Art vs Commerce and Pandering

Yesterday I was telling a friend about Steemit, trying to explain in simple terms how it works, and how we all could benefit from putting the information we already share on other platforms here, using our votes to help one another financially, beyond the mere ego boost social media has already accustomed us to receiving in the form of "Likes". She thought her teenage daughter, who already has a sizable YouTube following, might find this knowledge useful. So when the 14 year old entered the room, my friend suggested the idea to her daughter, whose immediate reaction was extreme skepticism.

"Sounds like some sort of cheesy scam!" Her initial assumption was that even if it were true that she could make money using the platform, this would necessarily be at the expense of her viewers. This is the logic by which "real" money traditionally operates. Unless you happen to be a central banker, for every dollar each person makes, someone else must part with some of their own wealth; thus in order for anyone to gain, someone else must lose.

So I tried to explain further. "The system automatically creates more money out of thin air whenever people add value to the network in a way that's useful to others. Even people who do nothing but vote get paid a little if their votes help others discover stuff they like!"

She remained incredulous, saying that even if it were true, she had made a promise to her viewers never to make money from her YouTube channel. If she had wanted that, she had already been offered the option to monetize her content, and had declined. She would not break her promise.

I admired her dedication to maintaining the artistic integrity of her creations, and to her audience. It reminded me of my early blogging days (except back then the word "blog" did not exist; it was simply a personal website where I did programming experiments and wrote about my life, as well as whatever else caught my interest), when the notion of putting ads on my site in exchange for extra pocket change was anathema to me. This was my art, not to be intermingled with the demands of the commercial world, where my message would be compromised and the viewing experience undermined by the presence of banner ads! Never!

Oh how far the net has come since then! I still feel the same way about ads, as the degree to which they have gradually become ever more obtrusive and obnoxious has not relented, degrading so much of the web surfing experience into a jungle of mostly trash.

On this front, Steemit carries great promise, offering a way to keep the servers running and other expenses paid, letting us express ourselves without having to clutter up the experience with irrelevant advertising. Or does it?

Now, instead of the ads competing for people's attention with an eye on making a buck, we all become advertisers in a sense, and the product is our own words and images, driven with ever stronger incentives to seek approval, to sell our messages to one another, potentially compromising honesty and integrity in the bargain. With the incentives that Steemit provides, does pandering (particularly to known whales, as this article points out) become more profitable?

Maybe so, but even if this is the case, I suspect that if I attempt to profit in such a way, I would likely fail, burn out on it mentally, and end up hating it just as much as every job where I've felt as if I had to pander to the boss in order to continue subsisting in this world.

I keep my cool for one more day
Laugh along enough to keep getting paid
I'm losing my hold on hope
Is this your idea of a joke?

I just keep talking to myself
Wondering to myself
What have I done, what have I done
Under the moon that follows me
Someone watches me
Under the sun, under the gun

--Conjure One, "Under The Gun"

It hasn't always been so. I remember many years ago, after getting my first job as a software developer in the corporate world, I put up a royal stink on the company email listserv about the way the company had "standarized" on such a hideously non-open mess of a file format as Microsoft Word (.doc) for storing and exchanging documents. Their argument amounted to, "It's what everybody uses, and we do too. Get used to it."

I made a counter-argument, "But don't we want to be better than all those other companies, work to a higher standard, and do things better, for the sake of excellence, to promote a better world than all those other companies are sinking into?" This seemed to fall on deaf ears.

A few months later, when they started to file for software patents... Well, I was utterly disgusted, but by then, I had learned that my opinions, no matter how rational the arguments, simply did not matter there. So I didn't bother with piping up about it. But I did rant a bit about it on my website after hours. Since I had already shared the site's address with some of my coworkers, who had become regular readers, word got around.

I found myself being called into the VP's office. I wasn't being fired, or even reprimanded. In fact, he said he was worried that they were going to lose me as an employee, and wanted to see if there was anything he could do to try and smooth things over.

"Well, how 'bout not supporting the corrupt system of software patents?" I explained my reasoning: That software patents amount to censorship by going beyond the bounds of copyright, which protects a particular implementation, to an attempt to claim more general ownership over any other original creation that might perform a similar function. Like the difference between copyrighting a particular telling of a story, in which the words in a specific order as expressed by an author are agreed to be owned by that person, versus trying to prohibit anybody else from even describing events from the story using their own words at all.

But it soon became clear that "smoothing things over" didn't mean the VP was going to do anything differently, no matter what reasons were given. It wasn't a negotiation in any real way. I didn't have that kind of clout. He did say that he believed it would be extremely unlikely that the company would actually use the patents to sue anyone, but instead to protect against others who might try to claim the concept as theirs and sue us. The argument for defensive use of such patents made sense to me in the context of the hopelessly flawed legal system, but I still didn't like it.

