The worst time to be an artist is the best time to be an artist
Insider #118 with questions of identity and the Substack problem
(This post is an important message to all readers and has therefore been made free to read.)
Dear Insider,
Writing to you is never difficult. Every Sunday, I know I speak to a friend and supporter. But this post is difficult to write because these are not subjects I want to talk about. Every sentence here makes me squirm in my seat, and every word you read has been edited and rewritten several times.
As a brown person existing on the internet, I do not always have the freedom to be just an individual. Time and time again, the various collective identities that make up my personhood are called into action. I think you know what I mean. We are all experiencing it in various ways.
In today’s post, I want to speak about the upsetting news from Substack leadership this week, and the conflict of individual versus collective identities in my life.
The SneakyArt (Insider) Post is written for paid subscribers and patrons of Sneaky Art. Every week, you make it possible for me to follow my compass and do my best work. Every week, I share with you the best words and the best lines from my journey as an artist and writer. Thank you for being here, dear friend. I hope you are having a wonderful holiday season.
It is the morning of the 24th, and I erased everything I wrote last night. I am writing since 5 am. It is now 8:36 am 10:40 am 11:30 am.
For those looking for a way to support my work in the new year, put SneakyArt on your walls or gift a framed print to someone in your life. Use code [SNEAKYREADER] for a reader discount.
Can I start with some good news?
I received a book deal from an important small publisher! I am not at liberty to discuss details yet, but a lot of next year will be spent writing and speaking about this huge milestone of my life.
Specifically, the 2024 journey with SneakyArt Insiders will be a behind-the-scenes look at everything necessary to make a book and everything necessary, beyond the making, for that book to succeed.
If you are a free reader, grab this backstage pass to join the SneakyArt Insiders Club on this journey!
Backstage passes are 20% off this week.
The gift of individuality
My path to becoming an artist started as a fresh immigrant in America in 2016, feeling thoroughly out of place. Strangers’ eyes at the local supermarket suggested what they saw when they looked at me - one of those people, with brown skin and a beard. My instant objectification pushed me to see them the same way - one of those other people, with white skin and a MAGA hat.
I needed a way to relate to the strangers around me. The Americans. I needed to make sense of their foreign environment. America-land. I needed to make a home.
How does one make a home? You need furniture and plumbing and real estate, sure. But four walls make only a house. To make a home, you have to extend beyond these walls and find - a neighbourhood, a community, public spaces, and some friends. You need a reliable place to buy bread which does not contain high fructose corn syrup. You need a cafe.
I started drawing tiny people out of curiosity but also out of this need to understand. I drew quickly to avoid attention, but also to capture their fleeting presence before they disappeared.
Through drawing, I found a way to observe the people of my world, strip them of their differences, and reach for the commonalities of our shared human experience.
If I could relate to them, I figured, I could be more comfortable. If I could be comfortable, perhaps I could feel at home?
To become the best individual I could, I had to extend the gift of individuality to others as well. To see them not as their ethnicity, or religion, or political affiliation. To see a person. Just a tiny person.
Nature v Nurture
Individualism has defined my life’s journey. But it is not my journey alone. Centuries of Western and Eastern philosophical thought, the economic aspirations of a fast-developing country, Bryan Adams and Led Zeppelin, and the psychological trauma of recovering from two centuries of colonization - many forces conspired to make it happen.
I was born in Kolkata (India) to contrarian parents who don’t like being told what to do. They will never admit this in so many words, but their daily lives were a lesson on the subject for my brother and myself. This matters because I grew up in a world that otherwise places collective identity on a pedestal. In a collectivist society, the highest duty of the individual is to fulfil the aspirations of the collective - be it family, community, ethnicity, religion, nation, or all of the above.
Recently, reading Identity by Francis Fukuyama helped me better understand these forces in my life and the larger world. In the book, the author traces the rise of individualism in Western society from the French Revolution to the codification of human rights. I learned that the individual’s right to live their life the way they want, even in defiance of their society, is still a new and fragile idea. Like all complicated things, it is fraught with strange dichotomies and small hypocrisies. Like all young things, it needs nurturing and care.
Every day, together, around the world, we are figuring out our individuality and the individualities of others. Dear Insider, it is good to be on this journey with you.
“War is the ultimate destruction of the individual.” - Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Cafe.
Here are some labels we can choose for ourselves - liberal, conservative, progressive, capitalist, socialist, anarchist, writer, artist, etc.
Here are some labels imposed upon us by accident of birth - Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Jain, Sikh, Christian, white, brown, black, etc.
Difficult times reinforce certain labels and weaken others. This year, uncertainties and fears have pushed us toward the shelter of our collective identities.
Am I a Jain? Or am I culturally Hindu? Am I Indian? Or am I a brown person in a first-world country? Where do I stand and why?
Collective identities spawn connections with other people, sometimes in confusing ways. Sometimes the connection is across nationalities. Sometimes it is across religions. Sometimes the commonality you find is tenuous, and surrounded by many larger differences.
