Werd I/O

[Vanessa Thorpe in The Guardian]

“Art is about reaching out. So I think it’s wrong to allow one strata of society to have the most access.”

This is an older article, but it resonated with me so much that I wanted to share it immediately.

This is so important, and a sign of what we've lost:

“I went [to art school] because the government of the day paid for me to go and I didn’t have to pay them back. There was a thrusting society then, a society that tried to improve itself. Yes, of course, it cost money. But so what? It allowed people from any kind of background to learn about Shakespeare, or Vermeer.”

A culture where only the rich are afforded the space, training, and platform to make art is missing the voices that make it special.

The same goes for other spaces: newsrooms where only the wealthy can serve as journalists cannot accurately represent the people who depend on it. Technology without class diversity is myopic. Above all else, a culture of rich people is boring as hell.

Art school - like all school - should be free and available to everyone. It's tragic that it's not. We all lose out, regardless of our background.

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[Sarah E. Needleman and Ann-Marie Alcántara at the Wall Street Journal]

"Earning a decent, reliable income as a social-media creator is a slog—and it’s getting harder. Platforms are doling out less money for popular posts and brands are being pickier about what they want out of sponsorship deals."

For many kids, becoming an influencer has become the new becoming a sports star: in enormous numbers, it's what they want to be. More broadly, if you dare to say that it's not a real job, you're likely to be drowned out by complaints and contradictions.

But it isn't, and this article makes it clear:

"Last year, 48% of creator-earners made $15,000 or less, according to NeoReach, an influencer marketing agency. Only 13% made more than $100,000."

Of course, some people really did shoot to fame and have been doing really well. But there aren't many Mr Beasts or Carli D'Amelios of this world, and the lure of being famous has trapped less lucky would-be influencers in cycles of debt and mental illness.

This is despite having sometimes enormous followings: hundreds of thousands to millions of people, with hundreds of millions of views a month. The economics of the platforms are such that even at those numbers, you can barely scrape by.

I like the advice that, instead, you should cultivate a genuine expertise and use social media to promote offsite services you provide around that. It might be that a following can land you a better job, or help you build up a consultancy. Trying to make money from ads and brand sponsorships is a losing game - and thousands of people are losing big.

#Culture

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This list of the New Scientist's favorite science fiction books is brilliant. The books I've read that are included here are some of my favorites of all time; the others are on my to-read list. What's your favorite?

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"In interviews with The 19th, a dozen Black fans of country discussed reconciling their love for the music with its racist, misogynistic past, as well as the pervasive image of White men who continue to dominate the mainstream industry. They are hopeful that Beyoncé and “Cowboy Carter,” released Friday, will help elevate Black country artists and serve as a bridge for more Black people to feel comfortable listening."

It's a superb album: musically and thematically breathtaking. Even if you might not ordinarily listen to Beyoncé (the "why" of which might be worth examining in itself), you really owe it to yourself to check it out. #Culture

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"Journalists write stories about incomplete events but there is always a mandate to write more. To write the next post that shows the breaking news. Authors write books that, when published, cannot be changed. An author can write another book, but the story is in print. No such mandate exists in blogging."

I am unashamedly a blogger, have been a blogger for over a quarter of a century, show no signs of moving away from this rather worrying disposition, and I truly love this framing.

Blogs are thinking-in-progress. A blog is never done (although you can always choose to walk away). It's lovely. I wish more people had one. #Culture

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"A trove of leaked emails shows how administrators of one of the most prestigious awards in science fiction censored themselves because the awards ceremony was being held in China."

What's remarkable here is that they weren't censored by the government - instead this trove of emails suggests it was their own xenophobic assumptions about what was necessary to be acceptable in a Chinese context that shut authors out of one of the most prestigious prizes in science fiction. This includes eliminating authors whose work that would have been eligible was actually published in China.

There's a dark comedy to be written here about a group of westerners who are so worried about appeasing a government they consider to be censorial that they commit far more egregious acts of censorship themselves. #Culture

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"You’ve got to offer your content to the hellish, overstuffed, harassment-laden, uber-competitive attention economy because otherwise no one will know who you are. [...] The commodification of the self is now seen as the only route to any kind of economic security."

In the new economy, every artist must also be an entrepreneur. In doing so, they compromise their intentions; a world where everyone is just shilling is one free from the purity of ideas and discourse. There is no such thing as being discovered or being heralded on the merit of your work alone. You've got to sell. #Culture

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A lovely interview with Winnie Lim, whose deeply human, beautifully-written blog is one of my absolute must-reads.

This spoke to me, except substitute Oxford for Singapore: "I felt very alienated and lonely as a young person in the 1990s. It was incredible to discover the internet and know there is an entire world out there, that there are actually many people living diverse lives that were not visible or encouraged in Singapore."

