Sean Conner

There was a brief moment where I believed that if I spent all day reading, there was a chance I could read all books published every year. I sobered on this idea when I walked into the the stacks of my university library, where five floors packed with volumes of books greeting me with the musty promise of ideas and thoughts from across time and place.

That was twenty years ago, a memory that comes back to me as I sit in the lofted cafe space of the Dusty Bookshelf. From my vantage point, I count eighty-three bookcases, each with seven shelves. A rough count has about twenty books per shelf, bringing the collection in view to about 11,620 books. And that's not counting the various tables laid out, or what I know is the inbound collections of books in boxes by the side entrance, or the large room of children's books just below me. These days, in a good month, I read two to three books (four if I'm lucky). Napkin math reveals that it would take me a good 322 years to get through the store's inventory.

There are an estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 books published each year in the United States. And 262.8 million hours of YouTube videos are uploaded each year (as of 2022). And 62,712,360 English Wikipedia pages (as of March 13, 2025). And there are an estimated 100 billion hours of content across Netflix's catalog. And tens of thousands of concurrent streamers on Twitch. And 34 million daily posts to TikTok. I relay these facts to you via Google Search's AI overview, which I share both to be transparent about the efficacy of the data, but also as a reminder that AI is poised to generate even more.

I call myself a "Content" Strategist (or more lately, a "Content" Engineer). I spend my day stewarding a "Content" Management System, which in this light seems an optimistic title when I reflect earnestly on how anyone is supposed to manage all of this. Lately I have seen video game developers describe their games as "content," with live games having subscription models promising monthly content infusions - new cards, new cosmetics, new levels. Content everywhere.

Of course, consumption is not the point (to the extent there is a point). I don't dream of being able to consume all this (though maybe some neural link aficionados do?). But as I think of this expanse, Arcade Fire's "Infinite Content. Infinite Content. We're infinitely content," come back to me. I am left to wonder, am I?