All My Friends Are Make Believe
I said this at work today and broke the chat:
“I don’t trust algorithms not to be influenced by advertising dollars and just serve me whatever someone wants to sell me, rather than something I find more organically by myself.”
The chat went silent. No one said anything until 10 minutes later when a coworker interjected something work related. Another 5 minutes passed in silence, until finally someone posted a photo of their dog and suddenly the chat was lively again with talk about pets.
I put a dead stop to what had been a lively and fully interactive conversation with multiple coworkers about celebrity gossip, entertainment news, and algorithms, instead of it being the beginning what I thought was a much more interesting, brand new one.
This kinda thing happens to me A LOT. Like, a lot, a lot. Both in groups and just one on one with people. Both in chat and in person. I say something and get silence back, the conversation dies instantly. And it makes me think I’m different from most of the people I’ve ever tried to talk to and always will be no matter how hard I try to fit in. No matter the dynamic of the group, I feel like I will always be the weird “other”.
Sometimes it’s very lonely being me.
No one usually wants to or is capable of talking about the things I’m interested in, an expert on, or the things I think about most often, Or at least I find it’s very rare in my RL, and increasingly rare in my online life as everyone’s surrendered to the walled, savage gardens of social media and algorithms.
Most people I try to have conversations or connect with either have no opinions on topics involving the internet or technology, they’ve never given them any thought, and they’re not interested in waxing poetic about any of it, past, present or future. It’s “too techie” for most of them, which I find so disheartening in the search for RL friends.
Technology, art, where they meet and their evolutions shape our entire world! Why does no one else I meet find this beautiful, inspiring, and interesting?
I miss having these kinds of conversations with Steph the Geek and my old friend Kevin, the latter of whom was the webmaster of CamwhoresDotCom, a kind-hearted technological genius, and probably still is The Final Boss Of The Internet. 🥺
Just not being relatable is one of the main reasons it’s difficult for me to have RL friends or even smooth conversations with potential friends. I always say something weird or unexpected, or talk about things in my life that no one else has experienced, or I’ll drop facts about niche interests no one in the room has ever thought about. The other people/persons don’t know how to respond or engage with me, so even in person, to my face, I often get ghosted in conversations.
I’ve never had a friend who also makes art for example, like someone IRL who wants to talk about the different properties and challenges of using watercolours, or what to do with Inktense pencils, or what a finicky pain in the ass resin is (even though it looks cool).
I’ve never collaborated on pretty much anything creative in my entire life, which might have been why I loved doing photo shoots so much a few years ago. It’s 100% energy exchange and collaboration with another person, to create something new, unique and beautiful. That is my jam!
But the thing I found with photography in the kink community, which was really disappointing, is that everyone only acts like your friend or engages with you as long as they think you might do them a service, and that feels shitty.
I’ve read that this goes for Tops and Dom/mes who regularly play with people they’re not close to at clubs too. Eventually you start to feel used or that people are being fake or kissing your ass to get you to do the thing they want. You as a person hold no value, just your skill and how you can make them feel or be perceived in the moment.
Because of this, I stopped feeling inspired to shoot people at all. It was so much labour and I didn’t feel the energy exchange or benefit would be fair to me with pretty much anyone who wanted to shoot with me. It never won me any friends.
I’m now “Facebook friends” at best, with almost everyone I shot and I can’t remember the last time any of them engaged with me on Facebook OR Fet.
I was primarily doing photo shoots to build my portfolio and gain experience, which I did, so mission accomplished, but I kinda thought I was making friends and “fitting in” along the way. In the end, it turns out I did not. 😞
The thing is, I don’t need any more “internet friends”, I have plenty of those. I spent 20 years in this house pretty much talking to them only. There are certain ones I’m really fond of and enjoy engaging with, but none of them can pick me up from the hospital or come over and make crafts if it’s been a bad week for mental health.
So many of my internet friends and people on Fet are trying to become or acting like some type of influencer now, it’s really fucking annoying to me.
I’ve noticed a lot of people have completely changed the way they post on social media in the last few years to be more authoritative, performative or more impressive, like for an audience. I also know many people who had locked down Instagram accounts and only posted for their friends and family, who suddenly opened up or started niche accounts and are now using hashtags for reach. A complete 180°.
It’s the new “American Dream” – except it’s global – in that everyone and their pet starts off on any given platform with an equal opportunity to go viral, gain a large following of people who aspire to be you, be your friend, or have what you have, get brand deals, and live an “easy”, luxurious life getting validation from strangers and scrolling social media from bed all day. (James Charles, I’m looking at you buddy. 🫵😂)
It all seems so desperate to me, like everyone grabbed a mic and jumped into the same mad river, only to be drowned out by the noise of the current.
Why are we all doing this? Why is everyone suddenly so obsessed with being seen as “cool on the internet” and getting validation from strangers? That’s literally why Elon Musk bought Twitter!
No one can do anything just to do it or because it’s fun anymore, there has to be photos and a social media post, or it’s “wasted content”, as if the experience itself counted for nothing or wasn’t enough.
