Looking back at the year, I've been doing two things repeatedly. 1) I've been screaming at my twitter feed and 2) angsting over what I've going to do next after the relative success of Veeptopus. As it turns out, the two are sort of connected.
The news, and social media, in particular, has sent me into regular paroxysms of fear, dread, and fury. The toxicity of Trump and his band of racist fat cat cronies is taking way, way too much mental bandwidth. Social media has a way of overwhelming the brain's system while leaving you with that hollow feeling of powerlessness. Facebook was once a fun diversion of junior high school friends and Farmville invites. But then somewhere along the lines, many of my junior high school friends turned out to be Trump supporters and the whole enterprise morphed into a cesspool of tribalism. Twitter is even worse. All heat, little light.
So for my own sanity, I'm taking some steps away from social media. I've removed it from my phone and iPad. I regularly use Freedom to block the nicotine-like urges to check Facebook while working.
The other problem is that I've been stuck thinking about what to do next.
Austin Kleon as it turns out was suffering from the same problem. As he wrote, summing up some ideas by Robin Sloan, that an artist needs to produce Flow and Stock .
flow is the feed (“It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people you exist.”) and stock is the durable stuff (“It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.”)
Basically, by focusing on my twitter and Instagram feeds, I've been concentrating on my flow and not my stock. Kleon preaches the virtue of turning flow into stock. The way that Facebook and the like are constructed, it makes it difficult to accumulate enough flow to turn into stock. Your ideas not only get flushed into the great social media feed but it also becomes the property of a massive corporation.
So I'm not only going to step back from social media, I'm going to pretend it's 2007, which is in my mind the zenith of the internet - back when it was still laptop based, back before iPhones. By which I mean I'm going to focus more on blogging. That way I can get all of my flow into one archivable space.
And maybe that will help me get enough light to move me forward.