It wasn’t THAT long ago that if you liked someone and you read their work, you’d bookmark their website and you’d manually check in to see if they’d written anything new.
Once upon a time, there were RSS Readers (I think it’s still a thing) where you’d plug in your favorite websites and it’d update the feed.
Point being, when you wanted to read your favorite blogger, you had to go door-to-door. The writer/content creator didn’t outsource their networking to social media sites whose only goal is to keep you stuck on their platforms. It seemed like a great way to share links … until it wasn’t. They lock you in and throw away the key.
It’s time to break out.
Thematically, it’s not that different from the back-to-the-land movement people adopted when the industrialization of food and farming, leveraged by the machine of capitalism, created a disconnect between people and food, people and communities. Here’s the Wikipedia definition:
A back-to-the-land movement is any of various agrarian movements across different historical periods. The common thread is a call for people to take up smallholding and to grow food from the land with an emphasis on a greater degree of self-sufficiency, autonomy, and local community than found in a prevailing industrial or postindustrial way of life.
Whatever you want to call it, social media and Big Tech has left us with few options: either buy into their rules or move back to the land, internet style.
Of late, I’ve had thoughts not unlike this one, and my instinct is to find a way to post about on social media, maybe for a like or two. I stop and realize the futility of such a thing. Social media has coached us to think that their platforms are the only means of distribution, visibility, and recognition. It never used to be like this.
They connected us only to use as battery cells, then slowly, over time, began draining us of energy and data. This is no new insight. It’s now on us to find the means to be searchable, to put out good work so people want to check out YOU the way they check a favorite news site for headlines.
I used to skim several websites in the aughts to see if there were new blog articles or updates from my favorite artists. The best figured out how to do email updates for blogs, like Seth Godin does.
Posting to social media feels like an accomplishment. And you might even be rewarded by the slot-machine algorithm just enough to keep you pulling the lever.
I’m done with that. I have a book coming out in a year and — don’t tell anyone — I don’t plan on using social media at all. Unless I’m strong-armed into it, I’ll leverage assets I own, not someone else.
I’m going to plow my own acre with my website. I’m re-wilding this plot with native plants. I’m going to keep publishing my podcast. I might up the frequency of my newsletter. I’m going to pitch work to places in the hopes that it drives people back to my little Internet farm.
