Hi Crowd!
On this 260th issue of The Crowd I thought I’d take a moment to remind/reiterate who I am, which might also remind/reiterate why you, dear reader, are here as well as think a little about where this goes next.
I’m Sean. Writer. Artist. Musician. Activist. Advisor. Advocate. Enthusiast. Critic. Observer. Participant. I've designed albums, written books, produced exhibitions, started companies and advised others. All/none of the above. Mostly I’m just Sean. This list has covered all of that. One day I might talk about music and tech and policy and art and sex and drama and crypto and memes and the next I might just ramble about a weird idea I had in the middle of the night.
You know this, you are already here for it.You likely bumped into one or more of those things, found them interesting and decided to follow along for the ride and I haven't been annoying enough yet to for you to leave, and for that I'm deeply grateful. A little confused, because I annoy the shit out of myself but sadly lack the ability to unsubscribe, however I suppose that helps keeps it somewhat interesting.
I've been blogging since before blogs were called blogs, and if you extend that definition to include "writing random shit for zines" then that goes back even further, early 90's. A very long time ago I used to have wonderful system with Google Reader and various RSS feeds where I'd find cool things around the internet and collect them together and send them out on Twitter. A friend asked if I could do that in a way that was easier for them to catch up on later, and this newsletter was born. In the years since then those systems have broken, been replaced by others, and broken again so these days I do a lot of it by hand and write things when I have the time/inspiration.
This "system" is good and bad because in theory it should be low pressure -do things whenever you want and who cares one way or the other right? But in reality it's high pressure because I'm always worrying that I'm going to forget something that I wanted to include here but also holding off on writing anything because the thing is in flux or I'm still thinking about what I want to say about it. This results in longer newsletters less frequently. Which is fine, but I also really enjoy shorter more frequent things I get from others, and also recognize that a big part of my own creative and cognitive process has been deeply tied to writing about things, so when I don't do that the tubes get all filled up.
In the heyday of blogging I often posted 10-20 times a day about various things happening in the moment, but that's not really a sustainable process longterm and unlike several of my contemporaries at the time I didn't work any deals allowing me to walk away with a few milli in the bank, instead - burned out and frustrated - I shifted focus and spent a decade building an environmental non-profit which I'm fairly confident has changed the world in more ways than one. This was awesome and fulfilling, but it didn't provide the same discussion/feedback loop that I had with regular blogging and so this newsletter starting picking up some of the slack there, but still fell a bit short. I tried to find it on various social media platforms (always dreaming of Twitter circa 2008), but at the end of the day that's just helping build up someone else's thing which I can lose access to without notice, so I've never really wanted to go all in there either. The web3 offerings are better in that respect, but are still struggling to get out of the "Tweeting about Twitter" stage. I've been wrestling with this for years honestly, it's a topic that's come up here in the past. Writing about writing.
I'm repeatedly asked if there's a Patreon people can sign up for, something I've always avoided simply because I didn't know what I'd do with it. Recently it was suggested that this might be the solution I've been dancing around, so I thought I'd go ahead and give it a try. Now before anyone says anything I know that Patreon is also "someone else's thing" like I just mentioned, so I've also set up a membership tier here which I'll - at least for the moment - try to mirror. I don't know how that will work out honestly, but this is an experiment and I reserve the right to keep messing with it until it makes some kind of sense. So this is what I'm thinking - this "member only" level which costs about as much as a cup of coffee (at a legit coffee shop, not Denny's/Timmy's you heathens) will be much much much more frequent, shorter, and unpolished. Much more stream of conscious kind of thing, with ideas that might develop and find their way into the newsletter but might also just be one off kinds of things. (update: a flood of error messages from patreon and stripe tells me this isn't for me right now so I axed it) It'll also give me a place to expand on some things from the newsletter that I might not have been able to at the time, or that I thought no one cared about, or just that I wanted to revisit. For example I might mention a book that I picked up, like W David Marx "Status And Culture" in the newsletter, but then later explain why I got it or an interesting thing I found in it. That kind of thing. Is this interesting to anyone? I have no idea. We'll see.
With Patreon they love it when you also set up a private Discord, so I'll see about doing that and maybe this creates a place for some discussion of some newsletter topics between various subscribers. Or maybe it doesn't, again I'm not sure, so we'll see how it works out.
Once again, thanks for joining me on this adventure and sorry for all the walls we bump into along the way.
xoxo
-s
