This began as a short “About” paragraph on Flickr, where I’ve been redirecting my shared photographs from IG (F you, Zuckerberg, and the capitalist horse you rode in on). Then it became a treatise offering myself something of an explanation of how it has come to be that I meandered, in the social-digital self-expression realm, from hither to yon and then back to hither again. Or probably more like thither.
For verisimilitude, I’ll transpose the would-be concise thumbnail sketch as-is. You’ll see it’s phrased initially in fragments, as if it intended to be brief. Then before long it breaks down and expands into a full-blown attempt to hold the wide universe in its arms. (A predictable tendency, by the way, in those graced, as I am, with neurological connective tissue directed more toward expansion and discovery, in lateral directions, than linear development with the object of swift conclusion.)
About
Life-long photographer; printed B&W in a city park & rec darkroom in the 1970s listening to Joni Mitchell albums piped in over the speaker; did goodly amount of participant-observer photojournalism as an activist throughout young adulthood; went digital when kids and an evolving family arrived and called out for documentation. Uncanny coincidence with advent of Web 2.0 & early emergence of social media.
Shared images online in various capacities during the first decade of social media, when dialog seemed to usurp commerce, ads had yet to appear in social feeds at least, and algorithms drove people to what they seemed to want to engage with, rather than what a for-profit entity wanted them to pay attention to.
Stepped back out of regular social sharing of creative output in the wake of ordinary life events–passing of father and diminution of spirit; impact of that and other family losses on scope of what’s sharable; change in focus & intensity of work; realization that multitasking work + parenthood + any final third variable is uniquely challenging to those neurologically wired as I am. Also spurred to “deplatform” self due to growing concern that the salutary possibilities of sharing and taking in ideas and such online was slowly eclipsing the health-conferring sharing of all of the above in person. Certainly for me. But, I wondered, mightn’t anything I publish on a screen of necessity contribute to the maintenance of said screen, and therefore of screens between people generally?
The commercial debasement of content-sharing vehicles gradually became clearer, and
the consequences, as they’ve come into focus, are ultimately quite alarming. To profit off of humans’ attention, one would first want to find a way to trap that attention into a kind of an infinite a loop, which one would want to control, ideally even produce, predictably. If you’re in the attention business, the most reliable driver of this profitable attention would of course be our evolutionarily cultivated negativity bias; this could be not just reproduced, but magnified by selectively redirecting attention toward the sensational, and the sensationally negative. None of this is anything we haven’t done long before, whether around the proverbial Neolithic campfire (“Look! Over there! A saber-toothed tiger!” *grabs handful of nuts & berries while hapless victim swivels their head*), or in Renaissance era, via early mass media in the wake of the Gutenberg Press (“Behold the perfidious treacheries of the wanton lass” blares the broadside). But as we know, the speed of the internet is the speed of electricity, or light. You can do a lot more damage, a lot faster now.
It’s almost too easy, too inevitable, looked at this way. And if all the above weren’t enough, set all this in the Anthropocene, at a moment when even hyper developed nations are shaken by climate extremes, and we’ve been reminded by global pandemic how very easily we, the mighty apex predators, can fall. What a very, very nice mess we’ve gotten ourselves into, to paraphrase the early 20th c. sage Stan Laurel.
And, we’re back.
From “Ladies of the Canyon” pouring over speakers in a selenium and sulfide-clouded darkroom, to Stan Laurel presiding over the media circus, and not the fun kind of circus. The scary clown kind; the kind on Justin Mertz’ super-unnerving Atlantic cover for October 2024.
Officially speaking, I have way more questions than answers. Such as:
- Q: What is the right balance between, on the one hand, maintaining an awareness of the rapidly unfolding national-international calamity (which of course calls often for wise action in response) and, on the other, restoration of the soul, by way of relief, redirection, anything else?
A: Dunno yet. Definitely pondering this daily, though.
- Q: Is there a way to reflect on the challenges facing justice- and decency-loving people at this time, without inadvertently magnifying a sense of panic and hopelessness?
A: Not sure yet, but hoping it’s possible.
However I am clear on a few things:
- Q: Do I want to support the suck of human attention over to any platform which profits someone who has thrown all human decency over his shoulder only to either (A) buy DJT off and spend his hours trying to best him at his game, or (B) prostrate himself before said pestilant egoist?
A: O hell no.
Corollary: thus am sharing these thoughts & images here, in this quaint, archaic Paleolithic, ad-free internet locale, where nobody but myself and folks who inadvertently stumbled into it will actually read them. If any bits of any of these thoughts appear somewhere else, it will absolutely not be Facebook, or Instagram, or Ex-Twitter, or any other equally corruptible for-profit enterprise benefitting only human despair and a small number of white men’s egos and bank accounts, which two items seem more or less to be one and the same anyhow.
- Q: If one can’t successfully, by one’s actions alone, stem a tsunami-sized tide of human malevolence and save every dear soul from its path, should one simply throw one’s hands up in the air and succumb to despair?
A: Not if one can help it, no! Firstly, because despair-induced immobility is the EXACT effect the pestilant egoist and his legions of enablers and sycophants are hoping to induce. And secondly because EVERY ACTION motivated by justice-decency-love, no matter how small–even it if it’s simply to affirm the humanity in another–absolutely makes a positive difference. Even to the SELF, if not to the other one is affirming. Remember the parable of The Star Thrower. (Go visit; remind yourself; then c’mon back. I’ll wait…) Yep: might be much-used, but it’s also the daggone truth.
- Q: What emotional-cognitive state will most imbue justice- and decency-loving people with the greatest sense of possibility, with the firmest grip on our collective potential to engage, to mitigate harm, to delay, possibly even (in some cases) neutralize the damage so vividly inherent in what’s emanating from the pestilent egoist steering the ship of state at the moment?
A: Togetherness. Not-aloneness. Camaraderie.
So. In an attempt to roust some of this life-affirming camaraderie, I am going to try (from time to time) to join my voice with others who never stopped camarad-ing all these years. Like Liz Gumbinner. Or Rebecca Solnit. Or W. Kamau Bell. Or, well, most likely: you.