everything is ads

[dragonlady7]

the author, advertising, pernicious influences of influencers

via https://ift.tt/Rv7mBDA

i was just complaining about this on a discord i’m a member of. (discord is. sigh. what is it. well it’s not the public internet. it’s not a substitute for social media. but it’s something. the incalculable harm done to fannish community by having so much of the active discussion now silo’d in these private, unsearchable servers is hard to state, but it’s a necessary retreat given that all the platforms keep proving themselves to be garbage. A N Y W A Y i had a thing i was gonna say.)

You are interested in an art form, or hobby. so you look it up on the internet. you find a creator who does the thing you like, and you follow them, probably on instagram currently. Their instagram has frequent posts about their art, which is great. Sometimes you can learn some techniques from them. But then they want to sell you courses in how to learn it. Of course they need to monetize, but it’s a bit off-putting; you just want to do this for a hobby, and want to learn how, and to have to pay to take a course in it is sort of beyond your means for this kind of thing.

And then like… half the posts are unboxings.They bought art supplies, which they are going to review for you. Here’s a haul video, which isn’t really even a review so much as it is just showing off each of these products. As they put them away, you can see that their storage is stuffed full of more and more unused stuff from all the previous haul videos and unboxings. Where are they putting all this? When are they using it? How much money are they spending on it?? Yes there’s an affiliate code if you want to buy one too, there’s a discount if you use it. Help a creator out. Support a small business!

I’m happy to support small businesses and I do like supporting independent creators but uh like… that’s… you wind up so inured to this constant buying of new stuff, and yes you can get a lil dopamine hit from shopping but my god, no. No. It is not harmless and it is not innocuous, when you are being constantly bombarded with this normalization of constant consumption.

(I have a fraught relationship with buying things. My ADHD Or Whatever It Is really likes the shiny new, but I have been broke most of my life, and my inability to do math makes me alternately over-conservative and reckless with money. I have had years where I spent almost everything I earned on frivolous bullshit. i have had years where I spent nothing that wasn’t on food or gasoline, and wore clothes with holes in them that didn’t fit and just made do and just lived smaller and smaller. This is a constant, ongoing problem, and watching a creator I admire unbox her new purchases of random shit literally twice a week does not help me untangle it, and that’s just one of the people I follow, seriously how does this person have the money to just keep buying more stuff.)

I know that the underlying problem is capitalism, specifically the current hyperconcentrated strain of it we have that means that the middle class basically doesn’t exist. When I was growing up, an author could make a reasonable career in the mid-list, putting out a book every year or two and living off the advance on the next one while the previous one earned out, and after a couple decades you could retire on the residuals. But by the time I was old enough to pursue a career, that line of work was dead; now you’re either a superstar or you’re grinding out two or more novels a year to make poverty wages if you’re lucky, and doing all of your own marketing too on top of it. Every industry has gone that route; anything remotely creative, there’s now no outlet for except hustling as a Content Creator on the Internet. You gotta have a little Etsy or a shopify, you gotta have a Patreon and make that worthwhile somehow. instagram wants a reel every day, you gotta game that algorithm for exposure, teach yourself video marketing on top of whatever it is you actually like. You can’t just work your undemanding civil service job and make extremely detailed tutorial pages in your evenings and weekends because you don’t have evenings and weekends anymore and every hobby has to become a slave to the grind.

So I’m not mad at the creators, I’m not mad at the people forced to hustle. I’m just so tired. The solution has to be systemic; yelling at the content creators isn’t going to fix anything. We need higher wages, we need better labor protections– I know that’s unsexy and not a good slogan for anything but believe me, that is the bottom line here.

IDK I don’t have a punchline. I guess I want to gently encourage y’all to practice non-consumption as self-care. Be aware of that side effect of constantly being bombarded with ads, where you just sort of absorb this feeling that it’s normal to constantly be buying things.

I’m not saying don’t click on your little indie creators’ ads. I’m just saying remember that everything is ads. [Just this week I bought deodorant from an Instagram ad because the girl selling it was hot, I am not immune. I know fine well what I did. Listen I needed more deodorant anyway and I don’t find very many people hot so it was notable.]

And, bringing it around to be immediately topical, when we say don’t interact with corporate accounts here on Tumblr, we mean corporate. Don’t hate the tiny hustlers. This is maybe the only platform where they can still have any kind of meaningful reach. All the others have realized that you can make businesses pay to not be hidden, and if they don’t ransom themselves, you can hide them from their friends and customers, but Tumblr hasn’t hit that yet. That’s the real origin of the Instafluencer– the actual brands’ ability to market directly is limited, so they have to find people to shill for them.

You can block ads. But when your favorite creator is shilling, you can’t block that without losing the parts you like too. it’s so fucking insidious. (Your picture was not posted)