On Changing Your Terms of Service

This morning, draining my first cup of coffee and circling the drain of my artistic well, I read “Updates to

This is bullshit and so can you

’s Terms of Service.” It contained, among other gems, these sentences:

Writing and then posting content on the internet has created this odd Möbius strip-like cycle of genuine, fulfilling creative expression—followed by this absolute, undeniable loss of self. And this loss of self has happened rather quickly and I have found it to be increasingly unbecoming of me.

It struck me. Froze me in my tracks. The whole post did.

I have found myself, lately, thinking over the creative decisions I’ve made in my life, what’s gotten me to where I am now. I was rubbing this worry stone in my head with last week’s post too. I wouldn’t change a thing and also can’t continue this way.

Last night, I sat down at 11 pm, up against a deadline for a submission window. I needed to write a 2,000-6,000 word essay—wanted to, as well. It’s the kind of essay I used to post here all the time. It’s the kind of essay I wanted to stop writing every other week because it felt too much like ripping myself open for the internet’s hyenas to feast on. It’s the kind of essay that terrifies me and thrills me—the literary equivalency of a perfect storm, the only place that I want to exist, creatively.

I pulled that essay from the depths of my soul, yanked it out like an infected tooth with floss tied to a doorknob. It hurt, it bled, it was a relief when it was over. It took five hours to write, from 11 pm to 4 am, and then another hour for me to decompress enough to fall asleep.

I had forgotten how much I love to write in the dead of night, when there is no one else around, when I'm not expected to do anything or be anywhere and no one is going to hold anything against me. I've spent my late twenties and early thirties thinking I'm not allowed to write like this, that I have to conform my artistic schedule to the patterns of suburban life. If I want the spouse, the picket fence, and the happy home, then art couldn’t coexist in the time frame that felt most natural. For years, I’ve wrestled my artistic impulses into the measured cadence of suburban expectations. Sleeping from 1 am to 8:30 am was my rebellious allowance, a sheepish white flag written using the unassailable science of circadian rhythms and chronobiology.

But this late-night writing, tucked into the quiet blanket of darkness, is the only way to write from my soul and not from my frontal cortex’s concerns of what will sell. Who cares if [redacted] doesn't like this essay? It wasn't for them, it was for me. And that’s the fucking point of writing anything.

I was going to come up with some more packaged way to say this, some sanitized, peppy, happy way to say that if your art doesn’t thrill you and terrify you in equal parts, then what, exactly, is the point? If you’re not right up against your edge, staring into the abyss of the creative unknown, then what the hell are you doing?

What the hell am I doing?

Source.

This onslaught of AI art has made this an urgent issue in my mind, a worry stone to add to the pile I keep on the desk in my mind, the desk inside a cave that overlooks an unknown valley where monsters lurk. Then

John Paul Brammer

wrote about this too, just this morning, and I felt a relief because he’d put words to a thought I couldn’t: That capitalism is cannibalizing art to make it real estate, to continue its long-established pattern of reducing anything soulful into a quantifiable investment, a bullshit practice meant to subdue something they’re afraid they can’t understand.

We can’t let it.

A computer-generated Starry Night will never understand why Van Gogh framed that painting the way he did. Expanding it to show the parts of the town left out doesn’t automatically make it better. More is not more.

Just like conforming an artistic practice to the boundaries of capitalism doesn’t automatically make it more legitimate or acceptable.

I wrote that essay last night by confronting the caverns of my soul, where dripping water echoes and eerie eyes stare out, floating in the dark without bodies. Perhaps it’s good, perhaps it’s not; perhaps it will sell, perhaps it won’t. That’s not the fucking point.

Yesterday, Vanity Fair published an article on Caroline Calloway, student-turned-scammer, a certain segment of the internet’s favorite beautiful girl to hate. I followed Calloway for a while, then got exhausted during the “I Was Caroline Calloway”/“I Am Caroline Calloway” set pieces. I muted her, then unfollowed her. I forgot about her for a while.

The author of the piece seems aware that she is a participant in the ongoing performance of Caroline Calloway. (How willing/unwilling she is as a participant is up for debate—she wrote the story, after all. Maybe her editor made her, maybe she pitched it.) By the end of the piece, she comes to the conclusion that Calloway is a con artist with an emphasis on artist. She’s a performance artist and her life, her lies, her book deals, and her scams are a 21st-century canvas. I’m fascinated by this interpretation of Calloway. I like it, even. Maybe she is conscious of what she’s doing, maybe she is deliberately showing us the folly of expecting art to conform to contracts and capitalism. She makes promises only to pull the rug out from followers; with every interview, she seems to ask, “Do you get it yet?” CHAOS IS THE BRAND, she once wrote.

Chaos is the art.

I don’t want my art to conform to the polite rules of suburban capitalism. I don’t want to write from 7 am to 8 am every day before I go do my job. I want to throw tantrums and throw paint and throw literary pasta at a paper wall to see what sticks. Because in those throws are the messiness of being human, which is the only art that really matters.

Is this a change in Collected Rejection’s terms of service? Fuck if I know. I’ll still write here. I’ll finish the heroes series because it interests me. But I’m tired of packaged and sanitized and rules obeyed.

Let’s see what waits in the valley, among the monsters and fog.