Dear You,

Dear You,

I don’t know if you’ll ever see this or if they’ll let you see this. By “they” I mean Facebook. Unless I pay them really large amounts of money, regularly, the amount of people who see my new work is slim to none. Maybe a few hundred out of the hundred thousand plus that clicked on a button and said,

“Yes, I would like to see the art that this person makes.”

Facebook and Instagram are strangling small creative businesses with their algorithms and as I recently said at a conference, if I started out today, writing, painting, making web comics, singing or doing anything else that relied on my ability to engage with an audience, I don’t know if I’d be able to do it. I don’t know how anyone can do it.

How does a machine know what we do and do not want to see?

As has been revealed again and again, in documentary after documentary and in article after article, the manipulation machine that drives Facebook, Instagram and Twitter thrives off anger and hate. The algorithm judges your level of engagement with the content and if you share or interact in any way with the content, then it judges that content to be good and it shares it. The content most likely to do that is politically charged, shouting, yelling that drives a wedge straight down the middle of society and alienates us from each other.

Hope, peace, love and poetry can win, but anger is easy and the machine loves easy.

For that reason, I am moving the majority of my focus to email. There’s a service called tinyletter.com that makes it really easy to manage a newsletter and I’ve started using it more and more. Maybe you’ve seen me mention it on twitter or Facebook or Instagram but you probably haven’t. If you go there, now, I will with some degree of regularity, send you letters about you, letters about me, small books that I hand out for free, information about things I’m working on, things I hope and things I hope we all hope. It’s not social in any way, no one will see that you read it, you will not be able to retweet it or upvote it but there won’t be as much anger as there is here on Facebook and I assure you, it will be sincere, and real.

I hope you subscribe here: www.tinyletter.com/pleasefindthis

And I hope you share this with your friends.

If they’ll let you.

My best,

Me.