Yesterday I made the spontaneous decision to put together a short clip from some snippets of recording that I had taken during my travels these past months. It was a joy to do this kind of work: handling artifacts that represent fond memories, exercising a sort of creativity that has been absent in my life for a while, and having an end product to feel proud of. High on this delight of engaging in the creative task, I found myself galvanized into a new hobby of editing videos and putting them out on the Internet for an audience. It feels like many of the hobbies I have had in the past or even now, such as design and blogging. They all have to do with creating stuff, with transforming ideas into real and visible products for mass enjoyment (“mass” is relative here obviously). It’s gratifying to just lose myself in a process of creating for hours without realizing it, and without feeling bored or catching nagging waves of guilt.
To go back to where all of these hobbies started: I began to be extremely active on the Internet some time in my early years of middle school. I was having a double life almost, being a studious kid at school during the day, then returning home and spending hours being part of various online communities under an alias. I didn’t do anything inappropriate; I was mostly pretending to an older Internet user to make friends and contribute to different platforms of my interests. I moderated some forums, ran some sites, acted as if I was a real leader in my online groups. I added 7 years to my real age, and my friends on the Internet didn’t have a clue. I learned how to make digital graphics and picked up a few skills here and there for navigating the Internet. It was certainly an odd hobby for someone so young (I was probably barely 12), and especially with the fake identity involved. But I had a blast chatting with all these people, building communities (albeit anonymous ones), and discussing my interests in film and music at length while learning practical skills simultaneously.
Nowadays, against our better judgment, many of us treat the Internet as our default source of entertainment. Even the DVDs and music players from a decade ago are antiques of a distant past. With YouTube, Netflix, and a never-ending supply of social media contents, we are permanently protected from a drought of entertainment options. New things are churned out in milliseconds by an invisible algorithm to satisfy our momentary hunger for stimulations, and we spend all of our leisure time (and let’s face it, work time too) glued to our screens. And for those who make a living building, running, and profiting off of these platforms (from the bosses in these tech companies to the engineers to the “influencers” and self-promoters), the need to keep the machine running is even more acute. As these tools become increasingly powerful and ubiquitous, they replace many things that were once crucial in our lives (why bother with a phone directory when every business has a flashy website and profiles across seven different social media sites? Why need a garage sale or neighborhood market when we can just slap a photo of our items onto the Facebook marketplace? Why take the time to call someone and chat for an hour when we can just tag them in memes and drop them some stickers?)
I think a full-fledged discussion on the Internet today merits a much longer post (or multiple ones), but the main reason why I started writing this post was that I suddenly realized, just as I was putting my video onto YouTube, that the online world has shifted so much since I was that kid pretending to be older. Now, because the Internet has matured into a full force of moneymaking rather than just a thing on the side to offer convenience from time to time, every corner you turn on the Internet, you encounter the matter of money. YouTube used to be where people simply displayed their silly homemade videos or their creative projects, but now the videos hit you with an embedded advertisement even more frequently than the (now going extinct) cable TV broadcasts being interrupted by commercials. Everyone is concerned with copyright when making something for the Internet, even when the purpose is just for fun or creative expression. There used to be a time when you were allowed to use your favorite songs in your videos (the artists would appreciate your loyalty and the free promotion, quite frankly) because no one bothered with earning money through these clips. Now you are hit left and right with copyright strikes because music distributors also figured out their way to optimizing profits but didn’t want you to share them. It’s a shame that the freedom to just make things for pure enjoyment is being exhausted by a new norm powered by an endless craving for profits.
I’m not here to critique the whole ideological foundation of capitalism in a post about making YouTube videos. Still, it’s about time we reconsidered the absurdity of how we approach such an essential part of our wellbeing as leisure. When we allow corporations to capitalize on our leisure activities and grant them the ability to contaminate our fun with their “maximizing profit” propaganda, we surrender much more than just our time and attention. Lately many folks have expressed an exasperation when one of the richest individuals on the planet decided to drop an amount of money equivalent to basically guaranteed welfare for much of the world to purchase a social networking site. Of course it still leaves a sour taste in our mouth despite the fact that the world has always revolved around the wealthy. It stinks not just because people realize the injustice (and ridiculousness) of it, but also because it solidifies the reality that our society will have to keep on resisting the influence of the wealthiest and in turn the most powerful. Something that started out as a convenience for communication and knowledge exchange might end up swallowing us into the deep spiral of generating profits.
I don’t really know the way out of this for myself let alone for others. Maybe it’s to still engage in the online world, to still create blog posts and graphics and videos, but defy the mass agenda of making money when you do so. Maybe it’s to re-introduce myself to a range of hobbies beyond the social media apps and even beyond technology. And no I don’t need a Skillshare subscription to learn how to paint; there are real people who can teach me in real life. Attaching myself to things that modern technology are too eager to label obsolete is a good way to resist being trapped into a dependence on tech for entertainment. The bottom line is that I do not want to feel like I’m being held hostage in my own hobbies by the trend of commodifying every bit of leisure. The annoyance with all the ads and copyright issues and the Internet people yelling at us about getting rich will pass, but it will be a pain for society if we end up seeing what the Internet can offer and make money off of as our sole choice of leisure.
nice
Thank you friend 🙂