On the eve of The Animus Society™ art salon & speakeasy's sold-out 3rd Edition, it is my distinct privilege to première a short film by award-winning auteur Siniša Koprivnjak @Sinisha39. It captures the essence #AnimusSociety, where the boundaries between self and story disappear. Featured in the film are @blockmuse, @droi_suye, and @WSutton76499. Artworks exhibited are by @ASpangereid, @CobaltinGPT, @KarolineGeorges, and @Sinisha39.

I think we’ve normalized something deeply fucked up about social media. Creators are told: come here, build an audience, grow your business, spend years creating, bring your followers, give us your content, attention, data and money. Audiences are told: follow the people you care about and we’ll show you what they create. We’re connecting you! Then the platform quietly inserts itself between both sides and decides whether that relationship is even allowed to exist. 👀 You can have 10,000, 100,000 or a million people explicitly say, “I want to see this person’s work,” and an opaque algorithm can effectively say: no. That breaks the basic promise both sides were sold. And somehow we’ve accepted this as normal. Creators are expected to reverse-engineer constantly changing algorithms just to reach people who already asked to hear from them. At some point this stops being a conversation about “engagement” and becomes a conversation about the fundamental product being sold. If almost any other industry marketed a product one way, obscured how it actually worked, then routinely prevented customers from receiving what they reasonably believed they were getting, we’d be asking serious questions about deceptive business practices and consumer protection. Social media shouldn’t be a casino where creators gamble their work for access to their own audience. And the justification is usually that algorithms make the experience “better” for users. Do they? HELL NO. These systems aren’t exclusively optimized for what YOU want to see. They’re optimized around engagement, retention, attention, advertising and the platform’s own business objectives. Your preferences are an input, but they aren’t necessarily the objective. That distinction matters. If I explicitly follow someone, that is data. I have literally told the platform what I want to see and paid them in time, attention and data. Overriding that decision while claiming to personalize the experience for me deserves a hell of a lot more scrutiny, including serious examination of what legal protections consumers should have. We’ve had roughly 20 years of this shit. It’s time we start fixing it in law. A follow should mean something. Right now, increasingly, it means almost NOTHING. And I would genuinely like to see the legal and consumer-protection questions around this tested much more aggressively. Like, to the max. ASAP. These platforms aren’t laws of nature. Their business models weren’t handed down from the heavens. They operate this way because we’ve collectively allowed these rules to become normal. They can change. THEY MUST. We’re teaching our children that businesses can make promises, change the rules after we’ve invested our time, work, data and money, then tell us to eat cake, and we’re supposed to accept it because we want to be included societally. Through inaction, we normalize being subordinate to products that extract enormous value from us while reserving the right to decide how much of what we thought we were getting they’ll actually give back. We’re teaching people this is simply the price of participating in modern society: hand over your data, attention, creative work and money, then accept whatever rules the platform imposes afterward. Fuck that. We can’t change shit unless it starts with us. Change starts when enough creators, users, businesses, lawmakers and regulators ask difficult questions about what product we’re being sold, what we give up for it, how that bargain has changed over 20 years, and whether these companies actually deliver what they promised. Because this isn’t just about creators being pissed off that their posts didn’t perform. It’s about who controls the relationship between billions of human beings. We’ve spent two decades letting a handful of companies write the rules governing an enormous part of human communication, culture, commerce and creativity. Maybe it’s time the humans write some rules back. Wake up