Category: InternetCategory: Internet

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.

Maybe centralized kingdoms of power are a bad thing, via the ACLU:

“Recently, Apple pulled an app called ICEBlock from the AppStore, making it unavailable in one fell swoop. This app was designed to let people anonymously report public sightings of ICE agents. In the United States people absolutely have a First Amendment right to inform others about what they have seen government officials doing and where — very much including immigration agents whose tactics have been controversial and violent.”

AI slop, censorship, never ending streams of videos – this is what we get from handing over so much of our lives to the unholy trinity.

Did a surprise Substack Live today on a whim. Just me, a webcam, and my cat (Blue) losing his mind in the background. OBS melted down half the time (I have no idea what I’m doing), but here’s some threads worth pulling out:

Serving the people who already showed up

I keep saying this because it never stops being true: Notes is just social media. Chasing the feed means a few winners and everyone else shouting into the void. The only sane move is making your best work for the folks who already subscribed, not every stranger on the internet.

Why I nuked every platform except substack

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn — all deleted. The only “social” thing I use now is Substack Notes, and even then it’s more of an on-ramp to my newsletter.

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I was honored to be asked to be Bree Noble’s podcast recently to talk about musicians trying to “make it all work” in 2025, coping with social media burnout, the vanity metrics, and how to maybe build something sustainable without sacrificing your sanity.

A lot can get distilled to the fact that a lot of what you post isn’t seen by like 95% of your followers. Or the gut-punch that every artist has felt, when you do everything “right” on social media and still get just four likes. As I put it on the show: “You reached fourteen people. That’s disheartening.“

We dug into what actually works, like playing a Tuesday-night show to fifteen people and making fans, or how grabbing a few emails after a set beats begging a platform to show your post to strangers on the internet.

Bree is a legend, and has spoken with so many artists over the years. She talks to Elaine Ryan about balancing gigs and sync work, Marc Christian about booking high-end events, Raven Rae about sustainable music careers – check out all of those interviews here!