If you are an independent, creative individual, the modern world has been designed and built to work against you.
No matter how hard you try, without community support, you cannot win.
Being a creator is a full-time job.
You cannot be a writer, a painter or whatever creative work you do in your spare time. Creativity takes your full time and all your energy. It’s a 24/7 job.
Usually, I wake up around 5 AM and go to bed at 10 or 11 PM, but I often wake up in the middle of the night because I’ve got an idea and have to write it down immediately.
There are no Saturdays or Sundays, no holidays, no birthdays, and, as is the case for me, no vacations either.
However, all that work is meaningless if it doesn’t find its audience.
I have two “business” websites, a Patreon page, a Substack page, and accounts on several social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, and Bandcamp. No TikTok, though. Actually, on some of these, I have more than one account.
Handling all these accounts practically is another full-time job.
So, you wake up one hour earlier and go to bed one hour later, and try to cover all that extra work on your own. Sure, it’s not possible, but you have no choice.
You start posting, and you are excited. Finally, people will discover your work.
Perhaps you will receive a couple of likes and one comment, usually an emoticon. The next day, pretty much the same. Or even less.
After a while, you realise that the same handful of people follow your posts, usually people not in your target audience: friends, family, old schoolmates, and similar creators like yourself who are interested in selling their own products, not buying yours.
You are losing two battles at once. One with people’s ignorance and the other with the algorithms.
Some people (still) believe that if they don’t subscribe, don’t like and don’t comment, they can “fly under the radar.”
Once, someone told me she deletes her YouTube likes every so often so that YouTube doesn’t keep a record of her preferences. Well, my friends, you can delete whatever you want because “they” – the big, evil high-tech companies – know exactly what you accessed, what you watched, what you have read. They know down to the second what page, what video or post you have spent your time on.
I remember a funny story. Around 2015, I spent most of my time working in audio production. I had an account on the largest remix content website at the time, and it had a large community. I made many friends from all over the world. Because the site was based on votes, we had a group of virtual friends who regularly supported each other. At some point, because of the site’s financial issues, they introduced paid ads. One day, one of our friends lashed out, saying that he had had enough of the pornographic ads appearing on the sidebar of the website. We had a good laugh because we didn’t see any pornographic advertisements. Most of the time, I had audio gear ads, and occasionally, occult-related advertisements. Not that I’m a saint. The ads, probably Google ads, were served based on cookies from your computer collected by the websites you visited. Long story short, you can run, but you cannot hide.
Of course, you can keep your computer or phone clean and regularly clear those cookies. You can run various anti-tracking software. It can make you feel better and safer, but no matter what you do, your online activities are not private, and “they” are constantly tracking you, collecting and storing all your data. This is the digital reality we are living in. The only way not to be tracked is to give up entirely on the internet and throw away all your devices.
However, if you like, follow a creator, the least you can do is like, comment on, and share her/his work on your own social media and recommend it to your friends.
By not liking, commenting on, and sharing, you cause incredible harm to that creator. The algorithm will notice the disinterest and consider those materials unengaging and not worth promoting, burying those posts and the author deeper. Social media is all about performance. However, without the consistent, permanent support of the audience, no author can perform.
Being “a fly on the wall” will silently kill the author.
I need to tell you?
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#socialmedia #creator #artist #attilakarpathy