Winnie and I both worked at Medium at different times, and yet both have a very strong own-your-own-domain philosophy. Her blogging story is really similar to mine, even if the content of her blog is very much her own.

Just a complete pleasure to read. #Culture

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Joe Sacco, the graphic journalist who wrote Palestine, Footnotes in Gaza, and Safe Area Gorazde, has started a new series, The War on Gaza.

It's accompanied by this statement from Fantagraphics:

"We want to state clearly and emphatically that we stand with the innocent people of Gaza. At the same time, we emphatically condemn the massacre of innocent Israeli civilians by Hamas on October 7 as a war crime and acknowledge with deep regret the grief and trauma Jewish people are enduring in its aftermath; but this barbarous act does not warrant Israel to commit its own war crime and to inflict exponentially greater grief and trauma in return." #Culture

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"So when we wonder where all the websites have gone, know it’s the curators we’re nostalgic for because the curators showed us the best the web had to offer once upon a time. And the curators— the tenders, aggregators, collectors, and connectors— can bring us back to something better. Because it’s still out there, we just have to find it."

For what it's worth, that's what I'm trying to do to share these links with you: highlighting interesting pieces, often from independent writers publishing on their own sites. I really appreciate the other curators I subscribe to, too.

Let's all connect and learn from each other! #Culture

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I think Chuck Tingle is awesome and proves love. This was a disappointing decision by the Texas Library Association, which is hopefully a learning moment for every organization like it.

Chuck's description of the intersectional challenges at play here is in-depth and well-stated. And there's this important statement:

"let me be very clear for the 100th time: i am a real person. this is not a joke. i am not playing a character. i am really autistic and bisexual. tinglers are sincere and they are not ‘so bad theyre good’. they are just good. camp damascus is not ‘my first serious book’ because my queer erotica is serious. my art is important and real." #Culture

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Every single one of these titles looks beautiful: I'm excited to put them on my want-to-read list. I don't think I read a single graphic novel last year, and I love them.

I'm grateful to Ritesh Babu for putting this list together. It's the kind of thing that makes a genre accessible: someone's subjective deep dive into something they love that other people might not have had the time or exposure to get into as much. Just lovely. #Culture

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Charles Stross on tech oligarchs trying to build the torment nexus:

"SF authors such as myself are popular entertainers who work to amuse an audience that is trained on what to expect by previous generations of science-fiction authors. We are not trying to accurately predict possible futures but to earn a living: any foresight is strictly coincidental."

The CIA famously funded the Iowa Writers' Workshop to guide American literature in a non-didactic, less revolutionary direction. I wonder if there's a future in funding science fiction writers to create stories with more utopian themes for leaders to draw inspiration from in the future. #Culture

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Every image here is stunning. #Culture

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Before there was Succession, there was Peep Show. A brilliant piece of TV that launched a bunch of careers. If you haven't seen it, give yourself the gift of checking it out. #Culture

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I know people who worked with Douglas Adams and I'm incredibly envious of them. He seems like someone I would have really enjoyed meeting - and his books (all of them) were a huge part of my developing psyche. This story seems so human, so relatable. Trapped by his success, in a way. #Culture

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A less-discussed problem with book bans: publishers will self-censor, as they did here by requiring the removal of the word "racism" in the context of internment camps. #Culture

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I found this interview fascinating: definitely a writer I look up to, whose work I both enjoy and find intimidatingly raw. And who happens to have a very similar day job to me. #Culture

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“When popular culture thinks of Blackness, rarely does somebody think of a tiny little town or a mountainside and the Black person who’s there. I want to be a part of revealing that this thread—that Black skin—can be even on the side of a mountain.” #Culture

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I see this as less of a problem in cozy witch fiction - which, I must be clear, I have read zero of - and more of an issue in American fiction as a whole, across all media. These books (probably) aren't actively laundering racist ideas; they're perpetuating cultural discrimination that is under the surface everywhere. Still, it's incumbent on authors to understand and be accountable to the tropes they're building with. #Culture

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This resonated with me a lot. What I'll say is: I'm glad Winnie is in the world. I know these feelings, intimately. I don't have much definitive to say about that. I haven't drawn any conclusions. It's a journey, daily. #Culture

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None of this looks like it comes from 1969. Although some of the content is outdated today, the style is far more modern - this feels like something straight from the internet era. Fascinating and relentless (I couldn't watch the whole thing). #Culture

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"How can I make this like me?" is something I'm striving to do better at in my creative work and my life as a whole. Words to live (and write) by. #Culture

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This is something we're going to contend with as our son gets a little older. Roald Dahl is an influential children's author (who lived where I grew up) who was also, unmistakably, a bigot with a deeply cruel streak. Some of these books are strikingly not okay. #Culture

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A lovely, personal reflection on (in my opinion) the best TV show ever made. #Culture

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