Category: WebsitesCategory: Websites

Nothing lasts forever.

Exhibit A: In the 1970s and early 1980s, my musician parents would play at clubs and resorts in the Poconos several nights a week, making good money playing country rock and blues.

On a recent drive through the area, I saw nothing but decay—most everything from that era boarded up, overgrown, and falling apart.

What happened? That shit is just gone.

Exhibit B: You get linked from a big social media account, and some of their followers will click and see your amazing work.

“If you’re wondering about the ever-increasing clamor to leave social media, my newsletter got linked to on X by an account with 247,000 followers,” said  Raziq Rauf in a recent note. It got one click.

What happened? Everyone is posting and screaming for attention, so 1) many people have tuned out, and 2) the social media platforms limit who sees your stuff. Hence, one click.

Exhibit C: Write for a notable outlet. From there, you include that in your “clips” and use that as leverage to write for bigger outlets and build a career.

“So, MTVNews.com no longer exists,” wrote Patrick Hosken on X (here), “eight years of my life are gone without a trace.”

Exhibit C.1: Over 25 years of clips from The Daily Show are wiped out, too.

What happened? This happened with AOL Music’s Spinner.com years ago, too. Once part of the #1 music site in the U.S. back in 2008, it’s all gone. Years of archives weren’t profitable (probably), so they just hit delete and some exec gets a big bonus at the end of the year.

A common theme among all three exhibits is someone else is in control.

It’s not personal, it’s business. Their business.

So what’s our business? How do we work around the inevitable decay in our own creative persuits?

• Are we waiting on a new platform like Cara? If so, can we collect emails on this new platform so we can export them and move on if / when it shuts down or goes sideways?
• What if we start buckling down on our local communities? Are we strengthening our online community with occasional Zoom calls and/or virtual co-work sessions? Phone calls? Can we do this sustainably?
• Are we raising prices? Are we cutting corners or investing in ourselves?
• Does our work require constantly checking our email inboxes? Does that give us life? How could we do this differently? How do we manage the expectations of our availability?
• What if we took all the time we spent making “content” for social media platforms and used it to experiment creatively? “Freed from expectations, what might we make and find?”

I don’t hold the answers. No one does. There is no map.

“If someone needs to understand the way things are, don’t give them a map,” says Seth Godin, “they don’t need directions, they need to see the big picture.”

It’s time we all become enthralled by the big picture, not the analytics.

Let’s stop looking at our stats and fucking email someone.

You know it takes just one email to tank shit, right?

If we get that email from work about being laid off, or we get dumped… one email and boom, our whole life is upended. I got an email recently from my bank and that shit was bummer town.

But it just takes one email to make us jump out of our seats and celebrate.

What if we emailed someone a compliment about their work? Pitched an idea about a project to someone?

We don’t have to wait for these opportunities; we can kick the door down and start making it happen today.

Let’s use our time calmly for a change, without monitoring our output. Making our best work probably doesn’t include punching a time clock.

Get in touch (and keep in touch) with the creative universe right in front of you (and not the open rate metrics from the last 30 days).

Doing all this helps ensure the strength of our creative communities, to withstand the inevitable collapse of the tech bro creator economy complex.

I don’t have the answers to stop the decay, but I bet talking about this stuff freely with other creative folks will help us discover the bigger picture.

Thanks for reading.

Computer-generated “art” is a race to the bottom, and I’m glad we’ve opted out.

Our job is to make what we make with the care of a human mind, drawing upon our experience and talent and passion. Every artist has their own reason, of course.

The consumer has their reasons, too.

Some want the cheapest, so there’s plenty of places to find art made for the everyone, the largest swath of consumers, the safest items you can put in a dentist waiting room, or your kitchen and it won’t upset the inlaws.

Some want the most expensive, the collectors’ pieces, the status that comes with owning a first edition, a rare piece.

Some folks, and I think this is mostly who we serve, care not just about the design but the designer behind it. The art, and the artist who made it. The music, and musician who made the music. The writer who created a whole new world.

It’s a dance to find these people and for them to find you, but it’s a dance worth learning, refining, practicing, and enduring.

It’s not an easy dance, and it’s not a dance where you’re sure to win in the end, but it’s probably the dance we should all be doing because otherwise what’s the point of living?

Social media told us that we’d reach all these people, and for a moment in time, this was true. Every casino has to pay out, or else no one would visit and play. The possibility that we might win keeps us coming back.

But when the casinos puts multiple obstacles in your way before you even get into the building, it’s time to find another game to play.

Is there one answer, one silver bullet, one new app that will return things to normal? No, never. I believe that “centralized kingdoms of power and influence aren’t the answer.”

There’s no one app, service, or medium that will save us all, but we can make this work together (because we’ve been doing it long before the techbros showed up).

Call your friends, book a DIY show, start a flea market, gather some freaks on Zoom or Discord, re-build our scenes from the ground up.

We’re not going back to how it was, we’re building it better.

My friend reminded me how we used to show up at friend’s houses unannounced and crash on couches after a long night of conversation.

Sure, as some of us approach our 50s we’re not gonna do that again, but what’s the new version of that?

What’s the 2024 version of hanging out at the 24 hour diner in town?

You’ve seen people making print zines, right?

Working on websites again and sending newsletters like it’s 2002.

House shows. Thumb drive clubs. Snail mail.

We’re getting back to the simple things with subtle variations, all in our own unique and artistic ways.

Social media rotted our brains on the instant gratification racket.

