works of wanderlust

Tag: social media

  • leaning positive

    Angry sells.

    Have you noticed? You probably have. I mean, isn’t that why we are living in these unprecidented times? Angry people, rage, fails, and violence all seem to generate more clicks, more views, voter turnout?

    I wrote a couple weeks ago about the weird fluctuations in my traffic. Some days I get a lot of clicks and some days almost nothing. I tossed some advertising modules up on the site because, hell, if I’m going to start needing to deal with increased traffic I may as well turn that into bucks to pay my hosting fees.

    But, truth be told, I’m probably not angry enough. Not even close.

    Look. It’s simple.

    I’m not picking fights with other bloggers or accusing people of hate crimes or committing hate crimes (I hope) or tearing apart the creative works of others for my own self-agrandizement. (Although this is sort of a critique of the social zeitgeist, so there is an argument that I am being negative about negativity to promote positivity, blah, blah, whatever.) I’m doing none of that. I could. I mean it’s so easy to be mad and pissy and negative. And I’d get a helluva lot more traffic.

    It’s an angry world and anger sells.

    The roaring twenties are roaring cuz everyone is pissed off all the time and roaring negative about damn near everything. It is almost performative. Like, people are hating on others for the lolz and the clicks. Literally.

    I do catch myself playing that game, too. Creeping into being mad.

    And I mean, look, honestly, you can be part of that obtusely unaware crowd of people who think rage and anger and being an asshole are somehow flags of independent thought rather that what they really are—the soup of the day—but I see through a lot of it, personally. That’s such an easy clear path to follow. It’s like lazy af and lit by a neon casino glow. It’s fake and wonderful and terrible and always so fucking lazy. But then what do I know. Maybe that’s just age writing. Hell, I’m creeping up on fifty. How did that happen? Yeah, maybe I am just naive. Maybe I just don’t want to lean into the clicks, huh?

    My truth is just that, as I wrote above, angry sells. And I’m not even close to angry enough to bank on this blog…

    …which was never the point when I started writing it. Still isn’t.

    If you have stumbled upon this site, congrats. The Algorithm doesn’t want you here. You have entered a place where there is nothing to be sold, nothing to be bought, nothing about which to tear off your shirt in a spitting rage. I have been trying—not always succeeding, but trying—to lean positive.

    That is not performative. That is just me. I’m not inclined to rage on differences, or tear down effort in any form or demand a level of quality that I could not first deliver myself (which is virtually never.) I am most just here to point and say huh, isn’t that thing that happened a thing that happened and wasn’t it mildly interesting?

    That doesn’t sell.

    But you are here reading it, so maybe there is hope for the world not being completely sold out to hate and anger, right?

  • already not famous

    The one-wayness of fame has got me thinking this past week.

    Now, to be clear, I could all-too-easily frame this in a way that could come across as very sour grapes. I’m not trying to be sour about it, but rather just hold up an observation and say—huh, isn’t that a curious thing that we just sort of take for granted. Almost all of us do. Even me, mostly. Except when I get a thought stuck in my craw like: 

    Fame is unidirectional.

    —and weird and fickle and imbalanced in a million little ways and really a strange artifact of some aging post-democratic late-stage-capitalist hellscaape, if I’m being honest. But for my point today, fame is oddly unidirectional.

    And if you don’t make stuff maybe you don’t even notice.

    But chances are, and here’s the thing, you are almost certainly a person who exists and may be worthy of a certain share of attention for whatever effort it is that you make each day when you wake up and do whatever it is that you do to fill each of your days. Yet, chances are also great that whatever it is that you do—stocking shelves at a grocery store, helping people file their taxes, building kitchen cupboards, delivering hot food to people’s doors, or integrating complex banking software systems—no one is really paying attention.

    On the other hand, certain people—famous people—go for coffee and wear a fashionable dress and there is a societal tidal wave of attention thown upon them. They make something, anything, and we all watch the trailer or throw money at the thing they made or sign up for notifications about it and give it our raw attention even before we know if its worth that all because of fame.

    And like I said, you are sitting there reading that and thinking, well… yeah. That’s fame. That’s just how it works. 

    And I’m sitting here writing and saying that, well sure, I know… but have you ever thought about how incredibly weird and strange that is?

    And yeah, maybe you don’t even care that no one is paying attention to your life. Maybe even that’s an optimal outcome of your actions. No one fucking look at me, you’re thinking. 

    Now. to be clear. I don’t even want to be famous. (That’s me saying that, believe it or not.) I’m not aiming for some kind of widespread name recognition or the attention and adulation of strangers around the world. That whole notion creeps me the hell out and I’m actually a fairly private guy who would crumble under the pressure of fame and too much attention.

