Fuck Social Media

And Fuck My Inability To Set Healthy Boundaries

Public post

Hey there, dear Patreon members, friends…and maybe people who aren’t my friends but are connected to me all the same.

This month’s article is coming in the middle of the month because I’ve been editing it every week for the last 4 months. I’m amazed it is getting published at all! The 4 month mark isn’t the big picture though—the narrative has been in the works since I was a teenager. Thanks for your patience as doing my best takes time. I look forward to sharing more quality posts for free here.

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The exponential evolution of our internet-connected world is leaving billions whiplashed. The already performative culture of America is further exaggerated by social media, where even our children are now proto-professionals cultivating their own digital identities. As someone in his early 30s, I am in the only American generation to know what it was like to grow up without and then with the internet, and therefore in a unique position to offer insight on this emotional landscape. As a professional artist, online business owner, and streamer, the discussion is something I don’t have the luxury of avoiding.

We could talk about the nuance of social media business, the nitty gritty of which platforms should get how much energy to optimize your profits. But unless you’re one of my mentees, you probably don’t follow me for that. And while I’ve almost accrued financial stability through my unconventional profession and lifestyle, my credentials, and my heart, are not in business optimization. Follow 1FW for actionable advice on making money with your personal art, or watch some Gary-Vee to suspend your disbelief in Capitalism for a bit.

My purpose here is to share the parts I don’t like about being online, the parts I don’t like about myself, and to share what I’m doing in the face of online platforms that straight-up reward my being unhealthy or making bad choices. By having an identity more online than offline, my well-being and survival rest on dynamically adjusting to social media. If yours does too, I pray this writing helps you in some way.

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Ø. What Changed in 16 years?

2003, I’m 15, and I’m very, very much on deviantArt. Getting a Daily Deviation was the highest artistic achievement I could think of. On both here and my personal Freewebs site, I obsessively checked my page views and other stats in hopes of foreseeing notoriety. For my comment signatures, I chose codified evangelical Christian messages to turn my online platforms into places of ministry, signaling to others that I was not [openly] interested in things like pornography. Across both websites, I must have had a total of 80 followers, likely around 16k page views. 1k of the views were probably my own obsessive refreshes, but the rest I worked diligently to cultivate.

2019, I’m 31, and I’m very, very much on Twitter and elsewhere. While I’m grateful people continue to follow my online presences for their own reasons, If I had the ability to hide how many people were following me, as well as how many of the ones that I follow are following me back, I would hide all that in a heartbeat. I just checked, and I now have a total of 26k followers across all of my platforms. Not 26k views, 26k followers. I'm emphasizing that for my 8th grade self.

The greatest irony of accruing a greater and more faithful fanbase: it really started once I decided to focus on being true to myself rather than trying so damn hard to be liked by everyone at once. You can pretend getting attention online isn’t that important, but when you’re online as part of trying to survive in your economy, attention becomes way more than a little puff of air into your ego. However, a fanbase stable-enough to guarantee small amounts of engagement on any one post is hardly the end of my problems. 

I. What counts as a “Big Following”?

Is 26,000 a big number for an online following?

That’s a complicated question. But I think it does have a roundabout answer.

It would certainly be big for 8th grade Jonathan. It’s a modest but solid figure for being successful only on Instagram, and it’s a nice beginning stage for a Youtube following. It’s socially formidable for Twitter and downright intimidating for Medium, its a crapshoot if not meaningless for deviantArt and Facebook, and for Fur Affinity (basically a broken furry deviantArt forum disguised as an art website from 2005), it’s likely financially viable. With 26k followers on Patreon, I would probably be a company shareholder and a secretary would be transcribing this for me in some posh studio. Because of the immediacy of consuming art, versus music or writing, I expect the average writer/composer/musician/DJ to have to work harder and for longer than any visual artist to build a comparable following. That’s why, for example, 26k is intimidating on Medium and not so much on Youtube.

“Jonathan,” you may ask, “across all your art sites, do you think a collective 26k followers counts as big?”

