In the glasshouse

Last weekend, I was eating out with my larger family, some of which I only see every few months. As we were sitting outside, surrounded by trees and the light of the setting sun, I was discussing social media with one of my family members. She and I are known for having loving, heated discussions about dividing topics, and this is surely one of them. She said, ‘I think it’s important to never share yourself, who you are, on social media.’ She’s well aware of what I do for a living and it wasn’t intended (nor received) as a slight against me. She simply expressed what I guess a lot of people feel around social media the last few years - it’s, in many ways, a place of great vulnerability.

What she was referring to, specifically, was the fact that a few months ago, famous German writer Cornelia Funke left Instagram and Facebook for the decentralised Pixelfed platform, claiming discomfort with the general atmosphere. Quite frankly, I can’t blame her.

I’ve been publicly present on social media for about ten years now and have made a living off of YouTube and, in a very, very small amount for a time on Instagram and Twitch, since 2016. Before that, I had small blogs and websites, and before that I self-published my novels when I was still in school. When I was a kid and the Harry Potter saga became a global phenomenon, I took the then child actors’ advice to ‘prepare’ for a public life because I already knew back then that I wanted to do something that, if it worked, would likely come with some form of public attention.

Let’s not turn this into a kitchen-psychology piece about covert (or open) narcissism - in fact, neither does being a public figure predict your level of narcissism, nor does the lack of public aspirations rule out the diagnosis, and heck, actual clinical narcissism isn’t as common as you might think. In fact, as I’ve found personally, there’s a bigger link between being misunderstood when you are young, for instance due to neurodivergence, and then later putting yourself out there to get recognition beyond your peers. But anyway. Not the point of this article.

In terms of social media, you could say I’ve been around. Aside from TikTok and Snapchat, both of which I wisely stayed clear of, I’ve tried most common platforms over the last decade and especially on YouTube and now here on the blog, I’ve shared very personal facts and stories to a pretty large audience. How does that feel?

Well. It’s ambivalent, to say the least. Vulnerable - for sure.

Cornelia Funke’s first post on Pixelfed says ‘I … left Instagram and Facebook because they have become a forum for hate speech that wants to poison the world with pictures and ideas, sowing seeds of doubt, darkness, intolerance and distress.’ While this is surely alluding to the bigger picture on the platform, she is certainly also saying this from personal experience on her own profile.

When discussing my job with people who are unfamiliar with how social media ‘careers’ actually work, there is one thing they almost certainly do know. ‘What about hate comments?’, they will ask.

The comment section on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and beyond is sometimes louder in terms of setting the tone than the actual post itself, which is why it’s so dreaded by creators. I know that some of my colleagues refuse to look at comments at all or have others moderate them. I also know that even if you receive ten grateful praises by viewers and only one nasty insult, you will remember the insult more. Basic biology.

The tale is as old as web 2.0 - where there’s anonymity, there’s social indecency. I’m not sure I still believe that fully, however. On a recent visit to the flea markt, a man publicly announced to a vendor that he sort of hopes Hitler comes back to ‘do a little cleaning’, casually, as if he was talking about the weather. So no, it’s not just about anonymity online. There is a huge difference between what people say and what people would actually do, and this applies to anything mean that is said online as well. But I’ve also come to see the comment section - whether it’s actually gotten worse in the last few years or not - as society’s thermostat. And anyone who’s posting online, as innocuous as their posts might be, will be forced to read the scale.

There are other people better equipped to explain how social media algorithms and intentional action behind the scenes at the big corporations contribute to the rising temperatures, and there are obviously also other factors at play that have a little less to do with social media itself and a little more with general economic fuckups of the last decades. This goes beyond what I can discuss in this article. My point is: Wherever society’s at (and right now, we’re pretty divided and angry), if you’re publicly sharing things online, you will regularly be the projector screen for people’s frustrations.

I have been scolded, ridiculed and virtually shouted at for owning a dishwasher (yep) or ‘propagating the green oppression’ because I live in a tiny house (I didn’t even vote that year), people have hoped I would die from the covid vaccine (didn’t even promote getting the shot, in fact, I said absolutely nothing about it) and otherwise projected their ideas of how other people should be onto what they saw of me - weight, habits, nutrition, career, you name it, they judged it.

Most of the time I simply delete the comment right away - angry answers aren’t the solution, trust me on this. But more generally, what happens of course is that after a while, you can accurately predict the outrage of at least one person about something you’re about to post. And that’s not something you want to think about when working creatively. It’s also not what I want to put in viewer’s heads when they scroll through the comments. What people say about the content gives a certain flavor to it, and I don’t want that flavor to be controlled by a desperate minority - which is why, to this day, I go through all comments (not all sub-comments, that’s impossible) and delete what I feel is inappropriate. I think you can figure out now why this blog doesn’t have a comment section - I want the texts to stand by themselves. Feedback is appreciated, obviously, and I receive e-mails and comments elsewhere about it, but here, I like things a little more quiet.

Another form of vulnerability is something viewers don’t often see. Involuntarily being a public projector screen also means that in order to get control over something they lack control over in their own lives, some individuals will try and deliberately hurt you and see the effects play out publicly.

