When everything ever created is a few clicks or swipes away, is depth even possible anymore?
I guess kinda makes sense that every major tech product on the market currently exists as a billion dollar shit-sorter promising us that it deliver the perfect golden nugget?
Algorithms verge on necessary when it feels like we are trapped in a room with dozen speakers constantly blaring different radio stations at us deafening us with a incomprehensible din of brain chemicals as we try to pick our new favourite song out of it.
The irony is most of my YouTube recommendations are now pseudo-scientific grifters half heartedly promising that the cure to all this is a dopamine-fast. As if the chemicals themselves were the problem and we would be just fine if we could their complete a 30-day challenge and join their members-only Discord. These assholes are rebranding self-isolation as the monk-mode-grind-set. Stop and think about that. The idea of the entrepreneurial-keratin-fueled-spiritualist. We used to just call that starting a cult. Which isn’t so far off, we just call it “the community”.
None of this matters though. In the time it took you to read the last paragraph, I’ve already switched to hate-watching a teardown of some man-o-sphere influencer getting hypothermia from a cold plunge.
Once, I forgot I logged out of YouTube and was horrified. It appears you need a fuck ton of supplements to survive the carnivore diet.
What was this post about? As I type this I LITERALLY CAN’T REMEMBER. Scrolled up. Right, is depth even possible in a sea of content?
Maybe? But it sure is a hell of lot harder.
When I was young, dumb, and full of fun, I loved Timesplitters 2. A second-rate, pretty offensive in retrospect, FPS from the mid-2000s. I think my hours played is thousands. During summer break in high-school I would stay up all night creating custom levels and maps. One of them was a RC racing mini-game… in a first-person shooter… it was shit, but it was fun.
A major reason why I decided this was worth hours of my misspent youth was I didn’t have many other options. There was no auto-play. I owned like 10 games max on PS2. There wasn’t much other choice. So I made a fuck ton of levels that were fun for 10 minutes, then forgotten.
(I swear to you flying to the top of GTA Skybox to jump out without a parachute just to see what would happen was worth it).
Do levels I made matter? No. Not even a bit. I don’t even think I have the memory cards or consoles that held them any more. But I can tell you I loved the hell out of that problematic game and the broken mini-games I built with it. Wish I chose a better horse, but I was 13. I didn’t know what the word problematic meant (which is probably problematic in itself).
Anyways.
Creation is harder than consumption. That’s obvious. Sure, making somethings gotten a little easier, but consuming is like 1000x easier now.
I think I am just aging. But this my damn lawn, and your hanging out on it.
Making something feels like an act of rebellion now. Choosing to use your time for something other than consumption and shopping. Deciding to make something that’s going to suck and most people won’t like anyways is ~revolutionary~.
If a revolution is a rejection of the status quo in order to bring about drastic, accelerated change, then choosing to make something, not as a means to capital, but just because you want to is a direct act of transgression against a economic system that asks you to spend more than half your waking hours (I work too much and love naps) getting that bag and the other half spending it or giving your attention to become a resource to be sold and traded in exchange for hijacked brain chemicals then…
Ya, viva la revolution, bb.