What really disturbed me was the way he talked about patents as if they were something to be proud of; how IBM had so many patents that entire walls were covered with them, displayed like trophies. He went on to describe how shareholders found them impressive, as if this was something to envy, or emulate. Maybe in his executive mind, a patent represented something to be proud of. I found myself thinking, That's exactly the reason I *wouldn't* want to work for a company like IBM. What a disgusting spectacle! How could anybody with a shred of honor be proud to work for a company that gleefully and excessively engaged in a system which would undermine basic human freedoms?

But I digress. Though I was certainly an idealistic young lad, that company didn't lose me over that issue right then; no, that happened many months later, when trust about other matters was broken, mass layoffs occurred, and the pattern of deception and broken promises, which I would later come to see as generally endemic to corporate operating procedure, sent me spiralling into a mentally unstable state, and I resigned, or got fired, or maybe both at the same time. I took my last exit being escorted out of the building, carring the last of my personal cubicle decorations with my head held high.

I wasn't pandering then, was I? No, but I learned a good lesson. In the corporate world, when you don't pander, you get ignored (or placated) at best, punished with termination, no severence pay, and exiled at worst.

During the months that followed that first job in the dot com boom/bust economy -- my initiation into the adult workforce -- I had time to think about all this as I struggled economically, eventually moving back in with my parents for a while, and reeling from the emotional loss of being surrounded by my geeky coworkers on a daily basis, most of whom I had gotten along with quite well, growing to think of them as my primary circle of friends. (We did, after all, spend most of our waking hours together for over 2 years.) Only upon being separated from all of it did I realize how much I missed it. (Then again, many of them had already been lost during the layoffs, so even before my stint ended, the place was no longer nearly as vibrant, which was part of why I stopped giving a shit and just wanted out.)

After that, when I eventually found a job in a big corporate grocery store deli, I learned superficial pandering as a matter of everyday policy. If you didn't excecute the program of smiling wide enough at every customer, even if it was just a fake movement of the lips with no real warmth, the mystery shoppers would doc points from your review. No joke.

Fortunately, I didn't stay at that corporate deli job too long, but the conditioning that one must automatically pander, assuming a certain fakeness in the context of the workplace, particularly when interacting with customers, undoubtedly stuck around in my subconscious long after. In a way, this programming may have helped me achieve excellence in subsequent customer service positions, even when they involved working toward better ends at food co-ops /that didn't impose such absurd policies regarding smiling. I had learned, without thinking, to act the role, a more general pattern of speaking and acting in a way to keep customers happy without even trying. A useful life skill which I don't regret learning.

So you see, at this point, given these accumulated life experiences, I may not even be quite capable of not pandering in certain situations. When it comes to matters related to earning a livelihood, I often tend to feel as if I must force myself to be ingratiating, at least to some degree, especially when my stomach begins to growl after eating a few too many dumpster dived pizzas, and I find myself closer to that survivalistic impulse to do whatever needs be done, or say whatever needs be said, in order to give my body the higher quality inputs it needs to keep on living.

But I do know how to write my truth. Blogging was my refuge. It was how I maintained my sanity, how I came back to my center at the end of each day after living in the world of fakeness. Recounting the events in anonymized form helped me make sense of everything; helped me remember and understand without losing sight of my own reality. So what about that old blog I stopped dumping my thoughts into on a daily basis all those years ago? Why did I stop?

I lost my readership. Or rather, they lost me. I went off the deep end. I learned about peak oil. I learned about the ways civilization has hurt humanity. I was reading Derrick Jensen, who was quickly becoming my all-time favorite author in the non-fiction category. Upon discovering a bit of CrimethInc literature, my mind was utterly blown.

Old friends from college, who had comprised my core readership, or at least the subset I most cared most about, expressed grave concerns about my sanity and well being when I didn't conform to their intellectual brow-beating. We didn't stop being friends altogether, but rifts became profound enough that we mostly stopped engaging in frank discussions on certain issues, because base assumptions had diverged to the point that such discussions became intellectually tedious, emotionally draining, and seemed to lead to little if any common ground. What was the point anymore?

Upon moving to Missoula, I found greater solace in face to face interactions with new friends, where philosophical explanations and debates were barely even necessary at all, because we were already on the same page regarding most of that stuff. The questions we talked about involved how to manifest revolution in our world, and what that meant in terms of living our lives every day, rather than regurgitating tired old debates about whether those who run the Federal Reserve have "our" best interests at heart.

When it came to artistic endeavors, my artistic focus became the sound, and my medium the radio airwaves. Less politics (though I used the artistic freedom granted by the college radio to disperse underground educational material here and there during the wee hours, for anyone out there who might be receptive and ready), more spreading the pure vibrational energy of music, feeling the world as an act of fluid poetry.

