This prolific poster of long form video essays was incensed at the draconian policies that resulted in her two hour long video being pulled from the site over a few seconds of copyright claim. I’m not going to out the specifics of this particular influencer (a) because she doesn’t need the publicity, but also (b) because she is just yet another example in a very long line of people who have made a bad deal for exposure and traded their content agency for the publicity and the fame that comes so much easier on those platforms.

This isn’t an anti-copyright post, but (given the evidence she presented, at least) the claim was very likely a censorial or cash-grab type effort that resulted in exactly what the claimant was looking for: shutting down a popular video. 

I’ve seen it so frequently now, and it joins a long list of “reasons these platforms own you” screeds I could write.

All that aside—because I really do hate to be the I-told-you-so guy—but I will be using this as yet another example of why content sovereignty is important to creatives and the lack of power that popular influencer type posters have to deal with when they use corporate social media.  

I’ll be the first one to tell you that overseeing a private website on a private space and relying 100% on my own elbow grease to build an audience and promote my work, well, it’s not easy. 

And yes, I am beholden to the laws of the land for what I post—of course I am. 

But I am also far less beholden to corporate and automated or algorithmic policies to that govern and manage and oversee what goes on a platform when I own said platform. 

It’s hard to feel sorry for any influencer who has built their entire business on the back of another business and then has to deal with the consequences of (even if you look at it even in the most benign way) working inside of another digital ecosystem—or if you look at it more insidiously, making a deal with the devil for fame and popularity. 

Once again, my best advice on this is to maintain as much agency and control over the things you make as you can. Or at the very least, when the system fails you, take it on the chin and stop complaining to the rest of us about the imbalance of the deal you’ve made for your popularity.

This is a cross-post from Of Poets & Processors.

Some of you may disagree that what you are seeing in your feeds is “the best” but my point is not that it qualitatively perfect, rather that it has been sorted by a bunch of factors that elevate it up to the top of the incredibly huge heap of everything ever made. It served the algorithm well, so it “surfaced” more frequently.

This isn’t a problem if you are only a consumer of these things, of course. In fact, great, you are seeing the stuff that everyone else likes. You are the beneficiary of the system working in your favour.

This is a huge problem if you make stuff.

Why?

It is a huge problem because frequently seeing only the very best of the very best, the cream of the crop, the top ‘o the heap, or the GOAT of all things is a terribly easy way to demotivate oneself.

There is a tension in the heart of every artist: comparison. 

Am I good enough? How does what I make rank against the collection of what other people have done before me? Is this story interesting? Is my photo popping? Does that song I wrote make people want to add it to a playlist?

Inundated by everything that ever was, filtered for interest, pop, and playability, honed by the algorithm, how could anyone just starting out on a creative journey hope to compare? 

We can’t. At least not at first. At least not without countless hours devoted to refining the effort. And maybe the answer is to close out the comparison, acknowledge that the world is filled with shiny beautiful things, and keep making stuff.

No really? Art for the sake of art is like science for the sake of science: Serendipity takes us to interesting places we never would have planned.

But when the only goal is profit the road has often been well travelled by thousands before us. 

I have a bachelors degree in science and while I never pursued academia nor research, I often throughout my career ran in the tracks of businesses, governments and charities that (in their own self interest, realized or not) would put pressure on the research industrial complex to create output with profitable outcomes.

The counterbalance to commercial science, of course, is often referred to as pure science, research driven by raw curiosity and following the data down interesting paths, an effort that has arguably both squandered a lot of money but also led us to discoveries that have reshaped the modern world in immeasurable ways. And more importantly, many of those world reshaping discoveries were not profitable… until they were, and so in retrospect businesses clap their hands at the ingenuity of the people who fought back all those profit-motivational barriers to discover interesting things despite it all.

Many of the same people who scoff at pure science will, too, flatly argue that the best art, the stuff hanging in museums, say, was created under patronage—the church, monarchies or otherwise rich benefactors—and so to claim anything artistic can be created lacking the same is a fool’s errand. 

The modern equivalent of course is corporate contracts, government grants or—for the smaller among us—algorithmically-driven fame leading to online fan sales. And it’s hard to argue that the folks who go viral are often the ones filling a commercial demand be that for trendy teen lit, spectral watercolour prints, or studio-quality family portraits. All of it is wrapped in sales metrics, of course, and all of it is considered “good” because it sells—it makes a profit.

So I’ll repeat: what happens when worth is no longer judged by standards except for sales? What happens to art for the sake of art? 

