A few months ago, I wrote a script for a video essay called “why I’m deleting Instagram” about creating comedy and art in the social media era.
I don’t think I’ll ever end up making the video. But it’s 3500 words I wrote and I think it’s funny to post something that algorithmically unfriendly on instagram. So here’s the text.
Do with it what you will and if that sounds way too long- you’re right.
It’s nice here. It’s quiet.
Our brains are slowly but surely getting rotted down to their raw ingredients, and we're all complicit.
I'm a stand up comedian and writer because I have no other real skills or education. Smarter people than me have said and will continue to say much smarter stuff than me about this. Truly, I’m stupid and have no serious qualifications. But that doesn’t seem to stop anyone else on the internet, so here we go- I try to write about things that I know, that I have expertise on. And one thing I know is that every creative person in my circles is hurting and it all, depressingly predictably, goes back to those dang phones.
We've all agreed that phones, maybe, just maybe- are bad. Right? Like does anyone at this point not have insane constant anxiety around their phones? If they don't surely it's just because they've been so very numbed down by the onslaught of never ceasing input, that they no longer know how to be anxious because if you’re constantly anxious, you can’t become anxious. None of this is new information, but it does feel like more and more people are reaching their breaking points. Many people want to go completely off the grid but no longer really know how. I know I don't.
I miss boredom, which feels so odd to say. When I was a kid, there wasn't much that scared me more than being bored. But boredom forces you to create, to use your imagination to make things feel more exciting. When I was a child, I invented a whole parallel universe called Teddyland that I populated with different factions and sports teams just so that in moments of boredom I could simulate excitement in my mind. I miss that, I never feel bored anymore. If I'm left to my own devices, well, I'll just be on the devices I own. How can I be bored when, if I can't decide what to watch, I don't even have to choose. The bright lights and flashy subtitles will calm me and satiate me, like jingling keys over a baby.
Do you have any clue what I'd give to feel like I, for a moment, don't know how to entertain myself? To feel like my environment isn't stimulating enough? I don't remember boredom. Most nights I fall asleep with a podcast playing, because god forbid I spend a waking moment without some kinda media. For weeks and weeks and weeks I've been saying I want to learn to be bored again, but the idea of even going for a walk without my phone filled me with dread. The other day I was performing some stand up comedy for about an hour and I had the thought onstage that this is easily the longest I've gone all day without checking my phone. For a brief hour, my job took me away from digital reality, but unfortunately the moment I’m back off stage I re-enter the matrix, because it’s nigh-impossible to be a creative and not use social media.
I hate that my job requires me to be a part of this. I work as a stand up comedian, so I spend a lot of my time with other comedians. One of the biggest misconceptions about stand up comedians is that they are funny. Some are, some aren't, kinda just like people. Before I started comedy, I thought that the "green room" would be this mystical space where these inspired weirdos would connect and laugh together, it had an aura of a secret party and like it'd be where great minds would meet and riff and gossip. But as I get older and the comedians I'm around get more serious, the discussions are all around what the algorithm favours, how to maximise your clips and advertising. Whether you like it or not, your social media presence and following will be the metric that much of the world judges you by. And, while that can feel painful and hurt- to a degree that's our own fault. We choose a job and path that inherently opens us up to public judgement. You don't get to be the only person holding a mic in the room and get annoyed at people having opinions on your voice.
I love what I do so much. The magic unpredictability and rawness of live performance gives you so much. Of course there are hard nights, but they are so so so worth it for the occasional one where the stars align and everything just feels perfect. Is a lot of it awful? Yeah, and that's amazing. Every night people of all levels are taking a risk and purely by getting themselves onstage they're being vulnerable and letting go of control. Sometimes it's magic, sometimes it's terrible, sometimes it's so terrible it's magic. Much as I'm the first to criticise huge parts of it, live performance sometimes feels like a bastion of something so very human in a world that seems to be getting more inhuman with every moment. A small thing that gives me hope is that people still love live art. At all the shows you can feel how hungry people are to enjoy the connection and magic of a great live performance. I see it every time that they come to a show of mine and watch the opener. If you take one thing from watching this, it's book a ticket to see some local live performer- musician, stand up, burlesque, drag. I promise you it'll be better as an experience than anything you've watched online. However, being a live performer is now so much more than just being a live performer.
I'm not someone that thinks that I should be able to just write down joke ideas and put in zero other effort and everyone should just love me and tell me I'm a genius- although it’d be nice if it happened occasionally. Being an artist is not meant to be an easy path, or everyone would do it. It's the best job in the world and I'd rather do this than literally any office job- people's attention is valuable and to be cherished- I should have to fight to stand out, I should have to put my everything into making something that connects enough with people to merit and deserve their attention. No one is entitled to any artistic success, and if you get any, you likely owe it more to luck and circumstance than your own personal brilliance- ESPECIALLY if you’re someone who comes from money and can afford the luxury of pursuing a creative dream. I'm very ok with the idea of competing with not just every other comedian, but with every other piece of art and media with which you could spend time instead of a show of mine. A healthy competitive spirit is amazing for art. It's fuel to the fire. There's few things that galvanise me to make better stuff than seeing a friend of mine create or perform something that makes me jealous.
