Escaping Filterworld

how to create art in the world

The first steps up Mont Royal.

A few weeks ago, my family went to Montreal for a few days. We ate bagels and walked in the slush, admiring all the dogs wearing coats and boots. We rode a ferris wheel and saw a laser light show in the 200-year-old cathedral where Celine Dion got married. 

We also went to the art museum. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve been in an art museum, and I forgot how much I like them. It still astounds me how much an inert object can make me feel. It’s the same with books, I know, but not being a visual artist at all, it seems like extra wizardry to transfer emotion via painting. I was especially interested in the art that made me uncomfortable. (This is why you do the artist dates from The Artist’s Way alone – my kids don’t necessarily want to stand there with me while I stare at something for five minutes trying to feel into why I’m distressed by it.)

I was struck by how much time, resources, and vision it takes to make good art. If you’re going to make something that hangs in a museum, you need time, space and materials. It takes so much trust in your vision. There are so many things in a museum that I don’t get – I don’t have that particular vision. But someone did. I admire that. 

And it’s something even more to not only have the vision, but to act on it. To gather the resources, to take the time. I don’t know how many failed trials there were on the way to the finished art that I stood in front of. But if it’s anything like my process, it was a lot of mistakes, and a lot of time.

This month, I read the book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka, and it really highlights so many aspects of why I left social media. The culture and art that has arisen in online-only spaces, the art that goes viral on social media, is often shallow, fleeting. It’s the opposite of the big, complicated, deep art that transfers emotion. The art of what Chayka calls Filterworld is made quickly, uploaded, and designed to be viewed for seconds. 

At the Museum of Illusion.

There’s a lot in this book that really resonated with me, but I want to highlight two points in particular that I can’t stop thinking about.

First, social media and algorithms have made it so we don’t know what we like anymore. If we spend our time scrolling feeds and looking at the internet, we see shiny examples of beautiful people consuming things, and we start to wonder if the way they live — how they dress, what they eat, the music they listen to and the movies they watch — if maybe we would like those things too. Kyle Chayka writes, “The bombardment of recommendations can induce a kind of hypnosis that makes listening to, watching, or buying a product all but inevitable —whether it truly aligns with your taste or not.” Chayka talks to a woman who, despite having loved fashion at one point, was having trouble figuring out what she actually wanted to wear. “I want things I truly like, not what is being lowkey marketed to me,” she said. She had a particular crisis after buying a pair of legwarmers. She didn’t like legwarmers (“I thought they were ugly, hideous, ridiculous,” she says) but after seeing them in her many various social media feeds, she ended up buying them. It’s that hypnosis of it all. You buy legwarmers even though you are pretty sure you don’t like legwarmers at all. But they’re everywhere, so, somehow, you’re not sure. The woman bought legwarmers, wore them once, and hated them. She tells Chayka that the purchase was “a choice I’m not even sure I made.”

I love this example because I, too, once bought a pair of legwarmers against my better judgment. (It was a slightly less dramatic example of being marketed to. I was buying socks, saw an image of legwarmers that looked cool and cozy, and bought them.) I remember putting them on and thinking that the general vibe was Henrietta Hippo from The New Zoo Revue (who is great and all, but not my style icon). Legwarmers are such a good example of a purchase we make because we see it online, and only when we’re holding them in our hands, in real life, do we remember that we don’t want legwarmers at all. There are, of course, endless examples of this sort of consumption now.

It’s certainly fine to consider influences from outside yourself. Someone recommends a book, and it sounds intriguing, so you read it. There is so much beauty in human recommendations. But the internet has created this world where we’re increasingly unsure of what it is we actually like. And knowing what we like — what we love, actually — is so important in the creation process. Creating art is absorbing things we love (and considering what we hate) and stirring them into a soup of what aligns with our particular taste. (The soup, in this case, is our art.) We love high fantasy with dragons, we love heist movies, we love books that are structured like they’re how-to guides, we hate when a beloved character dies, and so we mix all that together and write The Dragonrider’s Guide to Stealing Treasure, a delightful romp where no beloved character dies.

But if we spend all of our time in Filterworld, we become unsure of what we like. We become accustomed to mediocre sameness and manufactured outrage. If we manage to write a book, it’s The Everybody’s Bland Beige Nothingtown. We write that book and it gets no book deal, so we think we can’t be writers and return to the feed, defeated.

Which leads me to the second thing from Filterworld that has really stuck with me, which is that our value as artists, online, is more about the content we upload than about the art we create. (I’m not saying that our value has been cheapened overall, although maybe it has been, but that the internet and algorithms reward artists who churn out internet-friendly content over artists who surface every four years with a new book.) Chayka writes, “This is not to say that content begets art. In fact, the excess content demanded by algorithmic feeds more often gets in the way of art, because it sucks up an increasingly high percentage of a creator’s time…The author (me) is too busy Instagramming his artfully cluttered desk, broadcasting his writerly identity, and checking for subsequent likes to actually write his book.”

