Why I Left Social Media
Instagram hates me, and the feeling is mutual
Oh look, another wounded artist leaving social media! The algorithm, boo hoo, the rules, community guidelines, wah wah!
Look, social media is bad for your health. The endless scrolling though shit you don’t care about, the bombardment of adverts, especially after turning 30 and they start pelting you with ads for ED medication and weight loss pills! I still have the penis of a 15 year old, and no, I’m not giving it back.
But no, let me explain myself. I work hard to create the best possible tattoo every time, I spend hours, days even, trying to create masterpiece after masterpiece, dedicating my life to leaving behind a body of work that I can be proud of. I have clients who sit hours on end, suffering for my art, I create these pieces for real people in the real world.
Instagram is not the real world.
When I create a tattoo and I throw a photo up on the internet and dozens of hours of work, prepping, designing, discussing, traveling between Boston, MA, Oxford, England, or Berlin, Germany, or any of these other places I find myself tattooing, pushing my body and my client’s body to the limit, there can be literal blood, sweat and tears, and then we compress it to a 6.1” screen, a 10cm tall image, compressed so much that the details are missing, using a camera and a colour space that can’t differentiate between the greens and blues I’ve used, it absolutely destroys the majesty and magic of art.
Dave Grohl talks about how CD’s and recordings are useful, and a great way to distribute and share your music, how it’s a great way to listen to music, new and old, but nothing compares to attending a performance, when you see these four or five real human beings making the music before your very eyes, then you see real magic happen. You feel real magic.
And that’s the problem with social media and seeing artwork through the internet. It’s not until you see these tattoos in real life that you see the magic that these alchemists command, making something out of nothing, music out of wood and metal, tattoos out of ink and steel, and I believe that the set up for social media is an absolute disrespect to the arts. All that hard work to create magic, compressed into 3-7 seconds of viewing where the viewer stands no chance of experiencing the piece in the realm that it was designed and created to exist in.
How dare you?
How dare you compress the suffering and the effort of the client and the artist into a 10cm tall image and 7 seconds of entertainment?
How dare you put robots between the artist and the viewer, policing whether the creation is worthy of viewership.
How dare you dictate to the artist how their work should be displayed. Telling me that all my images should be reels.
How dare you tell me that I have to watch my language, because swearing is not acceptable, but genuine hate speech targeting trans people, real racism and calls to violence against people who drive certain vehicles are allowed and shared because you want to protect “freedom of speech”.
How dare you tell me that I’m not allowed nudity in my art because you want to keep your platform “a safe space for all users” then show me a video of a live dog having it’s face blowtorched, or a decapitation. How in the actual fuck is nudity in my work not safe, but videos of death perfectly fine?
How dare you? Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri, how dare you piss down my back and tell me it’s raining? Safety? Community? Shut up.
“Gunship Sexy” - Gunship’s Dark All Day album art, feat. Tiddies
Nudity Isn’t a Crime.
Obviously I’m aware that a lot of my work moves from just nudity into pornographic. But Pieces like Gunship Sexy is not pornographic, it’s a study on the human form, and a celebration of a particular album by a particular band, no prizes for guessing who, I need to be able to share my work. I do actually understand if you don’t want nudity on your platform, but when the humans I speak to, if I get through to a I object to accidentally seeing deaths while this tattoo is flagged as unacceptable.
Your morals are on backwards.
I know what it’s about though. It’s about money, its about keeping eyes on your platform. We know that hate is an easy emotion to trigger, and we know that it’s an easy way to get engagement. Hell I’m guilty of it, purposefully posting misinformation and antagonistic things to get a few extra views. But I want to create images that get the feelings of loneliness, and solitude, but power in the human form across, and give you a glimpse into my soul. Give you pieces of myself, and pour it into my work. But these platforms do not allow the nudity.
Creating For The Algorithm and NOT For The People
Instagram has convinced me that I need to do shit “for engagement”. But that doesn’t pay the bills. My tattoos do. It’s easily been a decade since I booked a client that found me organically through social media, they may think that they “just saw me on Facebook”, but I have tracking and I know that I hit them with a well designed advert. Everything you see on social media from Meta is about how to create “engaging content”. BUT the trick is that it’s engaging on social media, which has NO baring on real life. I strive to create beauty and mystery, work to create magic on skin. Facebook, Instagram and all the others are short-form entertainment platforms, so they want you to entertain. And entertain in a way that keeps eyes on the app, so that they might funnel ads down your throat at break neck speed, in the hopes that you’ll buy that ED pill, or those fucking Govee lights.
It demands that I create shortform content to grab your attention and keep you dutifully staring at your phone, while Apple and Samsung work on more effective and efficient batteries to accommodate your obsession with 13 second thirst traps, and hateful views of the word. Keeping you isolated, sad, focused on that tiny dopamine kick so that you stare into your advert device until you eventually buy some bullshit. And I hate it. I hate the whole fucking thing! So why do I continue to entertain it? because you’re told that you need it, it’s integral to your business, it’s how you stay in contact with your friends. YOU HAVE TO BE ON IT! If that’s the case, why are all my personal relationships built in real life? Why haven’t I booked anything through social media organic reach in years?
I’m making these posts for the robots, not for you. Why the fuck am I working for robots? They’re supposed to be working for me! ChatGPT works for me, Gemini, my Roomba, they work for me. I work for Facebook’s robots, and they don’t pay me! That’s some kind of fucked up slavery, and I REALLY value my freedom. Hence my position as the Managing Director of the company.
So instead of bitching and moaning about it, I’m just gonna leave, I think.
What Am I Doing About It?
Well, instead of bitching and moaning like I usually do, I’m going to simply stop engaging with social media. You can get on my Discord and my WhatsApp channels for updates and to communicate with me. All bookings are via email anyway, so that won’t change. And instead of quick fleeing Instagram posts, I’ll be adding to my own website, where I am the moderator, I police what is and isn’t acceptable, with a moral compass that’s focused on art, NOT what shareholders want and think is acceptable.
So! If you want to keep up to date with my artwork, my projects and everything else, I just ask for your email address. That way I can update you directly, without having to worry about whether the robots deem me entertaining. I’ll leave it to you to decide.