Category: CommunityCategory: Community

Making a living (or at least paying the rent) with a small, engaged email list is possible, even as people with massive social followings struggle to pay their phone bill.

As someone shared in our recent “BREAK UP WITH SOCIAL MEDIA” Zoom call, a big social media following might look good (as in, vanity metrics), but “getting more followers” isn’t the answer, but rather making sure the thing you’re offering is something people actually want to pay for.

Are you tired of working alone, shaking your fist at the internet in isolation?

MrBeast would spend 12+ hours a day on Skype talking with fellow YouTubers when he started out, hell bent on cracking the YouTube algorithm.

Those are two extremes, (isolation vs 12+ hour Skype calls) with plenty of room in between.

When you hear someone else doing something creative in a group setting, like painting, letter writing, or practicing their instruments, it gives you permission to start something similar for yourself, with people in your own creative orbit.

Hearing people talking about these gatherings on a Zoom call, or in person, is powerful, because you can hear the joy in their voice, and see it in their eyes. This is different than just reading about it, because you get to witness the energy in real time.

According to Ken Klippenstein, “the government is building a sociological profile of political discontent.”

Homeland security field agents are scouring the social media site Reddit, monitoring the communications of law-abiding Americans critical of the agency.

And if they’re scouring sites like Reddit, you know damn well they’re scouring Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and everywhere else.

Raziq Rauf from Running Sucks wrote about how some running clubs are choosing to not post about their events on social media because they don’t want to tip off ICE.

“I learned about all these run clubs from Instagram, but we’re doing a new thing where if you wanna get with South Central Run Club, you have to be in our Signal chat. South Central deals with hyper-policing. Most of our runners are Black and brown and you never know when ICE is gonna pull up. Instead of broadcasting our runs and making us vulnerable to surveillance, we stopped putting it on Instagram to make people feel safer to come and hang out.“

Exercising our legal right to free speech and protest (or just run with our friends) is hard without some of these digital tools, especially when those tools are owned by the very forces we oppose, but as Priya Parker says, “connection is the antidote to fascism.”

From Ana Roman, in their interview with Thought Enthusiast:

“A hundred times a day I think about artist-owned web spaces and how to build stronger communities that mutually nourish artists and creators… We need cozy web spaces where artists control the platforms, not algorithms designed to extract our labor.“

As I’ve said, maybe centralized kingdoms of power and influence aren’t the answer. It’s time for those in the “creator economy” to work together and take back the means to spreading culture and vibes.