Continued from an earlier post: Creative Positive (Part Two)

I continue to remind myself that, as a creative, refraining from posting positive things into social spaces not only is a kind of self-censorship but it leaves gaps that are quickly filled by negative things.

I was more active online in the weeks leading up to the unity referendum that happened here in Alberta, Canada in October.  It was not necessarily about joining into the fray and shouting partisan slogans or reposting dubious information.  I did my share to “get out the vote” and sent numerous reminders to friends and offers of free babysitting (which no one took me up on) but mostly I just posted non-political stuff.

I kept sending links to my running website.

I took dozens of autumn photos and shared them everywhere.

I fired up the frequency of my back posting from this and the other writing project I’m doing about algorithms and technology topics.

I shared positive thoughts and whimsical aphorisms about all sorts of things that popped into my head.

And I just tried to fill the space: not necessarily to interfere with the conversation, but because that’s my role. My job, unpaid and often thankless, is to clutter up your social media feed with the mundane. It is to drop art into your apps, pack your photo scrolling with pics from nature, and remind you that real life is bigger than political bullshit, that it continues even when the mouths of politicians stop aren’t flapping and hucksters of every stripe aren’t trying to needle a bit more power.

Rare moments, but they exist. They need to exist. They need to continue to exist.

Despite the evidence to contrary, life is bigger than all that.

Art. Thought. Story. Music. Colour. Trails. Sunsets. All of it must keep going no matter what. When they stop, when we stop being creative positive, then the negative wins and what is there left worth fighting for.

We live in complex political times. As I write and publish this initially in late-2026 the political landscape of my home in Western Canada is undergoing a nationalistic push to secede from the Canadian confederation. We are in the midst of a referendum… and this post is not about that, but it is about something parallel: that being someone who makes stuff, writes stories, draws pictures, and posts introspective daily essays on navel-gazing topics can feel monumentally inadequate to the moment.

Look no further than social media. The click rate on my posts are trivial for my creative works compared to when I go online and start engaging politically. And it can feel like a kick to the chest to try to rationalize that the attention of the population is nearly entirely consumed by a tidal wave of political rhetoric and partisan conversation.

Particularly right now it feels like the last thing anyone wants is a short story by an amateur science fiction author.

…or some autumn photography.

…or screenshots from a video game I’m working on.

…or a sketch of a funky tree in the park.

…or—hell, the list could go on forever.

How do creative people stand up in the undertow of the ebbing and flowing tide and find a role in all this that is more than just another screaming voice.

But like I said, there is more to making the world a good place than overtly fighting evil.

A picture of a beautiful autumn scene, or a clip from the latest build of my indie game, or some simple sketch-work passed into someone’s social feed is not a distraction from something good, it is a diversion from the darkness. It is a reminder that among the so-called important conversation there still remains people holding a beacon light for humanity to navigate it’s way back to normality.  

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.

When I go to a social function, I’m the weird guy with the camera.

Oh, I represent. I dance at weddings. I play games at parties. I help with the dishes at the holiday dinners. I’m not just the guy with the camera, but—yeah. I’m usually the one taking photos.

I call it a type because like every artistic pursuit there is always a cliché. There is always a tell. There is always a secret handshake that isn’t a handshake but maybe just a really nice camera that never leaves the hand and—shake: you recognize the other weird guys from a mile away.

Weird camera guys find other weird camera guys at social functions. We talk. We compare equipment, stories, and frustrations. 

Because… that’s community.

That’s the thing you want but you never recognize it until you’re driving home later that evening thinking you should have connected with that other weird camera guy on instagram or something so you could maybe turn an awkward social function conversation into something creatively productive—a collaboration, or maybe just someone to talk to about that thing you love to do.

I know my type. I’m the weird camera guy, and these hobbies are often lonely enough without pretending that we don’t see each other.

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.

Building a community is an effort that requires not just surrounding yourself with other creative people, but finding good people who support you from the sidelines.

This step is easy to overlook when it’s missing, and even easier to take for granted when it falls into place. 

Having people in your life who want to read your writing, hang your art, and attend your concerts is never automatic. It’s precious and a reminder that someone is paying attention. It can be all that holds you together on those too-frequent days when it seems like obscurity and irrelevance is your only companion on a creative adventure. It can hold it all together when the path is unclear.

Cheerleaders are, of course, not devoid of creativity or otherwise lacking in motivation. Heck no. But they might be people who appreciate your efforts in a field that they themselves do not excel. They are almost certainly people who understand the soul of creative effort and know that encouragement and support are the lifeblood and fuel of its continuity. 

And most often, they come unasked. You can’t beg and plead for them to cheer and you cannot be anything but thankful that they stay for a day, a month or a lifetime. 

But when you find them, notice them, and cheer right back.

Don’t confuse one with the other.

AI makes ideas by stringing together patterns that make sense.

Idea generators are the Frankenstein-esque cobbling together of digital randomizers and curious arrays of word-bytes that when triggered result in a mad-lib-style shuffling of the input data towards an often nonsensical list of results. There is no intention. Only chance.

“Write A ROMANTIC DRAMA about A FISH set in HISTORICAL ROME.”

“Write A SCIENCE FANTASY about A BARISTA set in A SANATORIUM.”

“Write AN EPIC POEM about LOST KEYS set in A FAST FOOD KITCHEN.”

I wrote my fair share of these generators.  The code behind them was simple: a couple data arrays chock full of verbs and nouns and settings and styles, a random number generator, and some user interface bits. It was all coding spare change compared to the corporate-billion budgets of modern AI systems that barf out polished gems of inspiration that could never match the lightweight brilliance of a digital dice roll.

Creativity, I think, often emerges from serendipity. Something amazing and unique can tumble out of our brains when we trigger those brains with curious nonsense.

I have asked AI for ideas, nudged it to brainstorm, and it comes back with clever concepts, sure. But none of it stacks as a trigger for the weirdest flights of my imagination compared to the raw random indulgence of a simple idea generator.

I think maybe the more we extract ourselves, remove our humanity, from the process the more boring the final result—and rolling dice, digital or otherwise, is just random enough to preserve our involvement in the loop.

Try my randomizer:

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. 

I have seen no shortage of posts, cartoons, reels, and tweets on the topic and usually it goes something like this: a person is begrudgingly doing the hard labour while the computer is joyously making art and composing music.

The irony is thick.

We built complicated algorithms and robotic mechanizations to churn through calculations and work in factories and clean our homes, and instead we’re having this crazy conversation about how we can distinguish generative music from human compositions in our playlists or avoid buying slop produced novels published in droves via online booksellers.

Over on another project I write about the blind pursuit of technological advancement and the cost to our humanity.  You might find it interesting, too. 

AI.

Generative content replacing our creative efforts. Our intellectual property slurped into algorithms that spit it back out through chatbots and neural engines meant to automate creative effort and pull humanity out of the business of using our imaginations.

We work hard all our lives so we have time to pursue hobbies, and for many hobbies are painting in the park or playing in a band or cozying up with a keyboard and trying to write the next great novel.

Are we so eager to hand these things over to algorithms?

Of course not, you scream into your screen, that’s why we’re all so angry about this so called revolution of generative artificial intelligence. You’re just stating the obvious!

But someone is eager, no? Someone wants to suck the joy out of humanity, and why is that?

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?