Unplugged

 Over the last 6 months I've made great progress in unplugging from social media and much of the internet. My Instagram accounts are now nothing more than digital photo albums that will sit idle once those projects are completed and maybe even deleted by Meta if they decide to eliminate dead accounts. I was hoping the stupidity of todays social media platforms wouldn't be as severer when the new Threads appeared. That people would revert back to conversations, engage with others, and post meaningful content. But in the end the masses can't shake their zombieness and now that platform is almost as bad as the rest, just without the advertisements. As for my involvement I post some photos, a few links but my engagement is almost zilch at this point because of the people always looking for an argument, political and social bullshit, and too many so called artists wondering why they aren't the next Basquiat, Picasso or Robert Frank because they have thousands of followers. Too many artists still think of social media as a competition and my goal is to stay far away from them.
  
  In light of this very little of my new work will be posted an any of the platforms and all new projects will be limited to this blog and my website. Speaking of the new. I'm beginning to put together new snapshot albums with 200 black and white photos in each. The idea came to fruition after conversations with two other photographers who are tired of social media. One of them in Pittsburgh and the other in Stockholm. Like me they're tired of wasting time with social media and they would like to return to physical media by showing real people their albums in person. Dan who lives in Pittsburgh told me "I would rather have 3 people look through my physical photo albums than 300 strangers or bots on social media". I couldn't agree more.

  The very idea that you don't exist as an artist if you're not on social media is complete bullshit. The art world and artists in general were just fine before the internet, it just took more physical labor. Today the masses are lazy while sitting at their keyboards posting photos at designated times at an attempt to beat an ever changing algorithm. Their goal is to reach anybody an everybody by trying to accumulate thousands and thousands of so called "friends". Ego can be damaging to an artist but ego and social media combined can destroy him or her.

      Maybe only a handful of people will ever see my albums and that's something I'm very comfortable with but I've spoken with a few other photographers over the years who began to have anxiety attacks without the fake gratification that social media provides. Why put yourself through that? Why help Schmuckerberg in his quest to control and manipulate you while becoming one of the wealthiest people on the planet? You can free yourself and build meaningful relationships, something that worked for centuries before the dawn of MySpace. Start a website, a blog, meet other artists in coffee shops and push those izombies and their laptops out the door. Don't post every photograph, every painting as soon as you make them. Send out emails, mail postcards, hangout at galleries and museums. Get real again or for those under the age of 35, get real for the first time.

My goal by the end of the year is to spend 50%-75% less time on the internet than I do today.