Thinking loudly about networked beings. Commonist. Projektionsfläche. License: CC-BY
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Parlamentarische Demo-Beobachtung: Polizisten schlagen Linken-Politiker*innen

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Gleich zwei Linken-Bundestagsabgeordnete erleben Polizeigewalt. Sie verfolgten als parlamentarische Be­ob­ach­te­r*in­nen Demonstrationen in Berlin. mehr...
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tante
5 minutes ago
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Polizisten dreschen mal wieder auf Abgeordnete der Linkspartei ein. Um als Parlamentarier sicher vor der Polizei zu sein, muss man wohl bei der AfD mitlaufen...
Berlin/Germany
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The Great Dumbening

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Think About Supporting Garbage Day!

It’s $5 a month or $45 a year and you get Discord access, two more paid issues a week, and monthly trend reports. What a bargain! Hit the button below to find out more.

The Great Dumbening Of The 2010s

Last week, podcaster Theo Von clashed with the Department of Homeland Security after the DHS X account used one of his clips in a post about deporting immigrants. “My father immigrated here from Nicaragua. One of my prized possessions is — I have his immigration papers from when he came here. I have them in a frame,” he fired back on his show. “This was just fucked up.”

The clip of Von went viral, with most liberal users responding with some variation of, “well, what did you expect, dumbass.”

But as Rolling Stone reported, Von is not the only manosphere influencer starting to distance himself from the Trump administration. Twitch streamer Adin Ross and Joe Rogan are both also questioning their role in promoting the Trump campaign last year, now that President Donald Trump is doing all the things he said he was going to do when all these podcasters were yucking it up with him on their shows. Which, once again, begs the question: Why are these guys so fucking stupid?

But their blatant stupidity is why they’re so popular. It’s the uncomfortable truth underpinning pretty much everything that’s happened in pop culture — including politics — since the 2010s social media revolution. The online platforms that created our new world, run on likes and shares and comments and views, reshaped the marketplace of ideas into an attention economy. One that, like a real economy, is full of very popular garbage. And, also like a real economy, is now so vast and important that it’s virtually impossible to change it. If you want access to it, you better get comfortable making lowest-common-denominator bullshit in front of a camera. And, of course, it’s a lot easier to feel good about doing that if you’re an idiot.

A brief aside here, but this is the big bet that AI companies are making right now. That our tastes have grown so rotten and atrophied that we won’t even care when our feeds start filling up with slop. In fact, the Russian government, which was arguably the country quickest at embracing our new digital normal, just announced an AI-generated news satire show that will air on state television.

The Great Dumbening of the 2010s didn’t just reduce our celebrities into influencers, though. It did the same to every famous person that wanted to stay famous and every person that wanted to become famous. It untethered popularity from tastemakers — cultural, political, financial — and turned it into something nakedly transactional. If you want an audience you have to talk to people who already have an audience. Culture rewritten by the network effect of a retweet. And it’s clear that podcasters like Von, Rogan, and Ross had no larger thoughts about last year’s election beyond, “Trump seems popular and popular people on my show are good for traffic.”

This is the same calculus that Paramount CEO David Ellison, son of Trump ally Larry Ellison who is in line to own TikTok btw, made when he acquired Baris Weiss and her TERFy Free Press Substack, installing Weiss as CBS News’ editor-in-chief. But, as I said, attention is transactional now. Which means Weiss going to CBS News has to be a win for Paramount and a loss for whoever was platforming her before. In this case, it’s Substack who might feel the hurt. Reportedly, they’ll lose around 5% of their yearly revenue when/if the outlet migrates off the site.

In many ways, this is the exact logic that led the second Trump administration to fully embrace influencers — Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was a Fox News host, FBI Director Kash Patel was a podcaster, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is basically a sentient Facebook page — and invest heavily in its own. DHS Deputy Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis is posting cutesy X videos attacking Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem is filming travel vlogs inside of El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT). And my suspicion is that the outpouring of extreme anger from the right following Charlie Kirk’s death last month was motivated, at least in part, by the fact that Kirk was being groomed to be the first homegrown influencer president.