Does that mean people don’t appreciate things as much “in the moment” as they used to before social media? Or does it mean that they appreciate them more now because they wax poetic about it after the fact on social media? 🤔
I think it’s the former when so much is done now specifically to make a “good” social media post about it, to be blessed by the algorithm and get engagement and validation from strangers.
I keep saying “validation from strangers” for two reasons:
- If we only cared about being validated by the people we know and love, the posts wouldn’t be public.
- My former husband tried drilling into me for decades how unhealthy and fucked up seeking validation, approval and attention from strangers is.
And I’m not saying I’m any better than anyone else, I was seeking validation from strangers on the internet long before social media existed, but unlike everyone else these days, I’ve always feared going viral the way some people fear cancer. I can’t think of anything worse that isn’t physical, tbh.
Name ONE human person who went viral and came out on top in the end.
I’d wait, but we’d be here for a while because I’m pretty sure you literally can’t.
At best, people who go viral return to mediocrity and obscurity in the end, a footnote in their towns, not much richer or better for it, if at all. But they’ll never be famous for anything else or do anything noteworthy ever again. That was it.
At worst they become a punchline and shunned by society for decades for even trying to reach the sun and/or spend the rest of their lives trying to make lightning strike twice. That’s hard.
I’m positive that going viral and gaining a million followers is a rush in the moment and it seems like a good, fun thing at first, you probably can’t believe your luck! The algorithm blessed you!
So you try to ride the wave for a while, but that wave always crashes out eventually, often with devastating, life ruining results.
Like…300 vicious YouTube commentary videos piling on about what a terrible person you are and how you didn’t deserve your sponsorships or your moment of attention, let alone one second more, using clips and screenshots from your social media accounts taken out of context because the worse the YouTuber can make the influencer or content creator look, the more views and engagement they get.
There is no end to “out of touch influencer” commentary videos on YouTube, just as there’s no shortage of “out of touch” or rage baiting influencers on Instagram and TikTok.
It’s a social media cycle or system that constantly feeds itself and those videos keep people in a state of “being upset” with 0 risk of causing themselves actual harm, which is an exhilarating place to be for a lot of people, like watching a horror movie.
“Going viral”, “breaking containment”, or having a million followers is just Andy Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame” prediction come true.
“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”
– Andy Warhol, Stockholm 1968
Even the biggest influencers and content creators we know right now, with millions of followers on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube – any given social media platform – their fame is temporary because most of the content they create is given away for free, not properly archived or searchable to be evergreen content, disposable, fast & easy to make and digest junk food for people’s brains to consume for three minutes.
Not to actually think about, but consume because we’re usually scrolling social media to avoid thinking, and usually we immediately forget and dismiss what we just saw on social media seconds after we scroll to the next thing. So, it might as well have been consumed into nothing, like newspaper burning up in a fire or a cookie disappearing from a plate. It’s just not accessible to our brains anymore because we subconsciously filed it away as trivial, so it might as well not exist in there at all.
Unless we see the content again and remember we saw it before, unless it’s particularly shocking, or unless it deeply affects or happened to someone we know and care about, we probably won’t recall the majority of the things we see on social media years after we see them, if ever again.
I can’t even tell you how many clever life hacks I’ve seen on social media over the years, thought “that’s genius! I need to remember that!” then immediately forgot. 🤦🏼♀️
For the past couple of years, I’ve been telling everyone to follow me on YouTube because I enjoy recording and making videos and wanted to start making vlogs. There’s no point in doing this if I only share them with a few people privately, so putting them on YouTube seemed like the thing to do.
Before making my first video above, I watched a LOT of YouTube to study several different niches and formulas for making videos within those niches. Like, maybe 3000 hours over a two year span.
My video didn’t turn out perfectly because it was my first time recording and editing myself talking and I didn’t have all the “right” raw footage, but I nailed the formula I was emulating.
I also watched a TONNE of “how to be an influencer and content creator” and “influencers gone bad” videos mostly to study what to do and what not to do if I decided to pursue building a video following on any platform, but also because camgirls pioneered ALL OF THIS – we influenced influencer culture, god help us!
As much as I’m annoyed and disappointed by everyone I know and their pet all performing for engagement and clout on social media platforms, I do find the whole thing sort of fascinating, but also a bit baffling, and a lot overwhelming.
The influencer and content creation industries – both mainstream and NSFW – are now massive, global, fast-paced, complex, and have a lot of moving parts on many different layers.
There was a time when camgirls, or what we’d call influencers today, could only get compensated in books, CDs, and DVDs sent from Amazon wishlists for their efforts creating content, entertainment and value on the internet.
Now it’s pretty common for even self-described “micro influencers” to go on lavish brand trips, get paid thousands of real dollars deposited directly into their bank accounts to make sponsored posts, and have agents working for them to find those juicy brand deals in the first place.
