empires rise and fall and i still freak out at pimples
touching grass is not enough, i must be one with the blades
You fill in the sign-up form for Bluesky, face curdling.
Hop, skip and jumping from field to field.
Your insides crinkle; like when the chirpy, charity
worker caught you slipping outside Farringdon station,
wearing your headphones as a necklace, charm-shaming
you into pledging £3 a month for a cause
you should care more about.
You should know better was a double entendre.
…How many of long white rectangles have known my name?
I like Substack’s set-up.
Parading around my clip-emptying rants, scribbling them on London/Cambridge trains (or one of the many other transitory spaces I find myself visiting more than actual destinations). Substack notes even has an edit function! (the neurodivergent equivalent of omg, it has pockets!).
I’ve been lucky enough to have a steady incline of subscribers. But a period of inertia last month pinged my neuroception. I questioned if I’d said something particularly off-putting somewhere. It likely wasn’t about me at all. Maybe this gloomy cloud of stagnation is actually faraway smoke of flames destined to engulf this platform.
It’d be a crying shame. Substack’s content moderation principles1 regularly give me pause about whether I’m going to continue to writing but I admit, I like it here more than any other digital space. Perhaps, like has little to do with it. I realise the utility of being here, with eerie similarity to any African immigrating into the heart of empire.
It is a toddling empire, intent on appearing bright-eyed and bushy-tailed about its commitment towards “all speech being free speech” as if everyone’s tongue has the same weight. Reminds me of a young Reddit2. Perhaps, becoming a greater tax haven for transphobes, paedophiles (sorry—let me not misparaphiliarise—hebephiles), white supremacists and other extremists who’ve been driven away with pitchforks from other platforms is probably not going to go how they think. Good luck, though.
Where do you go when you’ve been called a n*gger everywhere?3 You’re so desensitised by now and you’ve watched cyber-empires die like men. Myspace drowned by the Vesuvian lava of Facebook. Tumblr crumbling as Mesopotamia did — only the ruined ziggurats of safe-for-work art gifs remain. Twitter, in its dying crypto-bro wheezes, clearing the runway for Bluesky.
Pre-empting collapse, I sign a chiselled-off fraction of my soul away to the new blue butterfly god. I’m perched on the top floor of Waterstones in Piccadilly Circus. A frequent haunt.
When I arrived, someone was in my favourite seat. We had an awkward war of glances:
I begun—irked and fixated on the chair I’d shotgunned as my own.
She parried—quizzically from the seat wrangling my gaze.
I realised the obstacle between me and my preferred furniture was a person—with hopes, wants and the need for bathroom breaks. I contorted my scowl into a smile.
She smiled back gingerly.
I settled where I’m sitting now, typing this
—fin.
I’m CMD + tabbing between the confessional essay you’re currently reading, a google chrome window of Bluesky and a google document with a more fictional constitution (still a confessional).
The Bluesky page reads: No Posts Yet.
It awaits life. Textual midwifery to massage my profile baby’s back into breathing (apparently, doctors don’t hold newborns upside down and slap them on the butt anymore and that’s probably what’s wrong with this younger generation(!) no ruffage) but I don’t know the politics of this particular void yet so I’m reluctant to speak into it.
My fiction is a short story about a teenage boy who’s anticipating a fight in a fair with an older boy. The confession here: I don’t like conflict but I’m Frank Ocean with it. I don’t like to fight ‘til i’m fighting.
The essay you’re currently reading is confessional about fighting too, I suppose.
The truth is: I fear I’m a weary warrior. Too jaded, sluggish and impatient to migrate to another social media site.
Sometimes, I share my writing with the 15,000 instagram followers I amassed when my quotes were regularly published on a popular self-help page. Now, each time I post onto stories I get around 100 views, if I’m lucky. The disparity is jarring; like having 15,000 Leicester Square living statues in your bedroom.
Oh… you’re real. Who are you and what are you doing in my house?
I never wanted to earn those followers the way I did. Churning out banal, vacuum-packed, GMO-pumped wisdoms on a scheduled conveyor belt in return for empty calorie engagement, rasterising me into two-dimensions. The most I got out of it were tsunamis of spam promo requests in my inbox (meh, I suppose, the odd celebrity will peep my stories every now and then but we’d never pass the threshold of each other’s DM’s so… just the emptiest of bragging rights, to be honest). I’ve never felt more like a magical negro.
Social media unsettles me fundamentally. We were never meant to have thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people watching us. There was a time where reverence from an audience of such sizes was reserved for people inhabiting some otherworldly talent—a bizarre tradition but straightforward. Now, a person mines social wealth simply by existing in a commercialisable way, skilled at courting parasociality and manufacturing authenticity. It is evidence of a culture deeply disconnected from itself, strangled by capitalistic pressure and starved of fulfilling community, dealing with it all via the mukbangification of consumable personalities. The exploitation of labour is hitting a metaphysical singularity. Freedom is closer than ever! You just need to commodify the very fabric of who you are.
I stare at the butterfly wings of the empty Bluesky page, thinking however shiny this may all seem, migration is impossible without baggage. Despite my affinity for Substack, the anxieties I’ve accrued from other social media—the jarring comparison to others, the yearning for reciprocated admiration, the entitlement to beefier metrics and stickier love—are squirming to take amorphous shape here—which has perhaps granted me more urgency to confront them.
My Twitter gathers dust until I succumb to my sassiest base urges. My Instagram compels doom-scrolling through faraway aspirations that feel hilariously out of reach. I’d love to do away with the compulsion to clap-back, uncouple from hyper-fixating on a pristine presentation of life. But what is a man without a social media presence in the modern world? Unstuck in time and space, a ghost with no easily digestible soul to network with at parties.
