Now that the new website has been up and running for a little while, I wanted to take a moment to explain why I commissioned it in the first place.

That’s something easier said than done, apparently. I am on version six of this write-up. All of my previous attempts ended in a knot of tangents and anecdotes  – a surefire sign that I haven’t organized my thoughts enough. So I stopped writing for a week and thought about what was sitting at the core of all those rants, which led me to a single word.

Trust.

I’ll do my best to explain what I mean by that. Let’s see if I can stay on track this time.

As you may or may not have noticed, I am no longer on social media. I haven’t had a personal account for over a decade, but I decided it was time to leave as an artist, too. This was not a rash decision. I have considered it plenty of times over the past seven years, but worries about my livelihood or keeping the peace with those I worked with stayed my hand.

So what changed? It’s funny, but nothing in particular. There wasn’t some singular event that pushed me over the edge. I just finally grew tired of being a hypocrite.

I haven’t had anything nice to say about social media in a long time. I could easily expand upon that, but that is precisely what derailed the last five versions of this essay. And in the end, it’s not really what I’m trying to communicate. I’m not out to convince anyone to make a similar change. I believe that people should do whatever feels right to them, that we all make peace with our ethics and tolerances in different ways. I just personally felt how thin all of my rationalizations were, and I needed to do something about it.

You see, I wasn’t “connecting.” I wasn’t “sharing.” I wasn’t doing any of those positive words we see thrown about when defending these platforms. I was marketing. I was participating in something that I genuinely believe is a net-negative for society at large, run by people and companies that I see as centerless and nefarious, just for personal gain. Actually, scratch that. The potential for personal gain, which largely never showed up. And the chips I was playing at the attention casino certainly weren’t free. I was making myself feel noticeably, objectively worse. I was fostering an increasingly pessimistic outlook on people and life in general, all to play a game I deep-down don’t believe in. In my day-to-day life I found myself saying that social media is just the internet’s Reality TV phase, complaining about the pitfalls to anyone that would listen, all while still using it myself. And I rationalized this by just posting as little as possible.

When I admitted all of this to myself, I was appropriately embarrassed. I expect better of myself. “But everyone else is doing it” has never been a respectable excuse in my eyes.

But I also realized, returning to the concept of trust, that social media was only part of the problem. I wanted to believe that I could pin all of my complaints on the medium and the rest would fall into place. No dice. My trust issues reach far wider.

I don’t trust much of anything that is online now. Google searches are different for everyone, tailored to your own personalized surveillance. Social platforms are likely more populated by bots than people, scripted for who-the-hell-knows-what. Profiles are easy to fake. Comments can easily be generated. Stream counts are incredibly questionable. Websites are full of articles that are little more than thinly veiled ads. News sites A/B test articles right in front of you, and they have zero fear of getting caught lying now since they’re increasingly just mouthpieces for billionaires. “Best Practice” pieces are often penned by the companies themselves, to get you to behave how they’d prefer for their stock portfolios and shareholders. Reviews are so full of questions (Who is writing this? Is this their actual opinion? Do they have any idea of what they’re talking about? Do they work for a rival company and are writing this to damage a competitor’s reputation? Are they a person at all?) that I find them largely useless. I could go on, but I think you get the point.

But we’re not done. Now we must throw AI into the mix – the ultimate gasoline for the fires of mistrust. If someone writes me an email, I’m now suspicious whether they even wrote it. Photos and visual art are easy to generate, so I have little faith in them. Songs are not far behind. I wonder how many self-published books are just chat GPT dumps, hoping to profit from the grift. Again, I could go on and on here.

But here’s the kicker. Even if I am wrong about any specific thing I mentioned, it doesn’t matter. That’s the very nature of suspicion. Once it is in the room, the texture of absolutely everything changes. It’s one of the most insidious forms of poison, socially speaking. I equate it to catching a lover cheating. The event alone is difficult to contend with, but the aftermath is far worse. Formerly innocuous statements, like “I’m pretty beat, so I’m going to stay in tonight” leave you wondering if that’s true, or if they’re up to something. It turns simple conversation into tea-leaf reading, and the fear of ulterior motives is exhausting. And this goes both ways. If I am behaving in ways that are not very genuine, for motives I won’t quite admit to myself, I can’t trust my own behavior. The way most of us act online is a strange dance between misdirection and delusion, and I think we start passively believing that everyone and everything is this way. We start thinking that nothing is ever genuine, and everything is a grift of some sort. There’s something deeply cynical and existential about the entire exchange, and I believe it eats away at us far more than we realize.