Occassionally, I made a few brief attempts at a return to blogging, but couldn't bring myself to resume it as a regular daily routine. After many invitations, despite misgivings about the ethics of Zuckerberg's new corporate giant, I finally joined the facebook train. Many of my meatspace friends became facebook friends online, and the feedback provided by that network kept pulling my attention back there. Why write a blog entry when most of the people who are likely to be interested in it probably won't even see what I publish on my own website? Even if I try to announce every entry on my facebook feed, anything leading out of that walled garden tends to get demoted in ranking, and shows up on very few newsfeeds anyway. People comment more when you just write brief snippets straight into facebook, and it's easier anyway. So I got into that pattern.

This is when I came to recognize and admit that even when no money is involved, for better or worse, whatever online writing I've done in recent years has gradually come to be motivated to a large extent by the attention and feedback from people I know. Otherwise, what a waste of time it seemed to be shouting into a void. It didn't start off that way, back in the college dorm, when I was just making websites and filling them with writings about my life for the fun of it. My apache logs proved the size of my audience was zero back then. It was driven by pure intrinsic motivation.

So a theory I'm currently toying with is this: Ironically, the best way to cultivate an audience may be to not to try to impress them at all. Just put out there whatever my psyche generates, while still striving to articulate the points and anecdotes as clearly and eloquently as I am able, perhaps with a bit more polish and structural coherence that some of my old "Random Ramblings" stream of thought style web writing. (Though I do find myself indulging in a bit of that here now, because this is how my writing brain gets itself going.)

I'd like to think of it just as I did when my first site had no audience at all, and I certainly didn't dream of being paid for it. To truly enter a mindset of not seeking with the sake of reward in mind. That's the goal. It's hard if you happen to be hungry!

If I get upvoted and this helps alleviate the need to engage in other drudgery for money as often, what a wonderful bonus! Maybe it could turn into a feedback loop, allowing me to spend more time living and chronicling more interesting experiences during time that might otherwise be occupied by chasing jobs. Even if that doesn't happen, the creative endeavor is still worthwhile because I'll know I did my best. If my subconscious gets influenced by feedback or scores nudge me to engage in certain patterns more often, while refraining from others, that's the nature of personal evolution. I can't control it entirely. It may even be for the best, because such feedback can help guide me into producing things that are of value, rather than just my own ego

Even if it does mean a bit of unavoidable pandering here and there, I'd prefer to "work" in a way that I can put as much time as is needed into creating the best thing I can make according to my own standards, rather than be forced into cutting corners in order to avoid exceeding a client's budget, or missing a deadline.

My dream is a world where everyone can do what they like, create art if they love doing that (or not), let abundance flow freely, and share that abundance for the joy of it, rather than hoarding and rushing projects out the door due to fears and self-fulfilling prophesies of artifical scarcity. Ideally, in my utopia, a gift economy would supplant money entirely, or at least make having to compromise ourselves in "working" to "earn" a living unnecessary. The rest of the world may not be ready for that dream, but it seems to me that Steemit brings the possibility of realizing this hope a bit closer.

If the corporate government wants to manipulate the situation in such a way that money is perpetually scarce among workers, artists, and creative free thinkers, while giving bankers and military generals a virtually blank check to wreak havoc, treachery, and destruction on the planet, it's about time we start learning to leave their game behind! Once people get wise to the fact that we can make our own money, with a supply fluid and abundant enough that new money can be mined into existence on the fly in proportion to contributions recognized by peers, motivating, in the best way, a space where people can be themselves without the need to pander or suck up to some authority figure, because the abundance produced by our collective gifts provides enough for all... Well, that would be the fulfillment of a very big dream indeed!

To wrap this up, I'd like to draw a distinction between contributing and pandering. Contributing art means sharing creations that come straight from the soul's inner truth, made without regard for how they might be perceived or rewarded by a particular audience. It is a sort of discipline that reqires lack of attachment, even in the presence of a possible reward. Pandering is playing to the crowd, saying something because you know they'll cheer. Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference, because expressing a shared truth from a place of genuine sincerity can often be what makes people want to applaud most.

I would like to believe that Steemit can be a place where contributing to a genuine conversation without the need to pander quite so much will be encouraged and supported in the long term. As the community develops ongoing relationships of mutual recognition and growing understanding, and many of us "get to know each other" to greater degrees through these communications over time, hopefully it becomes harder to troll and fake that kind of stuff convincingly. But I don't know. This all a collective experiment.

So far, it seems to be off to a lovely start.

Now the coffee shop where I have been writing this has closed, and I must wrap up for the night...

Editing on battery power at a nearby outdoor park, so I can push this latest creation of the word brain out there for the world without any further delay... Go Steemit! (Alright, I admit, writing "Go Steemit!" could be pandering to the audience, but it is also what I am feeling! See what I mean, this stuff gets tricky.)

Just gotta let it be now.