8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: Jovial June

Chapter List

  • Artificial Audience

    I’m writing this on the day that Google died.

    I know, I know. Google is a thriving company with years of profitability ahead of them. I should probably also disclose that I own exactly 0.0209 shares of Google currently valued at approximately eight American dollars. So, I get it. Google is probably not dead, at least not in the strictest sense of the word.

    But the company was founded on the idea of democratizing the internet by helping average people find websites built by other average people, people like me building websites like this, and as Google switches over to an AI-forward search engine that mostly summarizes answers and, as an afterthought only just might send one of those average people into a click… well, the idea of getting readers from search is basically dead in the water.

    I bring it up here and now because like most creative people who create things, we do it with the idea of sharing those things with average people. 

    If you are reading this it’s now unlikely that Google helped you find it.

    And as we increasingly commodify creativity and ever more turn to AI to be the gatekeeper of what is seen and known, it is a difficult distraction to overcome as a creative human being wondering what it is even the point of making stuff.

    It’s not wrong to feel that way. I have felt that way a lot lately.

    All I can say is that I also feel it is worth it to keep making stuff, sharing stuff, and looking past the gatekeepers of what was for a moment—but is no longer—the most democratic creative outlet humanity had ever built.

  • Poise Purpose

    Three years prior to writing these words I was on the brink of a huge professional change.

    I’ve made a lot of excuses for that change over the span of time that followed it, but it was locked in step with the topic of this category of writing: finding purpose and keeping ones poise, and the side effects of failing in either or both.

    This isn’t a self-help blog, but it is very much the reflective writings of a guy who burnt out hard at his career because of a lot of big ideas that are in lockstep with both professional poise and purpose: that for many a job is a job, your salary could always be higher but you get the work done—but also that for many of us finding meaning and an honest life in our work can be an essential part of the balance.

    Burnout follows when that balance fails. And that balance is more precarious than ever when one pursues work that is already heavily skewed towards purpose and meaning, like creative pursuits, and away from salary and strict process, like creative pursuits.

    That doesn’t need to be a fatal blow to those efforts. At least, I think so.

    Under the category of Poise & Purpose I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.