Cherrypicker | Literature
Forever in the listicles labyrinth

Algorithms, AI, clicks and likes – everyday life in any office. Especially when content is produced endlessly. Elias Hirschl imagines such a content farm. His digital dystopia is so grotesquely funny that you almost overlook the abysses.

By Marit Borcherding

“Smile Smile Inc.” – great company name. Just apply there? Better not. At least not after reading the first few pages of Elias Hirschl's new novel Content. The nameless protagonist is guided through the company's interior by her colleague Karin – disillusionment included:

Producing on the assembly line

Where the smile company now stands was previously a coal mine, followed by a car parts factory: assembly line-like toil as a connecting structural labour element yesterday, today and tomorrow. Coal and cars fulfil(ed) a noticeable and visible function in the respective economic cycles. You can't be so sure about “content”. Hirschl's first-person narrator learns in the course of the narrated time that the listicles she “writes”, i.e. mostly copy-pasted, never appear anywhere anyway. This is because checking for “mass suitability, target group relevance and shareability” means that everything she has pre-formulated is completely replaced: “The truth is that not a single word that I or Karin or anyone else from our department writes has ever been published.” In other words: day in, day out, rummaging and sorting through the endless pool of data under precarious conditions with zero effectiveness. Nevertheless, some money is earned, but by others, who tend to remain invisible in the novel.

Burnout is pre-programmed

Not everyone can mentally cope with this overall situation indefinitely. Karin, for example, deliberately rams a hydraulic press into her hand after writing for nine hours straight. This is followed by a stay in a psychiatric ward. Her colleague Marta keeps whispering that they will all be replaced soon – and wishes for exactly that to save her. Her psyche was led into borderline territory when a cake-based internet trend, which Smile Smile has also jumped on, leads to Marta once talking at length to a new colleague. Until she discovered that it consisted of Black Forest gateau. “Out of desperation, she ate a third of her colleague, says Marta ... She still has kilos of her colleague's cake in the fridge.”

Another character on the verge of a nervous breakdown is Jonas, a Tinder date of the first-person narrator. He wants to found one startup after another and is constantly spouting self-congratulatory, hackneyed phrases such as “crisis is opportunity” that gloss over even the most absurd situation. It all sounds so desperate that reading it makes you feel deeply sorry for all those who believe they have to submit to neoliberal demands to the point of self-abandonment and who find themselves exposed to the ever more freewheeling conditions of the labour market in the cultural and communications sector anyway.

Unsafe terrain

Hirschl constantly pulls the rug out from under the feet of these and various other protagonists, not only in a figurative sense – to which they react either hysterically like Jonas or stoically uninvolved like the first-person narrator or not letting go of their ambition for effectiveness like Karin. The geographical setting itself, in which this novel is situated without a stringent plot, also starts to slip: The earth shakes in the former mining town, the water rises, darkness spreads. The author, who worked in Dortmund for six months as a city writer, has obviously been inspired by the conditions there as a former centre of the coal and steel industry – and has taken them to apocalyptic proportions page by page. Although, if you visualise climate change scenarios, it no longer seems so fictional.

A closer look

Elias Hirschl's art as a writer, which he already previously demonstrated with his novel Salonfähig (2021) about the “Slim Fit Generation”, is impressive due to his mercilessly good powers of observation: with the help of his unstable characters, he outlines the neoliberal transformation of the labour market, the overexploitation of the environment, the labyrinthine abysses of the internet, the phenomena of pop culture – and he can grab his readers with at least one of these topics. And then the writer, musician, slam poet and playwright demonstrates in literary, grotesque and satirical exaggeration what will happen if it all goes on like this and nobody takes a critical distance and questions the excesses that have already occurred or are certain to occur. Which brings us back to the listicles – see pages 162 ff. in the novel – where the first-person narrator has her computer generate a list of ideas over almost eight pages so that she doesn't have to work for the rest of the year. Each one is wackier than the last. And yet they would probably all achieve enormous reach. Which is not only really funny, but also deeply sad.