i was going thru my letterboxd reviews yesterday morning to remember what movies i've even watched so far this year. and after re-reading my Clockwatchers (1997) review, i had a thought. "dam, this might be one of the best things i've written all year." and then i saw this at the bottom of the review.
oh...
i know people have read that review. i posted a preview of it on my instagram story a couple times after writing it and got some friends telling me they enjoyed reading it. that felt good. but that disappointment of not feeling known, not feeling like something creative i finished and put out into the world was being interacted with at all? that hurt my soul a little. and it's a feeling i know all too well existing online as an unknown diy artist.
part of this is the internalized capitalism brainrot. where everything one does feels like it needs to be measured for how well it can perform to some unknowable audience. like your ideas all have to be investment pitches. and part of it is the way that type of finance bro "hustle culture" has infected the internet of today. where everything you do is measured by soulless numbers games like "click-thru-rates" and "engagement metrics." an environment onto which you have to factor in how your art will get fed through recommendation algorithms just as much as you do the quality of its creation in the first place. assuming you're not making slop, that is.
in today's online world, everything you do is "content" and that content is always being observed by an audience. we also exist in such homogenized spaces on the net that the information being passed around is of a high volume throughput. so this creates a dynamic where any type of interaction or idea becomes something sellable. something that needs to be raised above the noise of everything else to be declared valuable. ergo: you're either pitching a sale to an audience, existing or theoretical, or your being sold something by someone else at basically all times. and to travel more efficiently through such bloated epicenters that information needs to be highly compressible. every idea reduced to an elevator pitch. every image reduced to a thumbnail. as a result most things being traded online (art, ideas, conversations etc.) are of a low-quality transactional nature. simply meant as content for the algorithm machine.
but if you are an artist whose worked hard on something (like maybe a brand new mix that you spent weeks making and are very proud of and want more than like 40 people to hear) and want it to be seen by as many eyeballs as possible: you have to engage in the rat race where ideas vanish as quickly as they are posted. if you, like me, operate in a variety of creative trades, then you require many different windows to be viewed from when existing in online spaces. you're writing may exist on one platform and your audio or visual content on another. so if you just came out with something new, now you have to spend a disproportionate amount of energy compared to what it took to make that thing in the first place to scream into the void as loud as possible about it existing for people to interact with it. or even just... to see it at all.
and that suuuuuuuucks, dude
there's a lot we could go into about how traditional means of advertising, promotion and publication are dying and how all creatives have to fold several forms of labor into their craft that they were not trained in just so their art can travel through uncaring and unknowable corporate lines of code to reach an audience. how burnout among young artists is happening faster and harsher because of environments like this that we're forced to exist in. but i think it's equally valid to just lament the fact that this dance has become necessary for anyone to do to go anywhere at all creatively online.
i know to get your work out there you have to engage in the hustle culture. you have to sell your wares. i know "build it and they will come" is not enough; is hubris. i understand the game. but i wish i could play it just a little bit less. i wish i didn't have to go into each social media account every day and post the same things at "peak hours" for days on end before i see any traction on something i think is worth engaging with on the merits of its quality alone. if i'm going to be wrangling people's eyeballs, i want to at least point them to the same space every time to make it easier.
what i want is a centralized hub. a digital equivalent of a studio/gallery space that the public can check in on to see what's new with me and what i'm working on. now, i would love to have a patreon to serve as this. would love to have a community behind my work who support it monetarily because they believe in my vision. and maybe one day that will be the move! but more than anything, what i think i want right now is a Capital W website. i want a homepage, a domain, even. and no i'm not talking about a linktree. i'm not talking about a landing page. i'm not talking about a portfolio. i'm talking about a one stop shop for everything i'm doing. videos, mixes, reviews, access to my portfolio, a blog for writing, and who knows what else! you know, like how roger ebert's blog used to be, or don hertzfeldt's website. that's the kind of space i'm trying to build for myself online. it just seems correct.
and look, i'll still use my social media. i'll still post letterboxd reviews. i'll still make videos for youtube. i'm still gonna be chosting on here, don't worry. but i want a homepage with my face on it and everything contained within it to be authored by me and me alone. a place where everything lands first. and importantly, where it will remain archived for as long as i desire. that's something that nobody does anymore because it can't survive in the current internet landscape. not on its own. but i don't care. i value the worth of something like that way more than i'll ever value the clickbait hustle culture of blackbox algorithms written by codemonkeys with six figure salaries who have zero understanding of human nature and yet control every facet of how we interact online.
i say it's time to do my part to push back against the enshittification of the web. i think it's time to finally build a fucking website.