“I accept defeat,” I repeat after HINDZ from a recent video, “I accept that billion-dollar corporations have invested millions and millions of millions into the psychology and understanding how to keep me on these devices on their platforms, and it works.”

It’s not enough that social media gobbles up our attention – it tricks us into thinking we’re nothing without them.

This is made worse because “the creative status quo has made us lonely content machines.”

We are isolated, working on projects alone in our studios and rooms. We are so in our own heads that when we get together to discuss these things, we can cry.

We’re trying to figure this out on our own, thinking we’ll beat the tech bros with better-crafted hashtags, disguising our “link in bio” text, or churning out vertical videos to appease the social media overlords.

If we just read one more social media strategy guide, or watch more one more YouTube video then we’ll crack the code.

No, thanks.

I’d rather spend my time in deeper connection with good people.

• As writers, we can work with our photographer friends (like Patrick Fellows did here). Or the photographer Wesley Verhoeve who will make black and white landscape photos for “painter Brie Noel Taylor to paint over in color.”
• Cody Cook-Parrott hosts FLEXIBLE OFFICE, where amazing creative people gather on a video call to work on their projects together.
• Carolyn Yoo made a zine called ‘How to keep your hobby from becoming a job’, and it’s brought a bunch of people together in the comment section and in real life – I handed a copy to my creative friend, and she loved it!

Start reaching out to fellow zine writers, artists, photographers, and designers – get on a phone call, plan a meetup, gather in secret in remote parks, commandeer several tables at the local Denny’s, plan your own hyper-niche flea market, write a short skit.

These are things made outside of isolation.

Spending more time around creative people will do us more good than if we just sit on our hands and wait to be saved by the next tech-bro platform to deliver us a new magical marketing machine.

Are we so powerless to change the current situation that we sit back and hope somebody else fixes everything?

And then what? That person will sell the company to a Nabisco+Tide hedge fund subsidiary, and we’ll be back where we started.

Maybe centralized kingdoms of power and influence aren’t the answer.

The answer is other people, community, and the exchange of ideas away from the supposed champions of our “creator economy,” which was here long before the silicon valley dorks showed up.

You can wait for things to change, but reaching your fans on social media will never get any easier. NEVER. I’ve been saying this since 2021.

Find some other weirdos, form your own band of misfits and start having the conversation about living in a post-social media world, ‘cuz baby it’s coming.

Peter Kirn at Create Digital Media talks about SoundCloud and Bandcamp, and how they’re devolving into money machines for corporate shareholders.

“It’s a simultaneous reminder that we need to build something new, maybe this time not for the investors, but for the eu-IVs – for each other.”

Let’s stop waiting for the next publication or platform to save us. The fix isn’t waiting for tech bros to share a tenth of a penny more in streaming payouts – the power is with people reading newsletters and creating websites.

“Yeah, but Seth, these things cost money!”

Well, buy a domain name or wait by the phone for the next big platform – I turn 50 soon and I ain’t got time to wait.

The mass scale of social media was a mirage and we all fell for it. Going viral is the draw to get you in the casino, and you pay with hours of your precious life feeding the social monster for your chance at 12 likes.

Let’s start using the internet as a tool to find our freaks and build our communities. Make things and launch projects.

Make the weird shit you want to see in the world, and don’t just do it for likes or shares – reach out to the other weird shit people and start conversations.

It’s like we’re meeting at the mall food court – find your fellow weirdos and then get the hell out. Go to the record store downtown, go to a friend’s house and watch skate videos, hang out at a park – these are all the things social media platforms are afraid of.

Are we replacing Pitchfork tomorrow? No.

Will another site become the new Bandcamp?

Probably not.

But why have we become compliant little pawns in all this?

Are we so powerless to change the current situation that we sit back and hope somebody else fixes everything?

And then what? That person will sell the company to a Nabisco+Tide hedge fund subsidiary, and we’ll be back where we started.

Maybe centralized kingdoms of power and influence aren’t the answer.

Local music scenes seem to get along without local press, huh?

Gallery openings keep happening with zero coverage from local media.

I’ve seen individuals host creative Zoom sessions with 45+ people spanning several time zones.

I see artists speaking directly with their fans with reliable email lists, selling tickets and albums in the process.

Now imagine if all these pockets of culture and art and magic started organizing and working together.

Approach your social media and email newsletters like a DJ.

A DJ doesn’t open the set with self-promotion; they give the audience a carefully chosen playlist of music, drawing from various sources, sounds, and eras.

Similarly, you can blend your influences and experiences into a cohesive online presence for your audience.

Plan ahead and schedule social media posts on specific days. Set a rhythm for your posts, and tastefully repeat announcing your new songs, tour dates, and upcoming events.

We do this because, “if your social media posts are seen by less than 3% of your followers, that means over 97% of your fans didn’t see it.”

Now, when a DJ is sourcing music for a mix, they draw from their own collection, along with new material. Random discoveries from other mixes.

In a way you’re probably already doing this.

You’re sending new music to your friends, and going to shows.
Dropping links to music videos in the group chat.
Talking about upcoming shows in Discord, on social media, in person.

You’re more of a DJ then you realize.

Your “online presence” is your existence in the digital space, so keep it authentic.

Use your good taste and share that with your audience. Tell them the new album you discovered, the old album that moves you to tears, a book that inspired your creative journey.

This makes “marketing ” feel less gross because you’re just being yourself, reshaping the conversation into whatever online container you happen to inhabit.