III. Why Substack?
In which I root for Substack, and the written word.
I. Have you started a Substack?
If you haven’t, I encourage you to. I have a nagging suspicion that blogging (not vlogging, not Instagram, not TikTok) could fix what has gone wrong with social media, and I have a feeling that reading and writing could help take our minds back, and separate those who think from those who don’t, which is exactly what social media has done: stop us from thinking, and instead, follow, follow, follow.
Writing is a unique imprint of a person’s interior, which is ultimately what we try to reach with “social”, with connecting to others. So why not vlogging, or Instagram, or TikTok? I’m glad you asked.
What these other forms of social media share in common is that they all involve a camera. As a photographer and filmmaker, my work includes the study of this relatively new invention1, which I have done intensively for more than a decade. Over the years, I have developed an appreciation for this peculiar tool, and its power both on the human psyche, and consequently, our behaviour.
In short, a camera is capable of stopping time. Time is really the only thing mankind is up against, because every man and woman who is born will die, and death is the cessation of time. Human beings make sense of our lives as stories, played out in existence over time.
What this means is that a camera possesses both the power to immortalise, and the power to destroy. It is how Michael Jackson, the “King of Pop”, became like a god, whose influence can still be felt across the world, 15 years after his tragic passing. We may never have met him, but look — there he is, moonwalking in our minds for all of eternity.
When a camera is directed towards a person, it takes a very special individual to make the camera disappear, and an even rarer talent to pretend it isn’t there. We call these anomalies “directors”, “photographers”, “professional actors”, and “performers”. Those at the top of the game are paid huge sums of money to do what they do, because they are, in fact, ahead of the evolutionary curve. Good acting is the successful performance of natural behaviour under unnatural circumstances; an extraordinary ability, not to be taken lightly.
Acting for the camera is difficult, because the individual is subconsciously aware that what is being captured is, in some sense, “forever”. This causes the mind to become overloaded with a whole host of completely unnatural, impossible questions: who am I? how do I behave? how should I behave to reflect the “who am I”? or should I reflect who I actually am? how would I like to be represented and perceived? why? to who exactly? the person behind the camera? or the people who will see it later? where will the image be shown? so on, and so forth. To further complicate things, today the person behind the camera is often also themselves.
I am of the opinion that human beings have not evolved to handle such massive abstractions in rapid succession, within a limited timeframe, on demand. This is why despite the sheer number of people appearing on our screens each day, it is still monumental when an actor of rare talent, a “star”, pops up out of nowhere and dazzles us on screen.
Acting for an audience, real or imaginary, is a tremendous talent which may come naturally to some, but the subtle intelligence required to do it well cannot be commended enough. It is both very rare and very difficult to nurture, much less sustain.
The world was a far more authentic and sincere place before Facebook redefined social media, and suddenly bad actors started popping up all around us, urged on and encouraged by an invisible audience “online”, wherever that may be. It is important to note that Facebook began as Facemash, an online platform built by an on-the-spectrum computer nerd to rank hot women in university based on how they look. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but why did we trust the social development of the world in the hands of a socially awkward, autistic teenager who wanted nothing more than to literally score women on the internet?
It’s no surprise then that society is in the shape it is today. The world we live in is more superficial than ever, more socially awkward and disconnected, despite the abundance of digital tools built to connect people, because the person who set precedence for how we interact socially could not be more ill-suited for the job.
Even as Facemash was abandoned and repurposed, the seed from which it grew can still be felt in all of Meta’s products and social media at large, whose branches now penetrate every level of society, into all aspects of our lives.
When a camera is introduced into this equation, the panopticon effect2 is brought to a whole new level. "Big Brother” is no longer just watching. He sculpts, moulds, and shapes your every behaviour by exploiting your inherent vanities, resulting in every act becoming a pseudo-performance of how we think we “ought” to behave.
This works because the human mind is impressionable to a fault. This is why every influencer ends up looking exactly the same. Social media has conditioned us for so long to commodify ourselves, and as a result we optimise our appearance for profit, whether in social or financial value. This in turn breeds the vanity responsible for the epidemic of narcissism we’ve observed in the past decade.
This is important. We seem to have forgotten that the world was not always like this. Our image hardly reflects the multi-faceted nature of who we are. We know this, yes, but to rise above it is quite something else.
