I’m not sure. But I’m less sure than I’ve ever been. But I’m more sure than I was.
I think the bubble has popped, I think independent creator content is on the way out, maybe forever, maybe until the next renaissance spurred by a new platform. I’m not sure.
I don’t know what the future holds for me, doing this kind of stuff for a living. The situation gets more complicated all the time. I knew I wasn’t going to let what I do for a living or how it was going get in the way of the narrow window of opportunity we had to start a family, but we also knew it was going to be tough at best. There just isn’t a lot of hope left in me, everything I do feels like I’m putting my nails into the cliff but the cliff is actually beach sand. Day to day it feels like things can be ok, like it’s going to work out. Night to Night though, I know the background finances are getting ugly, debt is climbing fast and I increasingly don’t really have a path out of it. I’m less sure than I’ve ever been that I will be able to make this keep working for another year.
Every platform seems to have one root evil. Advertising. The thing that kills creativity, no matter where, is advertising. This country, this world, is ruled by it. No matter how good intentioned the founders of a platform are, the all mighty dollar of advertising eventually claws its way in and begins to strip the creative market from everything. Advertisers don’t want creativity, they want eyeballs. Advertisers don’t want kickback, they don’t want disruption, they want happy, smiling, consumers. You can’t have a creative platform, and a purely clean, inoffensive sterile environment. The two things just simply cannot coexist. This is why advertisers love corporations. They love big business highly controlled content that is put together by boards and staff and checked by senior officials and government departments before it can be seen by the world. It’s safe, its clean, it won’t lose them customers that could potentially be offended or upset by the content they are shown. It killed Tumblr, it kills YouTube more and more every day (did I swear in the first 7 seconds of this blog?), and I see it happening to Twitch faster than I can run away from. If there’s one thing I’ve grown more confident in, this past year or two, it’s that I’m more sure than I ever was, advertising is the death of creative platforms…and that’s just how they like it.
Will there be a savior? Will someone create a new platform on the hopes and dreams of it being purely based on individual creativity? Probably. Will they eventually fall to the grips of advertising restriction? Almost certainly.
I’ll keep making stuff. It’s what I do, its what drives me to feel like I make some kind of impact on the world. I literally felt like a completely pointless person before. I’m not sure I could justify my existence without some way of expressing my creative outlet anymore…but I know that the writing is on the wall. I’m going to have to step up for my family and do what needs to be done to ensure their safety and well being. I had my fun in the sun, ok it was more a mostly cloudy day, but that sun poked out every now and again. I hope I’m wrong, but my gut tells me I’ll be driving forklifts again by this time next year. I guess we’ll see. Maybe I’ll see some job listings posted in some advertising. Fuck.
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