Hello to whoever is reading this out there.
I infrequently post things and thought I’d give you a bit of an update. I packed up my house last year, moved into my mates room (Daniel is now my landlord), and then spent 5 months on Christmas Island working in a detention centre as a psychiatric nurse.
That was a time. The island was amazing and if you’re looking for somewhere interesting to go, I highly recommend it. There’s crab migrations, spectacular birds not found anywhere else in the world, and so many fish! The food is expensive but the alcohol and cigarettes are cheap. When you combine these things you get up to all kinds of fun, and I met a kiwi girl called Anna there who took me on a whirlwind tour of New Zealand at the start of this year.
During this whirlwind tour that Anna took me on, I found myself in Dunedin visiting my friend Sam. It was great to catch up with him again after so many years (thanks covid you fuck!) and there came a night where I was lucky enough to share a stage with him and totally wing a gig playing synth at a rugby club in Brighton. First time I’ve been on stage since 2019 and all things considered, it went pretty well.
I haven’t just been traveling around exploring the world however.
Prior to moving into Daniel’s house I had spent much of 2022 recording music. I had hours and hours of it. During the end of last year, I managed to edit 9 hours of music down into 2 albums, The Roslyn Complex; built in 1855 for John Guthrie, home to my noise in 2022 went online on the 31st of December 2022. Early in the morning of January the 1st 2023, A Gentle Start to a New Year. was released. I was happy, I’d ended the year well and started the next on a high. I also opted to put A Gentle Start onto Spotify too.
I didn’t promote these things at all really beyond making some videos that I put onto Youtube, using my Youtube channel as a way of promotion. It was working pretty well too, I’d gotten a few people to listen to the songs and there were some who enjoyed the videos.
Then I woke up on the 15th of February 2023 to find out that I had been banned and deleted from Youtube.
It turns out I had violated their community guidelines with a video I had made some years before. I’ll be honest, the video was totally fucked. It was rule 34 of the internet with Mickey and Minnie Mouse, set to some music I’d fucked with. I had tagged it as NSFW and not for children. To me, it was a bit of a joke and while it’s far from something I’d classify as being especially proud of making, it was a bit of a laugh.
To find out that this throwaway 1 minute video had led to not just the video being blocked but my channel banned, it pissed me off a bit. I lost all the things I’d been putting online for the past few years, and had no way to tell any of the subscribers that I was gone. Not that any video had gained any momentum really, but I liked knowing I could pull the page up and everything was in one place. It’s all gone now and over something so tame? Let me walk down memory lane for a moment.
Back 20 or so years ago when I was an edgy teen who didn’t get out and about much, I would sit online and discover the darker side of the internet. Not the truly dark web mind you, but I’d be on shock sites like rottendotcom (these are wiki links by the way, not links to the actual sites).
I would check these sites frequently, not knowing what I was about to find when I clicked a link. It culminated when I saw a particular video and I stopped visiting those sites. If you’re interested to hear more about that story I wrote a blog post about it.
My point is I’m used to seeing some pretty fucked up shit. What I posted on Youtube was, at least in my eyes, just a bit of a silly video with some cartoon porn. I figured I’d tagged it as NSFW, it’s adult content, so it was all good. It turns out however that you can’t post humorous but offensive adult content on Youtube anymore. Fair enough, they are a private company and they make the rules. I don’t plan on making more purposefully offensive things and potentially I could sign up to Youtube with a different email address and start again from scratch.
It’s not just the censorship on my video that’s changed my attitude though (incoming rant).
Youtube is a website that (these days) feels very corporate and shallow. A quick scroll shows the same contrived thumbnails, the same ‘shocked’ expressions, the same click bait titles. Youtube is about data collection, smashing users with ads before, during, and after videos, stealing peoples attention through features like autoplay, shorts, and suggested videos via their algorithm rather than promoting channels they have subscribed to.
It’s now much the same as most, if not all, social media sites which sucks because that’s why I liked Youtube. It wasn’t the same as other social media sites. It wasn’t just about shallow, short videos. You could easily find videos that had depth, with long form conversations about niche topics and communities. Those videos aren’t getting as much traction now because Youtube is mainly promoting shorter content, chasing the TikTok market.
I don’t want to make content and vertical videos. I want to make films and music videos and express myself through the medium of video. In short, I want to make art.
Art is something that, generally, takes time to create. It’s an in-depth look at something, like the human condition or our relationship with nature and ourselves. Similar to science, art dives into a topic to learn the depth and breadth of it. The insights are then reinterpreted via an interesting medium and shared with the rest of the community through stories, songs, paintings, poems, myths, film, dance, sculpture and any other medium that someone wants to try out. From a financial perspective, art is paid for up front when you buy a book, pay to see a movie, or buy an album.
Content, as I see it, is cheap, shallow, easily produced, easily replicated, and is often used as a lure to sell you something. An unboxing video is a way to sell the product that’s being unboxed, with a commission going back to the person who made the video. A person teaching you how to draw better leads to a course they are selling. A short throwaway video is a way to get people to find out about a new movie that’s out. All of this is fed to us via an algorithm that works on trying to hold your attention, and as it’s owned by Google, it most likely knows what you have been searching for online and does a pretty good job of feeding you the right stuff.
I have no problem with people making money off of their content or doing content marketing as a way to attract people to things they sell, after all I do it myself (although not well). I think it’s better to make money doing something that you enjoy than facing the daily grind every day if you hate it. If your content is easy to make and it pays well, that’s fantastic and I’m happy for you.
My point is if a video game is art, then a person filming their reaction while playing the game is content. They are not the same thing and shouldn’t be thought of or treated as the same thing. Youtube (and social media in general) is pushing us towards content rather than art as there’s more financial incentives for these companies when people make content. The more things they can put ads on and get data from, the better.
Art often doesn’t get as many views as content as art can be shocking, bizarre, high concept and less accessible; not to mention funny, ridiculous, and provoking. When you look at the big picture, with Youtube being such a huge platform for video and wanting to keep the place ‘clean’ for advertisers, I worry that there will be more watered down and censored art in future. Especially if making confronting things could mean getting pulled from the platform and losing your audience and potential income.
Leaving Youtube has been on my mind for some time now, and this has been the push I needed to finally get off, albeit not in the ideal conditions.
Phew. Rant over.
After doing some research, I’ve opted to go with Odysee as a Youtube alternative. I like the world they want to create, it seems much more hopeful than Youtube (and Google’s) slow domination of the internet. There’s financial incentives for creators, more niche/long form videos, and a bunch of web 3 stuff (Odysee is on the Lbry blockchain). This post is already too long but let’s just say I’m hopeful.
Here’s a link to my Odysee page. I’ll be putting things online there now, but for now I’m going through and working out what to put up and what to let go of. I’ve been given an opportunity of a fresh start and to upload all the same things again seems boring to me.
I might upload some more stuff onto Odysee over the next week or so, then I’m heading off on another trip and will be away from the computer for some time. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone for or really where I’m going, but I plan on heading up the East Coast of Australia to start with. I’ll be living out of the Honda Jazz again, and the plan is to keep recording music as I travel around the country. It might lead to another movie, it might just be a bit of fun. We shall see.
As for the banned video that kick started all of this, if you want to watch it, it’s up on motherless. I warn you though, this website is one of the shock sites I used to go on back in the day and now it is extremely pornographic.
That’s all for me for now.
Cheers!
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