To unplug, I get to write weird little mind-meanders about Looney Tunes and being kind to bugs. I see Substack as an acre of land to build a home. I’m too fatigued by the Groundhog Day time loop of calling out online platforms for not giving a fuck about me and other marginalised people. I’m not on a crusade to change Substack any more than I want to change Britain. I point to the drain and say, “you’re swirling, brother” and that’s about all the labour you’re getting from me. Its frustrating to have found a place to finally build on and the land’s waterlogged. I don’t want to move when everywhere’s wet.
The prospect of being a perpetual virtual wanderer doesn’t excite me nor does it feel integral to the tapestry of my life. Prowling around for the most socially conscious social media nation; or constantly diversifying myself, fragmenting my soul for the sake of branding, feeding it into different ravenous machines—none of it is as energising to me as finishing a music album, producing an arresting song, or penning an essay where the words bunch together like migrating flocks rippling through the autumn sky. Jack of all trades might be my bread and butter but creativity in eternal servitude of marketing self takes away precious, intangible resources from my biggest want; to be an undeniable force in the things I touch, constructing with such devotion and skill that even if you dislike it or don’t fuck with me—you can’t help but admire the care and intricacy. I am juggling conflicting wants but at my core, the instinct to resist contentifying my artistic children is perhaps a wake up call to cement the impact of my work more offline.
I’ll keep Bluesky—if only as an empty monument to my ongoing resistance to endless, online nomadism. One day, I hope I muster the will to double-tap my other social media zombies. Perhaps, even here. When I began writing this piece—I saw social media as empires, destined to collapse under their own weight or be thwarted by the hubris of overzealous tyrants. I struggle to see them that way now. It feels too dramatic for what they really are (or at least, how we should probably treat them). Social media is simply liminal, online trains and corridors that connect us to the destination of who we want to be in the real world.
I see you as an undeniable force. Your words are potent and honest and bring me right into your world. No matter how different it might be from my own, you manage to make connection. 🤍
I'm going to actually comment about this because we do come from two different worlds -- not the black and white obvious worlds people are too quick to throw around -- but more of a youth and age, generational thing. I'm not what you'd call techie as far as social media goes. I'm one of this world's old dinosaurs. I don't even have a cell phone. I've never been a big presence online until just recently. I got on Facebook to follow my daughter when her and her bestie went to Thailand after graduating from high school. They both had part time jobs and saved up for what was the trip of a life time. The only way of keeping in contact was through Facebook.
I was so new to the computer world then, I didn't understand what was possible. I didn't blog; I didn't even know what it was. I just wrote stories that were too long to send in to conventional publishers. I limited myself, and because of that, I never got on Instagram, or Tumbler, or Reddit; I didn't understand them and didn't see the purpose. I got on Twitter too late for it to matter. As for everything else, I didn't even know they existed. I stumbled across Substack, and having come here, well, simply don't plan on ever leaving. I have nothing to compare it to. I've read some complaints people have...the hate, the phobias, and just shake my head in disbelief. I don't care if they hate me, or don't read me, or think I'm an old stick in the mud fuck who is lost in time. That's not my issue, but theirs. If you don't like what you read, turn the page.
I believe you make what you will with what you have. I don't have a lot of anything when it comes to Social Media etiquette. All I know how to do is write. My own children don't even read me anymore. My daughter says I'm too Politically Incorrect because I'll write a story from a female point of view; or a gay person's outlook. She says I don't understand what cultural misappropriation is, and I tell her I didn't even know it was a thing. I wrote a story about a Black boxer, as seen through the eyes of his niece. It had nothing to do with colour, or culture. It was just a story.
I might not be everyone's cup of tea, but then again, I don't think anything I write is going to cause a cultural meltdown. It's not that I've seen too much, but I have seen a few things. I mean, I grew up watching the Vietnam War on TV and the Civil Rights demonstrations. A child of the 60's, I watched them land on the moon. Did I question it and think it was fake? Never even crossed my mind. I guess that makes me naive. But I like what I write and put it out without thinking I should be adding "trigger" warnings. I don't do that because I don't think anything I write is traumatizing to that degree. If I write about what I saw on TV as a child, how is it traumatizing?
So when I came to Substack, it was after having been on the one and only other platform I'd ever been on: Vocal.media, which was a bust because there was too much censorship. The fact you can write what you write here is a blessing as far as I'm concerned. The other site told me I was glorifying rape because I had a married couple in a story that were taking part in rôle playing sex games. Who needs that kind of shit? If I want to write a story about missionaries in Manchuria during the Japanese invasion, why can't I? Is that Cultural Misappropriation because I'm an old white guy writing about some time in history that no one reading it even understands in the first place? Substack offers me freedom, and that's something I'm not willing to give up.
I don't look at social media the same way others do, because I haven't been tainted by it. That might be my one saving grace as far as that goes. I don't read hate speech. I don't weigh in on the political ramifications and the contentious views others have. If I do say something about the situation down South across the border (I'm Canadian), I quite often hear from a Trumpster-diver who points out that whatever I say is untrue simply because it is fake news. I call him The Felon, and they get upset with me. But it's Substack and I can say what I want, right? I like to think...within reason. As far as I'm concerned, Substack is the answer to all our needs. I say, on my ABOUT page that it's all right if you don't like me. I also tell them if you subscribe to my PAID page and decide to leave, don't ask me for your money back because it doesn't work like that. I don't give refunds. The only reason is because I can't be bothered with that shit. That's why I like reading you. You don't take shit from anyone.