But attention was never meant to be traded this way and it doesn’t always work the way you think it will. The manosphere guys, who laundered Trump to their vast audience of men in pickup trucks, lost their “cool” aloofness after they were turned into mouthpieces for an authoritarian regime. In the case of Weiss and CBS News, as Zeteo News reporter Prem Thakker pointed out on X this week, Weiss’ first big pitch had, charitably, around 1,200 viewers. Brilyn Hollyhand, a young conservative named after a CAPTCHA, flopped as a Charlie Kirk replacement, probably because he has an even weirder face than Kirk did. And the influencer-run and influencer-driven second Trump administration can’t govern, can’t communicate, and still hasn’t figured out a way to outrun the mounting public pressure House Democrats have miraculously managed to sustain about the president’s connections to Jeffrey Epstein. And that’s the punchline here.

The tech platforms that promised to transform our attention spans succeeded, but only superficially. They created a new, much worse way of creating culture. A universe of dumbasses talking to other dumbasses, measured by numbers that don’t make sense and don’t reflect anything other than passive screen time. And they managed to convince conservatives to fully buy into this completely fake new reality. Who have only become more convinced in the last five years in their belief that this new kind of attention works like a commodity. That it can be hoarded and monopolized. (It can, but only by the platforms that run it.) That you can hire the biggest idiots you can find, make them transmit your slop from the most important institutions in the world, and as long as it’s as stupid and hateful and ugly as possible, you can trust that the algorithms will do what they’re programmed to. And it will “work” up until the minute we realize it doesn’t and never did.


We’re hosting a movie night later this month!

We’re taking over Low Cinema in Ridgewood, Queens on October 22nd for a special showing of the Slenderman-themed web series Marble Hornets. Ryan and Grant will also be doing a live recording of Panic World post-screening. Come join us!


The following is NOT a paid ad. It’s a good ol’ fashioned promo4promo. If you’re interested in promo swaps OR paid advertising, email me at ryan@garbageday.email and let’s talk. Thanks!

As artificial intelligence accelerates change across economies, industries, and governments, understanding the technology, and scale of its impact has never been more vital. Semafor Technology examines the people and ideas driving this transformation — from gigawatt-scale storage and energy infrastructure to the talent and companies reshaping Silicon Valley. Delivered twice weekly, Semafor Technology is the essential briefing on how technology, money, and influence are redefining the world. Sign up to Semafor Technology for free.


Patti Harrison Wants You To Know She Isn’t Trantifa

Instagram post by @party_harderson


The Trump 2028 Talk Is Getting Real Loud All Of A Sudden

Even though Steve Bannon has effectively been kicked out of Trump’s inner circle, he’s still a pretty good barometer for how they’re thinking. In fact, to tie into what I wrote above, his transformation into a slightly more buttoned up (he wears multiple collared shirts) Alex Jones-style podcaster was pretty good forecasting for where every other conservative was headed. Which is why you should take him very seriously when he starts musing about a Trump 2028 run.

On NewsNation last night, talking to host Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bannon said, “I think there are many different alternatives we’ll roll out after the midterms to make sure President Trump is on the ballot in 2028. And if he’s on the ballot, he’ll win.” You can watch a clip of it on X if you have the stomach for it.

What are those alternatives he may be alluding to? Well, wouldn’t you know it. Scott Leiendecker, a former Republican election official, just purchased Dominion Voting Systems. The company at the center of the 2020 election conspiracy theories. And just to kill any optimism you might have about the company remaining objective going forward, Leiendecker has renamed Dominion, Liberty Vote (uh oh), and posted a note about his intentions on Dominion’s website. “Our mission is clear: every vote must be secure, fair, and verifiable,” which is exactly what you’d say if you weren’t going to do that.


