I subscribe to Alicia Kennedy‘s newsletter, which I find delightful–no one writes quite so poignantly and philosophically about food in ways that make sense and elevate the reader at the same time. The other day, in an installment entitled “How I’m Thinking about the Internet Right Now,” she quotes a podcast (New Creative Era) that resonates with her experiences–and I quote:
They recently put out a new episode in which Strickler talks about not wanting to publish anything because it will just end up another blip that people scroll through while sitting in the traffic of apps owned by Meta, et al.
One thing Strickler said that I had to immediately type up in my Notes app: “What we’ve done to build audiences I don’t think builds meaning.”
Like her, I too immediately related to this. Unlike Kennedy, I don’t really have much of an internet presence (what, this site? exactly 1.5 people will ever see this post, and I’m being generous). I no longer engage with Instagram (I deleted the app), never created a Tik-Tok account, and after a 6-year hiatus I have returned to lurk on Facebook due to the fact that my daughter’s school parent group is there and is occasionally useful.
I used to be a much more enthusiastic Internet user (these days I’m more in tune with those who want to let it die and rebuild it from scratch). I learned to code back in the 90s and I had a personal site and a blog way before it was fashionable–in fact I had multiple special interest blogs, which I slowly let die as I became too busy and the job much less fun. That’s the thing with these special interests: you can build an audience over time (I built one for a shoe blog, and one for a Romanian-English poetry translation blog–what, I contain multitudes!), but maintaining these sites, let along trying to monetize them, is a different business, and it can be soul-sucking. Or, gradually, just become much much less fun. And then you wonder why you do it. Where is the meaning in all this?
It’s got to be meaningful to you, in some way (and you can hope that other kindred spirits will find it meaningful but there is no guarantee and you know what, that matters less than making it meaningful for you –and not in the sense that you will monetize it (oh, how I hate that word!) but that it fulfills that creative part of you that geeks out over whatever is that makes your heart sing. And those kindred spirits? They can take it or leave it but the moment they start bullying you? (For more content, faster, for posting the wrong thing that one time, for whatever reason, really.) Nah, not worth it.
Having to make money out of this? For me, it would suck the joy out of it. I mean, sure, it’s nice, but the pressures that come with being chronically online and having to “create content” (another phrase that irks me to no end) – again, not worth it.
I hate that this is how the promise of the internet has been perverted by our fetish for capitalism. Instead of a vast open plain where we can all wander, nomadically, or settle at will, we get these dystopian cubicles lining a rat maze, all chasing the same stale cheese. Instead of engaging in meaning-making we turn ourselves and everything we touch into commodities.
I am a rhetorician so I do understand the importance of audience. I get it. But I am not sure that’s the kind of audience I want to cultivate. Maybe I’m too old, but virality or the numbers of followers or any of that stuff has zero appeal to me.
I am writing here as a record. I could do it in my journal but I guess the siren call of an audience of more than zero is still beguiling. I’d prefer to attract kindred spirits with zero bullying tendencies. This is not my livelihood. But writing and thinking about writing are still my passion, so I’m allowed to geek out over it with no expectations and no strings attached.
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