Friday, Feb. 14, 2025
In the thick of major-league procrastination right now to the point that I’m procrastinating on the thing I was using to procrastinate from the BIG thing … procrastination all the way down.
Many of my riffs these days deal with social media and how to earn and maintain traction as a creative person. Substack is a big one for me. I don’t trust Substack. I don’t trust platforms that control the means of distribution, are “free,” and make it too easy to connect and share. Before you know it, you’ve been locked in. Before you know it, you’re getting fed things you never asked for. Before you know it, even your own audience can’t find easily find you.
And what we end up doing is shoveling coal into the social media furnace creating what, exactly?
Frankly, if nobody is going to read my shit, I’d rather it be on my own terms on my own property. And because it’s my property, I’m not at the whims of a landlord.
Ever wonder why when, say, you post something to Instagram and you get 1 or 2 likes or reactions. You close out of the app. You log in 10 minutes later. You see 2 or 3 likes. You log out, then log back in 2 minutes later because you’re sick in the head and you see another 1 or 2 likes, maybe 0, but that doesn’t stop you from checking back 15 minutes later. Are we really led to believe that there isn’t some “faucet” behind the scenes that drips these likes out over time just to keep you on the hook?
Listen, I have no proof, but my feeling is you might get 10 likes in one minute, but behind the scenes those likes get titrated out like an IV drip that way we’re more inclined to keep opening the app time and again.
This is the price of our collective laziness over the past 15 years or so.
There’s only one way out and the off ramp has no signs and if you pull of the freeway, your GPS is trying like hell to recalculate you back to the road. You do things in person. You pass around the clipboard. You pay for a newsletter service. You have to share things with your friends, too. You have to talk things up.
What you can’t do is hand the keys over to another driver and be upset they’re taking a different route than you would have planned, to a place you didn’t want to go.
