Beyond Instagram: Reclaim your Digital Autonomy
Substack and other creator-centric spaces as an alternative to social media
Part four of a series of essays on promoting your work on- and offline. Read the past issues here:
A couple of days ago, a photographer friend posted a frustrated cry for help in our photography group, asking if anyone knew somebody who could help him retrieve his blocked Instagram account. He shared a video in his story that called out police brutality and got instantly blocked without notice.
We’ve got several more instances like these periodically, mostly from people that violated the so-called - most of the time opaque - community guidelines. Underlying all these desperate posts is a sense of helplessness and a nagging feeling of being dependent on the favors of social media companies. In the case of photography (and many other creative and non-creative disciplines), this poses a serial connection to the individual work: If we don’t comply with these rules, we are in constant danger of getting our perceived reach and visibility taken away. So with a nagging feeling in the back of our heads, we comply and try to go the safe route of creating content that is not harmful to anyone and, second, optimized for higher reach.
But is it true? Do we think that being seemingly “successful” on Instagram and putting all the hard work into increasing our numbers mean more work outside, IRL? Do we need to play it completely safe, with the expense of sacrificing our creativity? Or are we bound to fail in various degrees of burnout if we try to please the algorithm?
Focusing entirely on social media visibility is tempting, especially for people just starting in the industry. To get the instant satisfaction of engaging with a semi-anonymous crowd of people, to raise the hope that with high visibility comes the step into higher paid creative jobs. But the way the platform evolved in the last years, it almost inevitably comes with the price of being forced to create work that happens within the boundaries of current social media regulations and trends. Suppose being seen at all in the first place.
The predominant and mainstream aesthetics get a lot of engagement, leading to a visual string of look-a-like content. On the other hand, genuinely authentic, wild, and experimental content gets sanctioned with low visibility.
The corporate logic is simple: Conformity means maximized compatibility for a wide range of audiences, trends lead to engagement, and what proves to click a lot gets favored by the algorithm. And in the end, this type of content means higher marketability and investment returns for advertisers.
The vicious cycle
Succumbing to that logic gets you into the vicious cycle where your trade your authenticity with the needs of the algorithm automatically. Turning your creative wants and needs into a form of labor, conforming to please the audience, and ultimately serving the goal of the companies to keep us glued in environments where we can be sold to.
I remember the transition of the few Youtube creators whose work I enjoyed, primarily for entertainment reasons—slowly turning from authentic, exceptionally personal, fun content into advertising and product placement machines. Out of the sheer demand to keep the engagement up and make a decent, and sometimes well above decent, living from creating content in rare cases, they get favored in higher visibility among the platforms.
Discovering a new creator nowadays on a platform like Youtube, for example, is impossible without actively searching for it. The suggestions on the front page never do you the favor of suggesting the nuanced, the counterintuitive, and the clever. It almost entirely shows you content that already has high engagement rates and proven concepts. And this content is mainly connected to higher advertising revenue, which is not a bad thing in the first place if done right. But if it comes with the price of conformity and less diversity, it slowly erodes the plurality of our cultural landscape.
What was initially marketed to us as tools that serve us to gain visibility turned us into servants of the algorithm. Conformity is the key to success; non-conformity is getting sanctioned and sometimes (shadow-) banned.
But what happened to experimentation, wilful acts of creativity, imagination, and fearless exploration? What about questioning the status quo and exchanging ideas outside particular bubbles?
So we create algorithms that have no purpose other than to reduce human novelty. To reduce that 20% of people who are not going to follow up with what the algorithm says - get that down to 10, get that down to five! Because human activity, human novel behavior, that to the forecasters is noise. That’s what it is called “noise.” And I’m arguing that the noise is the thing…That noise is what keeps us going. Noise is where new ideas come from. Noise is where that weird liminal stuff that makes us human happens, so I want to bring up the noise! That’s where human potential is.
Jess Henderson - Offline Matters
Digital Autonomy
When I first discovered Substack one year ago, I immediately thought: who wants to pay for individual creators’ content? What makes it more valuable than what’s already on social media, seemingly for free?
