8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Tag: social media

Chapter List

  • Attention Economy

    I admit I have been hung up on the idea of toiling in obscurity lately. 

    We live in this era where unless you have millions of followers the general consensus is that it’s not worth it to even try.

    As I write this I have hundreds of followers, many of whom are probably bots, and yet here I am—trying. Call me crazy for going in against the grain of common sense.

    The attention economy has warped our perception of what it means to do valuable work. I can sit here and write tens of thousands of words and to many—perhaps even to the opinion of most—that is all wasted effort unless I’m simultaneously hustling and selling and going viral and changing the whole damn world.

    Rather, I sit here writing, toiling in obscurity, and trying not to internalize any of that. Were I to let those feelings seep into my heart they would manifest as nothing more than a shard of failure stabbing me right through.

    Of course, I have given myself a double challenge. Climbing out of the hole of obscurity is hard enough, and deeply more so is climbing out weighted down by a less popular media format like—ugh—the written word.

    It’s a small thing but I try to look at each of these entries, each word and sentence and thought and idea, as something vital in a long game to make something bigger. I try to focus on making a thing that I would like to discover, not looking for a hole to fill and trying to fill it but rather making a mark and making it bigger and bigger until maybe, perhaps, possibly it gets noticed.

    That is the opposite of embracing failure. 

  • Political Abnormal

    I need to remind myself almost every day lately that there is more to making the world a good place than overtly fighting evil.

    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.  

  • Bad Deals

    Yet another fist-shaking post from a popular YouTuber rolled across my feed recently. 

    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.

  • Everything Ever

    The problem with unlimited access to entertainment and media is simple: in a sea of everything ever made powered by computational algorithms designed to sort it all out we mostly only see the very best of the very best.

    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.

  • Worth It

    We’ve all done it. We all should do it, at least occasionally. I do it ever few months, in fact.

    I Googled myself.

    For years, the result has been a modest list of links, many to my own websites, but often to a variety of articles from old jobs and public feeds from old accounts. It’s been a trip down memory lane.

    When I Googled myself the other day, though: I was greeted with an AI summary of my digital footprint, and a generated outline of who the search algorithm thought I was as a person.

    It wasn’t completely wrong, but it wasn’t a hundred percent accurate, either.

    As a guy who spends his free time in the pursuit of creative public expression I gotta admit: I’m a little frustrated that all the work I’ve put into building profile and connections online in the last twenty years has amounted to a couple paragraphs in an LLM.

    Search and social, after all, were the bridges between the stuff I was putting out there and the rest of the universe—but lately, not too many people are crossing it.

    “Keep making stuff.” I tell myself. “People will find it. And if it entertains just one person, inspires one other human to keep the spark alive… maybe it was worth it. Right?”

    This is a cross post from Of Poets & Processors.