Something to say

The word con­tent still makes me itch. It should­n’t, I know. That was a narrow prej­u­dice that human­ity has suc­cess­fully over­come. The world was ner­vous about young people in ironic tees, lean­ing toward cam­eras to reit­er­ate that they were ‘super-excited to be here, guys.’ But we all agree that those reser­va­tions cannot pos­si­bly apply to pro­fes­sors of the­o­ret­i­cal physics, or anchors of global cur­rent affairs shows. No, ‘con­tent’ became legit­i­mate right around the time that hand­held mics became ironic, and ironic click­bait became passé.

Somehow though, I never quite lost that prej­u­dice. I only wor­ried how sci­ence edu­ca­tion and opin­ion jour­nal­ism would sur­vive this adven­ture. It is hard to tell if they did sur­vive; we are so good at read­just­ing our real­ity. Researchers ref­er­ence memes now; long­form jour­nal­ists are super-excited too.

There but for the grace of God…

I was all ready to be super-excited. I bought a boom mic, and ordered a soft­box. My sister started a nice YouTube chan­nel, and I cut my edit­ing teeth help­ing her. I made plans for merch and mem­ber­ship, which I could actu­ally run from here; even pre­pared to set up a forum for live dis­cus­sions. Podcasts, too, obviously.

Any of these may still happen, but I’m now cer­tain that my prob­lem with con­tent is not about its qual­ity. I simply have to con­sume less and make more. And I’ve been think­ing: if my making becomes the dis­trac­tion that stops some­one else from making, then I’ve just passed the prob­lem on.

I don’t have infi­nite attention.

We’ve messed up the wonder of the global vil­lage, some­how. As the world teeters on its axis, we’ve all bunkered down with our noise-can­celling ear­phones, with cus­tomized, tailor-made fire­hoses of up-to-date stuff. Only the search algo­rithms know how to con­nect us. Maybe that isn’t such a bad thing if the algo­rithm belongs to a saint, but that’s an awfully big gamble. 

So I’ve been trying to cut out the mid­dle­man. I rarely smash that sub­scribe button, whether to chan­nels or newslet­ters. Instead, I write my book­marks in my notes app, and search with no auto­com­plete. I also pre­tend ‘Recommended’ and ‘Trending’ tabs don’t exist.

That could just be my per­verse, anti-main­stream side again, but let’s con­sider this. I have few pos­i­tive expe­ri­ences with com­pany-wide meet­ings, but break-out ses­sions often turn out better. And when every­body is forced to write or sketch an idea and submit it, some real gems always show up. 

Now, instead of all of us coming together on shared con­tent plat­forms, how about we break out? I’ll sit here on my site, and make as I feel led. You get on your site (I’ll help if you’d like me to) and make what you feel like making. And I’ll take reg­u­lar breaks, get out of my head, and come and check your stuff out. And if it touches me, I’ll come here and write a note on it, link­ing back to you. And we can email each other. Or maybe that forum thing? The forum thing is really call­ing to me. 

And I can take my time on each of these steps. I won’t have to hurry on from your con­tent, as I would if your cool thing showed up in the middle of an unend­ing list of rec­om­mended squares, on a plat­form that only gets paid if I click on a spon­sored square.

The actual plan.

My YouTube videos are going to be ‘unlisted’. I won­dered if it was unfair for me to only use the plat­form for its stor­age space, but this site’s server won’t let me upload raw video… I guess YouTube can scrape my uploads for AI, and con­sider that pay­ment enough.

My Instagram will maybe have monthly announce­ments of what I’m doing here, or some­thing like that. Facebook may never see me again in this mortal realm. Behance too. 

My music will be released for free here, with a Creative Commons license. I reg­is­tered as a song­writer and inde­pen­dent label (called “Holy Holy Holy”) on ASCAP, but it turns out they are kind of B2B, com­pared to Spotify etc. – who mostly exist to prey on music makers, and enrich big labels. 

I’ll set up a tip jar, because it would be nice to have my hobby sus­tain itself. Maybe I’ll do merch? I may just share DIY resources and tips instead – includ­ing free print files. If this some­how brings new eyes on my design busi­ness, that would actu­ally be more sus­tain­able – but I won’t sweat that either, career tra­jec­tory has been quite good since 2023.

So that’s it. Thanks, you can go away now. Go and make something.

You know what? I’ll take guest posts too. Just email me if you have some­thing to share, I promise I’ll read it and give it some thought.