Click here to view this post in its original form (with images) on Substack.
All culture is political.
This is unfortunate news to the girls who just wanna have fun, the boys of summer, and, I would think, the 53.3% of 18 to 24 year olds who did not vote in 2024.
But it’s an increasingly important thing to keep in mind as the modern channels for the consumption of culture—that is, the platforms—are now being consistently revealed for what they are: political tools for surveillance and domination, not to mention good, old-fashioned labor exploitation.
Where to begin? If we draw the line a mere decade ago, we could start with the first wholesale use of social media platforms as channels for foreign interference in U.S. elections.
It is well known (and I covered here) that Spotify founder Daniel Ek reinvests the capital he extracts from artists on his platform into military defense technology companies.
The recent sale of TikTok to a U.S.-based conglomerate of Trumpists—and its immediate descent into censorship, propaganda, and a hellscape of intrusive surveillance policies—is covered brilliantly in this recent video by Patrick Boyle.
We all saw the proud boys’ brigade of tech CEOs in the front row of last year’s inauguration, and if you haven’t seen The Authoritarian Stack yet, I would recommend (and frankly prefer) if you stopped reading me now to go study that webpage.
All culture is political, and/but in the States and much of the West, we are past the time of being able to drink black coffee, smoke cigarettes, and try to impress the people we want to fuck with our musings about it.
I work at a radio station and live in Austin, TX, and that means that around this time of year, we start being inundated by unsolicited emails from aspiring artists who are looking to secure some radio coverage for their trip to the city to perform during SXSW. Nevermind that SXSW has become an empty corporate shell of what it used to be, or that many in Austin’s own artistic community actively oppose the company in light of their exploitative artist compensation scheme and previous involvement with the U.S. Department of Defense (I should mention that last year, in response to the outcry, they canceled DoD sponsorships. Good, but also: do better).
But what depresses me about the artists who have been emailing my radio station, many of whom are younger and hoping to launch a career in music, is that when I dig a little deeper into who they are and what they’re getting up to online, they invariably position “content creation” as a part of their overall artistic approach. And because we are now at least one generation’s worth of humans into the social media and smartphone era, for some of the younger ones, it’s the only way they’ve ever seen creativity and art represented and responded to. Gone is the experience of sitting alone with a film, or at best with the people who saw it with you. Art is inextricably linked to the meaninglessly reproduced digital conversations about itself: it’s never only “what do I think about this film,” it’s “what does Wikipedia/IMDb/YouTube have to say about this film?” What does it mean for your art if there is no corresponding online content about what you create?
“My dear, we need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them.” — John Waters
The conflation of content with art is one of the most frustrating and pernicious effects of the modern platform-ization of all media. The sublime recording of Bach is a click away from the video of one person gorging themselves on enough food for a small Amazonian village is a click away from the illegally-uploaded film that has been mirrored left-right to avoid copyright infringement detection is a click away from more Bach (seriously, delete it all and leave the Bach).
Analyzing the situation is made doubly difficult by the fact that we’ve got an “all A is B, but not all B is A” dynamic at work. I wouldn’t be foolish enough to try to argue that art is not content, but I will die on the hill, if I must, that content is not art. Who decides which is which? My only advice, as ever, is don’t read the comments.
But that’s not what this essay is about, because what I really would like to criticize (and bring to the forefront of young artists’ attention) is the meta-positioning of all of these things onto platforms, which are invariably profit-driven, politically non-neutral spaces. Rational people may disagree, but if I had to choose, I might say the single dumbest legal opinion handed down in the modern American court system is that the owners of digital platforms cannot be held legally responsible for the content that their users post. This lone precedent is responsible for the entire bucket of hot filth—from the denial of basic, long-held scientific theories about vaccines all the way to the proliferation of pornographic content involving minors—that circulates in the exact same spaces in which young artists are expected to make their stand. And that’s not even to mention the nouveau underclass of underpaid “moderators” who are expected to sit at a cubicle for nine hours a day and repeatedly traumatize themselves attending to flagged content of beheadings, shootings, and naked kids. Justice would be chaining Zuck to a desk and making him delete those posts himself until he agrees to shut down the site entirely—I’d give him 5 minutes.
