There Is No Content. Theories of media and culture continue to propagate an idea of something called “content.” But the notion that content may be separated from the technological vehicles of representation and conveyance that supposedly facilitate it is misguided. Data has no technique for creating meaning, only techniques for interfacing and parsing. To the extent that meaning exists in digital media, it only ever exists as the threshold of mixtures between two or more technologies. Meaning is a data conversion. What is called “Web content” is, in actual reality, the point where standard character sets rub up against the hypertext transfer protocol. There is no content; there is only data and other data. In Lisp there are only lists; the lists contain atoms, which themselves are other lists. To claim otherwise is a strange sort of cultural nostalgia, a religion. Content, then, is to be understood as a relationship that exists between specific technologies. Content, if it exists, happens when this relationship is solidified, made predictable, institutionalized, and mobilized” (Galloway and Thacker, The Exploit. A theory of network”
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