Someone Made A Lot Of Money Of This Weekend’s Crypto Crash

A lot of people lost a lot of money on crypto this weekend. According to Bloomberg, about $20 billion was liquidated. It seemingly was tied to President Donald Trump’s escalating trade war with China.

The TL;DR here is that China has clamped down on the exports of rare-earth minerals due to Trump’s boneheaded tariff strategy. Trump then responded on Truth Social, threatening to impose 100% tariffs on China. Then the crypto market imploded. There was also a lot of really delicious cope from shrieking finance guys on X.

Posts like this give me a lot of joy. I can’t wait to print them out and read them around the trash fire as I walk the great American wasteland in a few years.

There was one person who made a lot of money this weekend, however. An account was opened on Hyperliquid, a blockchain trading platform, and put in a short about a half hour before Trump’s Truth Social post. They made about $30 million. How serendipitous!


Will Trump Give Barron TikTok?

This is, god willing, bullshit, but, let’s face it, nothing is off the table with these people. Internally, Barron is considered Trump’s internet whisperer. He was reportedly behind the big manosphere podcast push during the election. It’s not unthinkable that he could be gifted a job at the new Trump-run US TikTok.

The idea that Barron could end up on US Tiktok’s comes from a Daily Mail interview with Trump’s TikTok producer Jack Advent, who told the tabloid, “Young people are overwhelmingly the user base of TikTok. I'm hopeful President Trump will consider appointing his son Barron and maybe other young Americans to TikTok's board to help ensure it remains an app young people want to keep using.”

So, thankfully, this isn’t official, just speculation for now. But I do think it’s a good reminder that Trump’s influence will be felt on US TikTok.


You Can Finally DDOS Cars

This is one of those I hadn’t even really considered tbh. According to the X user that posted this, no one actually got in the cars. They all showed up, waited 10 minutes, and charged everyone a $5 no-show fee and left. Waymo then disabled pickups in the area until the next morning.


Weird Google Japan Thing

Google Japan made a rotary dial keyboard. It’s unclear why they did this, but it’s sick and, frankly, I want one. Also, as eagle-eyed viewers in the comments pointed out, the team behind this is so committed to the bit, they’re all slowly rotating in the release video.


Did you know Garbage Day has a merch store?

You can check it out here!



P.S. here’s it’s Tronin’ time. (X post)

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***



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tante
27 minutes ago
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"The tech platforms that promised to transform our attention spans succeeded, but only superficially. They created a new, much worse way of creating culture. A universe of dumbasses talking to other dumbasses, measured by numbers that don’t make sense and don’t reflect anything other than passive screen time."
Berlin/Germany
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How to eat with others

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Horizontal painting. Yellow background. Black text that says DON'T RENT HERE. IT'S TOXIC.
This is the last painting I did at my old studio. I left it behind.

You can support my shenanigans for a mere $2/mo.


This week’s question comes to us from Milly Schmidt:

Some people have friends with very different politics and they keep them very separate to avoid conflict. Obviously there are benefits of having diverse friends, even politically. Do you think all your friends should be able to be invited to a party or have a meal together?

I love everybody that loves everybody.

I also think that hanging out with people who agree on everything is boring. It’s also close to impossible, thankfully, because you’ll ultimately find something you disagree about. And that tends to become when hanging out gets interesting. For example, this weekend friends will get together and someone will say they’re enjoying the new Taylor Swift. Someone else will say it’s an album for cop wives. And suddenly, that becomes an interesting hangout.

Spending my childhood summers in Portugal, I spent a lot of time in cafés where people would argue about anything and everything. Finding the minor disagreement that would spark the argument was the goal of being at that café. Someone unfamiliar with that kind of environment would walk in and assume a fight was gonna break out. But this was just people communicating. This was people enjoying their evening by having spirited conversations with their friends. Which, counter-intuitively, ends up bringing people together. Because if I enjoy a lively discussion—and I do—the person willing to go toe-to-toe with me is going to be someone I end up treasuring as a friend. As long as everyone understands the rules of discussion. We are arguing about minor things. We’re making argumentative mountains out of molehills. This isn’t conflict, it’s sport.

