And yet, in recent years, I’ve had this creeping annoyance with the holiday I love. Which isn’t abnormal. We all get annoyed by the people and things we love from time to time. It just seems of late that I’m less experiencing Halloween than getting it shoved in my face. Instead of me excitedly bobbing for apples, I’m having my head thrust beneath the water and held down.
And I think I know a few of the reasons why, which I’ll explore with various articles over the course of this season, but I might as well start with the big one: social media.
I love the socials. Been on them for like 15 years, and they’ve taken up almost every minute of those 15 years. It’s allowed me to connect with cool people, make real friends, been a valuable source of information, and helped me extend the reach of my own work. But the fundamental problem with the socials is that it flattens everything into “content.”
Once upon a time, artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers—they blanched at terms like product and content. Those aren’t words that describe art or entertainment. Not words of engagement and connection. Not words you put next to pain and joy and the full spectrum of the human experience. Not something you strive for and pour your essence into to bring into the world. “Content” was a word used by those with faint souls who packaged and commoditized the art. It is a word of distribution, not of vision.
But then, at some point, people started making literal content, and, maybe worse, not just acknowledging it as such, but reveling in it as such, proudly proclaiming themselves “content creators.” And what I mean by content is media that is of little value either personally or artistically outside of a platform. It is not made to fill the ravenous existence-hole in our souls, but to fill a software program’s content stream. You know what I’m talking about: Reaction videos. Replicating memes. Lip syncing. Hot takes. Short skits about mundane life details. Fake pranks. Recycled information. Single-second videos. Rage bait. Faux-experts. So…many…other…types…of content. And not only does the content have no value outside the platform itself, it only really has entertainment value if you define entertainment as “killed time” (which, by the way, is a valid way to define entertainment…and all of life, for that matter, but that’s not the point here).
And you know the difference. For every writer with a publishing deal there are a thousand without one who keep on writing all alone in front of their laptops. For every musician on a record label are a thousand without who just keep playing everywhere they can pull out an instrument. You think that guy who does reaction videos keeps doing that for his own amusement and betterment if TikTok shuts down? You think that girl who films herself destroying stuff with power tools would keep doing that in her spare time if there was nowhere to metric and monetize those bits?
But still, again, that’s fine. Not everything has to matter. Again, life doesn’t have to matter. But if you want to at least pretend it does, we need to be aware what damage a machine like the socials can do. It harms honest, true expression on those platforms…and often blocks it from happening in real life. When you take real pieces of humanity like music or a holiday and insert them into a program designed to deliver short unchallenging content in rapid-fire, unending bursts, it often flattens the genuine experience and emotion just like the actual content. It all has to be flat to pass through the machine.
Suddenly, Halloween isn’t a celebration. It’s an opportunity for more content. A pretense to jump in front of a camera and hope people click buttons on whatever comes out of that. And every pumpkin and skeleton they show off deflates into something flat and empty.
And that’s the flatness I keep talking about—unnuanced, unconsidered, artificial, forced, untransformed, unimpactful, unnecessary.
It’s something to scroll past. The best video on TikTok, in the end, is something meant to scroll past.
Now, Halloween definitely works on the socials. I’ve seen it. I follow a lot of people who I would bet my trick-or-treat sack are being honest in what they’re doing—showing me snippets of their lives, of their loves, they are taking concepts and transforming them into something more unique. Hell, I try to practice it, believe it or not. But it’s really not the medium for honesty. Even honesty is flattened there.
In the end, it’s the whole sincere pumpkin patch idea of Charles Schultz. For decades I had no idea what Linus meant by a “sincere pumpkin patch.” Now, I kind of do. The socials are full of insincere pumpkin patches that make every idea, even the idea of Halloween, disingenuous and uninteresting. And then that, unfortunately, by the sheer weight of the amount of content and its influence on culture, becomes the dominant version of Halloween.
The end…of this piece. But if the socials were all that was annoying about modern-day Halloween, I’d be, I don’t know, less annoyed? But there are other things…
Part II: Blame it on the IP