    Yet, there is a sweet spot somewhere between “literally no one notices or cares” and raw unflitered Taylor Swift ubiquity. I feel like with the quantity of effort that I’ve made over the years, the raw and unending production of effort that I put in—and here I want to tiptoe very carefully because I don’t want to say I deserve it or even that I’ve earned it, because I probably don’t and haven’t, but—there should be something more than nothing in this fame equation that we all take for granted. It’s just so unidirectional. 

    And to be fair, that’s not even really what got me thinking about this.

    I got to thinking about it because I was thinking about a piece of so-called advice that fluttered across my feed on social media suggesting that blah, blah, blah engagement in building a larger network of people was all about engaging back—and I thought to myself: you know what? The hell it is. Famous people, and here I mean truly famous people, don’t engage back. They are swamped by attention automatically. The rest of us claw for scraps.

    I mean here’s the thing: I watched Pedro Pascal’s dystopic sci fi zombie show but has he ever done me the honor of reading any of my dystopian science fiction? I listened to Rainn Wilson’s podcast and he seems like a great guy and would probably have enjoyed listening to a bit of mine in return. Did they tho?

    Tho even as I write it, and you read it, the whole premise sounds beyond absurd. Of course they haven’t—we’re both thinking it. That’s my point. The whole equation is unidirectional and we just take it all for granted. We don’t even question it, and you are likely shaking your head at the obnoxious notion I’m presenting. Who the fuck does this hoser think he is?!

    Brad, you’re yelling at your screen. These people we adore have worked their whole lives on a craft that has elevated them above the rest of us, they are the faces of industrial complexes of creation that have systematically built empires of high quality content for the masses to consume. It is their very purpose and they have earned our adoration and attention, you say.

    Sure.

    And I’m just asking why we are taking all of that for granted.

    Why haven’t we aspired to a meritocracy, even with the internet. Why haven’t more of us sought out unfamous voices with regularity? Why don’t we have systems that draw attention away even a little bit more strongly from the firehose of ugly fame and let a dribble escape for the rest of us? Or, if when we have made those systems in the past, why do we let them devolve into just another outlet for the already-famous. Arguably, social media could have been that but The Algorithms now decidedly shift attention to those who already have it, bootstrapping the pre-amplified voices into furies of inescapable commericalized, advertizing-laden sound so imbalanced that beyond a lottery of rare chance no one else can ever hope to be heard above it.

    That’s just how it is, you say.

    I know. I get it. I just—don’t.

  • obscurity by design

    Blogs tend to get looped in with a broader definition of “social media” –and that is fair, to a point–but there is a much more modern attitude around social media fatigue and frustration to which that inclusion I may be less inclined to agree.

    I am going to write something that may make your eyes roll into the back of your head: I deleted Facebook. Seriously. But here’s the part where you can stop thinking of it as performative righteousness: I deleted Facebook over five years ago and have not looked back. People send me links and I ignore them. I am told someone sent me a message that I didn’t respond to there, and I say I have not logged in in years. Folks suggest I should check the online marketplace or visit their community page or whatever, whatever, whatever, and I shrug and tell them the same as I just wrote for you above: I deleted Facebook.

    This is a complex topic, social media.

    Our whole world seems to revolve around a handful of little corporate micro-blogging platforms that steamroll through the barriers to entry but, like a set of tire spikes at the entrance, create a troublesome blockade to escape again.

    So then that’s the thing. A lot of people “perform” the little notion that they have escaped social media apps, but like abandoning your car and walking out of a lot with tire spikes at the gate, you haven’t really deleted Facebook if your account is still there. You haven’t left Twitter if you could log back in and pick back up on whim. You haven’t escaped the doomscroll of Tiktok if you offload the app from your phone.

    I started blogging in 2001 and created my own little platform upon which I heaped countless hours of effort to write and post and share and converse. All of this was before the apps we know as social media were even twinkles in their tech bro’s thirsty eyes. And I write about it now because I am walking a fine line between grumpy old man yells at cloud (services) and clear-eyed neo-luddite looks at a world consumed by unidirectional experiences driven by inhuman algorithms that are literally destroying our society–and every day I feel like I need to say something.

    So, when I write that blogs tend to unfairly get looped in with social media what I mean to tell you is that sure, blogs are a kind of spiritual older sibling to the likes of Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, but maybe more of an older step-sibling, born of a different first marriage between society and technology, built and nurtured in a more innocent time, still problematic and ripe for potentially harmful communication, but far less wild and spoilt by their parents bitter fighting. Blogs are related, but they shouldn’t just be looped in with the other kids.