I also remember one particular evening in one particular café when someone loudly commented about how the previous regime did a lot of good for the country. Mind you, this was fairly soon after the revolution that knocked the fascists out of power. The café got stone cold silent. Every argument stopped. Every conversation came to a close. I have a vivid memory of hearing a spoon slowly stirring an espresso. And I watched as everyone’s head turned towards the man that had just said something positive about fascism. The silence held. And held. Until he quickly downed his coffee and politely excused himself as he walked out the door. Within seconds the café went back to its usual argumentative din.

There are welcome arguments between friends, and there are arguments that end friendships. It’s important to know where that line is for you. While I appreciate having friends with different points-of-view, or even different politics (as you phrased it) I will not be friends with people who want my daughter dead. I will not be friends with people who want, or even tolerate, my neighbors being kidnapped. I will not be friends with people who believe some of us are somehow entitled to more rights than others. And I will not be friends with people who believe if we keep our heads down, as others around us suffer, we’ll save ourselves.

We can argue about sports teams, we can argue about zoning, we can argue about the cost of goods, but we cannot argue about the civil rights of other human beings. We cannot argue about the right for people to live in peace. We cannot argue about the right for other people to love who they love. This is the line where argument turns from sport to a relationship-ending event.

Personally, if I’m having a gathering in my home I want my friends to feel welcome. Not just by me, but by everyone else there. And I need my friends to know that me, my guests, and my house are a safe place. Not just for this particular event, but always.

Think of it this way: if you invite someone from a marginalized community into your home and they ask if there’s going to be someone there that wants them dead, or doesn’t feel like they’re entitled to full personhood, and you tell them that you’re having a separate party for those folks the next night, how do you think that person would feel? You can’t claim to care about someone while also caring for the people who would bring them harm. You really don’t care about your friend in that situation. You’ve made a decision that speaks more to your standing in the social order than their safety. And that’s fucked up.

If you had dinner with a trans friend on Tuesday, and dinner with fascists on Thursday, your trans friend had dinner with a fascist on Tuesday.

Which of course brings us to Thanksgiving. My parents, being immigrants, didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. But in time, my brothers and I wore them down. We wanted to celebrate the same holiday that our friends were celebrating, which makes sense. We were kids. We wanted to belong. We also wanted pie, which was understandable. Pie is great! And, while I’m not overlooking the atrocious origins of the holiday, the idea that sitting down with the people you love and giving thanks is a genuinely nice idea. One that should actually be extended to all our meals. We sit down with the people we love and we share a meal together. The problem with Thanksgiving is that we’re not sitting down with the people we love, a lot of us are sitting down with the people we feel obligated to be sharing a meal with, even when some of those people want your friends dead.

After my brothers and I had grown apart and eventually moved out of my parents’ house and into our own apartments, we still made an effort to come together for Thanksgiving. Mostly because it seemed to make our mother happy, and despite our disagreement on mostly everything else, we understood that this was important. Still, these were not what I would call enjoyable events. The tone was tense. The possibility of my father’s mood going sideways was always in the air. And we were guaranteed to speedrun from a conversation to an argument to a fight fairly quickly, which my father used as justification for getting up, grabbing his keys, and bolting out the door. Which was how Thanksgiving dinners ended.

After a few of these, my mother started pulling me aside before my brothers got there and asking me “not to rile them up.” Which a few people reading this will understand translates to “don’t tell them there’s racism coming out of their mouths.” My brothers were free to use the N-word during Thanksgiving, the problem was that I wasn’t ok hearing it. The problem wasn’t that my brothers were racist, it was that I was pointing it out. At one point I asked her if she’d ever had one of these asides with either of them. Had she ever asked my brothers not to spew racist bile at the table? It was a needless question, because I knew she hadn’t. Growing up in their house racism was the default. That was the last time I spent Thanksgiving at their house.