So for the first essay of the year, rather than give in to the desire to rant, rave, and otherwise mourn the steamroller of hate and imperialistic violence with which Americans kicked off this year, I’m going to try to speak just to my people. This piece is directed at young artists, and indeed at all artists. Maybe you are one, or have a family member who is one, or know somebody who is trying to be one—this message is for them. I’m saying it because I don’t see anybody else out there saying it. Think of it as a kind of new creative Bill of Rights. If you know someone who would benefit from hearing this message, pass it on.
The New Creative Bill of Rights
1. Platforms are not an artistic medium. The unique product of your deeply human creative impulses exists across any amount of space and time. Platforms will decay and disappear; it is your natural born right as a person to create things that resist doing so, by any other name, “art.”
2. Your art is whole from the moment it is created by you. Its integrity is not determined by number of views, reviews, reactions, shares, likes, subscriptions, awards, or even money that it generates. Neither is its integrity determined by whether or not it is available on a given platform. In fact, you have the right to be the sole determinant of your art’s integrity.
3. The platform does not work for you; you work for the platform. Its algorithms are proprietary, unknowable, and built for the express service of generating profit for its owners. You have the right to resist being persuaded by their suggestions, best practices, and guidelines about how and when to create and post things.
4. Any amount of compensation you may receive from the platform—because of number of followers, because of advertisements, etc.—is insignificant and incommensurate with the value of the art that you provide to the platform. You have the right to demand to be paid more.
5. “Content creation” is a synonym for “unpaid labor.” You are under no obligation to spend your unpaid time making things for the platform, which itself is under no obligation to compensate you for doing so, either in money or views.
6. Because the platform is designed to be profitable, it will always prioritize profitable content. In our era, this has been consistently demonstrated to be not poetry, music, and love, but controversy, division, violence, and otherwise hateful material. Understand that by co-mingling your art with these things, you risk radicalizing both yourself and the people with whom you desire to connect. You have the right to resist—you are still an artist.
7. Because the platform is designed to be profitable, it will always prioritize profitable policies. This includes cooperating with authoritarian regimes who would seek to dominate and hurt other people, so long as the bottom line remains unscathed or even improved. Understand that by participating at all in an ecosystem of surveillance and subjugation, you reinforce the profitability and desirability of those policies for the owners. You have the right to decline to participate—you are still an artist.
8. Because the platform is designed to be profitable, it will always prioritize its most profitable users. Platforms are not cooperatives. Beware building any sort of reliance on the platform, least of all a financial one. The platform is subject to change at a moment’s notice at the whim of its private owners, and they do not care about individual users, their revenue, or sudden lack thereof. You have the right to decline to compete against other users—you are still an artist.
9. Your sole obligation as an artist is to create art. In spite of the pressure you may feel coming from peers, platforms, and profit-seekers, it is not your responsibility as an artist to seek an audience or to behave in otherwise degrading ways in hopes that the algorithm will grant you with one. Any time spent doing so is time that would be better spent creating. You have the right to present your art when and where you feel best represents it.
10. You are not “a” creative. You are creative. You are an artist. Act like one.
There’s so much more that I would like to say to young artists—or even a younger version of myself—but the above bullet points are a good start. I have been publicly pursuing a creative, artistic career for almost twenty years now, and believe me when I say that I get it: I get the pressure to conform, I get the desire to be seen, to be appreciated, to be compensated, and to be celebrated.
What I do not get is the willingness to engage with technologies that are now constantly being laid bare as profit-driven, anti-social, and in fact dangerous to our minds and our bodies (I really, really recommend watching the Boyle video about TikTok’s new surveillance policies that include training its generative AI using your image and voice even on posts that you save as drafts or do not ultimately post to the platform). Delete your account.
“But how will anyone ever find me if I don’t post to the places where everyone is hanging out?” There is an old German saying that if one Nazi is allowed to sit down with eleven people at a table, there are actually twelve Nazis sitting at the table. It is high time that we refuse to hang out in the same spaces that allow for the worst and most inhumane parts of society to flourish. You wouldn’t expect to see anything but toxic garbage at the city dump, and yet artists worldwide willingly consign the fruits of their labor to the internet’s equivalent thereof. Delete your account.
