Category: CommunityCategory: Community

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.

Sharing an hour with a community of like-minded creative people in similar pursuits will give you a greater “return on investment” than spending 45 days per year on social media.

Most people won’t do this because there’s no instant gratification of LIKES or shares.

An artist told me recently they paint with their art friends from around the world four times a week on Zoom, and they’ve been doing it for five years.

I don’t even need to know if that person sold 10 paintings this month, or built their email list to 10,000 people, and I don’t care. Fulfillment and a sense of belonging to something outside of ourselves can’t be measured in a spreadsheet.

Many creative people lose themselves in their phones, spending 3+ hours a day posting, engaging, and replying. Instead of scratching lottery tickets everyday hoping for that big break, put down the phone discover the real payoff with those in your creative orbit.

From my talk with copywriter & strategist Jen Baxter, where we definitely talked about going deeper with our existing audience instead of seeking more.

Instead of 10 posts, what if you just talked to 10 people? Have 10 Zoom calls with people. It’s scary—you don’t know who you might be talking to. But you can select who those 10 people are. If someone’s always commenting on your stuff, that’s probably a good person to DM and say, “Hey, can we hop on a Zoom call?”

Build that group of people to figure out and think about and knock ideas around with, instead of constantly publish, publish, publish and hope something sticks.

Watch the full interview here.