Get Your Head in the Clouds

Issue #154 | July 25, 2023

If you’re anything like me (a creative individual with attention deficits), you’ll remember school days when teachers bemoaned you for having your head in the clouds, with end-of-semester report cards that read: “Grace is great, but has a habit of daydreaming.”

I don’t know about you, but I spend a lot of my days worrying about… well, everything. The blue light, tweets, comments, edits, expectations, and energy congeal in my mind into one stress-filled amorphous blob. Things can feel overwhelming.

Most New Age advice for burnt-out creators centers around mindfulness: Just walk away from the screen, touch grass, meditate 15 minutes a day, and you’ll be fine, champ. No doubt, when you’re chronically online, meditation and sunlight are necessary to maintain sanity. But they’re not what’s keeping us from throwing our phones out the window every day.

It’s dreaming. Sure, IRL, I’m in 110-degree Texas weather, inches away from doom-spiraling about climate change. But in my mind, I’m in the cool 70s, lying on a beach, riding a bike on a peaceful tree-lined street. There’s always a way out—even if it’s just in your imagination.

Creators have no labor protections, and this industry is remarkably unregulated. When all day, you’re trying to muster up posts, respond to comments, meet impossible demands from brands, figure out healthcare, pack lunches, feed mouths, and plan for retirement, dreams can feel hard to reach.

For a moment, though, I want to forget about what is realistic. What kind of world do you want to see? A universal creative income? A world without trolls and hate speech? A 99% TikTok revenue share program? A Musk-less Twitter? The world is your oyster.

THE COMMENTS SECTION

“We’re not going to be able to bust up this concentration of wealth in this country without a profound amount of organizing.”
—Congresswoman (and Twitch streamer) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

In 2020, leftist darling AOC wrestled with tangled computer cords to live stream on Twitch. The hype around the congresswoman’s appearance nearly broke live-streaming records, with half a million people watching her play a sci-fi spaceship Mafia game (“Among Us,” of course). AOC was back on a stream over the weekend, three years later, laughing and trying to solve puzzles alongside streamers like Hasan Piker, Pokimane, and Disguised Toast as cute, tiny, colorful avatars in “Pico Park.” All the while, the stream raised money for the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), which provides resources to those attempting to unionize.

That wonderful escape from everyday life is something that only dreams could make happen. We can all take a lesson from AOC’s productive form of imagination, the kind that makes these fun moments possible.

This “hot labor summer,” dreams are moving everything. The WGA and SAG-AFTRA are uniting, the teamsters are gearing up for a strike, and hotel union workers and graduate student unions are banding together. A group of influencers and industry professionals even launched Creator Project 1.0, an advocacy group pushing tech companies to protect creators’ rights.

Dreaming makes these things possible, even if they seem insurmountable at times. So let’s keep our heads in the clouds. Even if our dream is just saying “fuck you” to bad bosses and big tech wealth hoarders.

– Grace Stanley, Newsletter Editor

THE X FILES

Twitter Is Now X, the Way Elon Wants It

Whether you like it or not, Twitter has a dumber name now.

By Steven Asarch, Passionfruit Contributor

→ READ THE FULL STORY

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IN THE BIZ

Users on Reddit’s r/place (a wonderfully weird digital canvas that people from all over the world together to paint on) are writing “fuck spez” all over the art piece in protest of Reddit CEO Steve “@spez” Huffman’s implementation of API price hikes. Ouch.
While Twitter is busy digging its grave, TikTok announced it is rolling out text posts—its take on its own Twitter alternative like Meta’s Threads.
TikTok inches closer and closer to becoming a record label behemoth by the day, launching a music program this week to work with emerging artists on exclusive concert series and new releases… Suspicious, as we know how predatory record labels can be.
TikTok is offering a bunch of “cash bonuses” to creators that use its new shopping platform—seemingly a distraction from TikTokers pushing for long-term, robust revenue-sharing programs.
As Patreon-esque subscription options are becoming more and more popular on various platforms, Instagram subscriptions rolled out to 10 new countries—Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the United Kingdom.