tl;dr: I have a new website (https://adri99.net) and I’m moving as many of my socials onto open-source alternatives (see below for more details). Below is an extended reasoning:
Many of us feel stuck. Stuck in boring jobs, stuck in lives of barely-surviving, bereft of human encounters that have the meat of meaning attached to their bones. More and more, as our lives evaporate and our water molecules coalesce in the myth of the cloud–a vast, privatised warehouse of information that is very much of this grim earth–we also feel stuck inside platforms that we dislike; these 2D universes constantly rising and multiplying and demanding our attention. Once it was Myspace and now it’s—fuck, I don’t even know any more? Instagram, TikTok, Patreon, Substack, X, and also PayPal, Visa, Mastercard —a cartel of ogres given licence by the US hegemon to extract a tithe on every transaction that passes across the silver bridge. Now the voices whisper in their insidious hiss: “You need to be LinkedIn—that’s where the curators are these days. You don’t want to miss out on all that precious exposure, do you?”
They arrive in our awareness like gold prospectors, marking a claim on the frontiers of our sensory awareness; performing this feat through the medium of our free will. Because it is my fingers, after all, that flex on the keyboard as I divulge my treasures. The kind of mining their doing doesn’t really line up with images of the Wild West, dirt streaked faces emerging from subterranean shafts with value they could hold in their hands. It’s more like the cyanide extraction used by multinational companies in Romania to extract tiny specks of gold dust from the earth by dousing hills and valleys in poison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Baia_Mare_cyanide_spill. Our minds are more like ore from which an infinitesimally small condensation of value can be extracted.
The Infernal Loathing Machine
When I open Instagram I feel a wash of dread as I lose myself in a flood of images and park my mind in vegan cauliflower steaks with chimichurri interspersed with images of police violence (my twin passions in life, according to the algorithm). I see people’s manicured achievements and stab inwards at my personal failures.
I always stuck around because I was afraid that opting out was a form of self-sabotage, but I’m not so sure now. My “reach” has more or less flatlined and I sense that social media allowed me to become more withdrawn from the world. I forgot how to talk about my work with real people. I so often failed to make the effort to even show up, to be a part of communities and scenes that are the lifeblood of art. This was because being on Instagram gave me the illusion of connectivity. I was alienating parts of what it means to be a flesh and bood artist being into functions of the platform.
Over time I observed that if I was semi-naked on a beach–doing my best to look like a hot, non-passing trans-feminine person living their best life—these posts got traction. Literally HUNDREDS of likes! So validating. Yet if I posted specifically about a show I was developing, or a video I had made or a text I had written, I would get 1 or 2 hearts. The evil algorithmic overlord is tuned to filter out content that looks like promotion. I’m allowed in Instagram because my hot beach body is sugar dust to scatter over a pay to play marketing platform. The ads on Instagram are abrasive and soulless but the mediated aliveness of our friends keeps us there. By trying to center myself as an artist, and not just a leisure consumer, I had broken their unwritten rules. I needed to pay up to Meta for the privilege of talking to “my” followers about what I wanted to talk about (not to mention the subtle silencing of content about Israel’s genocide in Gaza!).
It’s a subtle disciplining of a Pavlovian type where your behaviour on the platform gets shaped for you without you completely realising. It works through the giving and withholding of love (or likes rather). If a lover treated us this way, our best friend would tell us they’re abusive and to get the fuck out! But where are our best friends right now? And what does getting out even mean? Where can we even go?
Lines of Flight
Deleuze and Guattari dream of “lines of flight” from the totalising system of capitalism. Yet capitalism is like the haunted house of Luis Buñuel’s El ángel exterminador that you just, for the life of you, cannot escape. You want to leave, but there is some malevolent force keeping you inside. Often these lines are hard to trace because, just when you think you’ve found a way out—say Black Lives Matter, or punk, or psychedelics—you discover that these paths can lead right back to the center through co-optation and institutional capture. In fact, as Mark Fisher describes in Capitalist Realism, the domination of this system seems so complete that for must of us it is impossible to imagine worlds outside or after capitalism.
Yet, when it comes to the internet at least, there are alternatives. There are paths worth pursuing. If, for instance, like me you feel physically unwell whenever you open Instagram, there is an open-source, decentralised alternative called Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org) that is answerable to no corporate overlord.
When tools and platforms and technologies exist precisely in contradiction to those of dominance, extraction, and control, it is incumbent upon us to use them. While these platforms won’t necessarily crush capitalism and the war machine tomorrow, they model the fact that humans are capable of constructing non-hierarchical alternatives that aren’t ruled by extractive profit motives. How can we possibly imagine socialised healthcare, or factories run as worker cooperatives, if opting out of Instagram is too violent a change to even contemplate?
The Joy of Inconvenience
Compared to their corporate doppelgängers, open-source platforms lack a little in terms of convenience, (though compared with five years ago, they have come a looooooong way).
Yet it’s worth remembering that what we experience as convenience is also a carefully designed cul-de-sac to keep us inside abusive platforms. Anything that might lead us to put down our phones is airbrushed out. If you are worried about the amount of time you spend doomscrolling, consider that it’s the “convenience” of a never ending feed catered to your compulsive obsessions that keeps you in the doomscroll loop. It is not some psychological defect on your part.
