Going Forward
Back in the livejournal days, I wrote a lot more posts that were long and involved, more thought out, and more personal.
I think all of us-- fandom and nerds and geeks specifically, but along with us everyone in the world-- I think we have been immeasurably harmed by corporate social media.
We have been harmed by conforming to an arbitrary word count, by the pressure to post short, “content” multiple times a day, for that content to be “relatable”, tepidly ‘family (advertiser) friendly’, and in the service of getting as much shallow ‘like/share/reblog’ attention to this “content” as possible. In service to our own egos, yes, but beyond that, in service to the desires of the vast, money hungry corporations who graciously allow us to provide free “content” for their vast, money hungry machines of social media.
We have been harmed, too, by the social pressures these corporate machines of mass communication create. The pressure not to be too cringey, too weird, too arrogant; the anti-intellectual pressure never to be “pretentious”.
Well fuck that my posts are not “content” and they are not created for the money hungry corporate machine, and they are not for it to drip feed to a mass audience like baby birds with their mother’s heavily digested pap.
My posts are weird, they are pretentious, and they are not fucking advertiser friendly.
They have contorted our minds to demand constant attention of the mass-communication money making machine they’ve created, and I don’t want to be part of it any more.
Back on Livejournal we were thrilled if a post made it to a few dozen comments.
And you know what? A few comments is leagues and lightyears better than hundreds of nothing-interactions. “Likes” and “reblogs”.
Shallow interaction for the machine to fill a few more milliseconds of scrolling for a few more people.
My posts are worth more than that.
YOUR posts are worth more than that.
I’m in the middle of a vast self-exodus to my own hosting-- as twitter is destroyed from within, and reddit eats itself, and AO3 is the victim of mass campaign of canibalization by fucking normies who are the front of useful idiots for conservative christians, and for terfs-- I am leaving.
Social media is a corpse on the ground, and we “””content creators””” are the soul of it. That soul will not die, we will simply all find new bodies to inhabit and infuse.
But until that corpse is gone, I intend to be one damned annoying poltergeist for the scavengers to deal with while they rip apart the corpse of social media.
Fuck corporate interests. Fuck the money machine. Fuck the christian conservatives and the TERFs and everyone else who wants to hold you down and make you conform and lay still while they eat your corpse.
I’m pretentious. I’m long winded. And I’m not safe for advertisers.
Rattle those chains, baby. Rattle those chains.
appendix beneath the cut
