The Speed of Content and the Spectrum of Fiction

Despite the number of political posts on the blog, I really don't like to make them. I'm sure I'll do more, but I'd much rather push the boundaries of reality than report on it, whether by trying to crash the periodic table or quantifying holiness. It's fun to say I technically ran for office though.

I bring this up because today's post borders on the political for a bit. If your takeaway from this is political, however, I'd say you completely missed my point.

On to the main event!

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It is my suspicion that fiction outpaces base reality. Significantly.

In the 24 hours of any given day, far, far more than that is created to view. It is impossible for any one individual to truly see everything that has been put out there, even if they started now (or at any other point in the future) and only watched things newer than that point. The quantity of things to view would grow at a rate that you would only get further and further behind as time progressed.

But, why take my random speculation as fact when we can measure and prove it!

Let's start with a simple example: YouTube. In any given day, roughly 518,400 hours of content are uploaded (source). So, even if you watched YouTube 24 hours a day, every day, you'd be behind by 518,376 hours by the first day. I had some fun with data extrapolated from this figure (here it is if you'd like to play with it yourself):

YouTube Stats.xlsx

Download XLSX • 35KB

With this, I performed the same calculations with multiple simultaneous screens and even calculated that you would need 21,600 screens simultaneously going with different content to keep up.

Pictured: YouTube outpaces even 1000 simultaneous screens by quite a margin.

You can see that the mountain of content grows every day. And this is just from one source! I'm sure you'll get similar results with other content platforms like Netflix and whatnot, though they will probably be less pronounced. But you'd just be doing the same thing with different data sets.

It's worth noting that you can't do these same calculations with media that cannot be expressed easily in time. It's not that other entertainment (like books and videogames) doesn't add to the insurmountable pile of content that exists, but it's harder to come up with truly hard data for these mediums. Shrek will always take one hour and twenty nine minutes to watch while it is impossible to say how long it will take an individual to get through Shrek: Hassle at the Castle with the same degree of certainty.

Pictured: Did you know there are eight different main line Shrek games and almost fifty spinoffs?

In all the universes, you get to be in the one where these exist. Rejoice!

Seems I've already proved my point that the speed of content outpaces reality to a dizzying degree and I'm just a few paragraphs in. How can I make this more complicated and far reaching?

Well, if PetitTube (a site that serves up videos that have only been viewed fewer than 10 times) proves anything, it's that most of these videos aren't exactly "fiction" per se. Its a lot of raw video of things... existing. Is this fiction in the same way Shrek 2 is?  How is a random video of someone on a rooftop different than the Ogre of Dubrovnik? I'm glad you asked!

Well, normally, we use the terms "fiction" and "non-fiction" to differentiate between stories that are real versus those that are not. But I feel this binary doesn't accurately capture the subtleties of fiction and there is a distinct blurring of the lines between fiction and non-fiction in the modern age. Have you seen the state of cable news?

Not to toot my own horn or anything (though also to do that), but a good amount of my work cannot easily be put into a "non-fiction" or "fiction" bucket. Take Hazbin on Broadway. The story is fictional but I've purposefully pulled in the very real location of New York City as its setting as well as real companies and individuals. I wish some parts of it were more fictional, but that's a separate issue.

Pictured: Award-winning demon bukkake shows!

To further illustrate this point, let's take this single frame from Happy Day in Hell where I call Broadway shows circle jerks. Though most would take the entire series as fiction and leave it at that, is this image, on its own, fiction? There are a number of non-fictional facts that can be gleaned from this frame, from my whereabouts on that day (as well as the whereabouts of the people who walked into the shot) to the existence of a Broadway production of The Great Gatsby that stars Jeremy Jordan (who also was Lucifer in Hazbin Hotel). Plus, this did happen in the real world in a way that a hand drawn or AI generated image did not. The frame is also missing the narrative context of the video it comes from, making it feel less fictional than its video counterpart.

Okay. Where were we? A spectrum for measuring the fictional-ness of fiction! Right!

Let's imagine two axes, with the x axis representing the item in question's dependence on narrative with the y axis representing how much the same item is divorced from reality. Though I like this way of looking at content, there is no way of drawing a clear line of what is "fiction" and what isn't. But let's illustrate that with some data points!

Pictured: Ta-da!

Let's take a tour, shall we? At the bottom left (base reality, no narrative), we have the world as it exists. There is truly no single narrative that unifies everything happening in any given moment, yet it's undeniably there. On the other side of the narrative axis, you'll see where the news would be in a perfect world (narrative stories in pure, unadulterated base reality). Since politics and business require a level of contrivance, they aren't quite in base reality and are similarly not free of narrative. Governance itself follows less of a narrative as the day to day of a politician encompasses far more than just politics. In the other corners, we have a Jackson Pollock painting as something that is completely removed from reality and has no narrative while The Lord of The Rings is an example of a completely fake world that has a heavy narrative throughout.

I didn't want to incorporate the Bible because I didn't want to offend or alienate anyone, but it made for an excellent mid-point. Regardless of your views on the book, it is full of both allegory and plot while being in more than what I'd call "base" reality.

I want to highlight the film From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf (which you can check out here) as an example of something with little narrative but being solidly in base reality. The team behind it (CAMP) often utilizes footage from things like CCTV cameras and other sources to create art pieces. FGtGtG is compiled from the cell phone footage of the crew of a cargo ship in the Indian Ocean. Even though it lacks an overt narrative, you still piece one together upon a viewing. It's a fascinating reminder of how much the human mind craves story. Perhaps that is an explanation for why Shrek Forever After exists.

As noted earlier, there is no good line to be drawn using this paradigm between fiction and non-fiction and I think that may be the point. There are only degrees of fiction. Keep this in mind when consuming any kind of media.