My oversimplified answer is “probably not”, or even better, “Big enough for what, exactly?” If you think of it as a seed or a snowball, it is big enough to reap immediate rewards and still become bigger. 26k means you have some kind of a niche and are building momentum. I’ll need to continue planting, tending, and cultivating, but to meet my social media goals I am certainly facing in the right direction. I may want my online following to be much bigger, but with my current growth I’ve interacted with many more jerks (both well-meaning and otherwise). As my numbers increase, I’ll continue to attract even more negative attention.

Is there a name for this law of human behavior? “More money more problems” isn’t exactly it.

Anyway, I want the kind of following where I may be invited as a GoH at more furry conventions, since my themes on the furry fandom most furries haven’t even been exposed to. I also want standing outside of strictly furry spaces, possibly to be invited to do TED Talks on furry, especially my stance on how powerful and worthy of study the furry fandom is. I want every tweet I make on civil rights issues to go viral. That’s not a 26k follower idea. That’s more like… a million? Nah, maybe 300k? 300k sounds like a safe number for a mostly-artist. Hundreds of thousands I’ll settle on for now.

Even without setting deliberate goals for your online numbers or your online relationships, there are certain things you read just now that may have made you cringe or perk up. Some social outcomes feel better to you than others. If you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to take a moment now to consider what counts as “big-enough” for your audience, both in numbers and in quality. 

And that understanding of your goals becomes a matter of these questions:

1) What kind of people are you attracting?

2) Why are those people specifically attracted to you?

3) What is your personal standard of success?

II. Always Teaching

My partner Sasha and I give a talk on stereotypes in the furry fandom. To start, we ask audience members who do not know us to make assumptions based on our physical appearance. We then introduce slides of two furry characters (again, only for those who don’t recognize the designs) and ask for more stereotypes of who may own these characters. Once revealed that we are the character owners, we offer a third and final request for what one can assume about this relationship between character and owner. Like all things furry, these correlations happen outside the fandom, too.

What kind of person chooses this avatar and cover image? What do you expect from the designs and the text bio? Do you know what the emoji mean? What does the pinned tweet tell us about the profile owner's priorities?

The precursor to this part of our presentation was a thread I made on an exclusive nerdy forum back in 2013. Based on avatars, usernames, forum signatures, and how they chose to respond to the topic, I’d try to make assumptions about each one of them. Unless they were all lying to me, I was far more correct than incorrect for most of my guesses. I credit this to my empathy: imagining the years of a person’s life leading up to choosing names and profile pictures, and seeing what attitudes they broadcast.

This digital fortune cookie writing isn’t a particularly special skill. You do it all the time, you know, like when you get bad vibes from someone’s account. This uncomfortable rando is sending more info than you may have the language to articulate, but all the same you are left with a bad vibe. Just remember the “all” here includes your limited perspective. This instinct we have isn’t foolproof, so don’t be surprised to find yourself on either end of a misunderstanding.

As an American and online business owner and professional personality, my idea of online success is intrinsically tied to my lack of boundaries between my business and personal life. It may be messy, but it’s my mess. You know how artists can’t help but deconstruct every videogame and film they experience? The same thing happens with me and online presences: I’m always summarizing galleries, personal pages, twitch accounts, and more. Any time I linger on a screen name or art piece, a montage from an indie film on their potential life experiences runs through my head. If a screen name in my twitch chat leaves me with aforementioned bad vibes, I have an obligation to google it and see what comes up. If I find something bad, I let that inform how I should engage with them.

III. You want to fuck Chet

Here’s an example of a someone online that has a brand, even without being a business. And while I made up this profile from the top of my head—and I never met a furry named “Chet” that I recall—he’s based on a true story spread across hundreds of real people:

Chet is a white cis-male gay-leaning bisexual furry living on the West Coast. He’s mid-to-late twenties and reasonably cute/handsome. His fursona is a canine. He works as a *********, which is stressful, but he can’t complain because he loves helping people. Chet likes sharing encouraging messages aimed at no one in particular, because he thinks the world could use some more positivity. Chet documents occasional outdoor adventures as well as smiling restaurant visits. He tweets when he’s feeling like getting a coffee, especially on Monday morning. Probably plays multiplayer online video games or tabletop games. He worked hard to afford his fursuit before waiting 15 months for a popular maker to get to his commission, so he also shares photos of himself suiting. Despite his good-natured photos that never go past flirty, he has an 18+ profile linked in his bio sharing his playtime. Chet’s profile and communication style in general—and this is the most important part— is chill at all costs. He doesn’t like drama or politics. Chet does not want to tweet about these things unless it affects him directly. Chet is not here to judge. Instead, he just wishes people could grow up and get along.

