...somewhere else...
…on dreams, wishes and infatuations for a more social social media…
The following essay is a pretty ranty rant about thoughts and ideas I have been having around “social media” for a while now (forever). I meant to publish this last year when an online writing cohort called Write of Passage quit barely employing me. The idea then was “what if we took that product and made it a social media platform”? A year later and I think what I wanted all along is a little different than that.
I want a human populated anti-dopamine engagement-centric social media alternative. Something that mimics communities we belong to in real life. When I say engagement I don’t mean the way you see in a scroll or feed. We need to be nourished, not fed. We need semantic scrolls (shared topics and insights) and quality feeds (slop-be-gone).
Below is my pitch. I used muppet photos for this issue because I feel like a puppet from a bygone era. Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments, good or bad, happy or rad.
“We all need people who will give us feedback. That's how we improve.”
-Bill Gates-
The closest I ever got to experiencing the type of online space that I want to be in was through a writing cohort called Write of Passage. When I brought my muse to that program I was gifted with eyeballs in return. I got to have the millionaire mind behind a finance app tell me what was wrong with my squirrel wizard story1. I had an architect share with me their thoughts on my rantings about clouds that talked to me2. A CEO of a sustainable food start-up got to hear me yak on how to use rubbing alcohol to cure jock itch in an essay about why pickle flavored ice cream is an under-developed market3.
By forcing engagement as a function to the product, Write of Passage did something no other online space I have been to does. It created growth. Personal growth. Mental growth. Community growth. Potential growth.
With no guarantee of feedback or engagement you might only continue to see yourself as a reflection in a mirror. And if you have ever stared at yourself in the mirror before, then what comes next might resonate.
Oh look, a pimple.
My eyebrows are too eyebrowwy.
Does my neck really look like a beagle eating a ham sandwich?
Why is my hair so hairy?
I want go to an online salon (in the classical absinthe & cigarette smoke filled sense), not an online salon (in the classical big bangs & mousse sense). I mean, why obsess over our own hair, when we can better obsess over the hair of everyone else (wait this sounds exactly like social media - *takes off pigtails*). I want to be a monkey picking bugs off backs. Getting bugs picked in return.
Where is the media that caters to creative and professional artistic development? A platform that feels like a whiteboard or an online writer’s room. I want a maker’s space where we create in community.
^^^^^^ I know this about myself ^^^^^^
This is partly why I host two feedback gyms a week (FREE, at 9AM PDT and open - if you want to join just DM me). I specifically like learning from the ideas of others. Through interaction, assistance, discussion and collaboration.
Lately this place where I write (substack), this tool I use to share and be shared by others, is not feeling like where I want to be. The pain has returned. The general blecch and meh. Here has become (as the kids maybe still say) the ick.
“Distracted from distraction by distraction”
-T. S. Eliot (ostensibly remarking on social media)-
“I feel lonely. Like noise. Interactions imitate artificially. It feels like a crowd of people talking to themselves in front of each other. A TedTalks where everyone has a mic and no one listens.”
These were a handful of the fifty different complaints I made to my friend right before I quit Facebook in 2007. She had prompted me with an inquiry that cut right to the point of my issues.
If social media makes you feel that way, what are you doing on it?
I quit all my social media the next day. I felt amazing. It was like a pile of bricks had been lifted off my crumpled sock puppet form.
Seventeen years later and here I am again.
I have been writing on Substack for the past three years and every update it gets noisier and more obnoxious. It has a “notes” feed that mimics the lonely shouting into a racist cave functionality of twitter (only with more self-righteous butt-huffing). It added video functionality, so that everyone who fails on tiktok can come fail on this app instead. It paid millions of dollars to bring in “LEGACY MEDIA” creators and lockdown a $100M series C investment from Rich Paul and Andreessen Horowitz. I can’t wait to read LeBron James' first essay about how Luka Doncic bounce passes are a reflection of Plato’s Theory of The Cave (and crypto).
I started using Substack for the promise of meeting “my people” online. But as I look at the landscape of social media, and the continual push for all software in this space to become the exact same thing, I wonder if there is a space and a need for something else.
Many of you are indeed “my people”, and me “yours”. But my people, our people, us people, this is feeling more like MySpace than OurSpace. It is giving me GrrrrFace.
Grrrr.
***MEME BREAK***
“I always try to do my best to inspire people to be good and do the right thing.”
-Kylie Jenner-
Words I might use to describe social media are cesspool, a dragon’s thorn-covered dickhole, the pimpled assy end of Shart Street, or with heartfelt sincerity, “Black Eyed Peas Cover Band”. Creativity on social media is about as useful as pissing into my own mouth. I might get warm amusement from the action, but inevitably it ends in lip lesions (poses for a selfie).
Some people succeed in these spaces. They love telling me in ten words how James Clear helps them tell people things in ten words. But to me it feels like using a void to fill our voids with even more void.
Dope is better than dopamine and none of these social media services are getting me high.
It is not just a substack problem. Linkedin is where I go to watch people become ads of sad dads. Twitter is a racist forest where trees hate bushes and edge lords pray to their dongs. TikTok feels like giving cocaine to angry babies and watching them play frogger on silent. Facebook should be called “steal your face” book, because that is what they are doing with your photos, writing, and videos. How meta to train an A.I. to replace our family and friends with facebook branded family and friends.
When your grandma becomes a smart watch don’t say I didn't warn you.
And here comes the HERE.
Substack oh Substack, you crush-soda-colored tin-can-telephone echo-chamber (echo-chamber). According to the increasingly orange-pilled populace of the app, Substack is DIFFERENT. Sure it is. Like Pepsi is to Coke, a Marlboro Red to a Lucky Strike, or demon piss to dragon piss.