II. Do you remember Blogspot?
I do. I remember that the internet was a safer space. It was a platform on which we shared what was really going on in our lives, the things which were maybe too difficult, too private, or inconvenient to share in real life. We may then, on the right occasion and at an opportune time, get on a phone call, or a conversation face to face.
Blogspot normalised sharing our more private thoughts. It utilised the internet in a way which was protective rather than destructive, creating a generation emotionally intelligent enough to understand the distinction between the internet and reality, and to respect those boundaries, because one day, it might protect you too.
Facebook and Instagram changed all of this. The idea now is to dissolve those boundaries, to capture as much of your life offline as possible, and make it indistinguishable from the one online. As a result, entire industries now orientate the architecture of tangible spaces towards how they would be appear as intangible blocks of code, in a bid to attract digital avatars, who are brought to these spaces by the people playing them, to reenact the illusion of a “lifestyle” which doesn’t really exist, because it was manufactured for the gram.
These radical changes in human behaviour effectively boil down to this: unlike Blogspot, Facemash was a weaponisation of the internet (say Facemash slowly). It encouraged the pettiness of attaching numbers over the heads of people, and soon society was dumbed down, preoccupied with hacking reality and behaviour to increase this value, creating a culture which is toxic, artificial, and ultimately destructive, because it does not serve who we are, but the “brand” the avatar is associated with.
If we serve the avatar, and if the avatar serves social media, then who is there to serve ourselves? It is important to note that these numbers are completely meaningless today, because an entire industry serves to inflate them artificially.
The mental health crisis born out of social media is well-documented, and still being studied and analysed today. Depression and anxiety disorders are often attributed to the inability to be authentically ourselves, presumably from the unconscious self-abandonment which occurs as the avatar takes precedence over the self. Since Facebook set the tone for social media, being authentically yourself became the worst thing to do.
This was not always the case, and no accident, but a calculated, long-term, ongoing project of structuring the internet, which began long before TikTok was created to intentionally reduce the attention span of children even further. But why?
The indoctrination and conditioning of an entire generation insures the longevity of the ruling establishment. No revolution can be achieved overnight, and nothing truly worthy of being accomplished can be done without long-sightedness and mental fortitude; break down the mental will of children today, and the adults of tomorrow will be easier to control. Try getting a kid to read Don Quixote. If you can’t read Don Quixote, how could you possibly write it? And if you can’t write Don Quixote, how could you possibly write the narratives which shape reality?
In the days when blogging was social media de facto, our minds were freer, more engaged, and not subjected to the influence of highly sophisticated algorithms, bombarding our minds incessantly with divisive, subliminal messages, cleverly buried in advertising and content, then packaged and sold as seemingly innocent, mindless entertainment.
Every day, our minds are being shaped by covert programs we aren’t even aware exist, and without our consent, simply from being online. One could argue that without these mechanisms, it is Mother Nature who regulates and decides the order of society, and my instinct tells me it would not be the order we have today. This is why decentralisation is so important, which I have written about and will share in the coming weeks.
Nothing that is integrated into mainstream culture and permitted on a global scale is random or “natural”, regardless of what we are told. The current market model of social media amplifies the voice of retards, who influence more retards, altogether becoming a giant mass of retards, who are then marched to the gas chambers, simply from being told it is good for them. The same people are the ones who believe what they see when a reality TV star and a man struggling with dementia compete to lead the most powerful country in the world on TV.
There aren’t many platforms left on the internet which provide a community of intelligent and thoughtful writers, who altogether honour writing the way Substack does. We know that mainstream media really only tells us multiple versions of the same narrative. Substack’s model opens up the dialogue, allowing readers to engage directly with independent writers, who have broader perspectives, because the work doesn’t require the approval of the mainstream media oligarchy3.
Read this by Hamish McKenzie, the co-founder of Substack, for why I think Substack gets it right, then this by River Selby (“A note: this post contains content that may be triggering, particularly relating to suicide loss”) for the level of authenticity this community somehow inspires, and the vulnerability it accommodates.
Writing cuts through the noise. It exposes the people behind the avatars, and reveals the content in their minds, which works well for the authentic, and badly for the rampant, fake mess of the world. If you can’t write, check if you first have anything worthy to say. If you don’t, then well.
The first camera was invented in 1816 by French inventor Nicephore Niepce.
The panopticon is a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control, originated by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single corrections officer, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched.
“These 6 Corporations Control 90% Of The Media In America”, https://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6