A New Left
I am leaving instagram. Not abruptly, but progressively over the rest of the year and this is the new home for everything Black Lodges related.
There are plenty of reasons to do so and I will address the main ones here, and will also outline what I will do in the future.
Instagram, and thus Facebook, makes a tonne of cash based on my content and the interactions they create. On average this little page here generates around 350K impressions a week and this means that not only I, but all of you that interact with my content get blasted with advertising. Now, advertising is brain cancer at the best of times but in this particular case that money generated is being used by a person and a company whose core interests do not, even at the very slightest, align with my world view.
The fact that my work, radicalizing and teaching you lovely people, finances entities who I am fighting against is no longer acceptable to me. I have never believed in being able to change a system from within and this is just another logical conclusion in that regard.
Secondly, the very nature of our interaction with this platform does not help our cause - the building of a better tomorrow - I am sure you have noticed your own intrinsic disdain when using IG- you scroll, screenshot, like, repost and that’s it. All we are doing is feeding the content machine that FB uses to sell advertising. We aren’t creating our own progressive, humanistic modernity when we so desperately need to be. Breaking this cycle of feel good online activism and reactionary support of our enemy is long overdue.
Thirdly, the amount of time and work I invest on here, creating and selecting content, arguing, replying, acknowledging amounts to around 6 hours of work a day. 7 days a week. Posting shit talk for all of us to get angry about is simply reactionary, it doesn’t involve planning and building for a better tomorrow and thus creates a 21st hyper-capitalistic sense of modern alienation without any of the actual rewards.
There is plenty more but those are the main facts.
To the future.
I’m moving somewhere else to make the content I produce better, more informative and more useful. The artwork, the stories, the playlists and the t-shirts etc are still going to exist. Whilst IG will be used as a promotional tool for this newsletter and my product for the rest of the year I am moving all of my content to a two-tiered email newsletter. This two-tiered system won’t come into effect for the first month, only to give you a look at what I am working on.
The free tier will be a 4-5 day a week short blast similar to what you would have found on here. Some drawings, playlists and examples of how the global 1% fuck us over. The paid for newsletter will be sent out 2-3 times a week and it will cover current events, politics, art, music, action plans, interviews with focus on analysis and action. I no longer find it sufficient to enrage you, I want to give perspective, opinion and solutions. I will cover practical tips in resistance from my 25 years in this game. I will talk about music, conduct interviews, produce videos and obviously sell t-shirts to keep this machine running. The point is to offer you a greater, more detailed insight to me, my ideas and solutions for our future. I feel that via email, you will have the freedom to choose when to engage, how to engage and all without supporting a company that hates us all. This is as much for you as it is for me.
In the meantime, I will use IG to remind you where to find me. DM’s will be disabled. You can always reach me via email.
Thank you for the years of interest on here, it’s time to actually make a better tomorrow happen.
One Love,
Steven
In the meantime, tell your friends!