Is The Dream Dead?

1.

The old Adobe Master Suite was such an aspirational product for me. All the tools to work digitally across any media. It was central to the creative dream I had back in the early 2000s. Being able to work with any kind of creative media and share the results through the web.

A few years ago, Adobe switched to a subscription model and the Master Suite became affordable. I signed up right away.

But recently I downgraded from Adobe’s All Apps plan to their Creative Cloud Photography plan. The full Creative Cloud subscription had become so costly. And I was using so little of it. The notification that it was going from A$79.99/month to A$87.99/month was the final straw.

2.

Just recently, Google started offering AI answers to search queries. The more that search becomes about answers to questions the less it will provide traffic to sites like this.

Search already doesn’t work well. Less than half of search attempts lead to clicks, according to a recent study. For those of us who built the internet with our work and creativity, this means the end of traffic to our sites and the finding of new audiences.

Do we even need to go into the problems with social media at this stage? Twitter has turned into a feral wasteland. Meta’s all-powerful algorithms make Threads and Instagram places where it’s hard to sustain an audience. None of them treat links to blogs like this kindly.

The dream of being an online independent creative depended on people being able to find you through these channels. Search. Social media. Global reach powered by the internet.

3.

Back in 2004 when I started this blog, I was living in India. I’d recently withdrawn from a PhD programme. Looking for a new direction in life, I started to imagine a music studio. But I also wondered if the space could be more. Maybe a workshop for photography, design, visual art as well. It already felt like blogs were the future of publishing words. We were already talking about how music was a ubiquitous utility like water. Turn a tape and there it is. The same end was coming for distributing everything from photographs to radio, TV, and movies.

The dream wasn’t about being an internet writer, or musician, but something like a record label, or publisher. Nothing less than revolutionary creative independence.

4.

I built a simple studio in my farmhouse outside Delhi. With every move — from Hong Kong, to Singapore, and ultimately to Tokyo — I built better studios. More tools. Ever faster internet connections. Greater clarity of vision.

Reach and engagement are the words people use to describe growing an audience online. During those years, I experienced plenty of growth in reach and engagement. I landed work. Completed great projects. Embarked on delightful collaborations. Met amazing people. Travelled. Had wonderful experiences. And felt like everything was getting better.

Everything kept growing.

5.

Like the cliche puts it, the more things changed the more they stayed the same.

Record labels and publishers never went away.

Meanwhile, the internet’s intermediaries became more powerful. As we went from influencers to content creators, what never changed was how getting noticed relied on playing the game according to the rules of the medium. TikTok, YouTube, Meta, Google… they had all the power. They dictated the kind of content that rose or sank.

The creatives are just sharecroppers bringing their harvest to market.

6.

Scott Borne recently posted on Threads about how he made the transition to being a professional photographer. The first time he got a press pass for the Indy 500, he took a stunning photo of a spectacular crash. The image was syndicated by AP and earned him $3,500. Enough to buy a very nice new car back then.

In an essay entitled The Money Is in All the Wrong Places, Kelsey McKinney pointed out that back in 1936 Ernst Hemingway was paid $1 a word. In today’s money that would be $21 a word. McKinney points that the most she “…was ever paid to write for a glossy magazine in print was $2/word” and that “no one (and I really mean no one) in media makes $21/word.”

7.

A few weeks ago, I was on a quiet bike ride along Adelaide’s beaches. For years, rides like that were my inspiration. I would holiday in Adelaide. Take loads of photos of sunsets and seagulls. Dream about the ever-evolving studio. Plan for new creative projects.

But it has been years since I felt the freedom to dream like that. So much has happened in the past five years. Moving from Tokyo to London to Melbourne. Watching my kid go off to college. Come home because of the pandemic. Then go away again. The passing of my mother. Increasingly taking care of my father. Not really feeling like I belong anywhere.

During those years, the growth ended. Numbers for every metric. Readers. Subscribers. Followers. They all plateaued then started a slow, relentless descent. None of my efforts seemed to make a difference.

On one late afternoon ride, as the cool sea breeze tried to stifle my efforts on the pedals, I found myself wondering: what if no one ever finds my blog again? What if there are no new followers on social media?

