Periodically, I take long breaks from the firehose of social media, and it’s during these times that I realize, with great poignancy, how little value there is in the constant drumbeat of self-analysis (personal and communal) that has come to dominate public online discourse.
As an enthusiastic consumer of all types of media, I have started to feel as though we are drowning in egos, dissolving into a million fragments of artless navel-gazing and opinion. With every ‘think piece’ and ‘long read,’ I feel less informed and more assailed by someone else’s desperate need to be seen and heard. With every TikTok or reel, a sense that we are serving a man-made algorithm designed to exploit.
Media and the big personalities that define these spaces have devolved into an arms race for attention, fueled by creators with their constant cries for recognition, validation, and confirmation of their deeply held beliefs. While it’s often dressed up as critical thought and the pursuit of justice, this trend of personalizing every trial, tribulation, and trauma in society feels like just another reason to talk about ourselves in the most adolescent way.
The copious digital prophets of doom, splashing in their puddles of cynicism, are more interested in having their personal fears read and shared than in doing anything productive about them.
The reactive, hostile takes about who and what is wrong, and why everything is falling apart go viral — not because of those who are most vulnerable by bad policy and politics — but because the author’s ideals are not embraced by others, over whom they wish to feel superior.
The desperate clinging to identity, and the insistence that suffering as a virtue entitles one to more and larger audiences, results in digital pissing contests, undermining the very essence of art.
For me, the most compelling art, music, literature, and journalism is that which removes the creator from the center of the work and treats creative product as a discovery.
True genius (which I’ve had a rare opportunity to encounter in my life) tends to operate in a state of awe at its own ability to receive and convey creative energies in a unique way. That is the reward for engaging in the creative process.
It is an honor to stand as a lens through which pour universal truth and light.
Creative corruption, however, occurs when we begin to see this as our own personal source of power, one that we should command to serve our desired ends. Yet, even if one enters the digital fray with creative purity, I think it becomes impossible not to sully it by the addictive pursuit of ever-higher scores in the game of online thought supremacy.
Today, we see the commodification of creativity at its peak. We’ve captured the magnificent beast that is artistic inspiration and penned it up, letting it out only when we think we can fully control it, and only to produce something that serves a predetermined agenda — whether political, social, or economic.
We’ve sanctioned a handful of elite creatives to frame the public discourse — those who can create our respective authorities’ desired propaganda on demand — and given them a societal stage that they may occupy conditionally.
The creatives who have found respectability and a paid occupation in this modern world are, more often than not, aware of their own enslavement to the guarantors of their incomes and to the opinion of a public that is itself increasingly focused on ego gratification. They are aware of the unwritten rules — lines that must not be transgressed — marketability, bourgeois sensibilities, popular moralizing, and most importantly, the need to never, ever be seen as a political liability. They are aware that their art has been commodified.
Perhaps this adds to the anguished navel-gazing. The sense of being confined, of having our creative impulses forever at the mercy of some agenda that diminishes the power of our art.
Our collective arrogance in the face of creative power, actively diminishing our power as merely a tool in service to our limited intellectual, spiritual, and political demands, will eventually undermine our best efforts at control. Some things cannot be contained forever. I hope.
Receiving and channeling creative power is an intense experience. It requires great strength of mind, body, and spirit to take something like that inside and push it back out in a way that is true to both the source and to the artist as a lens. The creator is as much a medium as the tools they use to express their art.
Many an artist or writer who was not up to the challenge burned out quickly in the heat of this power.
Those who have found the path of creative longevity have found that they can only sustain their activity through disciplines that keep their channel clear for the long term — they are more a servant to the process than masters. But can there be a more rewarding way to exercise one’s agency as a human being? To submit to the process of creation, and to taste that power as it moves through us into the world?
My purpose in writing this is to remind us all: there are more worthwhile pursuits than trying to be heard or seen by people who don’t have the capacity to understand, or who simply don’t want to.
Creative freedom demands that we, as creators, remain free in every other way, too. Can we do that in spaces where every move is tracked, every click is counted, every thought measured and weighed against a fickle tide of public opinion? Where ideological battles shut down even innocent questions, those springboards of possibility? Can we produce the kind of truthful art, music, literature, and journalism worthy of our short but beautiful lives if our ability to create rests on the approval of others, as it so often does online?
I do believe that this digital culture is WHY there is widespread fear that our ‘creative existence’ is now being threatened by LLMs. The Powers That Be only see value in creative work if they can use it toward their own ends… and SURPRISE! AI does that job way more efficiently than we do. We’ve allowed this state of affairs by agreeing that our creative value lies in the product, rather than the process. And creative products can be stolen and re-sold, very easily, it seems.
For the vast majority of human history, artists were never rich and famous. They lived off the good graces and patronage of the wealthy. Art has never, ever been about churning out product and scaling.
It’s only in this day and age that we think creative people should become brands and wield great wealth and power. This idea is a lie that contradicts everything we know about art and music, literature and poetry; and it has been fed to us by the people who own the channels/media we’re using to try to achieve that status.
Now that they have decided that they can eliminate artists from the process, we’re left holding our dicks thinking, “Gosh, how am I going to compete in this space?” when art was never about competing.
Which is to say, the past 50 years are an anomaly, as far as creativity-as-a-career is concerned. And I, for one, am happy to see it crash and burn.
