Why Ghost.io, Why Now

I luckily came across the musician and civil rights activist Nina Simone around 15 or 16 years old. For me, a white privileged kid from Marin County, California, who at that point had probably only come across the likes of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young, Nina was a gift I feel to this day lucky to have been shown by my dear old friend Emily every time I hear or see her perform. Even though Nina did not write many of her own songs, it was her piano playing and her genius when performing strengthened by her presence and execution on-stage that was not only entertainment but, a righteous musical call to humanist empowerment for Black people - especially Black women - and really, all marginalized people, that I don't think I fully understood or was able to comprehend. Again, I grew up in Marin County, where the only bias I remember experiencing was maybe snobbery, not racism.

One performance that has always stuck out to me (and truly fucks me up every time I watch it) is Ms. Simone at the Montreux Jazz festival in 1976. The breakdown from The Guardian is a great overview of where she was at during that point in her life and contextualizes one song that always stands out to me, though Backlash Blues and others are also beyond all artistic comprehension. But during Simone's rendition of "Stars/Feelings," a mix of Janis Ian's "Stars" and Morris Albert's "Feelings," there was something so deep, real and raw in her performance, so filled with anger, frustration, and rage that, seeing it now, along with the quote a few paragraphs down, it all weirdly ties into why I decided to move from Substack to Ghost.io.

Though this move of mine looks and feels minuscule in the grand crumbling stage that is America right now and the social media platforms at present (as well as alongside Nina Simone's performance), the move, despite most of my followers being family and people I know, it still feels necessary...a little middle finger from the crowd to the Goliath that stands before us everyday, 24/7, with no intention of ever leaving or stopping. Harkening really to what Bo Burnham once said, "They are coming for every second of your life."

Connecting my move to Ghost.io and Ms. Simone feels a little blasphemous (and hopefully not offensive to anyone), yet, when you watch her perform "Stars/Feelings" right at the very beginning, she stops her intro - much like many are doing across platforms like X, Meta, IG, etc. - just as fast as she had begun. The audience, at this point, are totally unsure what's about to happen next. The moment is real, human and in a way, wholly uncontrolled and chaotic much like real-life is. Yet, in those few split seconds, I saw what command looked like; I saw and felt what artistic power was. I witnessed again after watching the performance the other day, many many years later, what a human being looked like when they said no to the constructs of the system that was designed to control them.

Then, she spoke.

"I'm not making fun of the man..." she said, "...(but) I do not believe the conditions that produce a situation that demanded a song like that!" Only to then pause and demand from the audience, "Well come on...clap...what's wrong with you?"

Then and only then did she go back into her music.

That leads me to the quote below, one that I had never come across before and really, the inspiration of this post as her words immediately connected the myriad of troublesome dots I feel we are facing as a global culture today...all of us very much in the grips of these omnipresent oligarchal powers

This quote (FYI, I tried my best to find the origin of the quote but came up with no concrete citation to any specific interview, writing, or recording by Nina Simone where she may have said this), whether directly told by her or not expresses what many Americans know about (and many like President Trump and others want to scrub and whitewash from the hands of time) the countries history of the killing and enslavement of African people, the Indigenous American genocide, and outright theft of 99% of their land. There is no denying this and trying to argue semantics or justify it presently via pseudo-colonist tactics should be muted, stopped, and corrected like this bozos posts below.

That said, Ms. Simone's words immediately connected me to the very real, very present reality we (to note...in no way am I suggesting that digital and social media exploitation/control is comparable to, or on par with, the horrors experienced by those who have been taken advantage of throughout American history, up to the present day)
experience everyday of our lives via the digital commodification of social media platforms, be it Meta/Instagram/X/TikTok/YouTube for social/professional use cases or Linkedin/Peerlist for career stuff or platforms like UpWork. We, as a culture and for many of us, have to be on these platforms, to survive. And seeing they are controlled by some of the richest, most powerful people in the world that only get richer the more you and millions of other people use them, the more one feels they are, in a sense, trapped.

Like Prometheus inverted, we were made to believe we, as a network or "global community," as Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg would probably say, stole fire (a symbol of knowledge and progress) from the gods together and gave it to humanity, liberating, in a way, ourselves from the old tired constructs of sticking a shoe string into two cans and then talking through them. As you know and can probably feel, that's not what happened.

Instead, the "fire" (social media platforms and digital tools) was all but stumbled upon, clumsily designed and concocted, only to then, when said "creators" realized they could make billions (with the help of the US government and military which may have created the first iteration of the internet during the Vietnam War according to author Yasha Levine, author of his book, "Surveillance Valley," gave it away for free. Nothing in this world is free though which lead all users, myself and everyone I know included, only to be controlled by a new class of gods: tech billionaires.

And that brings us to today: a vicious cocktail of a hastily growing collective autocracy, dressed up - but undressing nonetheless - as democracy, with its salted, bloodied rim barely holding on. Tragically, these social networks, instead of becoming gifts or even weapons to resist times like these, have devolved and revealed the metaphorical lie of "heaven" built by tech billionaires on the land of your time, your privacy, and your life designed to convince you it's paradise when in fact, it's hell.

Which is why, with Substack owned and operated by a questionable CEO, along with funding from a variety of investors from venture capital firms, angel investors, and individuals like Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Omeed Malik whose investment fund 1789 Capital (backed Tucker Carlson's new media venture as well as has direct ties to Donald Trump Jr. and the Trump Family), I felt inclined to step away and go with Ghost.io. And to be honest, it wasn't that hard, especially reading things like, "...(we have) a mission to create the best open source tools for independent journalists and writers across the world," and, "Our legal constitution ensures that the company can never be bought or sold, and one hundred percent of our revenue is reinvested into the product and the community."

To me, Ghost.io and everything that the fediverse is trying to be feels like the solution to the ever-evolving problem of constriction, surveillance, and exploitation that the biggest social media platforms are obligated to embrace to survive in the burdensome capitalist system we find ourselves in. And yes, I fault them for this. There is always a choice to do it better which is what I believe we're seeing with platforms like BlueSky, Mastodon, and PixelFeed. I'm not naive enough to believe these platforms won't get bought and sold and gutted like the rest but, for right now at least, they appear to be the resistance to everything else I've personally grown up on and only been betrayed/exploited by.

As a small-time creator and writer who genuinely wants to connect with like-minded people, writing essays, short stories, excerpts from my novel, and poetry without feeding into the content machine that enriches billionaires or provides training data for AI, I want to value, fight for, and contribute to something good for once. This feeling was why I first started writing at all - full of curiosity, opportunity, and possibility - which I hope continues and spreads.