The Creosote Reality
The soot is a living thing, a fine, grey powder that settles into the creases of my knuckles and the corners of my eyes before I even realize I’ve inhaled it. I’m currently wedged into a Victorian-era flue that hasn’t seen a brush since 1991, and my phone vibrates in my pocket with a persistent, rhythmic thrum. I shouldn’t check it. My hands are coated in creosote, and the air is thick with the ghosts of coal fires past. But I do. I pull it out with two clean fingertips-my ‘phone-clean’ digits-and see that a video I uploaded six hours ago has hit 11,001,000 views. It’s a seven-second clip of me accidentally dropping a flashlight down a dark chimney. It’s garbage. It has no artistic merit, no narrative arc, and the audio is mostly me swearing under my breath in French.
Meanwhile, the documentary I spent 31 days editing-a deep dive into the architectural significance of chimney pots in the 19th century, featuring actual 41-page transcripts of historical guild meetings-is sitting at exactly 101 views. I spent $171 on a specialized lens just for the close-up shots of the brickwork. I stayed up until 2:01 AM every night for a week to get the color grading right. The world doesn’t care about the brickwork. The world wants to see a man drop a flashlight. This is the new reality for anyone trying to build something in the digital age. We aren’t making art for people anymore; we are making offerings to a black box.
The Human Fixation on Control
We used to have gatekeepers who were human. You could hate them-the greasy record executive, the bitter magazine editor, the TV producer who wouldn’t return your calls-but at least they had ears and eyes. You could theoretically buy them a drink, or scream at them, or convince them that your vision was worth the risk. They were motivated by greed, or prestige, or a genuine love for the craft. They were predictable in their humanity. Today, the gatekeeper is a set of weighted variables in a server farm in a desert somewhere. It doesn’t have ears. It has engagement metrics. It doesn’t care if your work changes lives; it only cares if your work stops someone from scrolling for more than 1.1 seconds.
Cumin followed by Coriander.
The pursuit of order where none is guaranteed.
I find myself obsessing over the small things to compensate for this lack of control. Last night, I spent three hours alphabetizing my spice rack. Cumin followed by Coriander. It gave me a sense of order that the internet refuses to provide. In the physical world, if I clean a chimney, it is clean. The result is directly proportional to the effort. In the digital world, effort is often inversely proportional to success. The harder you try to be ‘profound,’ the more the algorithm seems to sense your desperation and hide you from the sun. It smells the sweat of your labor and decides it’s too heavy for the feed.
The Masquerade Analogy
Creators are told to ‘find their audience,’ but that’s a lie. You don’t find them. The algorithm chooses whether or not to introduce you. It’s like being at a masquerade ball where you’re wearing a mask, the audience is wearing masks, and the host is a ghost who occasionally shoves two people together and says ‘Talk,’ then disappears.
You are in contact with the platform’s perception of what they want.
Psychological Decay and Parody
This creates a profound psychological decay. When the rewards for your work are decoupled from the quality of that work, you start to lose your mind. You start to doubt your taste. Was the chimney pot documentary actually boring? Or did I just post it at 11:01 AM on a Tuesday when the algorithm was hungry for ‘Life Hacks’? You begin to tailor your output to the perceived whims of the machine. You start using the same hooks, the same bright thumbnails, the same frantic pacing. You become a parody of yourself before you’ve even figured out who you are. The machine isn’t just deciding who gets famous; it’s deciding what gets made. It is the new producer, and it’s a producer that only likes things that look like other things.
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The algorithm can keep the views; I’ll keep the soot. It’s easier to wash off than the feeling of being used by an invisible hand.
The Need for Leverage
There is a specific kind of vertigo that comes with a random viral hit. You feel like you’ve won the lottery, but you didn’t buy a ticket, and the prize is a bunch of people you don’t know screaming at you for a sequel. They don’t want your art; they want more of the accident. I’ve seen peers of mine-real artists, people who can paint or write or sing-get one random hit and then spend the next 41 months trying to replicate it, failing every time, until they eventually just stop making anything at all. The ‘Black Box’ took their confidence and replaced it with a gambling addiction.
I’ve tried to fight it. I’ve tried to ignore the numbers. But the numbers are the only way the machine talks to you. If the numbers are low, you are invisible. If you are invisible, you don’t exist. It’s a binary state of being. To combat this, some people turn to services that provide a baseline of visibility, a way to prime the pump so that the algorithm at least recognizes there’s a pulse. When you’re staring at 21 views on a project that took 11 months, you start looking for leverage. You look for a way to tell the machine, ‘Hey, look over here, this isn’t a mistake.’ That’s why many creators eventually find themselves looking for a
to give their work the initial momentum it needs to actually reach human eyes. It’s not about cheating; it’s about surviving the lottery. It’s about creating a floor so that the ceiling doesn’t feel so impossibly high.
The Complicity of the Creator
I think back to the old inspectors, the ones who taught me how to read the soot. They didn’t have to worry about whether the chimney they were cleaning was ‘trending.’ They just did the work. There was a directness to it that I miss… We’ve traded that directness for a scale that is incomprehensible.
There’s a contradiction in my own behavior that I can’t quite reconcile. I hate the algorithm, yet I check my analytics 11 times a day. I criticize the ‘low-effort’ content that goes viral, yet I’m the one who uploaded the flashlight video. We are all complicit in this new hierarchy.
The Flattening of Culture
What happens to culture when every creator is looking over their shoulder at a line of code? We get a flattening of experience. We get the ‘TikTok song’ and the ‘Netflix face.’ We get art that is optimized for the first 3.1 seconds because that’s the threshold for a ‘view.’ We lose the slow build, the nuance, the difficult beauty that requires patience. The algorithm doesn’t value patience. It values the spike. It values the dopamine hit. It’s an engine that runs on the frantic energy of 101 million people all trying to be noticed at the same time.
The Silence of No Views
I’m back in the flue now. The soot is thicker here, a 41-year accumulation of carbon. It’s quiet. My phone is dead. For a moment, I am just a man with a brush in a dark tube. There are no views here. No likes. No analytics.
The chimney is clean whether or not I post a photo of it.
Building Our Own Spice Racks
We have to build our own spice racks. We have to find the small areas of our lives where the math doesn’t matter and the effort is the reward. Otherwise, we’re just ghosts in someone else’s machine, waiting for a ghost of a producer to give us a signal that will never truly satisfy us. The flashlight is still at the bottom of the chimney. I think I’ll leave it there. It’s doing more good as a piece of lost history than it ever did as a viral video.
The algorithm can keep the views; I’ll keep the soot. It’s easier to wash off than the feeling of being used by an invisible hand.
The reward resides in the resistance overcome.
