I think that making art is an inherently social activity, or at least I can say that it certainly is for me and it probably is for many others. In the simplest terms, I want to make art and then share the art with others and have those others engage with it, and then reflect back to me that yes, I see what you’ve done here, I see what you’re saying or I feel the vibe you’re putting down, and it resonates with me—even if it is only one person who is responding. It is similar to when you speak: you would like a listener to hear your words, understand them, perhaps do some basic mirroring behaviors, ask follow-up questions and the like, to show you that they are listening and that what you are saying is valuable to them. The engagement is validating when it connects, but also informative and challenging (in a good way) when it doesn’t connect.
Cut to, the internet. When the Internet came around, there was sort of this idea that you could have an online community and get that kind of interaction with people online. And to some extent, you kind of could—around 2010 or so, because of the design of the internet at that time, when you made things, you would actually get a decent amount of discovery, and interaction with others online.
Over the years, because of a bunch of actions that large tech companies have taken (and actions governments have not taken in response), the whole internet has gotten more and more top-heavy. This means that fewer and fewer people are getting more and more engagement. So, fake numbers, but to demonstrate the concept, if 10 years ago you had 100,000 people getting 100 fans each, now, you have more like 100 people having 100,000 fans each, and this dynamic continues to get worse and worse each year.
When I released 100 Rogues in 2010, people were making fan art, uploading videos of themselves playing the game. I was getting interviewed by websites (remember those?) frequently. This wasn’t because we had some crazy marketing budget or did really anything differently from how I did things with my other games. It also isn’t because 100 Rogues is some super polished gem of a game: it was literally my first published game, it launched with bugs, inconsistent artwork and generally lower production values than almost anything else I’ve worked on.
Somewhat predictably maybe, this dynamic kind of matches the way that corporations have been conglomerating over time through mergers. 10 years ago there were more game companies than there are now, now everything has been bought up by Activision and Tencent and Take-Two. Fewer “creators” making games for a larger swath of the pie of potential players each. The bar for entry, the algorithmic hurdles, to even have your work seen at all, gets higher and higher. To become a famous game developer or Twitch streamer or whatever online in 2025, you need to not only invest a lot of cash in marketing, but also your marketing and even your work itself likely needs to be radically optimized for the algorithms—not for human beings.
I want to be clear though and say that the internet didn’t have to be this way. The internet is this way because governments chose not to enforce their own anti-trust laws or other regulations, and allowed this to happen. The government also failed to introduce new legislation that would have been necessary to maintain the vision of the internet that we experienced in the early days, one with a “blogosphere” lots of thriving communities, functioning search, and the basic concept of “discovery”.
But in any case, here we are, and I think even if the government wanted to start fixing things tomorrow, it would take years for us to build a better internet.
The Open Mic
One really awesome thing about being in a real, physical space with other human beings, is that a lot of shit sort of doesn’t matter anymore. If you are together with people, in a space, at a coffee shop, or out in a street, corporations have not really figured out ways to interfere with that and fuck that up. I’m thinking of something like an open mic, which just… could not be more distantly different from what it is like to be an artist on the internet.
On the internet, you need to radically optimize everything you do for an algorithm, to have a chance of getting seen. But at an open mic, everyone in the room gets an equal chance, 3-5 minutes, to get up in front of everyone else and share whatever it is you have to share. It could be a poem, it could be you playing an instrument you don’t know how to play, it could be a standup routine, it could be just literally you talking about your day. People of all walks of life, older folks, young children, people with different body shapes, ethnic and cultural backgrounds, or socioeconomic status are completely free to come to an open mic, sign up, watch everyone else, and at some point you get a turn to share whatever it is you have to share.
Me performing at an open mic in CT a few weeks ago
I bring up the open mic because it is about as far away from The 2025 Internet as you can get: the most fair, equitable, open sort of platform you could imagine, where there is no algorithm, no biases, no giant million dollar barrier of entry, no corporate conglomeration. Just you and a dozen or two other folks getting together, with one thing in common: you’re all there. You are sharing space with each other, in a spirit of curiosity about each other.
Obviously, most of the IRL art world isn’t like an open mic. The IRL art world is full of arbitrary barriers, unfair requirements, biases, and a lot of it is absolutely affected by corporate conglomeration and the internet even if it’s taking place offline. The more money there is to be made, the more these things tend to rear their heads, and one of the reasons that open mics are as great as they are is that basically none of the performers make (or spend) money in engaging with them.
This is somewhat of a follow-up post on my last post, where I talked about wanting to engage in real physical spaces more—and yet here I am writing yet another article on the Internet! I do think that the internet is going to continue to be a thing in all our lives, which is why we should demand that it move into the direction of the open mic. Discord has been one of my favorite internet-things, and part of that is because all chatters within a discord area pretty much are on an equal playing field in terms of the attention and time that their chats get. Everyone engages pretty much with everyone and it’s nice in that sense.
A final thought is that, given the fascistic hell-scape that we are speeding into, with more and more masked ICE brownshirt goons rolling into our communities to harass and kidnap our neighbors, I think it’s all the more reason for all of us to get out of our house and just be there. Be there when it happens means being there when you might meet an important collaboration partner, or see an inspirational show, or be an inspirational show for someone else, but it can also mean being one more person who is in a position to mobilize and resist fascism when it happens.
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