I don’t know really how best to begin, but maybe some background would be helpful. I’ve long felt a growing unease, towards how we as a collective and myself personally have approached our interactions with friends, family and acquaintances around the world. Mediated through an increasingly manipulative and soulless coterie of apps and platforms, with eye-catching trash content constantly luring my attention back to what is really just an ad delivery platform, I felt my social interactions become increasingly thoughtless and, actually, pointless.
Waking up one Sunday morning and finding myself hooked for a couple hours on forgettable, stupid content finally tipped the scales to the point where I deleted nearly every major social media profile just to rid myself of these leech-like algorithms. Here’s the kicker; I forgot to tell anyone on those platforms.
I don’t really think that my comings and goings are that interesting, so it was with genuine surprise that I received quite a few messages along the lines of “Hey! Where’d you go? I liked seeing what you were up to..”. This blog, I guess is a way to fix a few of these issues. It’s a much slower, more thoughtful means of interacting. I can write out how I’m feeling about this, that, and the other without that needling feeling of being too verbose on a dopamine fire hydrant like Instagram.
Similarly, I have always liked the idea of blogging. My own little treasure trove, not to be buried under the suffocating press of the algorithm. I actually have/had a secret blog that I only shared with a couple of people, and which proved to be a very fun exercise in simply Getting The Thoughts Out. So, completely earnestly; please come and read a post once only never to come again! Or check it out on the regular. It doesn’t matter to me, I’m just happy to be here.
There’s also this: I don’t really love the idea of dumping all these photos I’ve taken on to social media apps where they get compressed to shit and flicked away as the viewer moves on to a video of an AI generated Peter Griffin in drag explaining some mundane concept overlaid on top of footage of someone playing video games. It’s nicer to sit with the images, I think. And who knows, once I become less clinically embarrassed by my music production I might share some of that here too.
I think the key point here is friction. A concept that I’ve seen cropping up a lot lately (and which handily ties in with a few of my own personal philosophies) that argues that we need things to be a little difficult to access, use, or deal with in order to care at all. I think of how I used Spotify before I deleted it and returned to my old music collection. I didn’t give a shit. At all. It was all just more background noise while I was actively funding the machine breaking the artists’ backs.
So I guess what I want to say here is firstly, hello again. I have no fixed schedule but will update this site as and when I see fit. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I have enjoyed putting it together.
It is not everything! 