I am placing the blog on a summer hiatus/summer schedule. This essentially means I will not be posting on a regular basis for the next few months, due to other obligations, travel plans, and the desire to focus more fully on my visual creative works.
I realize this runs the risk of alienating those folks who do follow me, but it’s a necessary choice. I am feeling a bit burned out with life online in general.
The heavy push of “AI” in all things with no choice to opt out, accompanied by some very invasive licensing rewrites, requires that I consider at length the type of materials I will be making available to the Internet. Indeed, the digital creative process that I have spent many years of my life and career learning and improving is now potentially swept away. This is not any context that the AI is “replacing” those skills, but that the AI, and the companies who own it, are assuming rights to do with my work what they will, under the sham excuse of “protecting against improper use”.
My initial response to this overreaching asset grab is to go analog. A painting or sculpture made by my hand, is unquestionably my own work, to do with as I will, not what the corporation will. Even should I employ digital means to present and sell that work, the work itself lies outside the grasp of corporate greed, and the ignorant masses who are too ready to fuel it by boosting their own egos using AI created works “they made”.
A secondary consideration is that social media is now swarming with advertising to the point that I have no interest. Every new splinter service that bubbles up, should they survive long enough to reach a viable population density, must either subsist on ads or subscription. This is not unreasonable in itself. I am in the technology business, and I understand that the resources cost money (though I seriously question whether it costs as much as the mega-corps are raking in). A recent foray onto Pinterest looking for reference and inspirational images was saturated with 50-60% advertising pins. I have no time for that.
Meta properties are possibly the worst (I find it rather easy to ignore ads on Youtube, as I have many years experience ignoring them on TV) as far as this exploitation goes. Again, I seriously doubt the ratio of cost to profit is “fair and reasonable” even given the global reach of these applications and the need to support them 24/7/365.
Hardware is cheap. Software licensing from third parties (where it exists, most of the web runs on freeware Linux, Apache Servers, and MySQL databases) is tremendously cheap at scale, and this then leaves the proprietary code of application, and the humans engaged to modify and maintain it.
Facebook and it’s brethren are devised on top of freeware or Open Source engines, that are then extended by programmers. Many, if not most are offshore, making far lower wages than their US equivalents. The greatest amount of energy and resources are devoted to keeping “the algorithm” a perpetually moving target.
This spawns the false requirement to purchase advertising, and feeds a sub industry of expert consultants to “optimize your SEO”.
Having seen the output of various seminars and training programs, I can say without much fear of contradiction, that the persons touting them are not imparting any real understanding of marketing principles, and encourage practices which are antithetical to long established mass communication principles.
This leaves a discouraged attendee wondering what they missed, and ripe for the next round of “miracle cures” for the algorithm blues.
In short, the best way to make money on social media is to sell training on social media. Since the algorithm is always changing, and there’s really very few useful metrics available for statistical analysis, the average sole proprietor or small business won’t recognize the snake oil until you’ve packed up the wagon and moseyed on to the next town.
Obviously, there’s a lot of venom here.
I am not even going to elaborate on the extreme amounts of unwelcome posts of socio-political nature that, despite actively “curating” my connections on the social platforms, continue to invade that space. Yes, I do have political views. I have political discussions when it suits me, in private, with people who I may or may not know “in real life”. But so very much of what floats on line is pure misdirection, propaganda, and outright fraud.
I do not need to be marinating in this toxic soup daily. It makes me grumpy, stifles the creative impulse, and wastes a lot of time I could be drawing and painting and sculpting and petting cats.
So for the nonce, I shall post when I am inspired to post, and I really hope to post only when such inspiration is a positive thing.
No one (especially me) wants to hear nothing but bitching. I don’t want to be the one telling those damned kids to get off my virtual lawn, and lately I am feeling it. So I hope you will all understand.
The book is not closed, but I am going to put a marker here and come back to it at some later point, when I feel better about it all. If that doesn’t happen, well, I was around before all this. I am fairly sure I can function without it.
Thank you all who have supported me to this point. I hope you have some value from it. All previous articles will remain available for as long as I keep the site going. I now need to focus on other things, some of which may generate needed revenue to that end.
Peace, and Long Life. Live Long and Prosper.