Staring Into the Distance

Last weekend I found myself with a lot of time on my hands to think. Like, a lot of time. Like, an unfortunate amount of time.

Unfortunate because I was solo tabling my first con in over a decade and it was not great. One sale... To a friend.

Not my scene at all. Not my audience. Live and learn. Trying PeoriaCon next...

Any way, lots of time to stare off into the distance. Time to try and answer the question, "How does an artist find their audience?"

I mean, of course I am primarily thinking about myself, but, like I said, lots of time. So, the aperture opened up and a couple of truths became clear.

1. The internet sucks for finding anything now.
2. Third spaces suck for finding anything now.
3. Fandom and the data gold rush has ruined art.

I thought about other stuff of course. These were just the top three worth mentioning. I also came up with a theory on the so called "male loneliness crisis" but that is far less interesting than this...

1. The Internet Sucks

I don't mean to sound like an old man, but the internet actually used to be interesting. Now it is just a bunch of HOAs only the associations are also profiting from you by setting up cameras to watch the inside of your house. It is really fucked up.

Google fucked us with SEO, forcing not just a sea of sameness, but an arms race of terrible gamesmanship to try and hit the top spot on their rankings. And now, they just blew it all to hell with their AI summaries where they won't even send people your way. They will just spoon feed maybe a right answer to the person searching.

They aren't the only one. Meta has ruined the internet for visual artists and small businesses. Spotify for musicians. Etsy for crafts folks and artisans. Substack for writers. Hell, I would even argue Drivethru and Itch are bad for RPGs, small blip of a space that it is.

The platform has become necessary for discovery, but the platform bleeds you dry. Now every creative person has to become a "content creator" and make a faustian bargain with one or more unscrupulous companies to just do the most basic of human things...

Scream into the void, "I AM!"

2. Third Spaces Are Dead

Fear, phones, and capitalism have killed the third space. At one time, there used to be places you could go and not have to spend money to be there. There were a lot of them, and often times, those were the places of discovery.

The places you learned about new bands. New books. Art. Cars. Whatever your thing was, this was how you earned your knowledge. You met people in a space that cost little or no money to be in and talked with other humans.

It was awesome.

Now, everything is online, centered on commerce, or is hostile to people. Benches you can't sit on because of fear of the homeless. Parks that are closed to teenagers because of fear of the trouble they might cause. No music stores to wander and never spend a dollar. No community centers to hang out in.

An entire network of human interaction tied to artistic discovery was killed and never replaced. We were told it was replaced, but it wasn't. You can't have an ad hoc conversation about music browsing playlists in Spotify. You can thumbing through records.

3. Fandom and Data

I remember a time when no one gave more than two shits about what kind of science fiction a book was. Well, outside a handful of people who argued about that. You avoided them at all costs.

No one worried that Star Wars was really more fantasy than science fiction. People didn't care if Frankenstein was a classified as a gothic, science fiction, or just a fiction novel in the book store. It just didn't matter all that much.

The reason Jason Lee's character in Mallrats works is because of this very reason. He is the problem, not the solution. Some how, probably because data became gold in people's minds, he became the solution.

The data gold rush suddenly made classification incredibly important to everyone. Every business made huge investments in data collection. Everyone needed a data highway. A data lake. Everything was tagged and stored and, for the most part, never looked at again.

Despite that, it shifted the collective view of the world that everything had to fit into a neat box. Art had already been susceptible to this nonsense with the fights over "real rock & roll" or what qualifies as "real art." But again, before recent years, no one took those asshole seriously.

Now they run the show. You can't get eyes on your work unless it falls into one of their tight little boxes. Is it cozy fantasy, whatever the hell that means? Is it modern dancehall? What kind of horror is this movie? What micro slice of the pie are you targeting specifically?

What little box can we categorize the human experience to minimize it? How else can we package it and sell it to you? No way would we ever ask you to, I don't know, learn about it and try it out...

Is It Too Late?

This question haunts me. Are we at the very end of human expression? With the birth of this generation of "AI" and the damage it is doing, have we crossed the rubicon? Are my kids' generation the last generation to know art as something not created to fit a box?

Maybe. Maybe not. No one is smart enough to know for certain. The only thing I can be certain about is that I am going to continue to refuse to participate with the system as much as I can.

I don't begrudge people who feel the need to play the game. I get it. This shit is fucked and people gotta pay bills.

That said, I still don't know what the hell cozy fantasy is...