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This week on the Scroll Sanity podcast, we have an interview with Joe Hollier, the co-founder of The Light Company and creator of the Light Phone. I hope you will give it a listen!
During our conversation, we talked about his journey from artist to entrepreneur, as well as where he sees the future of digital technology going.
Joe said that he was an early adopter of the smartphone when he was in high school and running a skateboard company. At first, he saw the smartphone as a utilitarian tool, something that could help him check if his paintings were hung straight in the wall and photograph a cool spot to come back and practice tricks on his skateboard. But it was at art school that he started to see first-hand how social media was changing the landscape of the art world.
“Being a graphic design student and artist at the time, the advent of social media, specifically Instagram, a visual platform, was really popular amongst me and my friends. Even some of our teachers. It became this pseudo portfolio platform where you could show of your process, but it really started to change the dynamic of how people viewed your art. There was a kind of metric. If you had more followers, you must be a better artist. It flip-flopped the narrative. I’d see these really famous graphic designers that I looked up to with 150 followers. And then someone with 20,000 that’s still a student and they’re getting bigger jobs.”
We talked about Joe’s tech groove, which he says is a process that he’s constantly experimenting with. I think we can safely say that we’re all in the same boat, trying to find different hacks that allow us to use the tools provided by digital technology, while also maintaining our freedom and peace of mind.
As an artist, Joe talked about the importance of protecting his creativity. He says he has two computers: a work computer where he does all of his “Light Phone work”, and a second “personal” computer that he got recently, which he uses for his music collection and art projects that he’s working on.
This is what Joe has to say about that second work-free computer:
“There’s no email, no calendar. On the weekend, if I wanna look something up, I’m hesitant to open the work machine, which might pull me into ten different things. So I have that separation, which I understand is a luxury and probably unnecessary for most people. But being an [artist who uses a computer pretty heavily], I found that to be a really nice work-life balance.”
This is a concept that I completely relate to. I have long had an “internet computer” and a “creative writing computer,” which is an ancient dinosaur of a laptop that is not connected to the internet. I think of it, simply, as a word processor. I don’t do anything else on that computer. As I said on the podcast, I can’t get my own creative work done if I have access to the internet. Even with the Freedom app, it’s still too distracting and too tempting to get lost in the internet ether. It’s better for me to remove the temptation altogether.
But lately, I haven’t been making the effort to sit down at my writing desk and power on my clunky old computer to do my “deep work.” Instead, I’ve been heading to the library with my “internet laptop” and attempting to write from there. I’ve even started doing something that I’ve never done, in all my seven years of writing this newsletter, which is to type straight into the Substack interface. For some reason that I had never quite been able to articulate, this feels wrong to me. Thankfully, my co-host Nic thoughtfully articulated this point about benefit of having a work computer and an art computer during our conversation with Joe:
“There’s a distinction around the output, and what’s the intention with that output. I do photo editing and video editing. If I’m doing it on the device that I’m going to be distributing it from, like the phone or the iPad, I’m probably rushing. I’m probably thinking about the audience response, rather than the process and the work. Versus if I’m on my video editing computer, which is a little clunkier to share on social, I’m less likely to rush through and think about that dopamine hit that will come from the response. And I can actually be more in tune with the piece that I’m working on.”
It’s something that Cal Newport writes about in his book, “Deep Work,” and something that my writing teacher Heather Sellers used to say to us often.
When we’re creating art, we need to separate ourselves from the output. We need to embrace the process, however messy it may be. And we can’t do that when we’re drowning in distractions.
Joe’s thoughts about making art in today’s digital era:
“Making art in a vacuum is probably a problem, but if you’re so oversaturated with trends, comparing yourself and seeing so many other things being made, it’s probably harder to find your own voice. Seeing so much extra noise is probably hindering creativity more than it is enabling it.
There’s ego associated with it. If your work is so constantly tied with sharing it, some metric of success that is arbitrary and more than likely determined by an algorithm more so than the quality of the work.
I’m able to ask myself: Why am I making this? If I’m not happy making it for myself with no eyes on it, then maybe I didn’t want to be making it in the first place.”
For me, I have begun to grow more and more addicted to the external validation that Substack’s metrics provide. Like with social media, Substack offers many ways for your audience to engage with your “content,” and I have started to obsess over these numbers. I ask myself: Why don’t I have as many readers as this other writer? Why didn’t this post get as many likes as the other post? What can I do to get more eyes on my newsletter? How do I monetize this operation like other writers have? (I’m not the only one feeling the vibe shift around here.)
The reason I have been avoiding my writing desk is because it’s less attractive to work on projects that are nebulous and undefined, versus working on something that will give me immediate feedback and validation. An idea is a blob that requires solitude, time to marinate, and the exciting but sometimes dreadful process of going down a path to find that maybe it’s a dead-end.
As the saying goes, it’s about the journey and not the destination. Unfortunately, our digital world is all about the destination. And when you get there, you maybe be momentarily happy. But it’s not a satisfaction that can sustain your soul.
What’s your passion project? And how are you able to keep the creative process separate from the noise and external validation of social media?
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