But the competition goalposts move in a constant state of fuckery and the game’s rules aren’t decided by the right people or factors. At one point it seemed to be all about building your follower count, but now half the time your followers don't even see what you post. On a good day, a 10th of my followers even see my stories. You build a following to sell tickets to a show, but then people that follow you don't even know the show is happening. Fuck being able to connect and perform live, can you play along with the app's needs and requirements? That's the real skill now. Now, I don't know who the gatekeepers *should* be for success in the arts, but I damn well for sure know that it shouldn't be the same people that are actively responsible for the dystopian information era fascism that seems be all around us now. At least the old guard of industry gatekeepers had a modicum of taste, or at the very very least they were people. People with the fundamental ability to differentiate with a little bit of nuance, instead of just perceiving all forms of engagement in the same way.
I don't know if the olden days were better, I wasn't around for them. I do know that watching stand ups writing and performing with the express goal of creating a clip-worthy moment is ruining them. It breaks my heart to watch people mere months into performance dedicate all their energy to creating social media content instead of focussing on the joy of creative progression. So very many clips are so very terrible. And they're not even trying not to be. They've learned that if you create in a certain way that capitalises on our worst sides, you can amass a following of some kind. And it fucking works. All it took was sacrificing dignity and honesty and doing comedy the way it is dictated to you by some billionaire overlords. Talk to the comedians in person and they'll cite Norm MacDonald and George Carlin as their inspirations, as if those people would be seen DEAD kowtowing and bending over to create content. Do you think George Carlin would've used the word unalive to describe suicide and a watermelon emoji to refer to genocide? I beg you, watch his iconic "7 things you can't say on tv" routine.
Don't misunderstand me. I don't hate the creators. There are many incredibly talented and gifted friends (and enemies) of mine that have made their careers off of success on the internet. Wildly funny and hard-working performers who have been able to not compromise their spirit or their art. But for each one of those, there are countless more lost people screaming into the void, begging for attention and digital validation, or worse- actively and cynically creating divisive content with the express goal of starting fights to boost their engagement. Comedians who's income relies on their unique IP are using AI with no sense of irony at all- we'll get back to that. As much as they anger me, it's hard to blame them for playing the cards they've been dealt. I truly do not hate the player but I'm disgusted by the game.
I don't know how useful it is to go into the details of every single tip and trick I've heard, every way to placate the algorithm. I barely know which ones are true at this point.
It's nothing new for art to deliberately provoke to get attention. But the way comedy clips on instagram targetedly and cynically rage-bait seems somehow more soulless. Put out content-slop for the content piggies. Fuck quality, fuck authenticity, just make more noise, a droplet of mediocrity in a sea of uninspired lackluster bullshit. And that droplet of mediocrity will continue to educate machine learning to produce more mediocrity, more content devoid of even an attempt at individuality. We can't talk about creativity online without talking about the elephant in the room, except this time the elephant looks like having a soul is a distant memory and also for some reason it's hands are weird cos the machine can't figure out hands. Let's talk AI.
For the purposes of this video, I'm not gonna talk about AI's environmental damage by the amount of water the servers need to cool. If you wanna know about that, google it, and google's new AI function will tell you "Yes, the water footprint of AI is a significant and growing concern, particularly in light of global water scarcity and climate change. The massive energy demands of AI data centers, along with the water used in manufacturing AI hardware, are leading to increasing water consumption and potentially straining local water resources"
I'm also not gonna talk too much about AI in general workplaces- I'm not smart or particularly educated, my opinion should be meaningless on this. So I'm only gonna talk about what I know, which is AI and comedy or the creative process.
I've noticed an alarming trend of comedians using AI in their posters, videos, copy for their shows, even on occasion in their joke-writing, although this is rarely effective. And again, I don't necessarily blame them on an individual level, we've all felt the frustration of having a vision in our head of how something is supposed to look and being unable to execute that on Microsoft Word. Of course it's fun to see what I would look like as a Miyazaki cartoon. So much can be sped up, annoying processes can be skipped. I get it. Riskless passable mediocrity is better than something sucking, and in order to get good at anything you have to spend hours and hours and hours sucking. Hours and hours and hours sucking? SOUNDS LIKE MY EX *airhorns*.
For me, the enjoyable part of creativity is getting better at something. Feeling that you can now do stuff that you once couldn't. AI makes you skip that process to be able to look like you're really really ok at something. But that's as far as you'd ever get with it. It's called Midjourney because it's a journey that leads to being at best mid. By its nature of machine learning, it is destined to reward recycling and punish innovation. There are oceans of stand ups (and other creatives) just perpetually copying each others' style and videos, making the flashiest possible subtitles with trashy AI generated images, because they know that they need to do that- their content alone won't catch people's attention. How could it? You're competing for everyone's attention. And it's not other comedians you're competing with, really, it's people's crushes in swimsuits. It's Gaza and Giselle Pelicot news. It's subway surfers, tiktok dancers and memes so layered in irony that they've lost any connection to reality. Do you think it's maybe a bad thing that within 3 seconds of scrolling you can see all that in one go? Like maybe that shouldn't all live in the same place. Did we need an answer to the question “What if Pavlov’s Dogs had existential dread?”.
