Severance

Just a brief announcement (and longwinded explanation) to round off 2025: I’ll be terminating my social media accounts in the new year, specifically Facebook and Instagram. I’ve been chewing on this for a while, but a recent realisation helped me to make the final decision. Note: Please listen to Sofia Isella’s song All of Human Knowledge Made Us Dumb. Her entire catalogue’s pretty tight and she’s only twenty. For the past year, I have been working on a book where I discuss my approach to identifying and solving problems, mainly dealing with various difficulties I have encountered in life. This is an ongoing process (both the book writing and the problem solving), and a constant theme I encountered, when considering the past decade or so, was the presence of social media and how inextricably most of us are linked to and affected by it. Does it have to be this way? I don’t think so, but the thought of letting it go is a daunting prospect. The recent lightbulb moment occurred when I tried figuring out a FB admin issue and was reminded that there is no human way to be helped through the process. I found myself in a circular pit of stress, because at any point, the system could decide I was suspect and lock me out. This ‘social’ system is a faceless monolith with no human representative. There are simply too many users (2.5B and counting) and no human staff to assist with problems. The notion that this is meant to represent some kind of modern social fabric, is a red flag if ever there was one. Sincerely uttering the words ‘I hate this so much’ repeatedly was enough for me. From there it took only a few minutes to make up my mind. I use Facebook and Instagram professionally for the perceived advantages of being part of this ecosystem: for promotion, ads, exposure. As a visual artist, these are valid considerations since it is a visual medium, but in truth, I have leveraged minimal advantage off the back of social media. To get ahead on these platforms, you need to either exist on the content creation treadmill or sink a bunch of money into buying your way into an ever-enshittified algorithm, none of which are worth considering in my view. Another point is that (in my view), the negative effects that social media has on us far outweigh the handful of positives, so for me to promote my work on a platform that I consider harmful, would be quite hypocritical.

 To be part of the solution to this habitual dependence we have all developed, I’ll figure out ways to keep in touch with my people, both friends and supporters of my work. After another year of seeing the tech industry act with utter impunity (I’m not even mentioning AI), with much of the commentary around their behaviour treating it as simply inevitable, I believe it’s worth taking a closer look at how ‘inevitable’ this dominance really is. We hand so much power to companies by simply opting in, only to find ourselves locked into their ecosystems.

Because of this, I have found it difficult to breathe at times and I’m sure there are others who feel the same. Unsurprisingly, since I’ve made the decision to go the other way, I find myself breathing a bit more easily. My aim is to write a more articulate breakdown of my approach so that others who wish to extricate themselves from this chokehold may find it a bit easier. Meanwhile, I’ll be making an effort to keep in touch with all my friends and contacts in a more direct way. Thanks for reading this far and all the best for 2026!   If you would like to opt in for occasional update emails, please do so at the bottom of my home page or email me directly: https://www.flyingdutchmanart.com/about