I decided to take this week away from Twitter, and so I’ve scrolled through Facebook more than usual. This reminded me how saturated the website is with the most bizarre mobile game ads.
These are surrealist masterpieces in a way. They are so jarring and irritating that I have spent the whole day waging a crusade against them, pressing the “Hide ad” button and blocking their respective company. They are infuriating little videos clearly spat out by an algorithm.
Sometimes they are simple games being played incorrectly, which invites you to download the game because you want to prove you’re better than the dunce that made the ad. Others have a combination of bathroom humor and misfiring attempts at sexual allure. In one ad I saw today, a heroic animated figure punches his way through a wall to escape a bathroom where a toilet is spraying brown liquid everywhere and then falls to the bottom of a skyscraper where he suddenly finds himself in… a sort of logic game? I don’t remember. I hid it. In another, the game told me not to “let my lover see [me] playing this game” and revealed a woman with a variety of semi-sexual dialogue options.
Of course, all of this is designed to be irritating. Irritation captures your attention. The internet as a whole is drowning in this algorithm-produced content. Of course, behind it all are struggling artists and advertisers trying to get paid. If you’ve ever searched for freelance writing gigs online, you’ve probably hovered your cursor over a content mill position that invites you to write the dialogue for a roleplaying mobile games or SEO-based blog. Money is money, and, hey, at least you can put a writing position on your resume.
This is, of course, an infuriating feature of online life. All of my artistic friends complain about how difficult it is to share their work on Facebook. Since their ad space goes to the highest bidder, our personalized feed rarely shows us local musicians, filmmakers, or artists, but we do get to see ads for race-car-fashion-design-sex-cute-dog-keyword app which includes two-hundred microtransactions.
Some artists have played the system. I’ve recently become fascinated with Matt Farley of Motern Media who has produced a number of campy, poorly acted films including the 2012 horror masterpiece Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You! and the 2013 autobiographical film Local Legends. These films are intentionally designed to reflect the feel of old after school specials and 1950s B movies. If you don’t get the joke, it just seems like a bad movie.
Farley’s career has been built around messing with the system. According to his Twitter bio, he has released over 23,000 songs. This immense body of work produces a passive income. Sure, Spotify is notorious for underpaying people for music, but 2 dollars a year per song when multiplied by 23,000 songs becomes a living.
These songs are all written around search results. Farley discovered that kids like to search immature phrases like “poop” using their parents’ Alexa. He has written songs where he repeats a first name and the word “poop” over and over, doing this with almost any name you can think of. You kind find the Josiah version here. He’s made a career printing out keywords and trying to write short songs around them.
Why Farley is so fascinating to me is that he unapologetically leans into the “content production” side of art. The commercial aspect of his work is part of the joke. In Local Legends, he routinely advertises his musical work to the viewer while his character hands CDs and merchandise to everyone he meets. He’s a businessman because the internet age doesn’t allow artists to be anything else.
Everyone has a Substack. Everyone has a podcast. I have both and in my limited experience creating content I’ve found that quantity is almost always more important than quality. Releasing an episode of your show every week is more important than having good episodes. Writing a Substack every week is more important than having thoughtful essays. Why do you think I’m writing this piece right now? And you are reading it.
What’s the point here? Do I have one? I’m not sure. This all makes me feel cynical, and yet when I look at Farley, I see someone who has found a way to play the game and make what he wants to make. As I find myself scrolling through writing jobs or brainstorming Substack pieces or considering guests for my podcast, I wonder if I can find a way to game the system and create stuff that I like. I wonder if there’s a way for thoughtful art to survive this commodification.
The Warhol shtick grows old eventually. At some point, commodified art making jokes about being commodified is so layered in irony that it leaves me craving for some real, genuine, sincere beauty. Can we game the system to do that? Can we find a way to produce meaning when we have commodified meaning?
Perhaps I’ll apply to write dialogue for a mobile game. I don’t know. I’ve launched a new podcast here. If you want to hire me to write, you can email me at josiahwsutton@gmail.com.