recently a few things happened:
We all got sucked into the promise of a better web years ago. Google was scraping and indexing websites at a more rapid rate, due to the homogenization of web standards. Blogging became faster and easier and then shorter and shorter thanks to Wordpress, then Facebook, then Twitter. Sharing images was a tricky endeavor with web server host limits, and then we had flickr, to suddenly instagram, and now everything is short-form video instead. Everything became bigger, better, faster, easier, shinier... but the costs have been dire.
Recently I've become fascinated both with how social media has affected our collective mental health along with creativity, information sharing, and privacy. I grew up with the web - most of who I am was shaped by various websites, blogs, forums that I discovered between the ages of 11 and 18. We all know how the web has been contorted to commercialization, about how we're being tracked and our information sold at every turn... but the way in which we SEE each other has been convoluted as well.Instagram, my most relevant example, is chock full of people trying to commercialize themselves. It's not just Big Corporations selling to us, we are now doing this to ourselves. Just as my online friend mourns their lack of likes, comments, and financial success through instagram, most people on that platform dream of becoming a content creator. We all now see the internet as a way to brand ourselves - we wish to build a cult of our own personalities.
Imagine the possiblities! Getting paid to just post your breakfast! Having people fawn over you while you talk about your favorite paintbrushes or paper! We see so many other people sharing in that success, we imagine it's so easy for us to do it too. Build your brand, start your instagram, create your personal website on (sponsored by) Squarespace... just bust through the algorithm, be so good they can't ignore you. Success will surely come.
In the end, people produce endless amounts of content that allow social media corporations to get rich, mine your privacy, track you across the internet, sell you things. This is all regardless of whether you're an influencer or not. Keep in mind that every single piece of content you produce makes social media companies richer. It keeps them in business. You are providing the content that they are using to gain new users and sell ads and products.
Not only is the web soulless, uninteresting, lacking in creativity, and addictive, but it's built off the backs of unpaid work of creatives. Take back your work - sharing it among smaller groups, connecting to your local communities, finding discord groups or mastodon servers, creating your own personal websites and galleries, participating in local craft or art fairs... all of these are wonderful, more meaningful, and truthfully more financially lucrative ways to gain exposure to your own creative work.
Many others have written wonderful essays about the integrity, creativity, and uniqueness of the old web, and about the lack of privacy, the overt commercialization, and the addictive nature of the new web. But another important, equally insidious side-effect of social media is the massive amount of unpaid content created by artists and others in the hopes of one day striking it rich as an influencer, and the full-time job's worth of effort that goes into feeding the algorithm, the pain that comes from the lack of results, and the unrealistic expectations set by influencers and social media advocates.
I am firmly against the new internet's practices of:
It's amazing how much lighter, richer, and more inspired you feel creating outside of this machine. Do you want your work to languish alongside millions of others', bogged down in a system and exploited by major corporations, where the only one profiting is them? Do you want to perpetuate systems of abuse and exploitation? Do you want to encourage overconsumption in our dangerous climate crisis? Or do you want to take back what's rightfully yours?