    I tend to fumble over to analogy when I am stabbing around for my point.

    I deleted Facebook but I re-invigorated my blogging because there is something deeply toxic that is being nurtured on those social media platforms that is a little more under control on a private blogging site.

    I suppose we could deconstruct this a little more technologically.

    What is a blog?

    I have built so many now that I take it for granted, but essentially your modern blog, like this very one you are reading, is a giant database of text and images stored on a web server. I log into a piece of blogging software, in my case WordPress, which opens up into a friendly screen that invites me to do all sorts of things: manage my design, check the health of the site itself, change my account or add another user, and probably most importantly add or edit content. I can open a little word processor, type and type and type, upload images, add links and tags and a hundred other little design flourishes. And the big database behind that system keeps track of what I made, stamps a date on it, and let’s me push a publish button that sets that post I made to be visible to the public. All of that means that when you load up my blog, in a fraction of the second the blogging software goes into that database and shows you a reverse chronological list of everything I have created and made public. In my case that means you get a reverse chronological listing of (as of right now) a couple dozen long-winded, text-heavy personal essays with a smattering of photos and images. All of that is stored in a database I control, on a server that I pay for access to use, and no one but me–absolutely no one else–has any control over what appears here so long as I don’t break the rules of the hosting company or the laws of the land.

    You may be thinking that this doesn’t sound too different from, say, Facebook and you’d be right… to a degree.

    What is a social media app, then?

    Well, a lot of that stuff about databases and content uploading and profile management is actually pretty similar to a blog. You log into a piece of software that lets you write something, add pictures or video or links, drop in some hashtags, and press the equivalent of a publish button. But that’s about where the similarities start to diverge. This will be a simplification because (a) every platform is a little different and (b) a lot of this stuff is hidden, secret and proprietary to those companies. But just like me, those companies are managing a piece of software on a piece of technology infrastructure, it is simply a matter of scale. And just like what happens when you visit this site and the database and software work together to build you something to read and view and interact with, those platforms do the same. But where mine is simple and reverse chronological, those platforms have introduced something that we so often hear referred to as The Algorithm. All this means is that rather than a tidy ordered list of the stuff people post fairly, simply, democratically laid out like how I do in my blog, countless factors–from what the company wants you to see to what they think will keep you reading to what they think you might click on to buy, and the list goes on–weight into the order in which the software generates something for you to look at. And that’s it. That’s the difference… and in many ways it’s all the difference in the world.

    You will not be surprised to learn that not that many people read this website. I don’t have much visibility or profile on this big wide internet now dominated by a handful of massive corporate interests. Almost one hundred percent of the users of the internet (statistically speaking, of course) feed their time and energy scrolling through outputs of the software created and curated by Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Tiktok. And you go on these sites, you are entertained (by design) and you never leave… but you roll your eyes at the kinds of people who try to step away. And like trying to drive backwards through the tire spikes, most who try are unsuccessful.

    And then we yell at each other, on those very sites, trying to understand why we feel the way we do about them. Why do we feel empty. Why do we get enraged so easily. Why do we feel drained and broken and mentally bloated from the experience.

    I’m not going to sit here and write that there is any one reason, but I would contend that it comes down to something in the difference between a blog and Facebook feed… in which at the same time I would contend there is simultaneously very little difference, yet all the difference in the world.

    Whenever someone loops an effort for someone, anyone, to maintain a blog into the social media categorization that talks about the decline of the internet, whenever I hear that, I shudder. And I go write a post about it that you may never read, but which will be right here waiting for you in the exact spot where I put it, not promoted by an algorithm with an agenda, nor hidden by anything but my own obscurity.

  • monster blue fame

    Despite my protests about the fluxable nature of social media, I have been posting on Bluesky.

    That site, for now, seems like the developers have set out to build the anti-twitter twitter, and that appeals to me enough to participate. Again, just for now. But for now maybe creeping closer to and end because this weekend they rolled out verification. Blue checkmarks. A kind of quasi-fame bestowed from upon high by invisible criteria and processes.

    I don’t like it.

    Yet another popularity contest for which the rules are vague and unpredictable.

    Yet another bit of nigh unobtainable digital swag the rest of us cannot but hope to acquire to validate our own opinions and voices. To elevate our own perspectives above the fray once in a rare while. 

    But that said I don’t have a better or an alternative answer. Do we let algorithms decide who is heard? Or do we let corporate moderation decide who is heard? Or is it that popularity remains with the masses, even though the masses are turning out to be as many bad actors or sock-puppets as there are real authentic humans.

