our systems, and our platforms shift toward selecting for affective presence. The winner isn’t the most capable, but the most fascinating, the most watchable, the most compelling. Take it long enough, and our fundamental ideas of talent and intelligence warp toward a funhouse mirror version of themselves, stretched into the “Inland Empire” pantomime of a YouTube thumbnail.