Blaming the individual comedians and creatives for it isn't the point. I'm sure most of them hate doing it. Mostly I don't think it's done in bad faith or with any intentions other than furthering their own career, which is fair and fine. However, I've spoken to various comedians with massive online followings that feel trapped. Largely, they care infinitely more about the live shows than anything else. But they gotta play the game. Some are able to cynically detach from it, view it as a necessary evil. I think that's probably the healthiest realistic relationship to it all. I don't know if it's something I could ever do, but I'm happy for those that can.
I'm very aware of how whiny a lot of this video is. I appreciate that it's too long, too meandering, too pretentious. "wah wah wah making online content makes me sad wah wah wah". At one point I wanted this to be a comedy video, but I realised I don't find a lot of it funny, so this is what we're getting instead. Complaining about any of this in an era defined by rising fascism, climate crisis and ongoing genocide feels stupid. I heard a quote from a German philosopher Theodor Adorno in high school that really stuck with me. "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism".
When it feels like the world's on fire, it feels like on social media everyone is pouring on gasoline in the hope that the fire will thank them for a moment and give them warmth. Artists feeding themselves on sowing division, painting themselves as counter-culture warriors whilst dancing for a court that rewards them for staying in their place.
After all this, you might feel that I'm bitter and jealous of people with more online success than me. You'd be right. I've put work into it, but I still only have approximately 4885 instagram followers. I've published, and will continue to publish, lots of different kinds of comedy videos, chasing the elusive viral dragon. I've only ever had one clip do a little bit of numbers and obviously it's a clip from the one time I decided to put up generic local material that I hate. It was a dumb joke about Albanian players in the Swiss football team (I live in Switzerland) and it went viral because Swiss nationalists, Albanian nationalists, and Serbian nationalists all started fighting with each other in the comments.
I'm a hypocrite. I'm making this video essay all about how depressing it all is, and yet I'm going to cut it into small little insta-postable increments and you better believe that I hope they go viral. I figure if I'm against the grain enough, if I make content that is authentic enough, the algorithm will be FORCED to pick it up and then I will finally be king big-dick and get everything I ever wanted and feel spiritual fulfillment, just like I always yearned for. Of course I'll use AI to make my video editing faster. Of course I'll give it some clickbait lying title in the hope that it gets some kinda traction. I even literally pay Meta directly to advertise my shows, because I don't know how else to sell tickets. Even if I can't monetise this video because I used adult words, I'm going to hope that this motivates people to follow me, to come to live shows, to fund my pursuit of a job where I get to just create and receive attention and validation that yes indeed I am clever, yes indeed I am loved.
I hate that I live in this glass house. I feel trapped by it, because I don't know how else I can reach people, how I can distribute my art. I feel caught in a rat race with other comedians that also hate the fact that we're racing. Every time I make another little reel, I feel like I'm gifting my art to fascist kingmakers as free potential advertising. And yet, despite believing all this, I still really hope that when *my* stuff breaks through and does well, it'll be different to those before me. I'll use my platform responsibly and creatively. My little dance for the court will feel different.
Rationally I know that's all bullshit. Rationally I know that probably the ethical thing would be to delete my account, focus on performing in my community and remove any ego aspirations of bigger success. Value the eyes and ears in front of me more than the number on a screen getting bigger. But can you blame me for wanting more? Wanting to create something that reaches people? And do you have a suggestion for how I could do this without contributing to Mark Zuckerberg's pocket? I’m all ears.
I don't know what I can do. I feel like a video this bleak is narratively meant to progress and end on a message of hope, but I'm finding it hard to see. I'm trying to find hope in myself and my own actions, that's all I have left to control.
The past years I've spent online trying to find some kind of balance between content creation that might satiate the algorithm and making art that I can stand behind. And this very video is to me an exercise in trying to make something that feels real. Something that challenges me to embrace creating in a new form. Something where I'll have to learn how to use my camera properly. Something where I write unapologetically pretentiously and speak about souls and spiritual malaise, because I feel that sapping away from people. Something that's not funny, a new creative form and exercise in personal growth. Because I don't know what else to do. I don't know how to create for the algorithm, and I'm sick of trying to figure it out. Maybe if at the very least I can make some art about it, maybe that'll help me feel more ok about it.
And every once in a while, I go outside to look at trees and water.
If you watched this video in full, thank you for your attention and time. That is our most valuable currency these days, it feels like. I don't take it for granted. If you can, support your local performers directly and in person. And if you can't, I have a buymeacoffee.com/teddyhall where I'd be grateful for your support. And hey, follow me on Instagram.