    That never-satiable quest for fame seems to me to be one of the harbingers of the slide of truth and reality into the abyss within our societies lately. Celebrities writing op-eds. TV hosts filling important government jobs. Influencers deciding if your product or idea or service is worthy enough to exist.

    There was a time when having two hundred followers would have been enough for anyone.

    Today, if you don’t have at least a thousand times that you are practically no one.

    What have we created?

    To be honest, fame frightens me. I don’t know how I would handle a thousand followers, let alone ten or a hundred times that many. I don’t know how I would sleep dealing with the inevitable onslaught of contrary illogical collisions that would create. Part of me is happy with a few people occasionally stumbling on my posts or my blogs, getting a little chuckle or insight, and moving on. Being internet famous would almost certainly shake me to my core.

  • undeleted

    To be fair, I didn’t actually read the article.

    In these days of click-bait headlines it is equally likely that any given bit of tripe posted in traditional media is some too-clever journalist writing a bit of sarcastic parody humor prefixed by an all-too-clever title to draw in the crowds who are almost certainly looking for some bit of legitimate-seeming news to validate their screwball wacky viewpoints. The author then typically tries to write some clever well-actuallies… but then who actuallies need the article when most of us never read past the headline anyhow?

    So I didn’t read it. Couldn’t read it. At least not without forking out money for a subscription. So, won’t read it. Can’t read it. Don’t need to read it.

    The headline was “Go Delete Yourself from the Internet. Seriously, Here’s How” from the Wall Street Journal.

    And in this day and age of terrible tech advice abounding I’m pretty sure this was not parody. It might have been well-meaning. It might have even been sensible. But it was probably not good advice.

    Today is a day I have marked in my calendar as my “blogiversay” which is twenty-four years to the date of when I made my first blog post on my first blog. I didn’t put it into my calendar until years later when I noticed that the first post in the archives of the blog was, and would for a long time be, April 20, 2001.

    And then one day I deleted myself from the Internet. Seriously.

    There were a lot of good reasons to have done it. I was, what? Twenty-four when I first posted. I had just moved out of a backwards little life in a backwards little city (which you can ready-aim-fire at me for being judgemental but you could easily google the name of said city and you’d be greeted with a lot of right-wing, nationalistic, hyper-religious news-adjacent references that would vouch for my then and current opinion of the place.) I had a lot of growing to do, and I did a lot of said growing right there live on that blog, sixteen years worth. A lot of that blogging, those growing and changing opinions, may not have aged well, and good or bad, I don’t care to read and edit two million words of my blathering personal blog writing for any reason.

    So I deleted myself. I deleted myself when I got a semi-public job. I deleted myself when I started managing people, particularly a few stubborn ones who didn’t like me, and I deleted myself when it started scraping up against the gentle opposition of my peers.

    But here we are in 2025 and there are suddenly and realistically a lot of reasons to undelete oneself from the internet. There are a lot of reasons to hold one’s ground and push back against the very idea of ceding this digital space.

    Mostly? There is a vacuum that will exist in the space where each person deletes themselves from the internet and that vacuum would almost instantly be filled by something else. Something bad.

    Maybe some terrible AI content will slurp into the vacuum.

    Perhaps what people will see will instead just be more terrible influencer content and the tidal wave of stealthy and deceptive advertising.

    Or worst, and what I fear the most, is that the vacuum will be filled by the relentless creeping onslaught of political propaganda and the opinions (agree with me or not) which are increasingly anti-fact, anti-science, anti-intellectual, and anti-reality. I fear the space will just get filled with more lies, more manipulation, and more noise designed to overwhelm and crush what little remains of these fragments of freedom and democracy to which we cling.

    April 20, 2001 was a few months before 9/11, a day which for reasons beyond the obvious changed the trajectory of western civilization. On that day we went from an optimistic society progressing towards something special and we collectively did a u-turn into fear and suspicion and surrendering our rights for the illusion of slightly more safety. Now, arguably, many of those rights have been gone for a generation, nearly twenty-four years gone, and yet we all feel less safe than ever. What are terrible trade. What a terrible decision we all made together.

    Right now, a big part of me feel like that happened so easily because we deleted ourselves from the conversation. Deleted ourselves from reality, from truth, from the fight, from purpose, from everything. We deleted ourself from the internet, a great big town square where we should all be shouting and having a voice, arguing and making better choices for us all. We deleted ourselves and turned over our voices to corporate social media, to algorithms, to AI, to billionaires who claim that they are guardians of that voice but who only put it in chains.

    We deleted ourselves and surrendered.

    I am undeleting myself. This stupid little resurrected blog is the beginning of that effort. I am trying to reclaim my voice, small and unpracticed as it is.

    Undeleted.

    You next. Stay tuned.