• They/Them

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aurahack
@aurahack

I don't really add a lot of text to my art ever, let alone me sitting you down and explaining "what it means", so bear with me for a minute.

This week was a nightmare. I had a really hard time getting any work done because it's simply too overwhelming to exist in the spaces I do right now. I've tried my best to curtail this by forcing myself to not look at social media/news directly after waking up but I inevitably have to be on there to keep a presence and it gets increasingly harder to do so.

The idiots and horrible human beings that run Twitter are happy to tell you the site's doing great but those motherfuckers are wrong. It sucks out there. A lot of people are circulating factually incorrect assessments of the situation saying stuff like oh yeah Patreon links are super delisted now or throwing the word 'shadowbanning' around like it's ever been a real thing but the truth is just that the site is dying. There's less people on there and it's increasingly becoming a platform of creators posting to other creators because the audience is gone elsewhere. It's difficult for people to wrap their mind around that the place they potentially make a living off of is dying a slow death but it is and it's a point of no return. You will never have the numbers you had again. Those days are over.

"People are fleeing, but where to? What's the place they're going so I can go there?" Literally everywhere. Cohost. Tumblr. Instagram. Discord. A bunch of them at once. All of them. It doesn't matter, you are losing your 'one' place. That moment in time is gone.

It's so fucking hard to even come to terms with this because I make a living doing this. Being a person on the internet that you like that makes art that you also like. That's my job. My job comes from being able to do this and people appreciating that. And every day it gets harder. I post my work and it immediately gets scraped by god knows how many servers trying to build an engine that will spit out the most soulless garbage you've ever seen. You laugh at the bad results ignoring the good ones because it's not your reality, it doesn't directly affect you. You take solace knowing companies who wield copyright law like an irresponsible child with a knife sit in the shadows. That they'll use an army of lawyers to dismantle the algorithms that systematically steal their work. You feign ignorance when those companies don't just ignore it but use those tools themselves to wholesale replace artists they've worked with for decades. They could suffer. You could prevent them from ever seeing a penny again but it's what's $8 a month to you. It's nothing. They can have it. It's convenient. My job isn't safe and even the ones I'd have to consider as a backup are under threat.

But it's okay. Some people are finding a new home on a website that's like Twitter, but it's "like how it used to be." Better, I'm told. Don't worry, you can conveniently ignore the underlying issues and leadership that will plummet the site into toxicity and rampant harassment because, well, the other guy who's morals you question but don't care enough to cut out of your life is there. You could go somewhere better. You could build somewhere new. Somewhere that's not built by another piece of shit billionaire bastard asshole who seeks nothing but personal gain and cultural ruin. But that one guy you know is there. We could have it so much better and you do everything in power to make sure we don't.

I try to take a moment of respite to spend a few hours with the people who support me and enjoy my company on Twitch, where I'm told I need to ensure they give me the right kind of money and right kind of support and to prioritize those who spend absurd amounts of money on me because that's how I can squeeze the most juice out of them. They're a resource. They're such a valuable resource, my whole dashboard on Twitch has changed to show me how to minmax every one of them to make the most amount of money possible. Twitch likes that, because they take half of the money I earn. I'm not important enough to get "most" of my money. I have to settle for "some".

I have to start every day with this constant weight on my shoulders. Will I still be able to do what I do 5 years from now? A year? Six months? It's 9h30 AM and I haven't even opened Clip Studio and already I've lost the motivation to work because every possible angle of my work, of my career, of my art, is being poisoned and ruined by the inhuman. By bastard capitalists who want to hoard and project misery. By indifferent bystanders who watch nothing but disruptive horrors pass in front of them only to drop a like when I tell them how much I suffer on a daily basis.

It's suffocating. I try to scream onto a canvas and the audience to view it shrinks with every day. Why is it so hard? I just want to create.
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You can buy a print of this here. You can support me on patreon also.

edited to clarify my stance that bluesky is garbage and i resent people going there without even giving sites like cohost a chance

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in reply to @aurahack's post:

It's such a horrifying reality. Art and streaming are the only thing I could do long term due to a horrid cocktail of mental illness, as every job, every task, everything I do, I see it falling apart. The seams ripping and the knowledge that it will eventually break me moves closer.

Now the one constant source of promise, the art, the streaming, these things are being divided along with it's followers and all anyone is saying about how to handle it sounds like a tech nepobaby telling me to "get on that grind and run several circuses for different evil corporations at once for a chance of visibility" FUCK ALL OF THAT!
And some people don't realize how absolutely paralyzing this exhausting hopelessness makes a person.

Also for what it's worth, this image is beautiful!

if its any consolation the cracks are already starting to show with AI art - even at its most sophisticated it cant make anything compelling or appealing on a human level, and i think even people who don't know a fuckn thing about art can "see" that difference even if they don't think they can. eventually the technology will choke to death on it's own total lack of general appeal the same way NFTs and cryptocurrency are choking to death right now.

one of the failures of attempts to create right-wing social media websites is that right-wing social media websites don't have their beloved "libs" on them. They don't want to form communities, or create anything, they want to trigger the libs. This growing reactionary tendency combined with generational increases of inherited wealth means there are people to whom wealth means nothing but culture war means everything. Hence those reactionary forces, whose growth and change has grown stagnant due to inheritance and accumulation increasingly only find joy in torturing those who desire change and true disruption. This is how the ultra-wealthy wind up owning all of the public commons, so they can parade their resentment publicly.

I'm not sure where this ends, but we need to more than ever support eachother who fall outside of the boundaries of massive unchecked generational wealth accumulation.

