«an interlude for sharing»
on doing your thing, also some self-promotion
I feel a little pang of displacement every time I go to the «substack» dashboard.
All we want is to share, but we’ve been so trained to make content. It’s unclear what the difference is, and to what degree that matters.
Was a newsletter the right way to do this? It feels like «where» the internet is Now vs «wordpress», as though the walls of plato’s cave were a cycle of rocks waiting for their turn to IPO. Should this have been more modern yet, should this recap blog have been a «tiktok», now topically unstable? Is this pivot-to-video stamping on a human face forever? It’s hard to imagine a bottom line outside of capitalism, to imagine a Point free of constantly keeping up with how the attention economy works at an exact moment in time, when asking yourself what is the balance between an enjoyable and a viable project?
My band’s first single is out now, by which I mean it is streaming on «apple music», «spotify», «youtube», something called «tidal». Learning the ropes of how Distribution works, we had a moment of panic it would not actually be on the streaming platforms in time for our single release concert. Fortunately our celebration was legitimized by big tech with days to spare. Worst case scenario, it would be on «bandcamp» in time, a sub-tier of reality, it seems. More real, nonetheless, than the concerts we play in physical space, at fixed points in time, committed to nothing more than the memories of the people who were there, not making a single cent for Jeff Bezos. That’s probably not true; I bet somehow amazon makes money off of people going to a place in the real world to listen to wood and string make noise. meta certainly does.
No “real” wtf is pedro páramo this week, because all of this takes time. I practiced for a concert with my band. I’m writing dialogue and making music for a game jam. I’m working on more songs with another band. I’m writing a book with a deadline that is still blessedly a year away. I have a full-time job that has nothing to do with any of that. This should be ok, but that definition of ok sure isn’t in the interests of capital.