Let me say this plainly, for folks wrestling with whether they should spend Thanksgiving with relatives that want their friends dead: Don’t.

In the end, we are defined not just by our actions, but by the actions we tolerate.

If you insist on spending Thanksgiving with your racist relatives, go to fight. Call Uncle Bob on his Jim Crow bullshit. Make sure that the first person who brings up “men playing women’s sports” is met with a face full of mashed potatoes. When Aunt Mary starts reciting FOX News talking points on eugenics start screaming at the top of your lungs. When your brother-in-law starts yapping about the “criminal element” in the city, slap him with a ham. When your dad brings up what a terrible idea it is to have Bad Bunny do the SuperBowl halftime show, pick up the turkey and slam it across the wall. Become ungovernable. Bring airhorns. Bring whistles. Bring the chaos. Making a meal enjoyable for racists is never the goal. There are no medals to be won for sitting silently while a table that is meant for giving thanks is taken over by hatred. There are no medals to be won for being tolerant of people who want your friends dead. If you’re not willing to fight, then you’re just having a meal with racists.

Telling someone they need to be on their “best” behavior is only an issue when their real behavior is intolerable.

A better idea may be to spend the day with people who love and support you. People you actually give thanks for. The friends who have your back. The friends who love you at your fullest, loudest and truest. People only complain about the turkey being dry when the company is terrible. There is never enough gravy to make regret feel like anything but your soul leaving your body. When we are surrounded by people who deserve and cherish our company the meal is always amazing.

Family is a choice. And those whose blood you share had first dibs at making a choice, and trust that they did. I will be honest with you, when my friends tell me that they’re off to spend Thanksgiving with family it fills me with sadness. Not because I’m not happy for them—I am! But because a part of me will always wonder what that is like. We are born ready to love those closest to us. Our parents and siblings had first dibs on our love! I was always ready to love my parents, and there is a part of me that always will, but there is a bigger part of me that refuses to become the person I need to become for them to love me back. They made a choice, and in return I made one too.

I love everybody who loves everybody.

When I invite my friends into my house it’s with the understanding that there is both love and nourishment there for them. There will also be music, which we may argue about. And we might argue about the best way to make brussels sprouts. Or whether pie goes best with ice cream or cheese. (The answer is two slices of pie, one with each.) We might argue about something happening in local politics. We will definitely argue about the new Taylor Swift. But we will never argue about whether one of us belongs there or not. We will never argue about whether anyone there should feel welcome or not. We will never argue about whether someone should’ve brought their significant other, or others. (A heads-up is nice, if only to make sure we have enough pie.) We will never argue about whether someone should have autonomy over their own body. We will never argue about whether Palestine deserves to be free. We will never argue about whether we should look out for our neighbors.

We might argue about the best ways to do these things, and those arguments will get lively. They’ll get loud. Even within our core agreements, there is enough to argue about. There is love in those arguments, and in the end, they tend to bring us closer together.

I love everybody who loves everybody. I hope that includes you.


🙋 Got a question? Ask it here! I might just give you the rambling answer you weren’t looking for.

💀 You like zines? Me too. You hate AI? Me too. I’ve turned an old essay, How to not build the Torment Nexus, into a fun zine that can be yours for $5 cheap! Buy it here!

📣 If you get nervous/anxious/etc when you have to talk about your work, please consider taking my Presenting w/Confidence workshop. It really helps! There’s one next week. Get a ticket!

🍉 Please donate to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. Shit is worse than ever.

🏳️‍⚧️ Please donate to Trans Lifeline. Reward the bravery it takes to live your realest life.

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tante
4 days ago
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"In the end, we are defined not just by our actions, but by the actions we tolerate."

