Content Re-Farming as Modern Intellectual Decay

It is no revelation that some content creators harvest other people’s work and parade it as their own. Strip away the usual criticisms—plagiarism, laziness, creative bankruptcy—and a deeper structural pattern appears. Some prefer the dignified label of “discourse.” I prefer a more honest, less eloquent term: feed-stuffing.

Most of us have sensed it: an online ecosystem saturated with derivative materials. Up to ninety per cent of what confronts us on any given day is not original thought but a long chain of regurgitated originals—copied, repackaged, algorithmically rearranged, or AI-spun. (And no, don’t get me started on that particular creative catastrophe.)

Let us momentarily set aside morality. Assume, for the sake of argument, that re-farming content is harmless. See it as honouring those who wrote the original material. We’re paying homage to an idea or thought that speaks the same way we do.

What, then, is its purpose? Does this endless recycling genuinely enrich society?

First, content creators who promise daily output inevitably exhaust their personal well of ideas. The pressure to remain visible, relevant and ever-present forces them to mine existing materials. This is not a rare event—it is the dominant production model of the attention economy.

Second, the noble banners of “discourse” and “free speech” are frequently hoisted to justify this practice. We are told that open discussion requires permissiveness, that copyright concerns must bow to a higher moral purpose—public conversation. Silence, we are told, is dangerous.

But free speech is often confused with the unrestrained license to say anything, at any time, to anyone, without consequence. Those of us who have lived long enough recognise the truth: not everything that unfolds beneath the canopy of “free speech” leads us to a healthier, kinder, more enlightened society. Quite the opposite. (See: DoorDash Girl content.)

“Discourse” suffers from a similarly romantic delusion. The ideal suggests communities gathering harmoniously, exchanging ideas, learning from one another, building bridges through thoughtful debate, and closing each evening hand in hand around a metaphorical campfire, singing Kumbaya.

Reality is far less charitable. Most online “discourse” ends not in enlightenment but in social indigestion—and, frankly, a bad case of ideological diarrhoea.

The only material that truly matters is original content. Everything downstream is inherently compromised—borrowed, diluted, taken out of context, or manipulated. Reposts should be approached with scepticism, if not outright distrust.

The real issue is scale. The sheer multiplicity of reposts and reinterpretations ends up force-feeding us the same issues, the same takes, the same pseudo-debates, on endless repeat. By nightfall, the mind feels bloated.

Below the level of original sources, comment threads become an ocean of static—noise masquerading as relevance. Call it discourse if you wish, but it functions more like gossip. And gossip, while entertaining, does not improve society; it merely distracts it.

There is also a temporal dimension we rarely acknowledge. Content has a natural half-life. Its relevance fades quickly, sometimes within hours. The news cycle does not slow down to accommodate nuanced thought. Intellectual processing does not accelerate simply because the world demands immediacy.

The result is an ecosystem overflowing with superfluous information.

People post because they can, and have to, not because the world benefits from their contribution. The cumulative effect is a choked digital environment—too many voices, too little signal, too little reception.

When saturation peaks, individuals disengage entirely. If meaningful discourse ever existed before that point, it certainly cannot survive after it.

Robin Dunbar once observed that humans can sustain social relationships with roughly 150 individuals at a time. Beyond that threshold, cognitive overload prevents us from maintaining meaningful connections. His study—Dunbar’s number—may well apply to every facet of modern participation.

Our worlds, digital and otherwise, reach critical mass. Whatever “good” might have been gained from earnest engagement is drowned by noise and lost to our increasingly limited mental bandwidth. Participating is effortless. Tracking meaningful change amid the avalanche is nearly impossible.

To put it bluntly: the world is too small for every creator, every commenter, every reposter, every rebrander, and every regurgitator clamouring for relevance. My intellectual stomach cannot digest the volume. Nor, I suspect, can anyone else’s. Meanwhile, tomorrow’s feeds await us with more of the same, and then the day after that, and so on.

There is no time left—no cognitive real estate—where one can live a quality life, generate original content, and participate in genuinely productive, thoughtful discourse. The overload ensures that something must give. And it is almost always quality, depth, and originality that get sacrificed first.

–Michael (Dark Fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)