What if there was no more growth?

8.

You could really feel the internet changing around 2014. Online culture became rougher. Harsher. More hostile. Algorithms changed. There was either vitality or virtual obscurity. Little in between.

But also, I changed. Anxiety and mental health issues hit me hard. I had to slow down for a few years to heal and address experiences from earlier in my life that had caused me long-term problems.

My circumstances changed. In mid-2019, I left Tokyo. I packed up my studio, and I haven’t seen it since. It’s still in boxes. From London to Melbourne. Waiting until I find a new home.

9.

This all feels so absurd. How could we be so enslaved by these tools that promised us creative freedom? I hear Morpheus’s words from the Matrix echoing in my ears, “a prison for your mind”.

But what if the really absurd revelation is how free we now are?

I’ve been making time to think about this for a while now. What if it really is impossible to find an audience? Or build community? What if no one ever discovers this site again?

Maybe it all becomes simpler?

10.

Writing in the Coagula Art Journal, Hazel Dooney talked about the changing role of the artist in the digital age. Audiences don’t just prize art now. They want a connection with the artist. They demand the artist demonstrates their authenticity.

This means artists need to speak about their work. Their creativity and creations. But having to constantly curate a creative persona can be exhausting.

I’ve written before about the challenge of crafting a personal brand for creative work and my own struggles with the state of blogging and being a social creative. My recent essay for Writerly touched on this as well. A general fatigue I feel with writing for the internet. And the risk of live-action role-playing our creativity

Into this malaise, Dooney whispered the sweetest words of encouragement. To “…communicate less yet with intensity, embrace mystery, edit hard, go with my own rhythm”. As she puts it, “It is a simple approach, really: do everything as if it were poetry.”

11.

Years ago, I met a designer who did layout work for many of the best food magazines in the UK. Her kids went to the same preschool as my own. She worked from home and had a very stylish studio. But what caught my attention was how old her computer was. She didn’t have the latest Mac, and her software was several years out of date. But she did high-quality contemporary work.

And she seemed to have fun while doing it.

Pros don’t always have the latest tools. Reliability is more important than being up to date. It takes the pressure off as well. Freeing up mental space to focus on creativity.

12.

I am neither a poet nor a revolutionary. I lack the charisma to change things at scale or the deft touch needed for saying things lightly enough that they float through culture.

Perhaps that’s why I find my home in essays. Words like these are what I do best. Blogs like this are a good home for these words.

Maybe I don’t need to do anything more revolutionary than just continue?

13.

The early web was so unruly and unstructured. The amniotic fluid in which early blogs grew was chaotic but also creative. The internet felt more vibrant and surprising back then. Now it feels violent and shocking instead.

It’s like when the circus comes to town. You have an empty field. Then for a few weeks you have a circus. Then you have an empty field again.

14.

When I asked if the dream was over, I was mostly asking if the dream of making a living from creativity online is over. Of course, people still make money from being social media stars. By playing along and being a function in the algorithm. The human face to the collaboration between brands and platforms.

But I was never dreaming that dream. I never dreamt of trying to outsmart computers and algorithms and billionaires with fragile egos.

My dream was using creativity to make things that could be sold by being online. Art books, music, photos, prints. A workshop with a window to the web. Those dreams coalesced in a simple room off to the side of a dusty farmhouse outside Delhi.

I started to believe that dream was finished. Like Morpheus said, “a prison for your mind”.

15.

Ask me why I write and I will say it’s to make sense of the world. I take photos because it fascinates me that two people can stand in the same place and see different things. I love calligraphy because few things reveal a person’s soul more clearly than how they bring ink to a page.

And I play guitar because I started at age five and don’t really know myself when I’m not making music.

None of this has anything to do with the internet, with algorithms and social media platforms, with the wicked ways of the web.

16.

The dream isn’t over because the urge isn’t gone. Creativity remains. It endures and calls us forward.

What is over is a moment in our history. A period when being online made it feel easier to be creative. When various forces, emerging technology, taste and fashion, pulled together.

What feels insubstantial is the internet. That’s sand in my fingertips. What feels the same in my hands is a pen, a camera, or a guitar.