There was a thought for a while, maybe ten years ago, that felt true, which was: you have to be on social media if you’re a writer. What a brilliant and wonderful and free way to brand yourself. You can network, learn, get an agent, promote your book. It felt true and maybe was true for a while, and here we are now in 2024 and many of us are still operating like that’s true. But it isn’t any longer. Reading Filterworld highlighted how many things have changed (to be blunt: how evil these corporations are, how much more evil they have gotten), and I am here to tell you that you don’t have to be on social media anymore, as a writer / creator / artist. (If you want to be on social media as a human and friend, perhaps there is a way to do that, although I’d argue that, increasingly, there’s no way to be on social media for more than a few minutes at a time and have it enhance your life.)

In order to create, we need to go deep. We need to figure out what we like. We need to feel all of our feelings. We need to make messes and fail as we learn how to do what we’re doing. To make art, we need time, resources, and a vision. And sure, yes, it’s cool if that means a year off and a million dollars and a chef, but it can also be small and real. It can mean twenty minutes every morning, with a pen and a notebook, and a vision of the book you want to make. But we need to protect that, because the internet wants to take it from us. While my experiment of giving up the internet for February wasn’t entirely successful, it was enough for me to really recognize what the internet is taking from us. They want us to spend that twenty minutes stylizing a quote in Canva so we can upload it to Instagram. Don’t do it. In order to work toward your vision, you’re going to have to spend a lot of time, and make a lot of mistakes as you figure it all out. And every time you turn instead to the internet for answers, you become less sure of your vision. You have a vision for something beautiful, and in the end you’re holding legwarmers. Again, don’t do it. Make your art instead, please.

Look at this good boy! Chester Barkingham Saves the Country will be available this fall from Simon & Schuster, with illustrations by Eva Byrne. Get it September 17, just in time for election day! 😬Preorder links are on my website, both for Chester Barkingham Saves the Country and for my June 2024 picture book, Help Wanted: One Rooster. You can always order signed and/or personalized copies of my books from Print: A Bookstore.

Pay me for things!

• New course: 31 Days of Pep Talks. If you’re someone who likes my videos on Substack or who followed me on Instagram long ago when I used to post pep talks from my dog walks, you’ll like this one. You get a short (1-3 minutes) video, sent to your inbox (well, a link to the video, which lives on my website, is sent to your inbox, since it’s hard to email a video), every day for 31 days. It’s normally $15, but launch-week price is only $10 (until midnight 3/13/24). ALSO: it’s free for paying subscribers to this newsletter. If that’s you, you should have gotten an email with a coupon code to take the class for free. If you want to upgrade your Do the Work subscription, the coupon code will be in your welcome email.

• A reminder that you can book 15-minute critiques with me through the Manuscript Academy.

• If you’re interested in meeting with me for longer than fifteen minutes, now you can. It’s an hour of creative coaching from me, and it can be anything: have me tell you what’s working and what’s not in all your picture book manuscripts, or how to prioritize your creativity, or how children’s book publishing even works in the first place.

Thoughts and Links

• Rick the Rock of Room 214 is on two state award lists: the Indiana Young Hoosier Award List and the Missouri Association of School Librarians Show Me Readers Award.

• Relevant to Filterworld, here is an article about teen subcultures, and how they are all flat and fleeting now.

• “I gave up my smartphone because I felt like I was becoming spiritually sick.” I’ve enjoyed reading

  Carmella Guiol
  ’s journey without a smartphone on
  SCROLL SANITY
  .

• I’m fascinated by the concept of arboreal time. “Humankind appears to be the only species to have contrived clocks that count without reference to something outside of themselves. We also appear to be the only species to have use for these contraptions, to use time in this peculiar way.”

• I got the Journey oracle deck by Allison Filice recently and I’m into it. You’ve got to love a deck with cards for Money, The Whisper, and Cosmic Flow. And the illustrations are so good.

Books I read recently and loved

Disclosure: book links in this newsletter are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, a site which supports independent bookshops.

• Every Jenny Offill book feels like reading a version of my own thoughts (if I were a more-well-read city dweller). They’re a dream that carries you along and sometimes makes you laugh out loud. (This is true for her picture books as well as her novels). I just finished Weather last night, and I loved every minute of it.

• I found a copy of The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry in a used bookstore, and grabbed it because it’s by Gabrielle Zevin, who wrote Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. I loved it — Zevin is so good at writing interesting, relatable, funny, and flawed characters.

• We are divided in my house on Tom Lake — I loved it. Yes, yes, maybe everything does come easily to the privileged main characters, but still, I liked reading about them. I guess it’s a lesson that if you are as good a writer as Ann Patchett, you can write almost anything, and it will be an enjoyable way for the reader to spend their time.