Sarah Calanthe

I'm think the people making all these censorship decisions have fundamentally misunderstood the kind of people they're fucking with. 💅🏻 Between governments increasingly policing what adults can access online, payment processors appointing themselves the morality police, platforms deciding which creators deserve to be seen, and an economy that's already squeezing the life out of independent businesses, and this political hellhole.. it's been a spectacularly shitty time to be a creator. And if you're a fan, congratulations! You're getting screwed too. The things you love are getting harder to find, harder to access, and sometimes disappearing altogether, while corporations and governments decide what you should be allowed to spend your own money on. We've been angry. Exhausted. Watching years of work get jeopardized by decisions we had absolutely no say in, as usual. And frankly, we've earned the right to be fucking furious! But outrage isn't a business model, and doomscrolling isn't a resistance strategy.. this shit is eating up the attention most of us were already running dangerously low on. And frankly, I think we've spent enough of our limited resources reacting to this shit when we should be focusing on making ourselves harder to erase. Ergo.. they don't know who they're dealing with. Tbh I'm getting bored with being furious, and now I'm back to creatively being a pain in the ass. Because the people who survive aren't necessarily the ones who play the game "best." They're the ones who understand that when someone keeps moving the goalposts, you don't have to keep chasing the fucking goalposts. And if there's one thing independent creators, sx workers, artists, and the rest of us professionally ungovernable $luts have demonstrated, it's that we're remarkably fucking good at that. Being denied permission and being out of options are two entirely different things. We've done this before. We've built businesses when banks wouldn't work with us. We've found audiences when platforms wouldn't promote us. We created communities when institutions wouldn't welcome us. And developed entire systems for doing things that the supposedly respectable business world says we can't. Here are my suggestions for both fans and creators.