In 2019, if I remember correctly, I was still streaming on YouTube gaming regularly. One night, my livestream was raided by a troll channel, meaning dozens of users posting bawdy insults were streaming into the chat. My moderators did their best to instantly delete what was being said, but it was a lot. I stayed calm throughout, having dealt with trolls on many occasions before. Next thing I knew, they were posting my former private address into the chat and started ordering food to said address. By the time the stream ended, I had three orders, all of which were obviously to be paid on delivery. And to top it all off, they went to my ex’s house because that’s the address they had looked up. I had to call all three restaurants, two of which had already sent out the delivery, and call my ex late at night to explain the situation. That was … a lot.

This happened again two weeks or so later, leading to a police investigation that went nowhere (they could have requested IP addresses but they didn’t have enough staff I’m assuming), even though the chat messages contained death threats and other chargeable crimes. So yes, you are vulnerable out there.

A few years ago as well, an account on a chat website was circling around, impersonating me by using screenshots from my videos, zoomed in on my buttocks. Many, many fellow filmmakers and other creatives are dealing with fake profiles, asking viewers to donate money or sending explicit pictures. It’s an uphill battle and you quite frankly don’t even have the time to go after them all. It sometimes feels like you become one of those discounted filthy DVDs they throw at you at tech store check outs - instead of your content being watched tastefully in cinemas, you’re handed down to greasy, sad individuals who yell at the screen and make fun of you.

Being on the internet for that long as myself, not as a company (which can face witch hunts as well), I have always had a set of rules that helped me protect at least some of what’s left of modern man’s privacy:

• I never shared my former partner’s face or much of our interaction, even in videos when we were on the project together, like with my RV renovation. I have witnessed the devastating consequences of viewers turning on one of the two when a public couple breaks up. Lee MacMillan, former partner of Max Bidstrup, committed suicide in 2022 and her family cited the social media bullying after the breakup as the leading cause. I knew them a little from online, so this one hit me big.

• I don’t disclose my location, let alone in real time. I am strongly opposed to the law that forces solo freelancers to give up their private address online as a legal imprint requirement (for the lack of a company address, which is expensive - and illegal if you don’t really have a company there). Stalking is real. And yes, I do get weird e-mails and unsolicited letters. (And yes, only from men.) I’d rather not.

• I stay clear of any topic that I still have too much vulnerability with - meaning anything where people’s mean comments could actually hurt me or cause unnecessary doubt. That being said, you can’t predict what people are going to say so it’s never really a safe bet. It’s obviously a mindset thing, too - how much are you even willing to give people analytical autonomy over your life? This goes back to beliefs about your own self-worth and identity, which I think is what anyone ‘out there’ on social media should work on to protect themselves. That being said, some arrows will always pierce the armor (if not, you’re callous, which is not what you want). I wish we lived in a world where this didn’t come with the job, but it does. (And no, I’m obviously not talking about justified criticism. Not everything is hate speech.)

Being open and personal on social media is like sitting in a glass house. Even if you’re making sure that one side has curtains, it is a lot of exposure. So is it really worth it?

First off, I’m stubborn. Just because the conditions are adverse, I don’t see why I should be forced to give up something I love. Which is not the public attention per se - in fact, it’s rather awkward to think that tens of thousands of people are watching what I put out there. It’s creating something for other people to resonate with. In other words, it’s doing what other people, unknowingly, have done for me all my life when I felt misunderstood and have turned to art and literature and movies and music to find solace in shared experiences and sentiments. That’s just what I do. That’s the world I belong in.

And secondly, despite the craziness of living part of my life online, I know that it’s working. I have received many beautiful e-mails and comments from you, especially over the last few months, thanking me for what I do and sharing how you connected to the little films and texts I post. So it’s not in vain to give up so much control over parts of yourself so people are now able to dissect it to their liking. It’s not in vain to try and ignore the pressure to ‘stay relevant’ and instead just wanting to be yourself. It’s not in vain to know that many people out there don’t consider what I do to be a ‘job’.

All that being said, we can’t ignore the fact that a lot of the vulnerability online exists simply because the corporations who provide the platform don’t do enough to protect users. They are pretty damn good at collecting data up to our sleep cycles and political preferences, but utterly careless about basic things like support access for creators (I’m looking at you, Instagram).

It’s also a weird time in general on social media. Because production is so professional nowadays (watch videos from fifteen years ago and be humored) and we’ve seen so many scandals, a lot of viewers automatically assume that everything is scripted and fake, making it almost a sport to pick on creators to show how cleverly they ‘uncovered’ their ‘scheme’. For a vast area of social media, unfortunately, that is true - because attention as the sole currency doesn’t incentivize everyone to be authentic and truthful. But the rest of us get to bear that load as well, and people often forget that this is my actual life I’m putting out there, not something a content agency came up with. Sure, it’s my choice to do that. But that doesn’t mean it’s other people’s job to look for conspiracies behind my illness (‘How convenient - just when you needed the money, I guess’) or assume I was paid by the green party to promote tiny houses (still no).

So, in short (haha), I don’t agree with the idea that you shouldn’t put yourself out there as yourself. I do think that not everyone should do it, because it’s a lot to bear. And I think you certainly shouldn’t do it simply because it smells like quick bucks. But if no one is authentically vulnerable anymore for fear of retaliation, unfounded criticism, stalking or other harassment, where does that leave us? Especially because a lot of stuff is so fake today, we long for these little islands of sincerity in between. And I don’t see how society benefits from them being taken away. Sure, you can reasonably argue that social media in general, as it is today, is kind of a bad idea. But while it exists, I’d rather it has realness in it to remind people that not everyone is a hypocrite and we are ultimately all part of the same thing - the human condition.