Aftermarket Blues

Yesterday, I posted my first ever toot about this very website and the response has been… underwhelming. Which is to say, it is exactly as it should have been. Mastodon has a very different distribution model and a generally different approach to engagement and interaction. Its “culture” is much less performative and superficial than Twitter or Instagram. By which I mean, those systems train their users to respond instantly and at the slightest sense of resonance with the posts it puts in front of them. Their likes and retweets and replies are, basically, a Pavlovian response to a system of finely-honed cues designed to whip sentiments up into a maelstrom of whirling emotions, digitised and monetised as clickity-clickity-clack.

Lowered Expectations

If I take my conspiracy hat off for a second, I can see that what I’ve done is a classic case of transference: encountering a new, similar phenomenon and expecting it to behave in the manner of the old one. On Instagram, as a nobody, I could get, say, 2-5 guaranteed likes/shares/follows/blah by using the correct #hashtag. It seemed, at the time that I was still using it, a matter of simple patience before I had a big following and people giving me money for things. This, of course, is part of the headgame that Instagram deliberately implements and directly profits off of. But again, this is not how Mastodon works, but my expectation that it is/should be is the transference.

What I’m trying to do here, is console myself and keep from falling down the well, as it were. It’s very difficult to remember that what was a momentous occasion for me (actually telling the world about this website and my books/stories), is utterly meaningless to everyone else. As I told myself from the beginning (unfortunately I am a terrible listener) the importance of the exercise of posting about this site was the action itself. For the time being, the response of the “market” is irrelevant, and to be honest, I don’t want to think of Mastodon that way (or anything, for that matter).

Reverse Engineering

No. The point of the exercise is to find the generator that is powering the force-shield that keeps me locked into my tiny, hermetic universe and disable the fuck out of it. I don’t want to blow it up, I want to know how it works, so that when some sneaky, headfucking gremlin climbs back into my brain and builds a new one, I’ll be able to disable that one too¹.

And this is the first step. I’ve got the first corner of the blueprint: expecting everyone to immediately love and respond to anything I put in the world, and being emotionally crushed when I don’t get that (totally unrealistic) response. (That seems like a couple of corners, actually). Quite aside from the obvious and easy accusations of narcissism that I might hurl at myselfI’m choosing to interpret this expectation as the desire for respect and recognition and the wish for it to magically appear with a simple incantation.

Hocus Pocus

Invocation, however, is always a symbolic gesture, whether you actually expect it to work or not. And while it is not magical, it is important to continue to use those symbols which support and direct you towards the things you want to be/create/attain. You just have to calibrate your expectations to the fact of reality that everything takes effort, and sustained effort. That needn’t imply suffering, but it’s always going to take longer than you want it to, and your frustration and disappointment are always a measure of how much you want that thing.

So, in that sense, frustration and disappointment are good things, because it means that I actually give a shit, and actually want something. Which is a feeling I have a hard time allowing myself…

Previous attempts to blow up the generator have usually involved copious amounts of alcohol, or since I went dry, weeks and weeks of avoidance and junk food before finally getting to “fuck it.” Not what you might call healthy.↩︎