Ok so! I realise that I'm doing things a little backwards, having this post come after the previous two. But I feel like being non-chronological is in the spirit of this whole thing. And also who cares :)

compost and an ode to my 2007 macbook were the first two posts from a Substack newsletter I started at the beginning of this year. I decided to start it because, like many others, I had been feeling increasingly psychologically worn out by social media. I'd started periodically deleting the Instagram app from my phone, and in those short stretches of disconnection I'd started to find some peace. I thought for maybe the twentieth time about getting a 'dumb phone', knowing full well that I will never be an organised enough person to move through the world as it is without maps or tram tracker. Still, I felt itchy for change.


swim parallel to the shore


coastal beach
Growing up in so-called Australia, there's this thing about swimming, and swimming at the beach in particular, that got drilled into me by all the adults in my life at one time or another - parents, teachers, those Surf Life Saving PSA ads that used to air in the summer while I was trying to watch my cartoons. If you get caught in a rip, for the love of God don't try and swim against it. All that will do is make you tired, and then you'll end up getting pulled out to sea. To get out of a rip, you have to swim parallel to the shore.

And look, it's a bit of a clunky metaphor, but that feeling of struggling against a current was the first thing I thought of when trying to describe how it feels to try and get off social media. There's the pull of instant gratification, the dopamine hit, all that stuff. But there's also the more insidious currents, ones that have a stronger hold, I think, particularly if you are a person who at one point thought they might like to have a career in the arts. Currents like "What if no one sees my work?", "What if people forget about me?" and my favourite, "What if deleting my Instagram means I miss out on that one opportunity that's going to change everything?"

I wanted to stop getting caught in the rips, but I also didn't want to stop swimming in the ocean. I love the ocean. So I thought that, instead of giving it up completely, I would make some attempts to start swimming parallel to the shore. I saw many friends and peers on Instagram starting their own newsletters and I thought, maybe that's it! With a newsletter I could share all the things that I wanted to write about, things that weren't quite right for zines but still had a 'zine energy.' I could use it to share updates on things I was working on, on work I'd had published, on cool things my friends were making and doing and mutual aid funds to support. Pictures I'd taken and films I'd watched and mixes I'd made.


the current against my legs

At the start of the year, I signed up to Substack. And I liked it at first! I was mildly annoyed that I couldn't add mixcloud widgets into my posts; one of the main reasons I'd wanted to start a newsletter was so that I could showcase the fruits of a new hobby (making mixes using my teen and early 20s CD collection). But otherwise it seemed easy enough to use. I could upload my photos no problem, I could copy a Youtube link straight into a post and it would embed the video automatically, and perfectly centred. I wrote and uploaded my first post in January, and it felt good to be sharing more longform writing again. Something that had taken its time to grow out of the compost.

And then I started getting the emails. Emails with subject lines like, Recommendations from your Substacks which was okay, I guess, because at least they were recs from Substacks I'd chosen to follow. But then there was also the Substack Reads emails, an algorithmically driven "digest of posts assembled just for you." And, of course, Your June 2024 Stats In Review. This particular email contained a link to the analytics page for my newsletter, so I could check how many people had subscribed, opened, viewed and liked my posts. I started getting recommendations in my Weekly Stack about how to grow my readership. I started to feel the pull of the current against my legs.

After my first post to my Substack, I didn't write a second for almost another six months. I let the emails build up in my inbox, like all the other emails from all the other places I'd once shopped at or signed up to on a whim. I didn't share the link to it on any of my remaining socials. When I did write a second post, it was the transcript for a zine I'd written months prior, a half-assed attempt to do some 'self promotion' before heading up to Eora/Sydney for the Otherworlds Zine Fair. The initial excitement of starting a new project had worn off in record time and I was left to face the facts - it all felt exactly the same. I had started swimming sideways, only to get caught in another rip.


closer to the metal

I left my Substack to languish, and tried to reassure myself that starting it hadn't been a waste of time, that it was just more matter to add to the compost bin. I started to make peace with the fact that maybe I couldn't just blog through my malaise. And then I came across Caleb Triscari's essay, Closer to The Metal, published in my favourite online journal, crawlspace.
screenshot of an online essay, white text on black background
I really like this essay, both for its content and its creative presentation. Please consider giving the whole thing a read, but I wanted to share the part that helped me to start putting some of the pieces together. Caleb writes;

"Those who want the web to change – myself included – need to concede that this won’t come quickly, in light of the ‘convenient’ services that now dominate our lives. No-code website builders, streaming services, cloud computing and mainstream social networks have all done away with personalisation and individuality under the guise of simplicity. We wouldn’t know how to create a better digital world for ourselves if we tried."

I yearned for the long lost joy of being online, but I had forgotten where that joy had actually come from - it had come from me lifting the hood of the internet and crawling inside, to see how it worked, and how I could make it my own. And I was never going to be able to access those feelings again by dragging and dropping Youtube links into a text editor, or obsessively checking an analytics dashboard. It's why I continue to write in the face of professional rejection, why I continue to make zines, and probably will until I die - the process of the making is just as, if not more, important to me than the product. Of course I was never going to be happy with a platform like Substack. Of course of course of course.

There were a few other things that happened around the time of me reading Caleb's essay that have since helped me to strengthen my strokes;


Huh. Writing this list out now has made me realise that it's made up of three individual people who are in their own ways actively working to create a better digital world, for themselves and for others. And if these are the kind of people I'm looking to as I try to do the same, then I guess I must be on the right path. Nice.



I'm a big swimmer

It hasn't all been smooth sailing (swimming? I am really starting to stretch this metaphor). I still find myself periodically re-downloading Instagram to check and see if anyone's mentioned me, to reply to forgotten DMs and have a scroll through the stories. I haven't had the Facebook app on my phone for years, but I will still pull it up in a browser window from time to time, sometimes without even realising I'm doing it. This morning I opened my Newsblur app and saw that I had no new things to read and my first thought was 'oh no, I'm not following enough blogs.' This post has taken me weeks to write, and even longer to format properly. I still haven't figured out how to make my Neocities site responsive, so that it doesn't look like utter shit on mobile (I'll get there, or if you know how and would like to share pls email me. I will send you zines as a thank you.) There is plenty of friction, but I think the fundamental difference is that this friction feels good. It feels like when I make something with my hands, and I feel excited, not exhausted, to be on the internet again. The rips are fewer and farther between, and I'm becoming a stronger swimmer.



reading

watching

listening

playing