What does that even mean?

I mean… I get it. He wanted a million followers. He wanted to be influential. Fame. Adoration. Social capital. He wanted to be known and heard with a notification tab that needed to be silenced lest it wake the neighbourhood.

To me, the shy auteur and guy who values meaningful connection and measured interaction with real people, I found myself floundered by the question that came out of nowhere in the middle of a seemingly average job interview.

They keep telling us we live in the digital era, but I often think they’ve got it wrong. We live in the influencer era: social media as invaded every aspect of every layer of our lives and we have all become no less than personal brands who spend the day crafting illusions of our lives to share into those spaces. Even choosing to not participate becomes a meaningful action, one that defines a person and commodifies their social footprint.

Personally… I loathe it.

But it is inescapable and pervasive—and the reality of our times.

What’s a creative soul to do but figure out how to not get swept up in the digital river and washed away by the social networks.

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

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.

A personal brand goes well beyond a clever URL and a logo made up of your initials. 

In an online world we are presented with this ideas of an avatar, a kind of costume that we don when we share our work, our thoughts, or our best selves in digital spaces.

Since we are (obviously) unable to be online in the physical, tangible way that is the organic stuff of reality and a million years of social evolution, what we then present online is necessarily a construct. After all, we cannot know the subtleties of our own personalities like the ticks and quirks we give off when sitting across from a real person, so all of it is fabricated as some kind of manicured self image if we like that idea or not.

Embracing this idea, leaning into it, is the notion of personal brand: shaping that avatar to fulfill a purpose, and perhaps to be more than—or at least a more refined and controlled version of—our real world selves.

The notion this implies is that we are all somehow emotionally mature enough to construct these online characters in a way that presents us in a positive and beneficial way. 

What this implies is skill and nuance. 

What this notion misses is that not all masks well made.

To brand oneself, one puts on a mask and becomes someone or something else, which can be useful and necessary, but can be a difficult illusion to maintain. 

This doesn’t make it impossible or ill-advised, but rather perhaps something that is done with care and purpose and not just because it seems to be a fad.

Have you heard of the algorithm? We toss that term around like it has a deep history and long roots into our culture, and in some ways it might, but the algorithm itself is our newest creative barrier and one designed for the very purpose of siphoning the worth from everything you make.

In their unchecked wisdom, the architects of our modern global communications platforms realized two things. First, they understood that the firehose of random creativity that emerged from millions of people posting to the internet was more enchanting when churned into curated maelstrom. Second, they learned there was money to be made from turning the creative efforts of those millions into a commodity labeled with the soulless term “content.” To engineer this transformation of art into corporate value they birthed complex mechanizations to sort and shuffle, scrape, churn, prune, and cultivate, all if it extracting the worth of human creativity into a storm of placid, flaccid… ugh… content.

If you participate, that is if you make “content” then you will feed the algorithm and for a while you will feel as if you have achieved success. But rather than nurture the soul as art and creativity is meant to do, you will only enslave yourself to that mechanism.

On the other hand, if you make things that do not fit neatly into the digital slots and grooves of the algorithm, that system will almost certainly work against you. It wants you to fail because you give it no literal value.

But know this: you give the rest of us that value instead.

The algorithm wants you to fail, so prove it wrong.

There are no popups. There is no paywall. There are no subscriptions or memberships or signups. There are no requests for donations or me begging for money (and no, this is not one of them.) It is not an oversight or a bait-and-switch or a free trial until I get bigger and need revenue. 

It’s purposeful. It’s philosophical. Probably a little privileged, sure, but it’s what I believe is right for at least some of the work I make.

It’s not that I haven’t and don’t elsewhere dabble in trying to earn some side cash from my online projects. I’m not independently wealthy or above paying basic bills. Monetization was my mild obsession for a while, actually, to offset costs. But I can tell you the two big things that side-hustle culture doesn’t easily result in for me: cash flow and happiness.

We have been deceived into believing that everything we make, every word we write, every note we play, every photo we take, every art we create, and every word we utter should be part of a brand, a pitch, our creative time building to some kind of passive income fever dream of pretend financial freedom.

But it doesn’t always need to. Shouldn’t always need to.

And I should not need to explain that. I shouldn’t need to justify creating and sharing a thing like this site for the simple joy of it. I shouldn’t need to make an excuse for giving these words out for free because it makes me happy to write them, record them, and post them.

Making stuff for the sake of simply making it can be an important kind of intrinsic compensation, too.