I know businesses gotta business, I know capitalism is always gonna capitalism, but it’s just depressing to watch fun platforms inevitably degrade into stores. Google Image Search is a useless ebay shell. Instagram is a clothing store. TikTok is a theatrical sweatshop. Etc, etc.

If anyone out there with a ton of extra money who doesn’t care about valuation wants to channel the spirit of the original web and make a social media platform that is purely about art and expression and only aspires to ever break even monetarily, hit me up. I’ll donate my time.

For a couple years in our most chaotic, wild, and exciting period of radical change, @Steph_Sheridan_ and I loved our lives as an art project. It was reckless, it was aimless, it was unsustainable. But it was freeing. It destroyed and rebuilt us in the best possible way.

I’m happy to be a small business owner and I value the idea that I have to make things people actually want in order to earn their money. But I dream of a hybrid economy where the dreamers are free to explore, to express, to make mistakes, without crushing punishment.

There’s no good answer here because it’s a pretty short line to talentless trust fund kids who get a bunch of Daddy money to become DJs nobody wants. But somehow, we have to do better for artists. We can’t just mow over creativity so quickly in the pursuit of profit.

Somehow, some way, the folks among us who have something burning inside them need the raw space and time and materials to actualize that inner voice, and it shouldn’t be all about market value. My god, what a better society we’d be if money was thrown at artists over investors.

Anyway, Steph and I both played by the rules, we had big careers and houses and stuff, and we reached a point where we just needed to break out of that. We burned all the money from our houses on a couple years of total freedom, and we chronicled it here: https://www.instagram.com/newdaynewbackyard/

We had to get back to reality after a couple years because you have to be rich to just fuck entirely off and make art. But I really think every person yearning to break free should have the opportunity. I'd rather my taxes go to dreamers than oil barons and endless wars. //