Awhile back I noticed a pattern. “Do you ever notice that all the author girlies (all genders) all post the same thing?” I texted to a friend. At first, she was like, ehh no. But she came back a few days later. “They all post the same thing!” We laid it out like we were solving a crime, making connections, uncovering conspiracies. Finally, we drilled it down to these specific posts:
Product (book in a variety of lifestyle arrangements)
Lifestyle Product (book with their face)
Announcements & Events
Author-in-Context (themselves)
This is the algorithm for an author instagram. I tested it out and even with my shaky execution (I can’t follow rules to save my life) I quadrupled my reach. You’d think I’d care more, but I don’t. I like having solved the equation more than anything. My dayjob is in branding and social media is part of that. I love my job, I love the potential, I love culture and connecting with other humans, but also I’m so bored. It felt just like solving for x and I hate math!
On the other hand, maybe culture really is stuck. Our media and creative industries, mirrors of culture at large, are experiencing a stasis. Other researchers are dubbing this phenomenon Stuck Culture, The Age of Average, and Cultural Flattening. Franchises hog the box office while nostalgia is our only shared feeling left. The homogeneity is suffocating. Artists and creators, meant to inspire, find themselves captured by algorithms, metrics and financial incentives. Our new obsession, AI, isn’t intelligent as much as it is incredible at guessing what should come next based upon the past. It’s a tool to usher in our future, yet built upon the average. How symbolic.
Aren’t we all feeling the same thing? I adored Nicole Brinkley’s essay this weekend, I Want to Do The Work of Falling in Love. Both her and Matt Klein just completely sum up anything I’d say about the environment we are in as artists and creatives and even consumers. Go read them! Then come back. Because I want to talk about what comes next.
We’ve lost sight of what it means to be brave.
It feels like our facilities for riskiness and imagination have atrophied.
There were several things that jumped out at me in Matt Klein’s full report as being exciting, living things that I wanted to play with:
By considering yourself as an observer of culture, you neglect your responsibility as a critical contributor. Accept that you too are a part of the system. Get off the sidelines.
At a moment of algorithmic-recommendations, bumper sticker takes, and AI re-generated averages, the atypical sets us free. AI is often programmed to play a normie.
What if: We grew from seeing the flaws in AI as flaws in ourselves?
I did new ad copy for work last week and I had been doing a lot of reading that really inspired me to do something different. With some good push and pull, me and my coworker came up with copy and creatives that are. . .basic ass story-telling. Nothing super out there, but definitely different. Man, it felt like a risk. Everything out there is features & benefits marketing and I hate it, but I feel beholden to that average standard!
Benefits Marketing
What is features & benefits marketing? It’s the benefits you (the consumer) will get from using the product, because of these features. The graphic with a book and all it’s fun tropes trend? That’s a features and benefits marketing classic. Pitching a book based on its aesthetic? That’s a features (aesthetic) and benefits (you like this aesthetic). You can sell things with this, but you can’t drive culture. It turns art into a commodity. Honestly, this kind of marketing hasn’t been effective since Sears-Roebuck sold refrigerators this way in the 50’s. (And by effective, I mean, does more than act like a commodity).
It still exists, it will always exist, because it’s the easiest, most average, lowest common denominator way of selling a product. It’s also the only way most people know how to sell.
But god, it’s boring. You used to be able to vibe on social media and have, like, a little weirdo vibe and now, if you want your posts to be seen by anyone, you’ve got to do features and benefits baby. Here’s what I can do for you if you give me attention.
I have thought a lot about the question of what do I have to offer? And the reality is, the older I get, the less I have. I just don’t have anything to say that work like that. The things I want to talk about are the unknown, the messy tangles, the things I can’t offer anyone because I’m trying to find them myself. You can’t feature-benefit market a mess! I just keep trying to find a way to have a little table at midnight at Cafe du Monde, and invite the world to sit down, one at a time, and let us laugh and smoke a joint and turn over the universe to inspect it’s threads. That’s what I want. I don’t know how to achieve that.
The Point
The point is, what if we just stopped feeding the algorithm? What if we just fed it the zaniest, weirdest shit until it’s brain scrambled? Think of that world where instead of not posting, we post WEIRD. It made me smile, but I know it won’t happen. Too many people depend on the lowest common denominator. And truthfully, it’s a risk. I am worried about those ads.
But I’m also excited by the risk. I’m feeling so much creative energy, and enjoying playing with the algorithm, with culture, with reading widely, with a new project that it’s a weird little epic I have no idea if I can pull off. It feels good to be alive and the more I get to create, the more energy I have for it. Years ago, I began to complain about the algorithm limiting my creativity and I think I’ve moved past that—the question now is, do I have the courage to keep going?
My BFF and I have discussing this via text and so much here that I have felt but not put into words. Especially this: "I just keep trying to find a way to have a little table at midnight at Cafe du Monde, and invite the world to sit down, one at a time, and let us laugh and smoke a joint and turn over the universe to inspect it’s threads. That’s what I want. I don’t know how to achieve that. "
Feeling all of this EXTREMELY hard, I just want to have my little weirdo vibe