Gladiatordom

About the frustration of being a visible artist online.

$Sometimes I read tweets lamenting the phenomenon of artist accounts becoming less active, less personal. [Image: A person with a sad face icon tweets: I don\'t like it when artists stop posting about their personal life and hobbies. So cold. Unfollowed.] And I am like [a drawing of myself directing an extremely confused and cynically doubtful look at my phone] You want people to be vulnerable, on Twitter dot com? This gladiatordom of powerless discourse and faux media activism, where the unfinished prefrontal cortex reigns supreme? Here? [Image: An artist tweets, \"Check out my new studio!\" sharing a photo of a neat, well-lit small room fitted with pants and Ikea furniture. A random user, perhaps the same person as the sad face icon, responds, \"gross you capitalist bourgeoise pig enemy\". Author\'s note: this actually happened]$

$Meanwhile, the real capitalist pig enemy sits at the top suppressing wages, sucking oil out of the earth and poisoning the water and soil with fascism. [Image: A piglet in a bowtie sits in front of a laptop, relishing the drama of likes and retweets. It snorts, \"Boy oh boy this discourse! Glad I\'m not the one getting cancelled. YAS QUEEN!\"] It\'s hard to be #authentic #cutedogs #personalproject on the same platform as news reports that in a medieval fiefdom might be a signal of the endtimes. [Image: A timeline of tweets. The first shows a picture of a silly wholesome duckling asleep in a flower hat. The second tweets, \"Entire forests burn as CEOs convert ashes to $$$\". The third tweets, \"I got married!\". The last tweets in a non-ironic way, \"Death cult politics is good actually\" followed by a smiley face. Below this timeline is a parody of a medieval era drawing, of a man holding a phone as the top of his head is bloodily stabbed by another man\'s sword from behind. The stabbed man cheerily says, \"Welp, that\'s enough internet for today\" as he continues to doomscroll. This man represents me. The headstabber is Twitter.] Our ancestors would have applauded us for our mental resilience [imagine this in a sarcastic voice followed by gibberish laughter]$

$Honestly if you want an authentic, vulnerable, personal experience from a human being it\'s not gonna be on an attention economy centralised corporate technocratic platform powered by algorithms and trollbots. [Image: A monkey in a fez nervously dances in front of a crowd of eyes, being tossed coins that represent likes and retweets. The crowd heckles the monkey, \"Dance monkey dance!\" \"Keep dancing or you\'ll lose views lol\" \"You mean nothing without us\" \"Please be perfect\"] And it\'s not gonna happen by demanding strangers to open up to you for the sake of building a brand built for your convenience. [An image of me, an artist, resting peacefully as I blacklist the entire site and cut all ties with the social media market. My phone is off. My world is still.]$