Art and Drugs in The Age of Social Media

As everyone knows and has probably seen, I’m a pretty big stoner. I justify its use by consulting it for writing and creating. Every now and then it seems to get the best of me. Yesterday I hit a proverbial wall of brain fog and confusion - feeling a stranger in my own body and mind.

It got me thinking about all the drugs I’ve come to depend on. I can’t be a functioning human without coffee, and weed helps turn the volume of life down some. I’ve also replaced some of my intellectual drugs with headlines and status updates from Facebook.

How I got here has been slow and steady. There’s not a day I don’t check in with social media to get the happenings of the world as well as my friends.

This in and of itself is a drug.

I just wonder why I’ve chosen to replace intellectual curiosity with the curiosity of the world. Why do I need these things every day?

Everything from instagram to Facebook has become so quantifiable, and in so doing I think we’ve lost something. Art and its pursuit have always been capitalist enterprises but never more than now. The United States may not have a social credit score like China, but we have the equivalent in the way we measure our online influence. It’s no wonder that one of the most wanted careers is an “influencer.” And when you look at what that is, it is the ID personified.

I perhaps need to get more hip to the joke. If you look at my instagram, it’s rather impersonal. Just shows, concert footage, and if you come on my stories you’ll get some memes cuz, well, who doesn’t like memes?

Some people are using these tools well. Jesse Welles has been using it to push his socially conscious music. My pals The Doohickeys have been using it to illustrate their comedy.

And in that perhaps this is just the time we’re in and I’m just an old man waving his cane at a world he doesn’t entirely understand. But what this all comes down to is the art - what it means and the meaning of its pursuit. I wonder at someone like Bob Dylan coming up in the age of social media. Would he post poems? Political satire? Would his socially conscious message be as revered today as it was back then?

I think in many ways, capitalism has been decoupled from intellectual pursuit and we’re all suffering for it. It’s no wonder people like Charlie Kirk are lecturing on the “scam” of higher education on college campuses. People who studied computer science are working at Chipotle and the humanities have been under attack for some time.

And here I think we get to what we’ve lost by making everything a data point. We’re seeing a less educated populace, less curious. We’re all just becoming hamsters, hitting these platforms for our dopamine hit, not wondering what meaning they have, if any.

Used to be record companies would take a chance on an artist who wasn’t immediately successful. Bruce Springsteen had hits for other artists but didn’t have anything for himself til the 80s. Same with Queen. Now because of our digital, quantifiable world, it is just a matter of numbers. The success of the art is expected to be built before anyone even takes a gander at you.

I think there’s something to be said about this with the words of Steve Jobs: “customers don’t know what they want until you show them.” And while Steve is speaking in a purely capitalistic sense, I think the sentiment applies to good art and what we’ve lost as a culture. I think it’s why Morgan Wallen has the top ten slots on country radio, why Taylor Swift gets the line share of Spotify payout: the numbers are there. How their art will be treated in the annals of time, who can say.

Everything from Country music to tech is about numbers, but also something much more. If we’re simply capitulating to the machine all the time, are we not just placating to what’s there? Are we not stuck in an infinite loop of what’s popular or what used to be popular? How do we move forward?

People like Saving Country Music champion artists who sound like “real country music.” And this term has been thrown around in local circles about how country music ought to sound. While I have a distaste for most popular country music, I also have the sentiment that an artist needs to find a way forward and not be mired in what Donald Cutler calls the “nostalgia loop” that is being ushered in by artists like Zach Top.

But I think it all begins with being left to wonder. Being curious. The numbers indicate what’s working now, but not the future. Innovation comes like a storm formed out of the ethos. The rain doesn’t ask the crop if it’s thirsty, it simply comes. And, more importantly, it is NEEDED.

Thanks for reading.