With the addition of A.I. creators and tools polluting the app (with founder & investor approval) Substack is quickly becoming like everywhere else on the internet. It’s final form will be a Black Eyed Peas cover band cover band (fronted by an A.I. generated version of the “everything is fine dog” voiced by Ted Gioia).
“You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.”
-Ayn Rand-
**MANBABY BREAK**
THE GOOD (what I want) & THE BAD (what I got) of SOCIAL MEDIA (substack)
Here is what I get on social media.
Anti-social content creation in a vacuum (it sucks) with no incentive to comment on the creative work of others beyond a tap on the nuts. The apps are dopamine pilled, built to be addictive rather than stimulating, meant to keep me swiping (my ass). It is an A.I. content hellscape, every other creator is a bot, or a “creator”, avatar-starring in a self-delusional act of robot cosplay (one night only *ME* starring ME-gpt) The data is delivered in a black box (just like a plane crash) and the algorithm is transparent like a buried and blindfolded brick wall. Those who know where that info is (next to jimmy hoffa) sell YOU™ and meanwhile just getting paid a penny requires guilt tripping friends and family or paywalling our feet photos (check mine out over at FooteStack™).
Social media feels like a dragon pissing into my mouth at a Black Eyed Peas cover band cover band cover band concert. Can we build a different stage down the street?
Here is what I want on social media.
If you want feedback you give feedback. Publish credits tied to engagement credits. Consume to create. Create to consume. No like buttons. No emojis unless it is all of them (alongside an emoji creation tool). Everything is built for conversation/comments/discussion. Respect mindspace. Only one notification allowed a day, delivered as a digest of all activity you might want to respond or engage with. Only one post allowed per day (or week?).
The goal is to be productive and assistive on the app. Gaining an audience is a function of quality and participation, not a game to play. Build for human creativity, cooperation and community. A.I. content blockers (you can make auto-content everywhere else if that really floats your notes). Democratic product roadmap (the users create feature prioritization). On the blockchain, users own their content, and benefit from the performance and the growth of the product. Data and algorithm controls (see what you want, and control who else can see or use that info). It also needs a super top secret application subsection for Yanni and Carrot Top memes.
“We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community...Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own.”
-Cesar Chavez-
I want real neighbors.
It’s national night out tonight and on streets across this nation (I pronounce it ooosa) people that barely know each other are playing street games and barbecuing, the only function of force being their proximity. I met a 72 year old retired hippy who spent a full sunsetting hour telling me why Clinton’s relationship to Jeffrey Epstein was more forgivable than Trump’s. Now granted there are about 6509 Substack articles that say the exact same thing, but none of them gave me the pleasure of comparing purple American two party politics to dressing in Hulk Hogan drag and masturbating to an A.I. Hulk Hogan (coming soon to a palm pilot near you...R.I.P. brothers…).
Until we fight power it might molest us.
So down on the mat, count to three before I tap out, what the #!$*& am I going to do about it (besides rant, whine and make pee-pissy-piss-piss jokes)?
I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe I make the alternative. Would it be ironic to use A.I. to do so (or just more depressing)? Folks with no skills are building more and more these days. Something is going to lead somewhere (or nowhere fast). I feel like I need to get to that somewhere. Possibly even build my way there.
Or maybe all I was ever meant to do was rant and play in a Black Eyed Peas cover band cover band cover band cover band cover band (puts on a diaper, grabs a bottle of dragon piss, *gulp*).
Boom boom pow, I got a feeling.4
“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”
-Mahatma Gandhi-
**THE GURU TYE DYE CHI**
*editor’s note*
Seems like a good time to name check a few people who are already creating products that abet and abut alongside some of the wants I mentioned in this article. The world is becoming more makerful.
who manages a community around focus and writing at his app https://www.thesukha.co/ who just launched an A.I. feedback app athttps://www.feedbackfreak.com/
who manages a communication community athttps://www.writehearted.com/
& Dan Sleeman who are launching a new cohort for creators athttps://www.act-two.academy/
who is releasing an essay editing app and a book about Essay Architecture who is launching a “Build an App in 90 Minutes” cohortApologies to all the pissing dragons referenced in this article, dragon pee isn’t really all that bad (*gulp*)…the Black Eyed Peas are terrible though, no excuses at all. Also a cheers to the fine folks at Substack who if nothing else allow speech free enough that I can roast and criticize their product while using it to do what I do. Maybe it isn’t as bad as I make it out to be (it isn’t).
Thanks to
, , Samantha “I Owe You A Professional Endorsement” Law, , , and all the other rad folks who have talked to me about this sometime or another. If your name isn’t here it doesn’t mean that you aren’t. See you all somewhere. Or maybe somewhere else?FOOTENOTES
If you made it here, you are correct, this doesn’t exist, yet…
Other related app ideas — ONE (aka an app where you can only make one post ever — if you could only ever post one thing online, what would it be?) || PENPAL (your writing connects to one random user, they add/respond, it moves on like a chain letter, once it makes it around the world (10+ users) you get final edit and it posts, rinse and repeat) || YANNI (encouragement from the one and only Yanni recorded live from the Acropolis)
I read this at my desk at work and I've been reflecting on it a lot today. It is such a shame, I do feel super frustrated with this app and the internet and culture in general. I try really hard to keep up with a few folks here, read closely, and contribute to the kind of environment I wanna be apart of. But damn!! it's very frustrating to wade through all the bullshit.
I'm going to have to drop into one of your feedback gyms sometime. I'm thinking things should slow down in the winter sometime so I can do that. I could use some real time writing companionship for sure!
Hey, I’m one of your Pepe’s!
Excellent essay. I especially like the idea of no like buttons. They are not helpful. If you like, then comment. Your words are your engagement and your “like.”