web as performance

Today’s most vital cultural forms are your identity, personality, and image. And in this new cultural paradigm, the artist’s performance of themself is often more important than the art they make. The persona is the message.

the metrics, outward success, markers of “making it”, numbers, likes, popularity, visibility, praise or criticism or being ignored, awards, highlights, or trajectory that might come from what we make don’t matter much if we aren’t enjoying the process of making what we make.

What we're seeing is an end of the race to the bottom.

What's happened is that most of the major social networks only hire and promote people who make decisions primarily based on analytics. As a result these sites no longer have any real communities or organic content, and have been completely hollowed out by math-friendly refrigerator magnet... See more

I’ve heard we’re all comprised of two selves: the experiencing self and the narrating self. The experiencing self submits always to our circumstances—it feels, needs, desires. The narrating self, meanwhile, is removed—it reflects, rearranges, regales. These modes of being may directly concern a way of living, like being present versus being... See more