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Travis Hartnett's avatar

By and large, people get the art they deserve. There's plenty of quality stuff out there, but if all you do is root around the internet on your phone with no intention, scrolling scrolling scrolling, then you will be served up an endless stream of shit.

As an active musician, I can only shrug and continue as I always have--cheerfully laboring in obscurity.

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Robert Machin's avatar

Indeed. Doomscrolling invariable leads me to this shit, but there’s still a great gallery just down the street, full of fantastic art by local creatives…

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Zane Dickens's avatar

Maybe the trick then is to get offline. I'm noticing this more and more. That relative happiness, at least a reduction in comparsonitus-driven or slop poisoning induced depression, can be had by walking away from an internet connection in to nature.

Or speaking to real human beings face to face about what they love creating with their actual minds and hands. It's bizarre actually as someone old enough to remember the digital wave, but young enough to have embraced it unquestioningly at the time.

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Jay Hinman's avatar

I don’t even think it’s getting offline, necessarily. Just social media, and perhaps using alternatives to Google and Amazon. I started doing these things and my mind is much more clear and I find myself thinking about AI garbage far less than I used to, except to hand-wring about what everyone else is doing.

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Zane Dickens's avatar

That's interesting, I do some of those but I find either I have ADD or some tech induced version of it. I'm so distractible there's other benefits to getting offline for me too.

I'm 110% using the alternative to Amazon in our country. What do you use instead of Google?

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Devin's avatar

Sorry to intrude on the conversation, but here are two search engines orientated towards the 'small' web.

https://marginalia-search.com/

https://wiby.me/

For general searching, DuckDuckGo is a (somewhat) more privacy focused alternative to Google.

https://duckduckgo.com/

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Zane Dickens's avatar

Thanks for sharing and adding Devin, I'm going to dive into the first two.

Duck Duck Go I've known about for years, but maybe that's also worth a try to burst out of the search bubble I'm likely stuck in.

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Richard S McGown's avatar

I thank you sincerely for your laboring.

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KN's avatar

You're doing God's work, sir

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Screen & Spleen's avatar

Hear hear. Instagram should be renamed to Slop. It is an essence of a cultural nadir hijacked by all sorts of d listers and their performative bullshit for clicks from brain-dead morons who sustain them. Quality stuff has to be sought out and people need to be more outright in calling out slop when they see it. It is no longer a matter of taste.

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Svein-Gunnar Johansen's avatar

Could it be that it's because "normal people" now are the main users of the Internet?

"Normal people" often lack a developed sense of aesthetic preference. They tend to gravitate toward whatever others like, which usually amounts to the least common denominator dictated by influential voices. Most don't really even WANT art, and are only exposed through it indirectly through popular culture.

Apart from MEME based absurdities, slop-art is mostly what I would describe as "paintings" of social media photos: Usually just one subject, trying to look good in front of a background that is far more interesting than their face.

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