My guess is that Chet was either betrayed by assholes or was asshole-ing about himself. (Let’s say both. It was probably a little of both.) He probably decided to scale back from a world that he found disappointing, in favor of the pursuit of happiness. He’s a “furry lifestyler”, someone who prefers socializing and interfacing almost exclusively within the confines of furry culture (and on occasion kink scenes) to maximize this satisfaction in the face of an otherwise mundane existence. Chet doesn’t trust the world with his weirdness, because he has good reason to be afraid of that kind of vulnerability.

If a big chunk of Chet’s life disappointed him before, and he got to replace it with something friendly, fun and organic like furry-lifestyling, I think that’s a great place for him to start. I wish more people had access to that, actually, so long as someone doesn’t stay there forever.

Whether or not he realizes it no longer matters. I reiterate: Chet has a brand.

You may follow Chet on Twitter because:

- Chet is your friend.

- You want Chet to be your friend.

- You want Chet to like you. 

- You want to fuck Chet.

- You love fursuits, fursuiting, and furries.

- You two have the same fursona species/design/fursuit maker.

- You two are in the same furry professional group.

- Chet just makes you smile. He’s good doggo (:

- You want to be more like Chet.

And that’s not necessarily bad.

If you followed Chet for a combination of those reasons, how often could he talk about vulnerability, politics, the environment, or other weighty issues, before it started making you uncomfortable? If he never posted anything serious, that wasn’t why you or anyone else followed him in the first place. I think practically all of Chet’s followers would be fine with an occasional message on self-care, maybe even something anti-suicide. Anything deeper or more frequent jeopardizes his following by being “off-brand”.

But what’s Chet to do? Serious and vulnerable discussions may be appreciated on rare occasion, but too much and it just feels like he’s venting. Chet doesn’t want to be one of those depressed jerks who mopes around at the party and leaches energy from everyone. And if his life isn’t that bad, and things are pretty okay for him right now, why make things out to be worse than they are?

Chet has some great questions there. While there are answers, none of them are simple. Chet will experience this line of thought as an occasional passing concern, but some real shit will need to go down before he seriously considers if something in his online presence needs to change. If he does reach out for help, the majority of his immediate online interactions will likely take the shape of platitudes and hug stickers on Telegram. When people haven’t leaned into discomfort and articulated their journeys before, that’s about the best you can hope for. Chet didn’t know it, but this was the response he was cultivating this whole time. 

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Author’s note

Regardless of Chet’s feelings on this matter, I expect I’ve already personally insulted many people. By even suggesting that Chet’s life is worthy of improving—if Chet decides that he wants it to improve—I’ve offered something that a decent chunk of furries et al will perceive as a judgmental attack. As much as I may have love for those I’ve just hurt, I have to accept that they aren’t my demographic. If this is you, Reader, I’m genuinely sorry to have caused you pain with my words, and hope you’ll read on to find something worthwhile or forgive me if you find that’s not possible.

IV. Parasocial Interaction, Can I Stop it?

In Ian Danskin’s videos, he talks exclusively on sociopolitical trends. Most recently, he’s been unpacking the Alt-Right Pipeline, young adults in nerdy fandoms slowly and unconsciously adopting the talking points of White Supremacists. Popular creatives, not just fans, can be radicalized too: some who make edgy jokes under the banner of “free speech” are bolstered by those who find the jokes funny, which distances discerning fans and attracts destructive fans until the baseline of the creative’s output is radical. “When you invite wolves and sheep, only wolves show up.”