Mike Monteiro with another banger
Berlin/Germany
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1 public comment
rocketo
4 days ago
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"Let me say this plainly, for folks wrestling with whether they should spend Thanksgiving with relatives that want their friends dead: Don’t."
seattle, wa

Merz bei Miosga: Der Kanzler missbraucht seinen Kinderreichtum für Seitenhiebe gegen Merkel

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Friedrich Merz brüstet sich damit, der »erste Kanzler mit eigenen Kindern« seit 1998 zu sein. Das ist nicht nur falsch, sondern infam. Und offenbart ein von Vorgängerin Angela Merkel tief gekränktes Männerego.

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tante
6 days ago
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"tief gekränktes Männerego" ist Friedrich Merz' komplette Persönlichkeit.
Berlin/Germany
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Doin’ Discourse With Ezra and Charlie

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TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has four panels, all featuring the same three characters. Charlie, a white man in a suit and tie. Ezra, a white man in more casual clothing. And Reader, a Latina wearing shorts and a black tank.

PANEL 1

Charlie and Ezra are walking together. Nearby, Reader sits at the base of a tree, reading a book, and overhears.

CHARLIE: We need Nuremberg-style trials for tranny-affirming clinic doctors.

EZRA: As a liberal centrist, I can’t agree with that. But what matters is that we’re talking.

PANEL 2

The woman looks annoyed.

CHARLIE: Democrats want Mexicans to overrun us because they hate America and wanna see it become less white and collapse!

EZRA: That’s not true. But again, we’re talking! Thank you for practicing politics the right way!

PANEL 3

The woman stands up, yelling angrily at the two men.

CHARLIE: You know what happens in the cities? Blacks prowl around attacking white people for fun! Haitians rape your women and hunt you!

EZRA: Again, I can’t agree. But I–

READER: Fuck that racist bullcrap!

PANEL 4

Ezra and Charlie walk on, not speaking to the woman, who watches them leave with an annoyed expression.

EZRA: Tsk! So uncivil! That’s the kind of intolerance that’s ruining America.

CHARLIE: They should deport her!

CHICKEN FAT WATCH

“Chicken fat” is forgotten cartoonist lingo for unimportant but hopefully amusing stuff in the art.

PANEL 1: A notice taped to the tree says “DON’T don’t don’t don’t don’t don’t forget about me baby,” a reference to a song by Simple Minds made famous in The Breakfast Club.

PANEL 4: A heart carved into the tree trunk says “N.L. + S.T.” Another heart says “J.T. + J.B.,” but has been crossed out. A third heart says “A.H. + J.B.” All of these hearts refer to one of my favorite musicals, Sweeney Todd.
Beaker from The Muppets is sticking his head out a hole in the ground.
A rat is walking on the street next to the sidewalk, looking distressed as it reads something on its phone. It’s wearing a shirt with a hearts pattern.
A piece of litter on the ground says “REPENT. Panel 4 is upon us!”


Doin’ Discourse With Ezra and Charlie | Patreon

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tante
14 days ago
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The whole "discourse" meme is rotting people's brains.
Berlin/Germany
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The Professionalism Trap

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I’m in the process of rewriting a talk I gave a few weeks ago in order to record it and publish it online. When I mentioned that to a friend who’s a filmmaker and knows how lighting and all that works he offered to help me doing it “right” so it doesn’t look like shit. Which – if we are honest – my recording totally might.

I didn’t go for his help. Not because I do not know that his expertise would have helped but because I wanted to see what I could do myself, even if it’s a bit shit. Which is maybe not smart and totally goes against how “the market” works.

It has never been easier and cheaper to produce stuff – especially media – of massively high production value. Even smartphone cameras are good enough to record very impressive videos – given a bit of lighting. Microphones are cheap. Very good cameras and a lot of information on how to use them and edit the photos are affordable. Even open source content management systems (like the WordPress thingy I have going here) come with very sleek and professionally looking themes/appearances. It’s almost hard to produce something truly shitty-looking today.

This abundance of cheap tools could be seen as almost utopian. Tech-influencers and -executives will call this “democratization”. And even for people already making things this is very alluring: Your things could be so much better if you just did a few things, used a few tools.