My final bullet point is this:
TikTok does not produce anything. Instagram does not produce anything. Facebook does not produce anything. Twitter/X does not produce anything. The moment its users agree to cease producing content for these platforms, not even the most advanced generative AI will help them retain their profitability. They will disappear, faster than you can imagine is possible (remember Friendster? Me neither). We can make that happen by acting in solidarity. Delete your account—you’ll feel better. Everyone does.
The other side of that coin is that what the owners of those platforms lack in creativity, we own in spades by dint of our natural artistic proclivities. We can build creative places, and I don’t mean the type of profit-generating spaces trumpeted by numbskull millionaire Jack Conte (the Patreon guy)—those are just more platforms. I mean truly proletarian spaces that are open-source, not reliant on advertising income, censorship-resistant, and which are essentially decentralized and anarchistic in nature—that is, free from and resistant to ideologically- or profit-driven authorities.
The internet is that space. The internet is still gigantic, still cheap, and still accessible for nearly all of us. It is large enough and flexible enough that even good people in dire geographical positions like Russia and North Korea are able to figure out how to participate in it. We can build digital homes on the internet that are more inviting than profile pages. Last year I started a personal site where all of my work gets “shared.” The only people that ever fill out my contact form are bots that email me in Thai, but at least the things I post aren’t training AI technology that could be used to phone my aging parents and use my voice to pretend I’m being held hostage. My point is that even if you do not pursue art, you can do the same thing. We can still, as ever, build digital neighborhoods online that are far more interesting and productive than platforms full of rows and rows of cookie-cutter profiles. We do not have to tolerate the intolerance and violence that capitalist platform owners have decided is worth the cost of making boatloads of money. Delete your account.
For more navel-gazing about the insidiousness of platforms, read one of my first Substack pieces about “cultural smoothing.”
For a non-techie recommendation as to where to build your digital home away from social media, a friend of mine really likes BearBlog, and at first look, so do I.
For more information about online privacy, staying safe in a surveillance state, and not having your browsing behavior exploited by the billionaire class, I highly recommend checking out the videos that get posted by DEFCON and CCC on YouTube every year. There are fascinating talks at every level of technical understanding. Here’s a great one about “agentic AI” and why you as a consumer are absolutely not interested in having it come pre-installed on your devices and applications. What? You’re still seeing ads on YouTube? Brave Browser + AdBlockPlus plugin = no more ads, ever.
What Am I Watching?
Here’s to another year of recommending movies. I will go to the grave recommending things to my friends or indeed to anyone who will listen, even if no one ever hits me back about them.
Given the absurd obstreperousness of the American regime with regard to Greenland last month, it felt cynically appropriate (appropriately cynical?) to check out a film that takes place on the island.
Although it was shot in Norway, Zero Kelvin (1995) is the story of three men working a year-long stint as fur trappers in Greenland in the 1920s. It’s cold, entirely blue/gray, and by all accounts miserable, which doesn’t stop the young protagonist—a poet—from seeking adventure and inspiration by enlisting for a term.
On the island he’s met by the two men who will be his co-workers for the year: the bully Randbæk (Stellan Skarsgård) and scientist Holm. What follows is essentially a chamber piece for three actors as the men alternately struggle, cooperate, and spiral toward psychological and physical inversions of the hierarchy of their small trapping operation. It’s a slow boil in a frozen land, but the pot does eventually tip over, and it’s not pretty.
I saw this film on an old DVD that appeared to be essentially a telecine of the film print (that is, converted to digital by a process of video recording the film as it plays back, which is far inferior to the modern process of digitizing a film frame-by-frame). In other words, it doesn’t look as good as it should. This film is ripe for restoration by a company like Criterion, and I hope for the film’s sake that it does see that deluxe treatment at some point in spite of being apparently virtually unknown. Even in spite of the telecine, it’s clearly beautifully photographed, and the performances of all three actors are on point. Find it if you can.