Tech “Disruptors” Have Disrupted enough
Have we been disrupted enough yet? The endless need to technologically adapt to a new disruptive innovation has become fatiguing in numerous sectors of life. The social-media space is the biggest one that comes to my mind, as I recollected while reading a book from only a few years ago about marketing for artists.
The writer lists a series of platforms and sites to push your work on, and 80% of the ones he mentioned are redundant.
This becomes a problem if you want to try to make your work viewable online. The same author disparages some artist pages as looking like they were made in the year 2000 and not changed.
Can you blame them? We don’t really want to waste our time learning new platforms over and over again. We’d rather focus on the work itself.
As I’ve grown up with the internet I’ve tried out most of the big ones.
Myspace, fb, insta, tumbler, deviantArt, youtube, zazzle, wordpress, gab, telegram, now squarespace and rumble…. I’m probably missing a few. With every new platform there comes a new back-end to figure out, a new network and networking method to have to ingratiate yourself into, different ways to upload/download/store data, and this goes hand -n-hand with the changing gadget hardware itself, and the supplementary apps, and the need to constantly upgrade to accomodate data load.
I had stints of learning to code, starting with a unit in uni when the hot thing of the day was AdobeFlash. That was 2009. Redundant. I also learned Actionscript that year. Redundant.
HTML, CSS are still a constant but there was a lot more of an onus to learn the coding itself, which you basically have to be autistic to do well (imo), and my brain isn’t wired like that. A missing comma, a mispelled word, and the whole site is dysfunctional. It was brutal and uncompromising.
Later as the paranoia over online censorship ramped up during the mid-2010s I tacked on VPNs and looked into other crypto-circumventions. I got in touch with some Texan programmer who was building his own site-building interface (used in conjunction with Github) and got a domain name, then a couple of security add-ons to that. I was spending more time figuring out how to keep the site online and insured against bad-hat/deep-state hackery than I was doing the content itself.
This was impossibly complicated and I gave up for a few years and just focussed on developing my work offline. Working on drawings and paintings, out of the view of the online public.
I’m now back and am thankful that Squarespace has come along and made it alot easier. It’s also fun. Not since Myspace have I had this much fun building a site. I think the vibeshift of late 2024 has also helped. There is now less of a paranoid air for those of us who really just want to mind our own business and focus on our own work in our own small part of the world. Those of us that are done with the culture wars.
No this is not a promo spot for Squarespace! It’s early days though but I give this platform my tentative approval.
To further recap the “exciting and emerging” tech I’ve used that has been and gone:
I have animations that I saved on writeable cds and dvd disks. I’ve got an external hard-drive which is bigger than a rib-eye steak and which utilizes the once cutting-edge firewire connection. I’ve got USB 1.0, 2,0 and 3.0 drives. I’ve got an original 2xcd package of Final Cut Pro 5 or 7 (can’t remember which). I’ve got the adobe suite with bitcracker keys. I’ve got Autodesk Maya, which soon after became Alias Maya (or maybe the other way around?). I’ve got torrent-downloaded software. I’ve got film slides of my year12 folio work, and b+w/colour based film shots, and accompanying SLR cameras. A nod back to the dark room days which I saw the tail-end of. There is work spread across numerous different formats which are difficult to read, much less share. It’s actually the old-fashioned artforms of drawing and painting which are the easiest to transmit across any form of communication, and that have been the most durable and easiest to revisit. I also still have cassette, vinyl and vhs tapes of albums, movies, shows, gigs, and a PS1 (Sold the Sega Mega-Drive to get the PS1. Dammit!). And a game-boy Cartman Southpark Watch. I may still have a floppy disk that has Tetris, PoP and TMNT1. Need to investigate the storage tubs…. Don’t get me started on the garage band, recordings for which I recorded with Logic Audio Platinum, and then I did solo-audio soundtracks for my film shorts, using a software called… Garageband… :/
I was looking at paintings this morning that I did 12 or more years ago, and I didn’t need to turn on a single gadget. This is one of the things i like about painting the most.
I once got told by an old boomer bartender boss of mine that tech changed a lot slower back in his day, and that it was frankly a much easier world to live in on that basis. I’ve never doubted him on this score and hope we can get back to that. Too much tech change is disorienting.
New tech is fine, But we need more new tech that adapts to the core technological infrastructure we already have, rather than blow a hole through it. We also need products that feel more human again and helps us to re-engage with reality. Seems like these changes are what is happening now anyway with the next gen of tech, and not too soon.
The “Laser” was an early form of external hard-drive. Not to be confused with a Ford Laser that was the first family-owned car that I can remember from youth, and which may also be documented on this site at some point.
Firewire, Usb-b and Midi inputs. Everything you could possibly need in 2005. The “Laser” was second-to-none for early external HDs. Size-dimensions were similar to a Halal-SnackPack and weighed like a large ceramic tile.