Harassment and vitriol have become so common on Twitter that I've had to set my account private. I didn't even do that at the height of the GG harassment campaign. It's just everywhere there. Fully saturated hate and inescapable.
For the first time in a decade, I'm working on an indie game. A game that matters a lot to me and which i had to give up too much to see made.
The offer was: "It's a space opera that you may make as gay as you like." And the management and team have stood by that promise.
Twitter is my largest audience. People follow me there that stood by me when I came out of decades hiding in the closet. They accepted me as a woman when I feared no one would.
It's the only place left that I can promote my queer-as-fuck little space game, but there is no point.
Yesterday I was pursued by a group shouting "you will never be a woman". Even my quiet seaside town is not safe from the hunters. They are online, on the TV, and stalking the streets.
Your illustration speaks to me. Strangled so hard I cannot even gasp

Oh that's a mood and a half, or it was like 8 years ago when doing any sort of music work professionally felt even remotely reasonable, and I was absolutely sick of the confines of academia I was finding myself in (the feeling appeared mutual).

Anyway I'm in a fairly dull office job but one I'm good at and that arguably serves the public interest so even if this isn't the creative dream I'm at least no longer wanting to, uh, in minecraft myself like I was back then

There's a frustration with seeing cool artists on twitter and discovering that they don't have links to other platforms they might be on. They need to have something to keep from vanishing from the sight and mind of their audience once the Twitter Blue Whale crash screen makes its final flight.

I haven't been able to create my art for a really long time due to health issues. With everything going on I wonder if I'm too late. If I've already missed my chance because now everyone is scattering to the wind. And then I think about my friends who are dealing with that scattering immediately, as their work has less eyes on it. This whole thing sucks so much and I don't see any easy answer to it. 😔

Take care buddy ❤️ Hopefully things start to get better or stabilize sooner rather than later.

This is a really beautiful piece (referring to the illustration as well as the essay and both in tandem), thank you for sharing. I also don't get the urge to jump to bluesky I feel like even just their invite system is a major pain and I don't see audiences flocking there.

I'm afraid I don't have much encouragement to contribute, but you were one of the first accounts I followed on Cohost -- your art is amazing and all has such life in it - every character seems so real and beautiful. So I hope I can one day pitch in or commission something from you.

a platform of creators posting to other creators because the audience is gone elsewhere

wow that's haunting.

sorry. i'm still trying to finish my rinky dink breakout video game and it's slightly terrifying to have bailed on 5 digits' worth of twitter followers, the people i'm ostensibly going to sell it to. i wonder if any of them will be left to see me drop a tweet when it's done.

i miss twitter. old twitter, back when it was still fun most of the time. ever since it got overrun with reactionaries it's felt like a minefield. if they were too cowardly to ever do anything about that then maybe this was eventually inevitable. even if clowshoes mcgee has significantly accelerated the process

I agree with all of this, and I'm glad you said it out loud.

It's extremely scary out there. I'm not sure if there's comfort to give or not, given how bleak it feels.

Your art is fantastic, and I've subbed to your Patreon now. I hope we can all keep making our own work online for many years to come.

Capitalism seems to be very good at rolling out the red carpet for certain classes of people only for it to then rip it out from under their feet later when they feel they can rely on it being there. The virtual diaspora of social media's users disproportionately affects the art creators on these platforms that are dependent on them to get eyes on their art so that people with enough expendable income can throw money at them. As wealth further gets accumulated in the hands of the few, there's less and less of those people with expendable income to throw at art instead of groceries. Not only is it less likely someone is going to see your stuff, but it's also less likely they're going to be financially secure enough to support it.

Being reliant on a private platform like Twitter, or Myspace, or CoHost, or Digg, or Reddit, or Facebook, or Youtube, or DailyMotion, doesn't help matters much either. Those things can change in an instant for the worse, in ways that either directly or indirectly harm the people reliant upon them for profit and making a living. All of this lack of job security makes it harder to even create the art you intend to sell. Desperation typically does not make for the best inspiration.

Like you said, this was but a point in time. And now it is coming to a close. The glacier is starting to move, and those who do not know the direction it's moving and/or are unable to move with it will get crushed. And there will be people that will say that you should've seen this coming, that you should have been more clairvoyant. That you should have somehow known in your teens or your twenties that this wasn't going to last. It's not fair, and it's an unreasonable expectation.

I don't think the solution is a better social media. I think the solution is living somewhere that doesn't murder you with debt if you aren't squeezing your body for every ounce of productivity it can muster. But even that's not much of a solution, given all the factors tied up with uprooting one's life to go somewhere else. It's clear though that the social media reliant class of artists is not sustainable.

I guess if it's any sort of consolation, your engagement with this site helped me get comfortable with this space. I wasn't familiar with your art before this, but cohost immediately suggested your page after I entered a few tags I was looking for. Your stuff is really amazing, and I've had a lot of fun checking our your wider online presence, too.

I don't really have a large audience on Twitter, so I don't feel like I'm losing what so many other artists are losing, and I don't make a living off my art ( yet >:) ), but I do feel like I've missed out on the opportunity to even 'pop off' while hitting my stride with my art. I'm still exploring my style, and I feel like I've finally started making pretty considerable strides, but I feel like the shitbird is failing right as I'm getting into the groove.

Thank you for sharing your art even through all the crappiness. I think knowing other people feel as intensely about stuff in general as I do yet still keep going gives me a lot motivation to do the same. Life can suck a lot, and knowing you can't really control what's making it crappy really sucks, but being able to post stuff and have people be like "heck yeah, that's cool" seems to help me a little. I hope it helps you, too.

I can't even pretend to fully understand what you and likely many other artists are going through recently, and now more than ever I feel powerless to help. but I'll continue to interact and share where I can, and hopefully eventually support financially. rly hope things turn around somewhere soon...