I haven’t written anything in about a month, other than a couple of terrible poems. I want to think that it’s simply because I haven’t been in the mood, or I’ve been busy; both true. But it does feel deeper than that, I feel like I’ve lost a connection to an ephemeral force that was trying to tune a frequency in me, but it gave up, or completed its transmission. I’ve finished my screenplay after all & this blog for me was one way of procrastinating writing my screenplay, now I’m onto the hardest part of this truly god forsaken process, getting this thing funded.
Anyway, a friend of mine recently told me that “they can’t wait for the day that I talk about things I like”. On social media at the very least, or on my podcast, I tend almost exclusively to talk about problems & the way I see them or at least try give my two cents on some ‘important’ cultural development. As well as things I’ve been interested in from the point of view of what I think is important to know, basically my replacement for the old legacy media.
It’s true that I rarely am ever just talking about something I really like, Because writing for me, especially publicly is a way of getting out the darkest parts of myself out of my head, all the rage, sadness, & lamentations I feel all the time but am never really able to get out because it generally kills vibes; & god forbid any, #bestlife, #goodvibesonly bliss seekers have their bubble burst before the death of their first loved one.
I think I do need to get back to writing daily though, & I think I am going to post most of my daily writings up unless they’re totally awful or needlessly controversial, so if you are reading this & visit my blog regularly:
First of all, thank you so much, it’s nice to know people do read this. Some of you have even reached out to me which has been genuinely spirit lifting & shocking.
Second of all get ready for more regular posts, & hopefully a transition to weekly releases on the podcast with the great movie encyclopedia Samuel Reis.
I plan to do one week of either a guest or a solo rant, & one week of movie reviews where Sam & I take a filmmakers filmography, watch it all & discuss our thoughts on them, our first session went for six hours! We talked about the great Baz Luhrmann (The Great Gatsby, Australia). I’m not going to go into it here but Sam & I had a blast recording it, but I’m dreading editing the bitch.
Anyway, for today’s actual thoughts, I’ve been thinking about social media, & why it makes me feel like I’m staring into the gates of hell every time I become conscious of what I’m doing on it. I think basically it boils down to a few things at least for me, & judging by what I see it’s most people, even if not totally consciously.
Boredom/dread, I incessantly check my phone while waiting to do anything, waiting for a train, waiting for a friend to finish their call, waiting for a show to get interesting. Personally it feels like I’m pushing away an inertia, a niggling feeling at the back of my head that flares when I see a dead bird on the sidewalk. I always have an instinctive need to be distracted. This is not so big of a deal, this is also where I get to see what all of my other friends are up to, which these days is a blessing when you can go three months without seeing a good friend without even blinking.
Horny/Lonely. Huge one, I constantly install & uninstall fucking tinder onto my phone alternating every two to three months or so. Half of what I use Instagram for is to advertise all my ‘cool‘ fucking instagram videos & pictures to those matches who want to continue to talk, & then usually after we’ve fizzled out after tentative plans that keep falling through or a one night stand. We both continue to look at each other’s stories, sometimes for years. This whole thing; it’s entire structure depresses me so much.
I have this fantasy in my head; a young man in a red flannel, overalls & a coppola, leaning against a fence, smoking a cigarette, on break from a restaurant gig. As I loiter I see a gorgeous woman, tan, black hair with wide hazel eyes & a red & white polkadot dress walking briskly down some stairs into the courtyard. She lights a cigarette quickly as if to get it out of the way before she’s caught. I’m smitten, I can’t take my eyes off her, eventually she glances up at me & smiles a little. I smile back, she puffs down her cigarette, ashes it & walks back up the stairs, looking back as she’s about to turn the corner.
Later that night, while doing my second job playing in a small band. I see her again, waiting tables in the restaurant across from the one I’m playing at. She looks at me again, I smile, she smiles back, I lose my place in the song a little & mess up. The others glare at me & she chuckles. After I finish for the night, I wait around until she gets off her shift. I finally introduce myself, we talk, there’s chemistry, We spend the night walking through the coastal streets of the village under a bright moon.
This is the hyper idealistic Italian romantic in me, wanting to be swept away with someone through an alchemical reaction neither of us can control. This kind of romance, — the spirit of it, forget it’s literal practicality — is fucking impossible on Tinder & Instagram. There’s a feeling of griminess, like I’m being conned at every turn by whoever I’m talking to & the platform itself.
I don’t really know what my actual problem with it all is, people have found love there. There’s a convenience aspect to it, but every time I look at a selfie on Instagram, I feel a longing for some kind of genuine connection, a desire to be loved, with a jaded knowledge that there are thousands of people on the other side of that screen, reacting to a mere facsimile of them. This is all hidden of course, by the obnoxious vanity of it all. Or else often there is some kind of marketing tactic to attract followers, subs or whatever variation of clout manufacturing that leads on to my third thing.
Clout chasing/business. Social media is the new tragedy of the commons, I’ve never really heard anyone frame it this way but I doubt this is my original idea. To oversimplify it, the world is broken up into four categories, dead people, poor people who are stuck in their poverty, poor people who are upwardly mobile, & wealthy people trying to maintain their status. I want to focus on the two categories of poor people. Prior to social media/the internet, opportunities were more limited & based much more on your local environment. In order to make a living you needed a skill, or capital to be able to survive (leaving out tribal existences or any other self sustained survival). A skill could be anything from the ability to lift large bags of rice onto a cart to selling your body for sex. What the internet & social media has done, is allow opportunities range to be extended & allow the creation of digital capital with very low initial capital investment.
This has given those two classes of poor people the opportunity to escape the trap of working for an employer who will always take the lion-share of profits. They can post ‘content’, grow a following & have Youtube, Twitch, Patreon or whatever social media platform that gives them the ability to earn a living through their audience via subs, donations & views. For those employers, those poor but upwardly mobile; the mom & pop businesses around the world. It offers the chance of broadening your client base, web presence & generally earn more money through brand awareness.
So far it seems pretty great, more opportunities for more people to escape the tyrannical clutches of this horrible problem of inequality, which has been the tragic blight on civilisation since at least the agricultural revolution & maybe since multi-celled organisms.
But this tragedy of the commons is as real as every other before it, millions of idealistic young kids, lazy opportunists, con-artists, businesses, & artisans (including me) have sought to cash in on this digital gold. Creating a miserable sea of desperate people trying to get their slice of promised freedom, & independence. All for the low price of all the relevant information in regards to them for the rest of all time.
But worse than that, the warping of the social fabric into an even more crony capitalist, desperately lonely & atomised slum that I personally hate existing in. We live in a panopticon that makes everyone jaded & suspicious towards each other, & makes primary the language & culture of business, with its fucking HR departments, rigid social hierarchy, & all around depressing drab bullshit lifestyle the norm of the culture. There’s another rant here about how things like movie rating systems, Twitter mobs & advertisement policy create the taboos society bases its flimsy morality on, but that’s a whole other post.
I don’t have any answers, just complaints, & hatred towards this fucking lame culture I live in. I don’t want a million followers, I want a hundred & fifty loyal companions to live this tragic cluster fuck of a beautiful life out with. A million followers seem much easier at this point, but honestly, I’m optimistic that this shit will not last; because after all nothing ever does.
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