Come Sail the Blueskies, Where We're All Fish Flopping Around

Everyone is just waiting for their own self-destructive deep dive, right?

Sometimes I have nothing really insightful or meaningful to say.

I suppose I have a platform here of sorts and lots of lovely people who are willing to dip their toes into whatever I have to say. Sometimes, though, I just don’t have much to say.

All of this while I’m watching the social media landscape flop around like the carp at the end of Faith No More’s video for Epic. In fact, re-watching that video just now, it struck me by how that visual at the end was so powerful and how it had to have upset someone. My mind shot to the idea that someone would probably do a deep dive into the fish story to chronicle if a fish was harmed, who was responsible, and so forth.

… and, of course, I wasn’t wrong.

Because that’s how we choose to interact with our world right now. My brain went to “that’s a real fish, I wonder what happened with it,” and from there imagined all the possibilities. It’s a part of the strange obsession with the real, or hyperreal, that takes power away from art. The imagery itself is striking for a reason. They had a rotating cast of carp they filmed for that shoot, all of which were let go unharmed after. It’s not something I’d do, but it’s hard to argue the power of the imagery.

On top of that, I was also smacked in the face by the reality that the video was posted by my former employer, of which I was let go as a part of the sweeping “pivot to video” failure brought on by Facebook pushing false engagement numbers that helped smash online publishing at the time.

Last night I was messing around with BlueSky, a social media platform that’s become the platform de jour for people wanting to flee Twitter not because Twitter was bad for everyone’s collective mental health, but because it’s run by a megalomaniac trying to either control the world or destroy it if he can’t have it, and couldn’t help but think that no one has learned a single lesson about this stuff. Who cares what Jack Dorsey’s involvement is in all of this, it’s fine. It’s FINE. Substack Notes launched as a Twitter alternative, but quickly devolved into a hellscape of LinkedIn for “creators” of sorts, where everyone posting is trying to sell something, which we all know works very well to foster community. Meta is launching their own attempt at Twitter, because everyone wants to post under their real name on a publicly visible platform alongside their racist, homophobic uncle, right?

All of this while navigating the publishing world that’s so stuck up its own ass.

That fish flopping around makes entirely too much sense.

We’re really just stuck in a big ole loop all the time, aren’t we? The technology gets better, but at the end of the day we’re all fish flopping around waiting for someone to do a “deep dive” into the story behind the fish without understanding the situation.

Now go on, subscribe to me and maybe I’ll give you some stories to read. Or something. I don’t know.