We are in an era of a world that turns on the motive of what makes the highest profit. This is not new, but the overwhelming surge of mediocre, uncritical, and status quo-enforcing media churned by abusive corporate media monopolies is. Expressions of creative talent and articulate ideas in art, music, writing, film, television, and worldbuilding are now lumped together as merely "content" to be "consumed" as a one-way ephemeral relationship between creator and audience, the substance whose value to social media giants is dependent purely on the amount of interaction they receive through views, likes, follows, and shares - all so that they can run more privacy-robbing advertisements, promotions, and algorithms catered to keep their users on their platforms so that they can make more money. Basic human communication, socialization, and expression is insidiously monetized and arguably manipulated indirectly through invasive information-gathering, limited customization, and excessive use of algorithms to guide who should interact with what. The agency to express oneself and to discover new forms of expression based on one's own interests is increasingly being railroaded and controlled by the monetary motive of the platforms that provide the biggest spaces to host that expression, but their lack of robust searching, archiving, and indexing features makes it tedious to discover anything that isn't already trending. Content is being proliferated by these services not to be found, but to be profitable, which pressures creators to express themselves in profitable ways and hope for sheer luck. Their only other option is to hope for even more luck by creating things true to themselves, or flee to alternative platforms.

We are actively experiencing the height of what I am calling the death of creativity, and it doesn't just end with the art hosted on social media giants. It extends to the insufferable abundance of mass-marketable modernist minimalism in cars, interior design, website and graphic design, and even clothes. Whatever makes the most money is what gets produced, regardless of any other factors. Minimalism in itself is not bad and can be quite effective when used right; the problem lies in that this is the /only/ apparent option for any of these domains, and their application of minimalist design is specifically driven by a profit motive. Their designs are homogenous and forgettable, created to blend in rather than stand out. More and more of our world is being controlled, directly or indirectly, by the need for creative works to generate wealth, and we can see these ripples in the consistent meddling of profit-oriented authority figures restricting the creative decisions a group or studio can make. I need not elaborate more than on the recurring pattern of once wildly-popular creations like SpongeBob and the Simpsons to rapidly decline in quality in their later seasons. The truly horrifying thing, though, is that these two shows are still airing, which means they are still making money, which means they are still being watched by a reasonably large audience that offsets the cost of production.

The ultimate problem is that creative works are treated unanimously as a commodity that have an assignable monetary value, whether in terms of the price others are willing to pay for them or for the profit they gain through adjacent means. A monetary value to any part or whole should be optional, not mandatory, at the discretion of the creator that only they can have a say in. But the world we currently live in forces creative works to maintain a high monetary value if one is to survive off of it as their line of work (as there is no option to simply create without the pressure of survival); to be profitable, it must be mass-marketable, and to be mass-marketable, it must be sanitized and complacent. There is no room anymore for one to subsist on truly genuine, articulated, or thought-provoking work, because no platforms or groups with any mainstream weight to swing around will invest in something that has the risk of losing them money - even if it would be drops in the bucket of their overall wealth - and they won't invest in developing functionality for discovery, expression, and organization that actually benefits the interests of the users and creators because they already managed to become and continue to maintain themselves as monopolies without it. In fact, they can actively make their usability worse and it still won't matter, because their primary audience will use it anyway out of having no other perceived or real choice. You either continue to use the broken piece of shit because it's what everyone else uses, or you move to an independent platform that few people will be willing to switch to.

In one perspective, you lose either way. In another perspective, you discover options you never thought you could have, and relish in the space to express yourself outside of the pressures of mass media. This is the ethos of Neocities, and it is the primary reason I decided to create a website on this platform. This ethos also fundamentally guides the works I create. I don't just want to tell stories, and I certainly don't want to have parasocial creator-fan dynamics in which I implicitly hold more authority or influence than those who interact with my stories. I want to be part of communities who connect with each other on equal terms, who engage with each other's works in a way that accepts bidirectional influence as a net positive. I do not believe that media can simply be consumed by one party (implicitly, the "fan", which has no perceived influence on the work besides being a statistic that indicates popularity or success); the door opens both ways when someone chooses to view something, even if it isn't obvious. To treat creative works as isolated entities that must be legally and monetarily protected from all forms of deriviation and reinterpretation is absurd; there is no such thing as a truly original work. Human thought and ideas are fluid, interconnected, and dynamic, and they are constantly influenced by the ideas of everyone and everything around us. Creativity in itself is derivative, for it takes what is and shapes it into what can be. Everyone is creative in different ways, and everyone is on equal footing in whatever space we designate as encapsulating the community of some specific work or group of works. A "fan" is not one who consumes, but one who changes, feels, thinks, experiences, hurts, grows, connects, and creates in response to the viewing of something created. This chain reaction extends to the "fans" who later become arbitrarily designated creators of an isolated body of works themselves, though it is silly in itself to say one must create a conventionally identifiable type of art or story to be considered a creator. The relationship at its core is not creator-fan, but creators and creators, no matter how parasocial and distant it may be. Everyone has a creative voice of some nature that deserves the space to be articulated, enjoyed, and loved by themselves and others. It is important that, if nothing else, we step back and reconsider how we think of these relationships and the way these models have been influenced by corporate monopolies, legal structures, and social norms acting in complex feedback loops with each other.

I create not to be rich, popular, successful, or to have a large following for the sake of the pride those things can bring for better or worse, even to the most humbled of people. I create because it is fundamentally part of who I am as a person. I create because I am created by the culmination of my experiences, interests, loved ones, environments, communities, and others' creations that bring me more inspiration and passion than I can contain to simply conversation. I create because I want to have a positive and critical effect on the subjects that most concern me, and I find creation to be the second most imperative means of accomplishing this behind direct action and community support - of which it is not a replacement for, but hopefully an amplifier when done in conjunction. I create because it is how I connect to others and how I wish to be part of communities. I create because it is the loudest voice that I have to fight against the multitudes of hollow, vapid contentification and capitalistic pressure governing how we must create in order to survive in fundamentally, intentionally broken systems (though to say they are broken implies they don't work as intended, when in fact they do). And, most of all, my role is not simply as a creator, but also one who engages with what others have created, for which all these things I just listed also apply. I am created, thus I create, thus others are created and thus create, and all these things happen constantly and simultaneously. A mutuality between creating and being created is the most important means by which I form relationships with other people, and it is the means that gives me the most joy and fulfillment in my life. I am fascinated by the mechanisms of creation itself as much as I am by the mechanisms of being created and the experiencing of others' creations, which drives my interests in information science, cinematography, storytelling of all forms, and the fundamental nature of what exists.

While it obviously takes more work than simply creation and being created to dismantle the systems that are perpetuating the death of creativity, it is an extremely critical step to rebuild what is actively being damaged as collateral to this phemonemon. We must take our own reigns as much as we can out of the hands of corporate elites to express ourselves on our own terms, build communities based around valuing and promoting self-expression, and support other communities seeking to do the same. The first step of any change is knowledge of the problem; that knowledge is not easily accessible to others if we only let it sit within ourselves. I say this as someone who grew up in a very evangelical, politically conservative family that raised me to believe it is a sin punishable by damnation to be gay or trans, which kept me from accepting that I was the latter for many years. I only managed to unpack and ultimately reject these beliefs after long-term exposure to outside information and communities that supported LGBTQ people. If we are to revitalize creativity unburdened by the pressure to turn profit, we must first be persistent and active in keeping the conversation going on the problems with social media, the contentification of art, and the isolation of the self, and we must also support and engage with the communities dedicated to fighting these things. The neighborhoods on Neocities are just some of many that exist out there, and are ones I'm glad to be part of.