I was shocked about five years ago when I learned that a friend’s husband was a producer for a (I think) gaming YouTube channel, that it was his full-time job, and that the channel made enough money from ads and sponsorships to employ a whole team of people, also full-time, like a real television production.
The last time I paid attention to YouTube before that, YouTubers were still 20 year olds making goofy videos by themselves in their bedrooms and backyards. It was just the beginning of Jake and Logan Paul, and kids living in “content houses”. YouTubers were barely connected, organized or collaborating yet, let alone hiring full teams of talent, agents, producers, editors, writers, social media managers, content schedulers, camera operators, stylists, hair & makeup artists!
What the actual fuck, y’all?! When did the internet get so professional?! Who gave it all this money?! (Oh wait, we did, by giving advertisers our eyeballs and all our data…)
I was further shocked a few months ago when a lifestyle YouTuber I follow/study, casually dropped in a vlog that she works with an editor she pays to make her 20 minute videos. That she just lives her life and shoots raw footage, then sends it all to an editor with the approximate vibe and message she’s going for to be distilled into something quirky and entertaining.
If she didn’t casually make that offhanded confession recently, I never would have known and would have continued to assume that she’s just naturally this delightful and is really efficient at editing her own quirkiness and personality into her videos to release one every 2 weeks.
Instead, someone else used their quirkiness, personality and skill to edit her that way every 2 weeks as their job, and now it’s become her brand, so she plays it all up in her more recent videos compared to older ones…which is the same as Hollywood, as the television and movie industries.
I watch YouTube because it seems more genuine and authentic, less polished and fake, and not trying as hard as Hollywood to sell you something. The content seemed more trustworthy because biases were more blatant. Ads were more traditional to the ones on TV we were all wise to and sponsorships were more obvious, if only because regular people who aren’t Hollywood actors kinda suck at selling you things and most of them sound like the announcer on “The Price Is Right” when they try.
For the most part, it felt to me like being advertised or sold to on YouTube was largely optional because it was so easily identifiable and thus, disregarded.
Advertising in the modern era is nothing but manipulation to engage in overconsumption, which every single one of us is susceptible to and we’re so inundated with it we’re mostly defenceless. Learning to identify and ignore it, I think, has long been key to staying happy (or at least sane), saving the planet, and not going broke before you’re ready to retire.
I can smell an ad or sponsorship pretty quickly no matter how small or non-existent the disclaimer, I did go to college for advertising after all. I just wish I was better at the ignoring part of my own advice, and less compulsive. 😅
I hear the phrase “protect your peace” get thrown around a lot lately, which I’ve been preaching for-fucking-ever but no one seemed to get it until now, and which brings me back to the beginning of this post, where I said:
“I don’t trust algorithms not to be influenced by advertising dollars and just serve me whatever someone wants to sell me, rather than something I find more organically by myself.”
I have always lived in a carefully curated bubble where the flow of osmosis out of the bubble is massive (the content/art/entertainment/products I produce), but the flow of osmosis into the bubble (art/entertainment/food/culture/things other people produce or consume) is just a few trickles.
It’s 100% intentional ignorance, but not wilful ignorance.
I don’t do this to piss anyone off, to rebel, to keep myself dumb or numb, to be weird or different or superior. I do it because of my mother.
Growing up, my mother was, and probably still is, more interested in seeing what I naturally choose to do and create myself, with no interference, than to help, teach, or guide me in any way. Because it was important to my mother that artistically I have no outside influences, including her own, and that I express myself honestly, from within, it just became a part of my creative process and who I am.
For example, I was raised to be an artist, but I knew next to nothing about art history, or kinds of art, or art movements, or famous artists until after I’d developed my own style, just as my mother intended. I’d never even been to a real art gallery until I was 40!
So in a world of overconsumption, on an internet with infinite entertaining “disposable” content, on platforms all vying for my attention in order to manipulate me into liking and buying what they’re getting paid to show me…why on Earth should I pay attention to any of it?
The algorithms are all – 100% of them – primarily pushing content to us that companies are paying them to put in front of us. That content has a higher priority to them than showing you a funny cat video, even if all you’re there to see is funny cat videos. The content that pays the most, or keeps you on the app and watching ads longer, has higher priority than free content that might be more relevant to your interests.
So when it comes to music, how do I know that Spotify is recommending a band because it’s legitimately the #1 thing on the platform or in the world that I would like the most, or if it’s because that band’s label paid Spotify a bunch of money to put them in front of me, and the real best band for me did not and I never hear them because of it?
There’s no way every band on Spotify has the same shot of going viral when they join the platform. The algorithm and thus, the odds are stacked in favour of the bands that pay to play! The band with the most money behind them is not necessarily the next groundbreaking thing, and I’m rarely interested in things that get really popular or more of the same for very long, which is all the algorithms know how to serve!
So, that’s what I was talking about when I broke my work chat today and this post is exactly why I have so few people I call friends. No one in my real life could have had this conversation with me, so I had to have it with the internet and myself.
It is now 5am and I’ve been writing this for 12 hours, so I think I need to go to bed. 😴💤
