everything that makes life worth living is off these platforms and outside these systems
I am planning to leave meta by 2028 and i hope this Substack will be sustainable by than so i can continue building the solar punk future in real life without relaying on the slot machine of attention that is meta and Tiktok to generate funding. Eventually i will leave Substack as well but at least here i can take you with me elswhere. i am planning this move because everything that makes life worth living is off these platforms and i want you to do the same.
writing brings me joy, words and speech are my art form and i do with them absolute magic. i synthesize complex ideas, thinkers that i am inspired by, observations from the biosphere and the sensations of my body into living structures that shape people’s lives. i love this. i love that i get to do this. what does not bring me any joy whatsoever and in fact fills me with dread most of the time is how under capitalism and inside these social media platforms my art is constantly being measured against engagement. very consistently, my best work, my most precious ideas, my most beautiful prosaic writings get the least amount of appreciation. not because people don’t like them but because algorithms are literally designed for the sole purpose of showing you the most mediocre stuff, the most oversimplified, that which requires the least amount of work from you and therefore offers you nothing worth living.
the algorithm isn’t evil, nor are the people who designed it, and neither is your taste. it is the very nature of the setup that makes it so. you see, what makes life worth living is everything that is impossible to measure or calculate, our economic and social systems are built on exactly everything else.
what does makes life worth living? touch, sensation, being moved by a work of art, the smell of petrichor after the rain, a sunset, any sunset anywhere, witnessing and listening to birds, engaging with difficult philosophical work until you get it, thinking deeply, expressing your pain in art, dance, celebrating life with friends into the small hours of the morning, feeling loved, feeling capable, building cool shit. alof of things make life worth living, none of which is possible to quantify.
the sensations of a tree, hugging it, sitting under it, laying under it and watching the fragments of sun rays penetrate trough its canopy, the smells, the sound of birds attracted to it, the feelings, the intensities. and these are all just being a human next to it, now amplify it to infinity for all the life forms it supports. for Capitalism a tree is the value it can be sold for. that’s it. it simply is incapable of calculating anything else, at best some ad executives (which by nothing but a crime they are called “creatives”) will try and emulate these sensations on a billboard to sell something no one defenetly does not need..
what makes life worth living is the last front that Capitalism hasn’t been able to conquer and i think that if it could, it would have calculate the realm of sensation and put it on the stock market a long time ago. but it can’t. Capitalism is mindbogglingly excellent at taking everything Real, quantifying it into its Capital value, abstracting it into financial markets. It takes real labor power, libido, the life force of humans and turn it into “work” and humans into “workers.” it takes love, intimacy, friendship, relationship of kinship, strip it of everything that makes it what it is, keep the simulation only, the image that can be commodified and consumed as if it is the real thing.
the smell of petrichor is not a perfume, real intimacy is the model with Botoxed lips on the billboard selling you the idea that you will be worthy of her touch once you buy this product, even the Capitalist on the other side of the purchase is trained to think that another billion is what will finally secure his sit in the realm of the happy just to discover it did no such thing and the race to the bottom goes on.
but i digress i little. where was i? oh right? the lifelessness of these platforms we are all on.
i think that the worst thing that has ever happened to art is the ability to put it immediately in front of strangers on the interment. and i am saying this fully aware of the irony on the fact that here i am writing here on Substack.
algorithms like the systemic structures they are part of are incapable of measuring anything that makes life worth living and since they are currently responsible for what content we are seeing for a lot more of the time than we would like to admit; we end up engaging with nothing that makes life worth living. it is both maddeningly stupid and a testament to how the setup is training us to be unthinking animals that some people still think an intelligence can emerge from code, we could have the most advanced LLM, it will still only ever be able to access everything that does not make life worth living.
these algorithms worked so incredibly well for me when i was building a business around sexual education for men. i gained half a million followers on Tiktok in a year and was making really good money by being the good little bitch of the algorithm, pumping out 1-3 videos a day, all short, oversimplified, tips and tricks about sex. the platforms loved this despite how often my videos would get flagged and accounts banned, i would go viral constantly. when i left all of that behind and started talking about Palestine, i would go viral all the time because i still made the content that makes people feel strongly about something without doing any work, without being required to think on their own. without making any comparisons obviously, and as much as both of my content subjects are important in their own right, the same reality can be observed;
algorithms cannot measure anything that makes life worth living
therefore they are designed to quantify everything else and put it in front of us
now we are in a situation that both creator and consumer are trained to put out and engage with the most mediocre, oversimplified, low stakes stuff.
when i started talking about actually getting off these slot machines of stupefying attention, most of the time it feels like barely anyone is watching it, out of almost 40k followers on meta barely 2000 see my videos, people rarely comment let alone share anything despite it being literally the blueprints of how we get free. longer, more nuanced, sometimes complex stuff that makes you think and requires you to mentally and physically engage is simply the opposite of what these platforms are designed for.
yeah of course over the last few years a lot of us got radicalized by watching the genocide in Gaza unfolds. it will be wrong to state that it did nothing because millions if not hundred of millions are now freshly aware of the Palestinian struggle mobilize locally and globally, boycott and won’t shut up about it. but there’s also definitely also a conversation that needs to happen about the role the algorithms play in pushing sensational, violent “content” that garners engagement and keeps people on the app, screaming into the void or on each other, wasting precious revolutionary passions in comment section and long hours of scrolling instead of world building. when is it baring witness and where is it just genocide porn?
back to art.
what makes art moving is relational. its the work you need to do to generate meaning out of it, to feel something, to be filled with inspiration or feel understood or heard by it. it is an intimate dialogue between the artist and the receiver in which both of them become something else. it is genuinely depressing to me to see how few people engage in difficult literature anymore. ho people use moralizing nonsense about the academic elitism of inaccessibility to mask their bare laziness and lack of desire to learn. i am no throwing shade on any person in particular, we are not to be blamed we are the victims of this systemic setup, including me. every group reading we start in the collective starts with 8-10 people strong and go down to 1 within the first month or two. why? is it because they are not interesting or enjoyable? they are fucking epic. it is because reading, especially dense philosophy and theory, like a lot of things that makes life worth living take effort, and who wants to be challenged about anything under Capitalism?
a little metacognition moment: as an artist who exist on social media like the rest of us, i notice myself often pondering how can i simplify and flatten my art to make it viral. what “hooks” should i start my videos with. what ratio of longer meandering videos/writings to “the shit i know will go viral” is reasonable?
i am fully aware that in a world where money is still the currency necessary not just for survival and accessing sustenance but to fund all the real life alternatives to capitalism i am building and to give it away to people in my community who relay on me to feed themselves (there’s at least one friend and two whole families that rely on me); i need to be on social media to generate more of it. i am completely publicly funded care worker and artist, subscribe if you want to build with me:
i am writing this because i think it’s time we build an alternative internet where relationships emerge organically by real people their art and sensations, by what makes life worth living instead of by dead algorithms. in fact it’s already happening thought mesh networks but we have a way to go.
i am writing this because maybe this will make you log off social media for today, maybe for this week and go build something, create something, touch someone in the real world. we need to all get busy building alternatives that makes us more independent of this Capitalist hell hole and we need to start now, i am writing to those who get it and take meaningful action outside of the platforms and those who want to do the same.
to a future beyond scrolling friends.
that’s all for today. see you tomorrow.
