Category: InternetCategory: Internet

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.”

I love the internet. I love Zoom calls, message boards, and checking my bank accounts without visiting a branch.

I read blogs, news sites, keep up with sports, and music, and current events with intention, rather than sitting back and letting these things be curated for me by computers that are programmed to increase shareholder value and help pay for executive yachts.

Social media is a walled garden, similar to AOL back in the early 2000s. The platforms do everything they can to keep you on their service. Not on-line, but on-their-service.

“You’ll see what we show you,” they say.

Posts with outbound links don’t get seen, and sometimes links aren’t allowed at all (like Instagram).

Fresh new content is wired to your eyeballs with every swipe and scroll and refresh, giving you very little time to even click off and actually do anything “online.”

From the ‘Butch Is Not A Dirty Word’ Kickstarter:

“Our entire library lives scattered across platforms we don’t control — where every algorithm tweak and policy shift edges us closer to erasure.

If our Instagram disappeared tomorrow, ten years of work and community memory would vanish with it.”

We can’t trust the tech-bro platforms. This is why we must build our own websites and platforms that we control, outside of the greedy claws (and watchful eyes) of the Unholy Trinity.

“We’re divesting from Big Tech and building our own independent digital archive — a permanent home for a decade of history, built by us and belonging to us.”

Social media can act as an outpost, a billboard, but don’t let it become your home. I like to say that we meet our fellow freaks and weirdos at the food court at the mall, but then we grab dinner and head back to our bedrooms and back porches, to our own spaces free of corporate influence and control.