Can subscribing to one label compromise another? How do I weigh the labels that constitute my individuality?
Nazi newsletters on Substack
The big news of the week is Substack leadership equivocating on the subject of profiting off white supremacist publications. Not only did they neglect to engage with a large collective of writers in good faith, but their response (after two weeks of radio silence) was cowardly and poorly articulated.
Smarter people than me have spoken about this. I suggest -
: “McKenzie is smuggling a host of value judgments under the pretense of not making value judgments, and it’s dishonest.” [Read]: “I do not think anyone should be able to espouse Nazism without consequence, let alone be able to profit from it.” [Read]: “It’s been disappointing to realize how little the founders care about so many of us, whom they’re essentially in business with, and profiting from.” [Read]Hate sells fast in these times. Fast money is good money for social media companies and their VC overlords. Substack is funded by a16z, the biggest VC firm in Silicon Valley (and by extension, the world). The leadership of a16z consists of tremendously immoral, evil people. Two years ago, they wanted to uplift every struggling artist with NFTs and cryptocurrency projects. Now they want to replace everyone with AI and word prompts, and are warning them to not get in the way.
Colonizers, but they make a lot of money, and for a lot of people that is the end of the conversation.
Silicon Valley colonizers control every open space on the internet today. Anywhere you go, your presence is recorded and monetized. Anything you do, a little sliver of money trickles upwards, straight into the veins of the addict, salivating as he stares at his stock value with beady little soulless eyes.
Let me be clear - I f*cking hate these people.
The best minds of my generation are spending their lives making slide decks for the VC firms. Every graph has to point upward or they are fired. If they can get enough graphs to point sufficiently upward, they are given scraps from the table. The best minds of my generation hope to have a seat at the table someday.
Let me be clear - If you are working for a soulless, evil corporation simply because it is the best money you can make, you are a mercenary. F*ck you too.
The worst time to be an artist is the best time to be an artist
It is tremendously disheartening. As a writer with them for 3 years, as a participant in their inaugural Grow program, as a member of the 2022 Substack Fellowship, and as a user during the beta-testing stage of Notes, this is a betrayal of trust. I no longer assume good faith from them. But I am also not content being pushed out by Nazi scum.
The wonderful
wrote about this sense of entrapment to her subscribers this morning:An independent writer like myself — and like the other writers you read and admire here on Substack — finds themselves with very few options. They can flee this platform, as we have fled Twitter, as we have fled mainstream news organizations that have opted for “both side-ism” on any number of issues including but by no means limited to fascism, as we have fled Facebook. The Nazis will follow. It has become more and more clear to me: This is no way to fight… [link]
Wannabe fascists all over the world share these tactics. My first brush was with the troll armies deployed by India’s current ethno-nationalist government in 2013/14. Their job was to flood every subreddit and forum and comment section, and to poison the wells of every discourse with mockery, hateful speech and incivility. They feed on all the life they can find. When the good people leave for another platform, the trolls follow behind them with fresh calls for “open debate” and “free speech”.
Trolls and fascists can crush you without doing physical violence. I know this. I stopped drawing political comics completely - after building up a FB page to over 30,000 fans - because I could not take the relentless abuse. Back then, I thought humour would be my weapon. I thought that if I could make someone laugh I could disarm them. But the other thing about Nazis (and Hindutva bhakts) is that they are entirely humourless. I gave up.
This became another reason to look for sneaky art in my world - I wanted my creative expression to be bulletproof.
I was reacting to them but, in the process, learning something about myself. There is a thing beyond clever jokes, edgy remarks, and witty rebuttals, that I can access now. I refuse to let them take it away.
In her post, Anne Helen Petersen lays out a crucial message that inspires me this day (it is now 12:08 pm):
So here is what I can promise you, reader: that I will continue to be a thorn in the side of Substack’s leadership when it comes to this issue. That I will continue to use my power as one of its initial writers — one who they use as counter-evidence to the claim that they profit most off anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theories — to hold them to account.
This is my promise as well, as a brown person navigating online spaces. It is my duty for all the labels I have chosen and for all the labels that have been thrust upon me.
Where do we go now?
It has been an exhausting week. And some of you may have read about Substack in the news. Some of you may decide to not associate with Substack any longer, regardless of the writer or the publication. I can not tell you what to do. Your journey is yours, as mine is mine.
I am figuring out the best path for myself. Jumping ship immediately would hurt my work and this equation with you. I am figuring out how to not run from the Nazis and stand for my principles.
My call to you is the same as it has always been - If you identify with my journey, and are heading the same way, let us walk together.
Last week, I told you I had two big pieces of news to share. The book deal is one of them. The second is much bigger than all of this. I can’t wait to celebrate it with you soon!
Insiders, please scroll below to grab your free seat at next month’s Insider Hangout.
