Stop Complaining (part 1)

Artists have never had it so good

Lives in a van. Bimbles with a camera. Often pointing his pixel box at scruff. Has been known to run long distances. Would consider cake as a form of payment.

Recovering.

Welcome back ….

Am I getting wiser, or just older; perhaps a bit of both.

Rather than rushing a response on notes, or cobbling together some half-arsed long form post to be read by 8 people, I decided to step back, finish my beer, and then sleep on it. In fact, since those opening lines quite a few days have passed, and I’m now back behind the keyboard trying to wrestle something out of the jumble of thoughts in my mind.

Over the past month or so I’ve noticed that my timeline on here has started to feel a bit like Groundhog Day, with a lot of posts complaining;

• This platform has changed and not for the better

• Discoverability is waning

• I miss the good old life

Well, I’ve got news for you, or perhaps to coin an old Arnold Schwarzenegger line ..

‘STOP WHINING’

Let’s get into it ….

Oh and I’m pretty sure these thought are going to span a couple of longer form posts, perhaps with a few posing questions at the end. I’d love to hear your feedback.

The Golden Era Is Gone (and it ain’t coming back)

For a decade or so (2010 - 2020) social media platforms were in a race against each other. They wanted users. Lots of users. Their business models depended on growth, and to encourage that growth they rewarded us creators with something that had previously been almost impossible to obtain: free distribution.

The barriers to entry were broken down. Gatekeepers were gone.

A photographer could upload an image and have tens of thousands of people see it without the need for gallery representation. A writer could build an audience without printing presses, editors or distributors. A video creator would upload a video, perhaps several GB in size, without caring not one jot about storage costs, while potentially having thousands (or millions) of views within 24 hours.

And for a while, it made a lot of people very happy (and no doubt a few, very rich).

This was a golden age subsidised by venture capital and a race for user growth.

Now platforms are businesses. They are optimising for themselves, not for us.

Is there anyone out there?

The uncomfortable truth is that many of us built our expectations on a temporary anomaly. A glitch in the matrix perhaps. And now we grieve its loss, and a lot of people are angry.

Although to be clear, we’re not grieving the loss of some ancient god given right. We’re grieving the end of a remarkably generous (small) moment in history; a moment when technology companies subsidised our ability to be discovered because it suited their needs.

We now find ourselves back to the reality that creatives have faced for centuries;

attention is scarce, competition is fierce, and nobody owes us an audience.

So instead of complaining about the collapse of creative opportunities, we instead should come to terms that we have exited an unusually easy chapter in its history.

A few questions;

• Do you feel platforms have become unfair, or have they simply become businesses?

• Have we mistaken free exposure for a permanent entitlement?

• Is our frustration really about losing opportunity, or about losing abundance?

Ah, the Good Old Days - were they really ?

One of the dangers of living through change is that we judge the present against yesterday rather than against long term history. A drop in reach on our social media feed feels catastrophic only because we're comparing it to the years when algorithms showered us with attention. Compare it instead with what creators who came before us faced, and the modern landscape begins to look rather different.

Creativity has been around for around 2 million years.

Perhaps someone shaped a particularly elegant hand axe. Maybe they decorated something. Maybe they danced around a fire, told stories, or mimicked animals to entertain their group. Even among our ancient ancestors, status, recognition and belonging almost certainly mattered. Humans are social creatures. Being valued by the tribe had survival advantages.

The key difference of course was that the social circle was local. Nobody stood outside the cave muttering, “Only twelve people admired my spear today. Last week it was twenty.”

Attention was local, personal and limited.

Now let’s fast forward to a writer in the 1800s. You might spend years perfecting your craft, but your work would only reach people if you could persuade a publisher to take a chance on you. There were no websites, no self-publishing platforms, no newsletters and no direct line to an audience.

The Gatekeepers

A landscape painter might rely on wealthy patrons or exhibitions. A novelist might mail handwritten manuscripts and wait months for a response. A poet could spend an entire lifetime producing beautiful work and die unknown, not because the work lacked quality, but because distribution itself was so limited.

The gatekeepers controlled almost everything.

And how about being a photographer in the mid 1950s. You shoot film. Every frame costs money. You develop transparencies and carefully package them for submission to magazines. Then you post them and wait.

Weeks later a rejection letter arrives, if you’re lucky.

If you wanted an audience, you had to slowly build relationships with editors, galleries and publishers. It took time and lots of effort, along with a generous helping of pure luck.

Success often depended on who you knew and where you happened to live.

And then, in the 1990s came The Internet, but it was a heck of a lot different than what we see today.

We built clunky websites by hand and hoped someone might stumble across them through AltaVista or Yahoo. I can still picture the little graphic of the digger and under construction sign on pretty much every page on my very first website.

Writers joined forums and email lists. Musicians burned CDs and mailed demo tapes. There were no recommendation algorithms, no viral posts and no “publish” button that instantly placed your work in front of thousands.

If you wanted traffic, you earned it slowly.

So, despite the ever-changing algorithms and the frustration they inevitably bring, I still believe there has never been a better time to be a creative. When viewed through the lens of history, the opportunities to create, publish and share our work are nothing short of remarkable.

What has changed isn’t our ability to be discovered, it’s our perception of what discovery looks like. Perhaps we have become entitled?

The ease with which we can distribute our work has quietly distorted our expectations. Somewhere along the way, thousands of readers, viewers or followers became the benchmark, and anything less began to feel like failure and that perhaps is the wrong comparison.

A few questions;

• How many people need to see your work before you feel satisfied?

• Do you take time to have your work noticed by your local community?

• Be honest; if you lived before the dawn of the Internet, given the obstacles to having your work noticed, would you still create?

  • If the answer to the last question is yes, and you also find yourself complaining about the lack of reach today, then perhaps that is the fundamental problem?

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Okay, I think that’s enough for now, but I’d be interested in your feedback. In an upcoming newsletter I’ll continue with my thoughts based around a few key topics;

• Why do we think we are owed attention ?

• Perhaps smaller audiences are healthier ?

• Perhaps creation was never meant to be about scale?

I have a bunch of other thoughts on the topic but I’ll disappear back down into my bunker for a few weeks to try and once again wrestle them into something tangible.

If you have gotten this far then thanks so much for reading.

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Other corners of the inter webs you can find me.

• The X100 Diaries

• My Portfolio

• Bimbles magazine

Thanks so much for allowing me a few moments of your time. I hope you have enjoyed my words and images, and if so a quick share amongst your own community will help spread the word.

And if you really enjoyed it you can even consider throwing a few pennies into the tips jar. It helps most with diesel costs for the van to keep me on the road making images.

Until next time .. Happy Pixels …