Third Culture Collective
[ the members of third culture ]

Why Social Media is not DIY

what does a major label do? they find an artist, produces their sound, records it onto a medium, distributed it out onto the world, and advertises its existance. Major labels do not manifest the way they used to, but the core concepts remain.

my thesis is that both the personal and public social interactions formed by social media are artificial. they are not real, they are not authentic, they are manufactured for profit. an artificial, profit seeking corporate behemoth dictates the way you should sound, dictates where it is distributed, dictates who sees it, and dictates the compensation you should receive. the trick, the wool they put over your eyes, is that they make you think YOU are in charge of the process. You’re not. you think you are the one deciding how your music should sound, where you choose to distribute it, who you show it to, and then you directly receive the compensation. this is by design. the entire reason social media giants have become so powerful is because they found an ingenious method of creating a digitized form of the human condition, amplified it, made it shiny and attractive and enticing, and capitalized on it. THAT is the difference. the moment profit enters the picture, authenticity is gone.

Now they have an overwhelming incentive to manipulate the human condition, the social experience, and you can see this everywhere. they manipulate the way you compare yourself to others, the way you form opinions on groups of people, the way you communicate ideas, the way you laugh, you talk, you think, you breathe, you sleep. they dont simply give you a free space - what a naive assumption. they stick their grubby little fingers into the contraption and make sure to perform all the necessary tweaks and adjustments so that there’s more and more and more. more talking, more happiness, more laughing, more buying, more yelling, more hatred, more everything, but that is not human. humans do not grow like that. once you reach that level of exponential growth, the parts within the sum lose their meaning. they fade away into obsucrity under the tidal wave of endless expansion, and art dies.

that is why social media is not DIY. the moment you surrender the creative process to social media, you surrender your freedom and your humanity to corporate overlords. it is out of your hands, it is out of the communities hands, it is now in the hands of the powers that be that must twist and manipulate and destroy your passion at will in the name of profit, and if you think along that way you’ll find popularity and distribution and meaning for your art, you’re a fool. you gotta do it yourself.

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