This isn’t new for me. I’ve felt this way for a while now. I am finally able to give it language, which is an improvement, but it still left me feeling somewhat lost. Because I still love what I do. I work on music and art every day. I don’t take days off because I don’t want to. And I enjoy sharing the results of my labor if they feel successful, or if I think they might be interesting/helpful to someone else. But sharing means going back into spaces I have so many issues with, behaving in ways that make me think less of myself and others simultaneously. I’ve come to hate releasing anything, because of how negative my world-view becomes.

So with that in mind, I forced myself into the opposite perspective and thought about where I don’t mind sharing. Two spaces came to mind – my website, and my mailing list. That’s it. Everything else is so riddled with suspicion at this point that I don’t see why any notable amount of effort should be spent on them. And I’m getting old enough to feel how finite my time and my energy are. And I don’t like wasting them.

So with my feelings sorted, I reached out to Rogue Studios again. I had such a nice experience building the “A Light in the Woods” site that I didn’t even consider shopping around. It took us about 6 months to get all of the ideas implemented, but I’m really happy with the result. And here’s what I’d like to communicate with you, whoever may be reading this, in the pursuit of building trust in a digital space:

I am the only person who writes here. If it is on this website, it came directly from me. If I am sharing something, it’s because I chose to. And while you may not enjoy something I’ve made, you can at least be sure that I’ve actually made it.

Beyond that, I was also pining for some way to better represent my work. This is a very old gripe of mine. Trying to condense projects into rigid platforms like Instagram always felt like such a let down after all the years of labor. These platforms are built around quick, short and ephemeral media, and that’s not what I make. But here, on my own site, I can be as thorough as I need to be.

And I must say, it feels really nice to know that I own it. I could never look past the concept, concerning spaces like YouTube and Instagram, that I was building a castle on someone else’s land. They may claim they want me there, but landowners always want people to work their land. It’s how the value is extracted. And they may push the illusion that you are in a partnership, but they really just throw you a few scraps to keep you trying. Because at the end of the day, it is their property and they can do what they want with it, within the bounds of the law, and the benefits will predominantly be theirs. I’ve seen too many people work incredibly hard to build up their profiles, only to watch all their reach disappear unless they were willing to pay for ads, or pump out half-baked material to keep up with schedule demands designed to burn them out. And while it does take effort to make good hosting platforms, we care far more about what they actually host. I often think of these platforms as digital tupperware, to help me keep an eye on what really matters in the exchange.

But I am not naive about the decisions I’ve made. I’m well aware that most people are never going to visit this site, that my reach will be more limited. But the counterweight to that issue is knowing that anyone visiting made a deliberate decision to do so. It is not passive. I am not paying a company whose practices I disdain to rent temporary space in the feeds of total strangers. I’ve built my little digital museum, and people can visit as often as they like. The fact that it’s an active choice means a lot more to me than the internet equivalent of a drive by.

And you know what? No matter what happens to our online landscape, and how much of a grifty, corporate hellscape it turns into, I will always enjoy making the things that I do. It’s fundamental to who I am at this point. I’ll happily share my results here as long as I am able to.

And I want to leave this all on a positive note, because this change has been a good one.

Since turning everything off and reducing my time online to less than a tenth of what it used to be, I am a lot happier. It hasn’t been an easy habit to break, and a part of me will always miss when it was such a space of discovery and information, but I feel more peaceful than I have in a very long time. Interactions with people in my real environment leave me feeling optimistic far more often than not, and I am far less negative than I was even a year ago. And this is all with the world in the sorry state it is in. I’m not sure where any of this will lead, but it’s been great to feel like I am no longer on some suspicion-fueled ride, at the whims of whoever is rich enough to own the roller coaster. I like my life more. And I don’t know if there’s a better trade than that one.

I hope this finds you healthy and well. Until next time.