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Doing it Yourself

Doing things yourself frees you from gatekeepers. This is infinitely valualble, and in some ways dangerous.

On one hand you are freed from systems that filter out valuable ideas that are displeasing to those systems. The machinery of capitalism for example is happy to sell fantasies about bucking capitalism, but responds violently to actual challenges to capital's control, such as calls for unionization or The Internet Archive trying to create the greatest library in the history of the world.

On the other hand, gatekeepers protect communities and ensure quality. You must be intolerant of intolerance if you want tolerance to survive. A filtering process is valuable when people have only so much time and energy to spend on some genre of thing.

Curation is an underappreciated art and one that always happens. Algorithms curate what you see. Access curates what you see. Your location curates what you see. It's a valuable thing when you can trust a person to curate something for you. It's a sad thing when you can't.

I use BlockTube to block thousands of YouTube channels because that algorithm is untrustworthy. I don't use TikTok because the algorighm pays intimate attention to my attention and exploits it to ensure I spend the maximum amount of time watching videos that don't enhance my life but do keep me glued to a screen.

Doing it yourself, you lose gatekeepers of quality. No one says "you can't write that, it's unpublishable" which means your published stuff might be crap. It's scary. Nobody wants to embarass themselves.

Not doing it yourself means you'll wind up making the stuff the gatekeepers deem "publishable" which is mostly crap, but it doesn't have as many typos.

I've heard artists in school that don't trust their teachers because their teachers don't respect their style. They have no way of knowing if the teachers dislike their stuff because of the quality or the style.

It's a fundamental flaw in the gatekeeper design. If the judges of quality are the judges of content, the content and the quality are intertwined. Dogmas creep in. Experimentation is discouraged. Art stagnates.

Mira Bellweather published "Fucking Trans Women" herself. It was "unpublishable" yet she published it. People read it. It has value.

The gatekeepers never would've published it, because the gatekeepers protect white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. They supress queerness. Queerness of ideas. Queer thinking. Diverse thinking. Non-traditional thinking. Unexpected thinking. Artistic thinking.

Doing it yourself doesn't mean doing it alone. Friends are great. Touch grass.

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