After digging deeper, I found that there was great freedom for the individual to create content that ain’t dependent on algorithmic grace. And in return, it opened up the possibility of forming a genuinely engaged community of people actively opting into your content.
And I can see a strategy to consolidate even more means of digital content by incorporating video and podcasts, which opens up another vast set of possibilities. And these possibilities are pretty numerous in the case of photography: Digital diaries, classical newsletters to announce the latest work, behind-the-scenes, experimentation spaces, theoretical articles, essays, and communities. There are already quite a few people flocking toward this space, especially after the recent events regarding Instagram’s new changes.
I’ve listed a few noteworthy Substack accounts at the end of this issue.
In the best case, this means that revenues for the platform through user-generated content and a fair share of the platform stay consistent and don’t get compromised by corporate greed or the sheer need to grow exponentially to fulfill the demands of possible shareholders. I genuinely wish that Substack’s growth is slow and healthy without being conformed and swallowed by giant corporations, as happened to Tumblr back in the day.
Hamish McKenzie, Co-Founder of Substack, recently wrote in a rather combative post:
The trend that Substack is part of is not a newsletter trend, or even the much-hyped creator economy. We are part of a seismic shift in the media economy that is all about writer and creator ownership and independence. When writers are in charge, they can do the work they believe is most important, have a direct relationship with their readers, and have the potential to make far more money than they could get from being an employee who produces content for others to own and disseminate. Our fellow travelers in this trend are not email service providers or legacy news organizations, but the likes of Shopify, Twitch, Patreon, OnlyFans, and Discord. This subset of the media economy is thriving. It is entirely different to what some people think of when they talk about a “newsletter economy.”
And I can see the vision behind that. Creating valuable content for an audience that actively decides to follow your work instead of being fed randomly by “Explore” pages and sponsored posts.
On the consumer side, I personally rather spend a few dollars to support the work of an individual creator than be fed with random, ad-infested content in a rigid and hostile environment. On the creator side, this, my very own Substack, will evolve over the coming months.
I have already started to explore a few ideas. I chose this space to incorporate a more personal approach and a deeper insight behind the scenes, fulfilling my promise to relentlessly open up my process, concentrating my side- and personal project aspirations more toward this platform while using corporate social media merely as a form to guide more people towards this space (and for the occasional quirky experiment and portfolio pieces).
Substack became my happy place on the internet as a creator and consumer. And I genuinely hope that more of you start getting creative on this or any other creator-centered platform.
Have fun and:
Don’t fuck it up, Substack!
Sincerely,
Ramon
Photography on Substack
Here is an ever-expanding list of Substack accounts that I follow, focussing on photography as a medium. Let me know in the comments if I missed any new ones. Always hungry for more! And start your own; what are you waiting for?
Crewdson Trail Log - brilliant Substack by photography legend Gregory Crewdson and his team.
Interloper by Alice Zoo - Monthly essays or conversations on photography
Process by Wesley Verhoeve - One of the first photo-centric accounts on Substack
DRAWLIGHTS by Peter Nitsch - showcases the work of established and emerging lens-based artists
FlakPhoto Digest by Andy Adams - Community news, book reviews, and pictures
Nowhere Diary by Kim Høltermand - A photography community
Adam Ferguson - unfortunately defunct Substack by Australian photographer Adam Ferguson. Bring it back, please! (But reading the archive is well worth your time!)
Plain Sight by Zachary Ayotte - Essays on photography by Zachary Ayotte
Joel Pulliam’s Newsletter - a photographer in Tokyo
Mostly True by Kenneth Jarecke - Thoughts on photography and journalism
Feature Shoot - Substack extension of the popular photography blog.
Year of Love by Lina Scheynius - An intimate diary by photographer Lina Scheynius
Seasons, a Journal by Alain Astruc - Personal essays and photo series by french photographer and filmmaker Alain Astruc
Thanks for the shout out Ramon. Just signed up for yours after seeing so much good stuff already!
Great reading Ramon!