And many of us are profiting off of this every day. My favorite type of media (the long-form video essay) for example has been in sort of a golden age for a few years with the production value of these films going up every year. But I keep wondering if that is always a good thing. Like why didn’t I accept my friend’s help in making my recording good? (Well aside from all the usual bullshit and insecurities in my head, but let’s ignore all that.)

I think the level of quality that everything has these days, every image, every website, every song, every video also has downsides. It defining the “norm”, the expectation we have from one another has two main issues that keep irritating me.

The Second Job

Getting cheap tools of high quality is one thing but tools don’t work by themselves. They still need a lot of experience to use them properly, to get the results these tools are advertised with. Yeah, you can build a small home studio to record yourself for a small 4 digit EUR budget, but can you actually use those things? So now you have to dig into all kinds of other things, into manuals and howtos.

Don’t get me wrong, nobody loves a rabbithole as much as I do, but did you really need another extra hobby/job? What did you want to do when you started? Say you wanted a website to publish your writing. Now you are diving into the specificities of your chosen CMS and try to bend it to something you saw somewhere and it doesn’t want to budge. But you wanted to write, right? How’s that working out for you?

We are inventing extra jobs for ourselves and put them in between us doing the thing we wanted to do. Because professionalism.

This also leads to us having a harder time to be happy about our work because it’s harder to determine what’s “not good enough”. Are you unhappy with your writing or the way it looks? Would the writing have been better of you hadn’t dicked around making sharepics for Instagram (because that’s how you run a website!)?

In the end all the extra work can make it so much harder to get people to do the things they actually wanted. Because they wanted a professional thing and not some janky 90ies looking site. But why not? Maybe it’s not your business to run a perfect publication and maybe it doesn’t need to be. What did you want to do before professionalism clouded your mind? Why not just do that?

Too Weird

Professionalism not only derives from tools of course. Especially in algorithmically driven platforms (think Youtube or Instagram) – but also in others – there’s a sort of grammar to learn based on the properties of the platform, what it “rewards” and what its users expect. There’s a reason everything on Instagram looks like advertising. Because it is.

So say you want to make videos and have them on youtube. You quickly learn the lengths that work on that platform, you learn how the images are supposed to look so people click them, how to do the greeting/introduction. Every platform establishes very narrow, very rigid rules for the content that is successful there.

But it’s mostly documented, right? There’s so many howtos there telling you how to do it, maybe even some “AI” to help you! Cool.

But now that the thing that you wanted to make has been reshuffled and reshaped into something platformy, is it still what you wanted it to be? Is it still you? Does it make you happy? Well maybe the success makes you happy, fair.

Professionalism has a strong normative quality: That is the reason that professionals have standard processes and workflows (which enable working together easier and help ensure quality) but that’s also the reason why you cannot really distinguish individual bankers or tech-bros from one another: They all look and talk the same way.

Professionalism tries to limit the “weird”, the “unruliness”.

Of course: It’s capitalism

All this of course comes from capitalism. The push for professionalism comes – to a large degree – from the thought that if you put time into it, you maybe can make some money off of it! Maybe it can be your job! Everything needs to be a business or a proto-business.

But it shouldn’t.

If you are trying to make a living off of your writing or drawing or video-making or crocheting or whatever, that’s cool. I am rooting for you.

But not everything needs to be. Not everything needs to do the professional things. The growth hacks and the pro tools. Some things can also be just a person doing a thing and putting it … somewhere. Doesn’t matter if the platform or the form ain’t all that. It’s just a thing someone did and wanted to share. In all its potential jankiness.

So yeah, I’ll probably record my talk on my own. And this has totally not been a very long-winded way for me to legitimize my bad orthography.

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tante
19 days ago
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I think we might have locked ourselves into a professionalization trap. Shocking revelation: It's capitalism's fault.
Berlin/Germany
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