I’ve been recovering from a recent bout of digital marketing. I don’t want to go into where or how I got it, just that it’s left me itchy in that way that creative types get because we needed the money. This sounds more venereal than intended, but then, courting a certain virality was part of the gig.
The scratch for this itch? Maybe some old school Internetting. Hmm. Remember when blogs were a thing? Did it. Email newsletters? Clicked “here” to unsubscribe. I’ve been off and on the podcast ride enough to admit it the siren song was really just loving the sound of my own voice all along.
I’m also hastening an end to my tenuous relationship with social media. I ceded my Twitter account to Russian robots months ago and now I’m contemplating further social media decouplings. TikTok? Don’t get it, don’t care. Instagram? I can barely live my own life let alone curate it to look better than yours
I long ago converted my Facebook profile into a “page,” which is the social media equivalent of Kal-El giving up his superpowers in Superman II — sure, you can become mortal but then you can’t really do anything and you can’t get your powers back unless you find that magic glow stick (and that, my friends, was last seen at a SOMA warehouse in the 90s).
Thereafter, Facebook has merely served me as a “distribution vector,” as “infrequent electronic letter”-writer and thinker Craig Mod aptly describes his similar use of social media. Perhaps I’ll hire a Russian bot to post for me rather than going all-in on #deletefacebook, which requires an AI to figure out how to do it anyway.
This is the general thinking: If I’m going to scream into a hole on the Internet, I should own it and my personal data with it. That way, I can more effectively market to myself and turn a vicious circle of posting to ZERO readers into a virtuous cycle of affirming the work of Number Fucking ONE.
Also — I’m just gonna say no to SEO. Now Google can’t find me and stalk me with ads for every search term I’ve ever entered. I recently dropped the E when searching for Moleskine notebooks and have been pursued by blister protection products since.
And no more digital sharecropping for the likes of @Jack and Zuck and probably Putin. I could never muster the algorithmic mojo to viably surface on their platforms anyway. In this infowar, I’m not interested in being a hostage. So, I’m going to tend my own online Victory Garden and make it fertile ground — even if that means it’s only full of my own manure.
