Don't Underestimate Yourself
You know how people like me, raised by a single mother in the middle of nowhere Ohio with little natural talent get to a PhD? Grinding shit out. Growing up watching my dad’s privileged world but being given f***ing nothing, I earned every ounce of love or respect that I ever got in that world. You ever play a sport till your legs give out in cramps, chasing a dream to be seen in your father’s world? You ever see someone cramping in a match and know its time to put them out of your misery, so you can earn love and respect. You know why I am an inferno? Because, I came up in a different world than a lot of these cats that had everything handed to them. I am gritty. I am grimey. I was asked to be “the man of the house” at 15. It’s that part of me that’s talking to you now deep in the night when everyone else in the family is sleeping. I am just another embodiment of kid raised in shadow of Detroit during the Goin’ to Work-Era Detroit Pistons, grinding away at my own dreams when no one is looking.
I am that guy that would scream so loud during tennis matches (in joy and frustration) that I would see spots. I am that guy that would tell my doubles partners we going to dig these cats graves out there. I was bloodthirsty and ruthless in a genteel sport full of privileged kids. I channeled all my anger, frustration at a world that kicked me to the curb over and over into the simple confines of a game. I suppose my whole burn, burn, burn kick is just the way that articulates itself now. I can’t play tennis without having thousands of dollars in medical bills now, because I don’t know how to do it any less than 100%. My body has just given out, so I am channeling my anger into my words into this project. I am calling out all the man-babies that don’t know how to be real men by showing up to being a loyal partner and father. I am calling out people telling me to put away my sword when I just learned how to use it for the first time. I am calling out the people that think they bringing back the garbage of a neo-new age with all its cultural appropriation, white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia. No, no, no, over my dead body. We are not going back to that garbage. I can’t buy into that love and light scam. I have been and always will be a being of the darkness.
I have to turn to this part of myself when I am exhausted. I hit another wall this past week. As a parent who does magic, has a day job, and makes art, its all such a delicate balancing act trying to maintain the space to keep the practices alive that sustain me. So, when Juniper had a 104 degree fever two weeks ago, it was sort of the typical game over for most of my extra curricular pursuits. She was out of school for two days, and Lily and I were trading off shifts taking care of her. I somehow wrote a rather detailed essay last week in like a 8-10 hour stretch (during a babysitting stretch and deep into the night) on that Saturday. But, come Monday, I was toast, especially when the person whose book I discussed in the essay didn’t even appear to read any of what I wrote. It always feels real awful when you spend what little free time you have responding to someone’s art to have them not engage with it. Look, its more complicated than that, I know. This person is very busy and has their own health issues they are traversing. I just was hurt by it.
So it’s these past ghosts of myself, suffering through the worst imaginable things I can remember, that I remember when I am feeling down about these essays. Like, is it honestly that hard to ride the wave of pure draíocht that come flowing out of me? No, this is nothing. I may lose some sleep, but I am following through on what I believe in: maintaining my spiritual discipline in showing up to this project with all my baggage each week. You know what was hard? Being forced to expose myself to my worst possible fears everyday for weeks on end to treat my OCD through exposure therapy. That was hard, but I did it. Being continually lied to by my father to the point where I have no idea what is real with him. That was hard, but I found my way through it. This flowing lava of prose is just pure cathartic enchantment. It feels like I am riding the rumbling precipice where two tectonic plates meet, coming to some deeper understanding of myself a little at a time.
So what do you take away from volume 4,392 of me oversharing? Well, just keep going. I am not asking sharing this with you to reify some bullshit capitalist non-sense that you gotta suffer to reach anywhere. I am just saying that deep down inside you is something that is as determined, as grimey as Toledo James was. You got a whole other gear inside you that you can call on to maintain your own artistic and spiritual discipline that you have set out for yourself. That is, in itself, more important than anything you can get out of sharing your work publicly, save the magical occurrences of crossing paths with new collaborators and colleagues as they pop up in the magical web of your life. I cannot tell you how happy I am now that I just decided to punch in and channel whatever was meant to come through me into this mediated text. These little tidbits of grimey, Toledo James make me so proud to share. I cannot let them die.
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“Listen.. people be askin me all the time, "Yo Mos, what's gettin ready to happen with Hip-Hop?" (Where do you think Hip-Hop is goin?) I tell em, ‘You know what's gonna happen with Hip-Hop? Whatever's happening with us’ If we smoked out, Hip-Hop is gonna be smoked out. If we doin alright, Hip-Hop is gonna be doin alright.
People talk about Hip-Hop like it's some giant livin in the hillside comin down to visit the townspeople. We (are) Hip-Hop. Me, you, everybody, we are Hip-Hop. So Hip-Hop is goin where we goin. So the next time you ask yourself where Hip-Hop is goin ask yourself. Where am I goin? How am I doin? Til you get a clear idea. So.. if Hip-Hop is about the people and the.. Hip-Hop won't get better until the people get better then how do people get better? (Hmmmm...) Well, from my understanding people get better when they start to understand that, they are valuable And they not valuable because they got a whole lot of money or cause somebody, think they sexy but they valuable ‘cause they been created by God.”
Look, I was just gonna take like three weeks off, because I was in a funk about the internet. I was gonna do the thing that people do on the internet where they tell people that they going to take a break, which is a whole other thing that is sorta funny when you think about. No judgment, because I am too tired to judge others on the internet right now. I just want to put on my Judgin’ Jim Hat (trademark pending) and judge the version of myself from two days ago that already had that whole post drafted. Then, I slept on the couch while my toddler watched cartoons, watched some TV with Lily, and went on a bike ride. Then, WHAM, this section of the mos def song hit me up side the head while I was listening the guttural yelling of a nordic animist band that performs amplified history. Yes, I was literally thinking of a whole other song while listening to a different genre of music.
