As the ongoing Great Platform Collapse picks up speed, my desire to Do A Post has collapsed with it. And it’s a real shame. There’s plenty to be said, plenty to be shared—hell, I’ve made more art in the last year than the previous five years combined. And as a mid-30s music person who spent middle school downloading poorly-labeled 96kbps mp3s, the ability to post music has been around for most of my life.

Yet, due to The Millennial Curse, I also remember a time before.

One of my several high school bands uploaded a few of our basement recordings onto our MySpace page in around 2005. It was neat that our music was streaming online—a novelty at the time, as even Pandora wouldn’t launch until the end of that year—but our primary method of sharing the record was by hand. We threw a launch party where a bunch of friends brought over their chunky 2000s laptops and burned the album onto blank CDs from Office Depot deep into the night. Home Movies and Samurai Champloo played on a CRT. God’s In His Heaven, All’s Right With the World, etc.

We’d hand out CDs liberally to friends, family, anyone who would listen. None of us were trying to get signed or anything. All my other band mates were a year older and heading to college. I had another year of high school and didn’t know what I wanted—just that playing music made me feel something stable. Sure, it was fun to play guitars in a basement and in the handful of kinda shady all-ages venues and on your friend’s roof. But more than that, music served as a psychic ballast for me, regardless of genre or context.

After a failed first attempt at college, I took a more earnest stab at songwriting in my early 20s, putting out five records in four years. By that time, Kickstarter had come along for financing recording and production costs, and Bandcamp made mass distribution more accessible to the average indie musician. Most crucially, the social media landscape of the late two thousands and early 2010s made sharing content to a self-selected audience of interested peers easier than ever. 

When Instagram was acquired by Facebook in 2012, the social web was dominated by a single call-to-action: SHARE. iPhone 4 photos from parties shared on Facebook, toilet missives shared on Twitter, square smudges of faux-sepia shared to the gram. At every turn we were compelled to share, to post. Home pages and company branding for these platforms made it a moral imperative. Mark, Jack and, uh, Instant Gram all chanting in unison: “Share, share, share, SHARE, SHARE”

Mike Rugnetta (the Lou Reed of video essayists) has a great piece on the rise and fall of this Sharing Ideology and how savvy marketing positioned platforms as catalysts for positive social change. This feel-good, neoliberal facade shifted focus onto individual user action and conveniently obscured the reality that these platforms enjoyed a huge material benefit to us constantly posting by way of selling our personal data to advertisers.

At the time, it seemed like a decent bargain for a lot of folks. You and your mee-maw were populating the marketplace of ideas with good, good posts! Never mind that she’s sharing flavor-blasted minion memes telling her friends to drink Windex to cleanse the Bill Gates 5G from their GI tract. Or that both of your browsing and location data is being sold to the highest bidder. Now she gets better targeted ads for new cleansers from S.C. Johnson (a family company).

Cut to a decade later and the “share” call-to-action has all but disappeared. The veil has been sufficiently pulled back on posting being a net positive for social change. Not even the platforms believe it anymore. And the utility those platforms once served for artists and musicians—the ability to share work with people who followed you, actively raising their hand and asking for it—was sacrificed at the altar of the great algorithm. Only the most engagement-inducing content need apply.

And yet we still post. While I’m sure some folks continue to post out of habit or muscle memory, I think there’s a latent hope that we can reclaim some shred of connection that peak social web era made us feel. I met some of my closest friends through Twitter, of all places, most of whom I’m still close with to this day. We’ve largely shifted communication to private Discord servers, keeping The Algorithm at a healthy distance and cultivating a circle of good faith where no one is asking how come we hate waffles.

I needed to get a proper web site up and running again (ed. note: oops I did just that and you’re on it right now), and I wanted a place to share photos, words, music, etc. without having to rely on a platform I have zero control over. I guess having a blog again is the RETVRN TO TRADITION move for me, particularly after finding a new RSS reader to replace the social media scroll with more useful news and writing.

So, for now, I guess I’ll post here. Unless I get tired of that too.