Category: InternetCategory: Internet

I joined some Dark Forests recently. A common theme in two of them was, “do we really want to do this?” In a bigger one, it was… well, more. More noise, more notifications, more threads, more… just, always more.

During a recent conversation, someone said they haven’t installed a new app in forever.

In the early days of the internet, it was a place I wanted to visit, but I didn’t want to live there.

Are we done?

As Substack co-founder Hamish KcKenzie recently said “email is an important distribution channel. It should not be your only one.”

I’m pretty he didn’t mean “if you’ve built everything on Substack and Substack goes away tomorrow, you’re fucked,” but well, the shoe fits.

Email lists are wonderful, of course, but only until Substack has an outage, or KIT suspends your account (I’ve heard that happen), or Gmail banishes your email to the promo folder (or worse).

The entirety of your work shouldn’t live on a platform you don’t own; not Substack, not Instagram, not YouTube. A website you own, on a hosting service you pay for, via files you can back up – that’s your safest bet.

Publishing your work on your own website ensures your biggest fans can find it, even when they don’t get an email from you.

​Join us later this week to talk about what a real owned presence looks like; things like your website, RSS, print, word of mouth, direct relationships, and more.

Thursday, April 30th at 2PM EST
Sign up here. https://luma.com/7asv89sv

Yancey Strickler posted on Twitter. His idea went semi-viral, and then the trolls chimed in.

“Scale doesn’t just amplify the signal you want. It hands a megaphone to everyone else too. My presence on public channels gave strangers the license to try to wreck my work and ego for sport.”

The idea of “getting word out” sounds so pure and good, but sometimes enduring the negative effects make it not worth the trouble.

I don’t walk into marketing meetings and tell people social media is stupid.
I don’t want to “win a debate.”
My ideals don’t require a dissertation defense.

This is why I rarely post on Substack Notes anymore, as suddenly I’m required to defend any statement and make accommodations for any angle I didn’t address in my original post.

I’d rather write a newsletter to people who subscribed to it.
I’d rather write a blog for people who bother to visit.
I’d rather present ideas with my member community.

These are my safe spaces. Life is hard enough, I’d rather not turn Social Media Escape Club into a hard-mode fighting game. I’m allowed to seek comfort and quiet, and so are you.

As Yancey says:

“What I’m left with: a desire to unscale. To be in spaces where ideas can be heard and developed without the rage brigades trying to inflict pain just to feel something. We’ve been taught to see scale as the whole point of being online — a delusional VC logic we’ve accepted as the cost of participation. We shouldn’t. Our attention and energy are too scarce for it.”

I save time and energy by not being on the social media platforms, by not having comments on this blog. I might lose in the “reaching new people” game, but I’d rather keep my sanity as a daily win.

I was asked “What does online presence look like for a producer who has a busy schedule?” on Substack Notes, and I figured I’d share the answer with the world wide web, in hopes it may be helpful to someone.

I think the online presence for any creative professional is trust building. Day in, day out, how do you put on display the things you know, the ideas you connect, the people you work with? And do that in a sustainable way?

Because if you start making 30 second polished vertical clips to get shared on platforms for people that just love scrolling 30 second clips, that might get eyeballs, but does it earn trust?

Or does having an archive of work, a body of things you produced, arranged in a refined manner in your corner of the internet, work better? Something that maybe doesn’t “get eyeballs,” but is hand delivered as a link to people who matter. Something passed around from people who know, with a “you gotta check out the work this person is doing” nod.

So I’m hinting hard at the “have a good website” angle, of course, but I think that more aligns with where artists can land, and soak in what you’re doing, and how you operate. Fill it with the occasional nice video talking about your work, a collection of albums you worked on, ideas you’ve discussed with people in and around your creative orbit… make it as cozy as the studio space you’d like to share with an artist, rather than frantically handing out flyers on a busy intersection.

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.”