My newest zine, Creativity at the Margins, uses mushrooms as an analogy to argue for the value of human creativity in toxic social media ecosystems.

I’m always seeing “do what you love” offered as advice to people who are struggling to make a name for themselves in a creative profession, and I think this is valid. At the same time,

it bothers me that this advice always seems to come from people who already have a substantial following. It’s easy to say “do what you love” when what you love happens to coincide with the interests of thousands of other people.

Still, I’m all for doing what you love, and I say this as someone with relatively few followers on social media. What I want to advocate for is the value of doing what you love even when you’re not popular, and even when it doesn’t seem like your work is successful according to quantitative metrics of evaluation.

Because of social media enshittification and Gen-AI slop, it’s become difficult to measure value by numerical metrics, and I think this is an excellent time to be imperfect and strange. You never know what sort of mycelial connections might form in the substrate of fallen giants.

If you’re interested, I put a few paper copies of this zine on Etsy, and you can download a free digital copy (optimized for phone screens) from Itch.io

🌿 https://digitalterrarium.itch.io/creativity-zine
🌿 https://www.etsy.com/listing/4542820261/creativity-at-the-margins-zine