(This was originally written as an FB post, but why feed the Algorithm any more meat?)

“It is very difficult not to write satire.”
-Juvenal

In which I write basically for my own enjoyment.

I get quite little social media engagement; it’s one of the fascinating perks of having thousands of people who never unfriended you because they’d really like to keep reporting your posts as irrelevant, abusive, or worse.

(Yes, I have 5000 ‘friends’ who don’t talk to me*, Facebook’s not a great place for thinking. It’s silly. There are so many individual tactics which give people great weapons on social media, which makes me say: How are you supposed to enjoy social if it’s also a weapon?)

Here’s how my time on social media goes. I say:
“Jeff Mach likes kitties.”

A half-dozen, a dozen friends respond. It’s pitiful engagement, fantastic friendship. Guess which I’d rather have?

I hear nothing. People are surprised at the level of nothing I’ve heard, but of the people who’ve said TO ME (instead of to each other) “I’d like to look Jeff in the face and give him a good talking-to and tell him exactly what I think” is…zero. People don’t talk to me or engage. If they engage, I can get something from it. If I engage, I can be incited, even trapped by brilliant, horrible tactics like that fake ‘screaming’ video. (The video is real; the context is so fake I’m surprised the people who wrote it haven’t, like Pinocchio, risked being unable to leave a room because of the size of their noses.)

Then they say this loudly wherever I’m banned or carefully excluded:

“THIS IS ABUSIVE! *I* LIKE KITTIES, AND I’M GOOD, AND JEFF MACH IS BAD, SO HE MUST HATE KITTIES!”

I was complaining about it for years. But…

I mean, it’s kept me out of the weird madness of the supposedly organized Steampunk community. Don’t get me wrong – most members of the community are great people who have no choice but, like the rest of us, to believe their influencers. The people who run the politics of the Steampunk Community are, like most influencers, people who claim to represent others. Most of them do. But the vast majority of people who love Steampunk, in its myriad forms, know its heroes (Thomas, who’s still on my friends list*, and GD, who is not, to name two) – as distant, awesome creators. They are generally warm, friendly, awesome humans.

But to the tiny community of now-influencers (you’re welcome, kids!) who made a lot of money, and sometimes careers, out of my work and our works together or even adjacent to each other – the people who tore the community apart somehow believe are the Steampunk Community.

(It’s NOT a coincidence that the failed attempt to turn over The Steampunk World’s Fair to people who claimed to want to run it…started on their point as a fairly blatant cash grab and then, when they realized they had no idea how to run it, announced that their real intention had been…what…to put a stake into my heart, and thus traumatize the entire Steampunk community based on stuff so useless that there hasn’t been one criminal charge? It’s classic: create a scandal, kick someone out of power, take over. But, um, make sure)

It used to make me angry. Now it’s funny and sad.

Ah, well. A “promotus”, in Latin, “goes forward”.

We go forward.

But what a silly way for supposedly grown people to spend their time.

_______

* Thomas is quite independent, but the Steampunk community has excellent ability to put pressure on my friends, partners, friends of friends, people who look kinda like me, people who are their business rivals, people who chew the wrong kind of gum, and people who don’t have their own handmade never-from-Hot-Topic goggles ….so wherever we were before this, I’m sorry, Thomas, if you gotta go. But…if the Steampunk community is open-minded, should they really be blackmailing people to leave?

** Don’t look at me like that. YOU figure out which of the 5,000 people that you generally could name on sight and spoke to at events two to eight times a year has magically switched sides and turned against you but stayed on your friend list, not as a friend, but to make your social media essentially unworkable to reach people. It’s… a great tactic. If only the were interested in making great people instead of great tactics…

But seriously, you take thousands of people, most of whom you usually spoke to after they messaged you. YOU message each of them and give them a week or two to respond. This doesn’t actually weed out the people who aren’t your friends. Many of your friends might (wisely) not be on FB often. But all the people who listen to each other and have never, ever once asked for your side of the story…oh, they love Facebook, and the Algorithm loves them.

The post Jeff Mach and the “Steampunk Community” – a cheerful look at much foolishness appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.