Upon relistening, it occurred to me that “Fear Not Of Man, a song that is now 23 years old, speaks to some deeper issues that I think we experience in the virtual communities that we are a part of. Most notably, Mos is pointing our that all creative communities, no matter their size or where they meet, are at their core comprised of people that have forgotten that they are the one that breathed life into the thing that they have deified as some ‘giant livin’ in the hillside.” I think this is one of the principle challenges that we experience in our virtual communities presently. Many people have forgotten that the magic of the internet, though it has always been partly hijacked by billionaire’s dreamscapes of dominion, is brought to life by the people that make real connections through word and symbol.
Truly, if we really concerned with our craft, our spiritual development, our own philosophies, why are we thinking that the internet tools that we share our work on are some ”giant on the hillside,” as mos might call it, that determine our success, our worth? That’s not to diminish the real struggle that people experience with the lack of transparency around how one can share their the work they are trying to sell their work to eat and have a roof over their head. It’s just to raise a point about the disempowering effect one can have on themselves when we think that social media companies or other technology companies wield some sort of perfect control over us. The internet is nothing without the people who use it. Yes, us, and we are endlessly clever at using the internet tools available to us for our own purposes and subverting the gaze of whoever wishes to view us.
I think my essay “A Seed of Rebirth,” is worth reassessing with this idea in mind.
In that essay, I talked about Instagram like it’s some giant in the hills that was an extractive, attention colonizing tool that was a barrier to my work. I think it’s quite popular to treat social media platforms and the internet in such a way, characterizing them as a panopticon that is constantly observing and monetizing what we create. This is certainly in the spirit of what Michel Foucault was discussing when he said, “visibility is a trap.” Yet, as a sociologist who lives in the margins of functioning organizations outside academia, I always have always been skeptical of such characterizations of the absolute power of any tool, because tools only retain their use when used by ordinary people.
However, that characterization resonates with people because many people use extractive practices when using social media platforms. When I am speaking of extractive practices, I am referring to the act of using the internet to sell yourself, your services, your crafts, expect a return, and play little other role in that space building relationships or meaningful connections to others. In this way, that person’s activity seeks to toot their own horn to gain forms of financial or social capital through sales or sponsorships and little else. I think the internet and social media tools specifically lose their magic when we approach them through extraction mindset. When more and more of what we encounter on the internet is caught up in people trying to sell things to other people selling things (because everyone is running a business), it makes it seem like the whole internet thing feel like a bombed out hellscape when really it is probably more like amazing magical web that can take you through countless death and rebirth cycles with who you find there.
What if we approach our sharing on the internet and social media like we were putting out a self-funded zine or art show in a virtual public square? To me, this implies a distinct change in how we approach the act of sharing. The whole purpose of sharing isn’t about accumulating or hording capital with such a perspective. No, its about believing that we have worth, what we have to say about our experiences here is valuable, and that we believe in the inherent magic of how synchronicities we know nothing about can bring us into community with people who believe the same things. This does not imply in any way that your symbolic capital of your follower count will go up. No, in fact, unless you are in the booming panda meme game, you will prolly lose followers while radically following your own artistic vision. However, the quality of the interactions that you have with the 20-30 people you find through that process will far eclipse the 200 people who followed you three years ago but haven’t seen anything you posted in 2 and half years.
Call me weird, but I still think the internet is a place where art community can happen and that dramatic personal change can occur. I believe this because I have gone through numerous death and rebirth cycles due to the people and ideas I have found on the net. The only artists that ever embraced me as a colleague were on the net. I didn’t go to art school, so sharing on the early Instagram (circa 2014) was how I came to learn how to be a public artist. This is where I made my first artist friends, many of whom I still talk to today. I would not be the weirdo dad who practices fiber magic were it not for the opening this internet space provided for me. Consequently, I am not ready to cede all the space to the doom and gloom of saying this is a total hellscape. I mean, yeah, it can be bad, but it’s still this amazing communication medium that can change your life if you have the right rules set up for it.
In that spirit, I have a set of rules called the “Give a Shit Guidelines" that basically are a set of practices that I use to try and find my weirdo art friends and make the internet less of a hellscape.
Show You Care: I typically get like really into one or two people’s work in any given week. In such instances, I will like, comment on, and share their social media posts. I will go read their substacks or blogs and seek out their print or other physical media. I even have gone so far as to message them and let them know how great I think their art is. Some people dig this and a friendship is born. Others hate this and want me to leave them alone. I always honor their wishes either way. lol.
Inquire about People: Once you are in relationship with a fellow internet dweller, inquire about them often. As my friend Sharon Arnold noted in her essay on curiosity and observation this week on her patreon, “To care about something means to inquire after it.” YES! I love this form of internet community building that offers an invitation into deeper engagement with people’s work. Some of my favorite people I talk to on a routine basis I have built relationships with by inquiring about how their work is going or discussing key ideas in their work with them. This is a simple form of care that I think is a powerful antidote to the negative things people say about internet art communities.
Shrink Your Network: I routinely go through the people I follow and cull those accounts of people that I have interacted with meaningfully in some time. This is just to reduce the sheer amount of information that could become a part of my feed so that it limits the possibility of doomscrolling into oblivion. It also allows you to be more present to the work that is coming across your feed, so that I can be available to become awestruck by something that they have created. It doesn’t always work this way, but shrinking your social network does raise the probability it will occur.
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