Large quantities don’t faze us. We are accustomed to profits in the billions; city populations, visitors, sales in the tens of millions; personalized recommendations, search results, comments by the thousands; and scientific discoveries by the hundreds. But no sooner had we felt that plenty of money, information, and possibilities were normal than we began to face a world of scarcity. Perhaps we’ll go down in history as those who witnessed the arrival of an era of unlimited availability only to contend with massive shortfalls. Resources of all kinds are said to be dwindling: the sudden loss in assets, equity, and funding; the decreasing availability of non-renewable fuels; and the slowing output of the global food supply chain. It’s like playing poker under more favorable house rules, but with steadily disappearing cards.

At the close of this era of expansion and surplus C-Lab speculates on one of the period’s emblematic inventions: Content Management, or the collecting, organizing and sharing of digital information. Our retrospective appraisal of recent developments in the managing of information offers insight into the ability of Content Management to serve the current realities of digital abundance and material shortage, and to protect both vast and extremely limited quantities.

Like Content Management systems, Architecture arranges information and objects into a navigable environment using technology to configure the environment’s spaces and circulation routes. It embodies the values of the presented content, setting the tone for the visitor’s experience through the design of the public interface. Architecture is a structure of experiences involving interaction with numerous forms of content, introducing choice, connections, updates, human encounter and surprise, and in this respect is the precursor and operating blueprint of Content Management. Architecture facilitates our current relationship to digital material, and metaphors borrowed from architecture are used to describe system frameworks. As you will see, some of the essays and interviews describe how architecture continues to inform the thinking behind Content Management, for better and worse.

Though Architecture and Content Management both claim to clarify, they obfuscate. It is argued there is an inevitable need for Content Management because the ever-growing amount of information requires culling, sorting and interpretation for it to be digestible and to possess value. But in fact its service is justified by creating the problem. Content Management begets content production: sites that manage content often make it, adding to the stockpile of material they and others collect and process. Like the early architects of Koolhaas’ Manhattan who legitimized the necessity of their profession by causing the irreversible state of congestion which they then took as their mission to solve, Content Managers produce massive quantities and redundancies that necessitate the existence of a service industry to oversee them. Only supertraffic validates a superhighway, and the ones who supposedly give order to that infrastructure are the ones whose outflow also impacts it, challenging the infrastructure’s capacity to function efficiently. Like with architects, it is not the clear distribution of spaces and ease of navigation that Content Managers design so well, but the stimulus of additional material and inefficiencies that defocus a stable environment, in this case, the continual introduction of adjacent goods, services, news and viewpoints.

Even the term Content Management is beautifully deceptive: its bureaucratic connotation entirely lacks sex appeal, as if it is about administering material, not creating it. While sites that mainly just manage certainly do exist, even they produce content through light editing and re-dissemination. Sites that once just collected, published and archived information now create their own content (news aggregation sites that have begun to do their own reporting), but more significantly, content is being cooked up by repackaging borrowed information to a much greater extent than ever before using techniques such as comparison (juxtaposing two pieces of information to prove or disprove one’s validity), repetition (posting similar stories to the extent that preponderance approximates fact), inventory (collating opinions to establish dominant views or social patterns), re-labeling (substituting headlines to alter a story’s emphasis), and subtraction (the selective editing of a story).

The production of these leveraged types of content have yielded unexpected advancements in two related practices: commentary and rumors. The easy accessibility of facts has put a premium on Content Producers’ ability to shape them into well-reasoned commentary. At the same time, there is a premium on the ability to take questionable information and turn it too into plausible, finely crafted stories. Smart commentary and rumors are likewise essential to the production of architecture, and as we enter a period defined by all-pervasive accounts of retreat into a world of scarcity, there will be a need for new narratives about distribution, preservation, and resourcefulness, like those you will find in these pages.