8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Category: [12] Social & Community

Finding your tribe and building a community for collaboration, and to beat creative loneliness.

Chapter List

  • Influence Less

    Look, it’s a blurry line between being someone who wants to make stuff and share their creativity with the world on one side and being someone who wants to be the main character of the internet on the other.

    Blurry, but not invisible.

    I personally struggle with my own identity on the modern internet. I make stuff for the joy of making it. I write stories because I feel the very human need to be a storyteller. I draw and make music and build games because I am compelled to use the half of my brain that is steeped in creative urges to do those things. 

    The tepid pool of what becomes popular for all the wrong reasons, though, is a little sad.

    I see reels that are staged or commercial or generated or simply rage bait.

    I see posts that reek of corporate pandering or identity grooming or culture shifting.

    I see profiles that are bots or resume acts or cons or worse.

    It’s all fake.

    What is to be done about those?  Nothing, maybe, but looking away and being better than that, not stooping to that grade of duplicity, treating people everywhere—your audience and the people around you in real life—with the respect they deserve. Maybe that will help a little.

    It’s old fashioned, but here’s the real:

    Be genuine. If you are out there making stuff that is fake or even whiffs of influencer-grade performance, just… don’t. Be better than that. 

  • Meta Creativity

    I blame the processors for the rise of meta creativity.

    It is us, too. It is our penchant for gossip and rubber necking at disasters, but I would argue that it wasn’t until the algorithm turned it into a cottage industry and a lucrative product that meta creative content blossomed like an algal outbreak in mountain lake through our feeds.

    Let me interject here with a definition. When I use the term “meta creative” I am referring to a genre of published media that falls somewhere in the uncanny valley between genuine creative works such as film, music, art, and literature on one end and critique-slash-analysis on the other end. In the middle there is a new variety of lazy, reactionary performance that often involves belittling, mocking, panning or otherwise pointing and laughing at (sometimes literally) the work of other people (and this is the important part) with nothing of value to add besides the raw reaction.

    Honest critique and analysis plays a vital role in creativity, and any art school grad will tell you that learning how to gather and act on genuine feedback is vital to improvement. 

    On the other hand, the kind of sloppy green screen overlay of a mocking primal reaction to something, positive or negative, serves very little besides its own self promotion and amplification on the work of others.

    It is a spectrum, of course. There is no perfect critique and there is no absolutely pointless meta creative reaction, but the algorithm certainly seems to reward the lingering gaze of any and all of us who stare a little too long at the simplistic emotional takes of reaction clips. 

    We’ve lost something for that, and I write that as both a creative soul and as grumpy old guy who knew a more supportive creative era, now passed.

    This is cross post from Of Poets & Processors.

  • Reality Thirst

    As insurmountable as the social media algorithms often seem to me, occasionally I break through for a few moments and sense the craving beyond.

    I started taking a lot of black and white photographs lately. If you are reading this post where I published it, on my blog, you may have noticed that each is accompanied by an often-unrelated black and white image. There is nothing particularly secret or hidden in the connection: I just like taking photos and was using the effort of writing here as a place to showcase some of my other (very human) work.

    As I was taking all these photos it occurred to me that I should be sharing them with others besides the handful of readers on this (very new and very obscure) blog project: so I started a fresh Instagram account, gave it a silly name, and started uploading monochrome pics, including many of the ones you can see at the top of these posts.

    Viral is the wrong word. 

    But there was certainly a gush of unprovoked interest in my photos.

    Raw. Simple. Often just fuzzy macros of textures from my yard and neighbourhood, these pics are not works of art. But neither are they slop. They are intentional snaps and observations collected from micro-adventures by yours truly. 

    And people flocked, are flocking, seem to be continuing to flock to follow and like and comment on those pictures. 

    It was a side effort that spun off from the main effort that has become orders of magnitude more public than the original. 

    People, it seems, are craving, yearning, thirsting for something real and interesting.

    This post was original posted on of poets & processors.

  • Social Community

    We’ve been watching one of those reality competition shows where a group of artists in an eclectic field are brought together to participate in a multi-episode grind where every nuance of their niche artistic talents are tested. 

    You’ve seen these: glass blowers, knife forgers, puppet makers, miniature modellers. The formula is usually the same: artists, judges, tears and hugs.

    Yet I’ve often found the particulars of the art itself are less interesting than the side effect of bringing together a group of people with a shared interest. As much as the production demands of the show oft only glimpse at it, a keen eye can often spot that these people sometimes seem more torn about losing and being cast off one at a time per episode not because of the money, but because they are being torn out of a community.

    Social media is a pale substitute to gathering with your artistic peers, I would argue. It can help find your tribe, sure, but there is something irreplaceable about the collaborative energy of a crowd and the erasure of the usual loneliness of a being a creative soul.

    Not everyone need apply for the next reality television production, but seeking and nurturing an artistic social life is arguably almost as important as learning and practicing one’s art.

    Under the category of Social & Community, I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Unworthy Comparisons

    Don’t ever let me hear you say that what you are about to write… and then post …and then share is “not worth it” or doesn’t measure up.

    Do let me remind you what passes for paid for media these days. I opened up my news app this morning before I wrote this and here is a selection of some of the more absurd articles I saw in my “top news” list, and again… I pay for this feed.

    There was a celebrity gossip story explaining that such and such a celebrity had posted an image of herself on Instagram. The article recapped the insta post. That was it. That was the article.

    There was an article explaining how to use a kitchen drawer, including an explanation of stacking objects inside so that they didn’t tip over or misbalance the cabinet. That’s it. That was the article.

    There was an ordered list of the best foods on the Costco menu. There are only about ten things on the Costco menu and “best” is, of course, at best a subjective measure of anything. That’s it. That was the article.

    We judge ourselves far too much and too often self-censor because we think we can’t stand up to the yardstick of social validation.

    But just write what you want to write.

    Tell the story that is important to you. 

    Don’t compare yourself to the rest of the world because often the world is often too absurd and basic—too unworthy—to bother comparing with.