I’m trying to guard these vulnerable feelings with care, but I want to say something in the open about how utterly lonely it is trying to find the audience for Intrapology.
Rationally, I know that this is not personal, nor a reflection of the quality of my work. For one thing, Intrapology is made by a team of very talented people, and even on a bad day I can see clearly that my own deficiencies as an artist are more than adequately counterbalanced by their contributions. But I am Intrapology’s lead artist and main spokesperson, and a big part of my job involves exposing myself to large amounts of rejection. I try not to pass that on to others on the team, but sometimes it leaks out in our meetings and rehearsals. In addition to the steady supply of “unfortunately, on this occasion…” emails from institutions and organisations, there is a pervading silence in shared public spaces that eats away at you over time.
A large part of this is the sheer incapacity of social media to reach anybody anymore, and the uncertainty about how to help each other to rebuild internet culture away from algorithms.
There’s a lot of discussion of loneliness these days, spurred by the notion of a male loneliness epidemic. This recent piece by sociologist Allison J Pugh specifically highlights “depersonalisation” as a phenomenon that’s encoded into systems for managing resources and attention, including social media apps. “Ultimately, depersonalisation can stem from endlessly scrolling past other people’s posts, serving as merely an audience for their experiences, bearing witness to other people while never being witnessed in return.”
I’m surely not the only person struggling with the current state of the internet. Thanks to the dominance of algorithmic platforms, and the level of enshittification that has been reached, it’s no exaggeration to say that we’re being actively kept away from each other’s creativity. We should therefore identify recommendation algorithms as a key source of loneliness. What could be lonelier than having a powerful computer with you at all times that is designed to connect you to other people, and nevertheless finding that almost nothing you post will actually be seen by almost any of the people who care about you, and vice versa? What could be lonelier than looking for community, and only finding micro-celebrities and ads?
People in my community, hungry for the kind of art I’m putting into the world, look in the space where artists like me are supposed to show up and instead find insubstantial nonsense engineered to keep them scrolling. Even when our friends post, we are more likely to see their algorithmic doppelgangers - sponsored posts by people who share similar identity markers. In a way, it’s similar to my experience of dysphoria before coming out as trans. No matter how much time I spent out in public, no matter how hard I tried to connect with people, in a certain sense I was never really there - all my speech was heard through someone else’s voice, all my interactions perceived through a face that didn’t represent me. Or, it’s like that episode early on in the last season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, when Willow gets off the plane from England only to find that she’s phased into a different dimension to all her friends, unable to see them and unable to be seen by them.
Ironically, it’s a very Intrapology thing to experience - a world that falls apart because the social structures do not exist to support it. It would make a good premise for an episode in a later season, if I ever get to make it. In a couple of months, I’ll be writing the grant applications for Season Two, and I’ll have to somehow argue for our ability to reach audiences. I’m currently not sure how I’ll make that case.
It’s bizarre to think that 12 years ago I crowd-funded a book. A couple hundred people showed up to support something I wanted to create, back when I was young and inexperienced. It would be wrong to say that things were easy back then. I remember how demeaning, stressful, and precarious the experience of crowdfunding was even back when it was new and exciting. But now, with the benefit of years of work and exposure internationally through festivals and exhibitions, I have to fight tooth and nail just to get 25 people to sign up for an online event. It’s embarrassing to admit that out loud, but I know it’s not just me, because I look around me and see other artists and organisations struggling the same way. Not just struggling for money, but struggling for visibility. And ultimately, as austerity squeezes ever harder while enshittification deepens, those are two faces of the same problem.
There are many things we can do to reduce the loneliness of the internet as we know it. I would like to see more people consider the structural impact of their choice of platforms, and contribute to off-ramps into the independent social web. But there are simple steps that we can take even within corporate social media, and I think these same steps are also necessary on the fediverse and on blogs. Some examples that come to mind for me:
- Every day, comment on at least 5 posts by small accounts
- Unfollow large accounts, to increase the % of posts you see by smaller accounts
- Make posts that celebrate or respond to the posts of other accounts of a similar size to your own
My hope is that consciously taking actions like these will help to retrain internet use away from the passive scrolling of algorithmic feeds. Leftists with big social media accounts like to say that “we” (themselves and their subscribers) are reclaiming corporate internet spaces. I say, let’s actually make an effort to foster creative grassroots cultures through our actions, rather than hoping the algorithms will do it for us.
