Protecting our precious ... engagement vectors.

So I used to make jokes, back when you could still do that. Some of them were short and stupid (captioned animal photos, twitter, my penis) and some were almost novella-length and took years of careful setup to eventually deliver the punchline (my Rosario Dawson zine, all of my romantic relationships, etc). It was a way to pass the time, and to put something out into the world for the pure enjoyment of others. You don't need a belly laugh, nor credit, nor money. You just need to know that somewhere, for a moment or two, someone closed their eyes and shook their head gently back and forth while exhaling, and that their day was slightly brightened by the experience.

The whole internet used to be that. Just millions of people making stupid, outsider art, off-key songs, cat gifs, etc for the sheer joy of making them. Monetisation had yet to be inserted into the public consciousness. People were just ... doing stuff. Because they liked doing it. If other, different people liked what they were doing then great. If not, they did it anyway. You made what you liked, and its audience would find it eventually. We were unconcerned about popularity because we disliked popular things. It was a (digital) world by, of, and mostly for, weirdos. It wasn't until the advent of social media (specifically Facebook 2.0) that the internet became full of nitpicking moms and aunts and people with the internal monologue and emotional/intellectual depth of a medium-sized labrador.

But even before that, the internet was still primarily made of closed loops. Pocket communites, message boards, the nascent "socials" and the like. These loops all (I was going to say "for better or worse" but it's always worse) suffered the same exact fate(s). If you didn't live through any of them, see if you can google the trajectories of livejournal, friendster, myspace, tumblr, etc and compare it to the current state of facebook, instagram, reddit, et al and you can probably figure out where they're headed. And this would occur with or without horrific decisions from the top down designed to monetise the platform. All social media sites are inherently ourobouric, with or without intervention. At least the old ones were designed initially to be for the user rather than for the express purpose of data mining and commerce.

I used to migrate from one to the next whenever the internal or external rubicon had been crossed. If you can see the holes, why stay aboard a ship until it actually sinks? Then I got married, sold my animal blog for the money to get married, moved to Scotland, opened a restaurant, and gave up the internet altogether for a while. That was nice. Not the work, nor the seven year decline of a once quite hopeful marriage, but not spending my mornings on Facebook, slowly coming to hate the people I love and value. After all, negative "engagement" is still good for the modern internet's true purpose, which is very clearly the absolute and utter erosion of all privacy and security in the name of invasive advertising. A real human being, after all, does not think of oneself as a brand, nor do they give a flying fuck about "engagement" unless it is two people choosing to join themselves in matrimony. These corporate marketing buzzwords have filtered into people's everyday conversations to the point that I think they're through the looking glass and can't hear themselves from a truly human perspective. They're tubes, as my boy Howard Beale once said in the absolute classic 1976 masterpiece Network.

"We'll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know! You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here! You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal! You do whatever the tube tells you, you dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing! We are the illusion!"

And that was about television. If they could see it then, imagine what they'd make of the internet now.

So despite my general aversion to what the modern internet is in comparison to its previous iteration, I nonetheless acknowledged that it is still the best way to rapidly disseminate information to large groups of interested parties. So in the spirit of minimalism and ease of use, I chose to only use one social media channel for my businesses here in Scotland, since having a way to talk to my customers on a daily basis has been important to me ever since my coffeeshop in Michigan had a livejournal back in 2001. At the time (2015) that was Instagram, the least offensive option of those available. Post a photo of food, maybe say what the food was, then fuck off. "Here are the specials," "This is my wife," "This is the heart/lungs/liver/etc that will be haggis later," etc. No fuss, no muss. And you can look back over seven or eight years of the platform and see that I never once used a hashtag (let alone 275 per post), weird premium filters, never ran a stupid like and tag two friends contest (so insultingly blatant in its follower-scamming), nor paid for a promoted post. It was for the customers, the actual physical human customers. For their amusement and to keep them informed. I don't live in the tubes. I live on Victoria Road in Glasgow, and I sell buns and katsu and strange noodle soups.

So I tried to weather the many, many storms of instagram, from its buyout by facebook to its hashtag vortex, the rise of the influencers and the insertion of reels, on and on and on. I endured three-to-five campaigns against the restaurant by people who had never stepped foot in it. I just ignored them, since they're tube people and I am not. As expected, they had no effect. Still, I knew I should leave. The platform was poisoned, and the holes in the ship were larger and more worrisome than those in several former internet shelters. I was being lazy. I don't like changing my routines. But the other day I tried to make a joke, which I will paraphrase here for your edification (mind you it was beneath seven carefully edited 1970s magazine advertisements, which I like to photoshop in my "spare" time, so nothing racy). I said, to the best of my recollection:
I am so tired. If you don't come buy a thousand buns today I am going to go on one of those classic American indiscriminate shooting sprees. Not this schoolhouse thing they do nowadays; just picking people off at random with a high-powered rifle from ambush like my grandpa used to do. This world has gone off the rails lately. We really need to get back to basics.

Now, I hate explaining a joke because it immediately renders it unfunny, but I'll do it here anyway for educational purposes:

1. This joke implies that shooting sprees are an American tradition which we hold dear, but

2. Like most dearly-held traditions it has been corrupted by the youth into a perversion of its original meaning, and that

3. My grandfather was the DC sniper, and

4. I, in a fit of exhaustion and familial piety, would like to reclaim the lost art of indiscriminate murder from "kids these days" because

5. I am not selling enough Taiwanese steamed buns.

That post was removed in under ten minutes by the same people who allowed and encouraged actual idiots armed with assault rifles to storm the US Capitol in an attempt to overturn a democratic election result. But I suppose the engagement on those conspiracy posts was higher, and so, algorithmically, it makes more sense to alloow an armed insurrection in the gun capital of the world than it does to let a solo restaurant operator in a country where guns are illegal, who has a 20 year history of talking dumb shit on the intertnet and is the published author of a humour book, make a DC sniper joke in 2022.

So fuck them. The vast majority of my actual customers can't even see the restaurant's posts anymore anyway through the absolute shitstorm of "reels" and/or the idiotic, parasitic lies of "influencers" looking to lie to real people for free tacos and skin creams from corporate bastards and/or AI selected ads based on the behavioural biometric data your lengthier "engagement" has generated, etc.

So if you need information on specials, maybe some random music, an advert or two rendered in the style of a 1930s theatre playbill, a small rant about litter, a photo of soup, or just a fucking break from social media ... pop by this stupid website and kick your feet up. If you need food, I can suggest a bun shack on Allison Street that would really hit the spot.