I love the phrase “New Year New Me,” it has this undercurrent of understanding that this year will not actually feature a “new me,” the same me will make its reappearance, with a new veneer of hope that life’s trend is going upwards. And it has been going upwards, if that is any consolation. Last year began with me working on a casual side project, which was an Instagram account by the title of @medicatedblistex. It came from this sentiment (which I think is shared by many) that no posting on social media is ever authentic. It is a medium not capable of a true connection. And if you seek to make your posting feel authentic, that is, itself, inauthentic.
Now, for context, the account was of the schizoposting variety, which led more to concern for my wellbeing, as opposed to adulation and praise. I also made around 30-40 other accounts which would comment under the posts, creating its own hyperreal digital ecosystem. I made accounts like @directorguillermodeltoro, who would only talk about his film “The Shape of Water,” as well as his fascinations with “monstahs.” A fake Korean family account made an appearance, as well as @asianmorrisey, where I would write his lyrics to be replaced with anti-Asian slurs. The goal was to fully explore the schizophrenic and overwhelming nature of social media, and the list of fictional and real characters that dominate our screens. As well as the memories that linger behind us, which drive our desires. An account titled with the date of my car crash would appear randomly in comment sections, leaving comments such as “remember me?,” and relevant automobilic onomatopoeia.
I don’t think anyone really fully got what I was going for. I don’t think I did either. But I enjoyed it because it made social media fun again. When now it is so rarely fun. Every account would be an example of Deleuze’s “dividual self,” the fragmentation’s of an individual stretched so thin by capitalism and media, in which you are not fully you, but a collection of media and memories that are stripped bare and apart, and in turn, which make you. You are not an individual, you are a collection of media pieces through which you form your sense of self.
I kind of want to get back into posting it there, I’ve been making new accounts in a seed-planting style of story telling, letting them sit first and then deciding how they fit in. I am also perhaps prescribing more intent on my part on what this account was, as it kind of took shape naturally as I kept doing it. But what I find probably most interesting in the context of my life was that it fulfilled a need, a desire. Which was the struggle in sharing a part of myself on an inauthentic medium. This inauthentic medium, which slowly becomes the only place to fully share a part of yourself. I have a problem with criticisms of social media that gloss over or characterize social media as a false place for sociality. That is not true, it is totally a form of sociality, just one with many things lost. How does one be authentic in an inauthentic medium? how does one be genuine in our postmodern irony poisoned time? I don’t know if it fully did that, as I found that true authenticity, a very real sadness I tried to convey was lost in the gloss of irony I needed in the first place to justify posting it. I don’t think you can be authentic anymore, and our lack of authenticity is most likely, the most authentic one can be.
I ran the account from January to (I think) April, and what I am really grateful for was that it was the stepping stone I needed to write long-form work that wasn’t academic writing: blogs. I was lucky that I was president of the CMNSU at the time, and had an outlet in which I could write blogs. And this gave me the jumpstart to want to convey myself more, even if the writing tends to be convoluted, and navel-gazing to an almost narcissistic degree. I project my criticisms onto the world, and get annoyed when no one wants to hear.
I had a great streak of productivity from the months of March to August, I think I wrote around 30 blog posts in that time. But since the end of Summer, and the beginning of grad school, it’s definitely taken a bit of a plunge. That’s why this year, I’m gonna see if I can scratch that writing itch more. It never fully left, but whether it was exhaustion, or the fear that my writing needs to be “upgraded” now that I am a Master’s student, the writing just fell off to the wayside. I’ve got around 20 drafts of blogs posts, either half-written or barely started, that I should end up turning into blogs for my invisible audience. And I really should do it for perhaps the person who needs it most in my life, which is me. There’s so many small projects I want to do, and I find that now my rut is that I know what I want to do, it’s just mustering the willpower to do it. Blogging is a dead medium, no one reads anymore (unless its smut disguised as BookTok bestsellers), so treating this as a exercise in talking to the imaginary nowhere works, narcissistic diary posting for the invisible public. Slopunk, the blog that gets traction by curious clicks from strangers in my Instagram Bio. I don’t track the metrics of this blog too much, but I’m occasionally surprised by how well it tends to do. It’s most likely amplified by people to which i turned into a stranger, like the way someone judges someone-you-used-to-knows’ attempt at a podcast.
I’m happy with the name Slopunk, I wasn’t sure at the start but I think its stuck. I like that you don’t really know how to pronounce it out loud. It’s meant to be read and interpreted within your mind and not necessarily to be brought into the real, which highlights the way reading really works, especially on the internet. As I also tend to too often wear my influences on my sleeve, it is of course a call back to Fisher’s blog K-Punk (K refers to Cyber). A perhaps too cheesy influence, but yet again, my relationship to authenticity causes a struggle for my inner self. I just hope professors and phd students don’t check out this blog, I’m very insecure about those of higher statuses than me judging my genuine self, one still characterized by needing to improve himself in a field that will do nothing but let me down, which I crave in a desire-repression way.
So “New Year New Me,” it’s the year of the Snake after all, which means that this will be a tumultuous and unlucky year for yours truly. Meaning that blog posting might actually go up, I tend to do well when the mental deck is stacked against me. A deck that I shuffled. Let’s see what happens! Maybe I could invest my scholarship money into WordPress Premium. That way more bots can visit my site and amplify my metrics, and the ego boost comes in as a temporary antiseptic to problems much deeper.
-> Slopunk <- 