I stand by the opinion that Facebook was pretty cool and useful for its first several years of existence. It has long since ceased to be of any use or value, but I do still have at least one account which occasionally comes back from the dead, and so I recently allowed myself to log on and take a look around.
I posted the following cyberpoem to my feed on Sunday, May 2, hoping to draw some sympathetic attention to the most recent flurry of blog activity. As recently as 2017 this would have garnered at least a couple of stray eyeballs. In 2021 it garners nothing at all, not even a passive "like" or a snarky TLDR textspeak comment. I'm fine with that on the cosmic level. On the earthly level, well...talk about screaming into a void.
I share all of this just so no one accuses me of hiding, of not getting myself out there, of any of the things that hard-working normal market-oriented people like to say to introverted nonmarket lurches like me when we seem to be underachieving and/or slacking. You can't market what I'm doing here, not even to people who would pay for it. But here is what that would look like if it were possible. Now playing around with colors in dedication to an honored blogospheric ancestor.
I don't believe in self-promotion or in single-use plastics or in narrative, but it's impossible to avoid them completely. =+=+= A booking agent once said: "that guy's like a stalker." A friend once scolded me: "you should be playing with everyone." =+=+= I still believe in the Basic Blog, vintage 2003 or so. Fuck all this other Marshall McLuhan shit. =+=+= I am still furloughed. Trying to reckon with 5+ years of notebooks, post-its, and emails-to-self, re: political art, overpopulation, high school band, etc. =+=+= Nobody reads unless I post about it here. And then only for a day or two. =+=+= Sometimes my sources and my thinking are opaque, or just wrong. I cannot improve without feedback. Should we have to pay $100,000 for that kind of feedback? =+=+= I have people to play with (music and scrabble). Not "everyone," but good people. I could use more intellectual sparring partners. En garde! =+=+= I'm just a Basic Blogger living in a McLuhanite world. =+=+= I have a masters degree and an iPhone, but JSTOR and Apple News just are not cutting it these days. =+=+= Functional unemployment doesn't scare me. Intellectual underemployment is terrifying. =+=+= Clearing the backlog has been messy and uneven. The constipation analogy is not out of place here (thanks Vinny). So, I've added a "Tentpoles" widget in the right sidebar of my blog to curate some older posts that I worked hard on and still believe in. =+=+= So where are you blogging these days? Take me to your Gutenberg Galaxy. Less "stalking," more "playing with everyone" please. I don't believe in self-promotion or in narrative, but, well...
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