I guess I should start with something indicative of what's to come, try to give you a sense of the content you're signing up for, and do what any moderately successful person on social media does in these digital streets—treat myself as a brand, you as my customers, and so forth. I'm not going to do that, though. Not because I'm above that—the weary presentation of being "real" or "authentic" is its own conceit—but because I don't really know what this will be, or rather, I don't want to know, I don't want to set out neat little parameters around a set of tangible products that you can feel comfortable about purchasing and I can feel comfortable about selling.
I'm not comfortable with any of this, period, and this has haunted every attempt I've made or considered making when it comes to the various models of crowd-funding for artists that exist. What I want, more than anything else, is what Twitter has provided for years: a platform in which I can be silly or not, as and when the mood strikes me, where I can share my life, and respond to the topics of the day among an audience of friends and strangers, colleagues and industry people, who are able to signal their dis/approval swiftly with a click, or God-forbid, actually engage in conversation. Recently, like many others, I've been trying to find an alternate space I could utilise as my primary communication platform, thanks to the munted fuckstick known as Elon Musk taking a radioactive shit all over Twitter, and consistently struggling to find an adequate replacement.
I've launched and unlaunched a Patreon. I've got a Substack I rarely use, I'm on Insta and Mastodon, but not TikTok, and I've found all of it barely tolerable if not unbearable. Why? It's taken some time but I think I've finally figured out what it is that has made Twitter so easy for me to use without the hang-ups that invariably rear their awful heads elsewhere. At its core, what it comes down to is effort, how we perceive it, and the extent to which that perceived efforts leads to success. This is bound up as well in the platform, and so the contempt we all have for Twitter is actually vital to its popularity, because by dint of its own speed and micro form, everything about it registers as of-the-moment, effortless, a spit-take, rectifiable, deletable, impermanent. It doesn't matter if you "succeed" on Twitter. It doesn't matter if you "fail". In this way it is the only social media that genuinely resembles the process of thought itself, a constantly churning mind, where some things spark with others to create a flame, but most don't, and it has little to do with the person behind the words.