In fact, strange things can emerge from inconvenience. Strange beautiful things—like falling in love with a stranger while you wait for a bus, for instance. So far, I haven’t quite reached that kind of rapture, but here’s a very telling example: On my way out the door from YouTube, I joined a PeerTube community. There was some kind of glitch and my email verification got lost somewhere in the tubes. The kind soul running the server wrote to me to apologize and to help me set up my account. I wrote back to say thanks and, oh by the way, ask why he had set up the server. As well as some tips on how to make the most of Mastodon, he gently explained
I had always been interested in Free Software… and recently just decided to go all in concerning the Fediverse…. There’s a bit of an addendum to all that, which potentially makes it a longer story; summarised: I had to face the reality of disability in the past 5 years, but still wanted to use what I have in resources, ability and time to give to mankind and its development.
Everyday communism. I found this moving, honest, and uplifting. I haven’t felt that online for a long, long while.
The Medium Is The MEssage
Marshall McLuhan famously wrote that “the medium is the message.” It’s one thing to have an eye on content—what we express in words—but it’s equally vital or even more important to observe how platforms shape both not only what can be expressed but also the economic, social and affective experience of communicating with other humans.
Instagram and its ilk operate as affective extractors: they distract, agitate, then numb us. They become arenas where we fight for attention and success at the expense of others, mapping the values of neoliberalism directly onto virtual space. At the end of the day, when something goes wrong, I have no one to talk to—just buttons to click and forms to submit.
Mastodon and related projects center human relations over extraction. This shift isn’t just about: what can this platform do for me? But also: how can I shape the future through the technologies I give my time and attention?
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Where to Find Me Now
Web ➜ WordPress
https://adri99.net
My website’s been on WordPress since forever but I shortened the URL to adri99.net, so you can scream it over the din of a basement rave and still be heard.
Instagram/Twitter ➜ Mastodon
https://tldr.nettime.org/@adri99
Discussed above, but also: what is it with these Silicon Valley types, happy to host Nazis out of their throbbing commitment to free speech, but draw the line when it comes to pornography? I mean, they must be real freaks, with massive guilt complexes, jerking off in the dark while preaching about “community standards”. Of course! You would have to be horribly hung up on your body and its leaky desires to built a society where human interactions float in the cloud and the unruly body is left behind.
Mastodon–or to be more precise, the communities managing the federated Mastodon servers–often allow erotic content so long as you flag it.
Substack ➜ Mailman + WordPress
https://noise.autistici.org/mailman/listinfo/adri99
Substack begone. Now my newsletter runs on Mailman (hosted by Autistici, an anticapitalist tech collectives) a tracking-free way to stay in touch with my beautiful, and yet also very smart and discerning fans. Like you. Did I say my fans were beautiful?
Patreon/Substack ➜ Liberapay
https://liberapay.com/adri99/
There are a lot of people to support right now. For instance, hundreds of thouands of Gazans are living on the edge, so I don’t want to take up any of that space.
What I’m talking about is alternative ways of funding art, if indeed we think that art is worth funding. We cannot rely on the market or on the distorted state capitalism to decide which artist gets to eat and which one doesn’t, who gets to realize their strange motivation and who gets pushed to the margins.
Berlin’s arts funding got gutted by 50%, and none of what’s left is going to artists who might be a little bit watermelon-inclined, if you know what I mean, cough cough genocide cough. The curators and gatekeepers at state funded institutions are terror-stricken at the thought of losing, power, access, privilege, art parties, and above all cocaine–that sweet, sweet cocaine.
Instead of Patreon or Substack I’m using Liberapay, a non-profit and open source crowdfunding platform.
My goal? 200€/week to survive this rat race. How?
- 120 humans toss in 7€ / month (less than two flat whites); or
- One oligarch rents my soul for 800€/month.
I’m good with either.
Bandcamp ➜ Archive.org (+ Liberapay)
https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A”Adrienne+Teicher”
I’m ditching Bandcamp for two reasons: their swingeing fees irritate the fuck out of me. Fan pays 1€ for 1 track – €0.15 for Bandcamp – €0.33 for Paypal = just €0.52 for artists! That’s 48% gone!! Even more grubby, the company busted its heavily unionised workforce after it was sold to an outfit called Songtradr, laying off half of the people who made Bandcamp what it was – stabbing artists and workers while slinking by like Hannibal Lector in that faded underdog garb. This anti-worker assault was a reminder that we can’t trust corporate platforms with underground culture.
If, for some obscure reason, you still like to download mp3s you can do it at archive.org with a friendly reminder to lay down a few coins for the hungry artist who creates the work you love.
Telegram channel ➜ Signal group
https://adri99.net/signal
Yes, I know, Signal was funded by CIA-adjacent spooks, but at least it’s nonprofit, encrypted and it won’t mystify your elderly relatives. Unlike Telegram it doesn’t that have those weird icky crypto, gulf oil blood money vibes. Sure, Langley’s probably eavesdropping via quantum computers powered by alien tech recovered from the Roswell UFO crash site, but pobody’s nerfect.
YouTube ➜ PeerTube
https://videos.abnormalbeings.space/c/adri99_channel
See above, and also, on peer tube the medium is the message. No ads, no algorithms, just a little online commune run by digital degenerates.
Workshop
Did you find this interesting? Would you be interested in a workshop where I help you fuck the patriarchy and destroy capitalism without making grim compromises to tech ghouls? Send me a message https://adri99.net/contact and I might set it up.