If Chet is popular (and especially if he’s popufur) his online interactions will foster something called Parasocial Relationships. PSRs are in effect during a lack of balance between a fan and a figure with a fanbase. Commonly, this is the term for any engagement with a persona (or fursona!) that is treated like a reciprocal relationship, despite a lack of mutual interaction. The PSR is at its worst when a fan absorbs character traits from an idolized figure automatically and indiscriminately. More commonly, it’s championing someone without viewing them as human.

The statistical likelihood is that most of the readers of this post will be consumers and not creators. But as an artists’ artist, I’m pointing this section directly at creators, and especially creators with sizable followings.

Creators, you will always be more influential than you know, and further, you are a starting point for Parasocial Relationships. This PSR starts with you whether you like it or not. You don’t need a fanbase of exclusively children to run into PSRs or for tangible consequences to reach you. Whether you are sharing an opinion or sharing art you did only for yourself, your fanbase is absorbing your tastes in different ways, and you are affecting every consumer to varying degree. Their opinion on you has an indeterminate affect, even down to your income or what is more likely to entertain said following. As the creator (I’ll assume without an agent), you’re the only person that can or should dictate what and how you produce your work.

With this in mind, popular creators, how big does a potential negative have to be for you to change what you do?

V. You, a Cartoon Character

Every social media platform has different purposes, demographics, and general vibes. As discussed in my previous posts, the precedent you set in your online presence is—privilege notwithstanding—up to you.

Without some status of celebrity or history of faithful followers, you will likely never be read as both a funposter and an emotionally complex person on the same platform. In other words, if you’re a mainly a shitposter on Twitter, the general public will have to go outside your immediate feed to begin understanding you.

Posting furry in-jokes, #Exvangelical testimony, and my own art on Twitter has gained minor momentum. I can retweet important articles about civil rights issues that go largely ignored. However I cannot go full-on horny on main without making even myself uncomfortable. My branding is eclectic but has rules.

I need to be true to myself, and in a nebulous space like Twitter, that can be hard to do, because there are certain images and ideas that I should not place on the feeds of all my followers. @jonathanvair on Twitter may have a rare artistic nude, or censored mature work in context of an article, but that’s not the same as publishing drawn porn of animal people, posting nudes, or RT’ing/liking other fetish work, and knowing that content is going to be seen by everyone from my professors to family members.

One of my mutuals is a very sweet elementary school teacher I know through Sasha’s family. I wouldn’t call her sheltered, but she is kind of person to say, “Oh dear,” if she heard something crass. Before sending out a more aggressive tweet, I first picture subjecting her to it. I try not to tweet something so extreme that she feels obligated to unfollow me, but I also trust her to handle serious discussions. In other words, if I’m going to make an elementary school teacher feel weird while browsing her account in public, it had better be worth it!

This idea dovetails into an earlier post on what we owe (or don’t) to those who don’t understand or respect us. I mention this school teacher mutual because she is a quality person to me. I don’t expect her to automatically be on board with everything I write, and I sometimes feel bad for indirectly throwing extreme content her way if she hasn’t yet muted me, but I’m definitely invested in her life. If she does unfollow me, I have to accept that my feelings will be hurt, but I’m already doing my best to balance who I am in the face of many people skimming my thoughts.

Twitter is terrible for many reasons, but one thing it’s good at is being multifaceted. I can build job connections with art directors, but I can also get attacked by immature young adults. I can make inside jokes with furry porn artists, and I can also tweet to priests and pastors about Biblical exegesis. It’s a machine that is absolutely destructive, but it carries an element of hope. Since I’m resolved to be my messily eclectic self, all I can do is accept that my fanbase is self-curating. Only people who tolerate my quirks stick around. And if I do something wrong-enough that they feel obligated to remove themselves, I hope that they trust me enough to say something. 

VI. AD Doesn’t Just Stand For “Art Director”

The obvious solution to this online identity crisis would seem to be my separating professional from personal interactions online. That’s fair. I already have a business page on Facebook that is completely different from my personal page, after all.

The only problem being that I already have a private Twitter account. In the last two years it’s been leaked at least twice. One of the only online safe spaces I had imploded.

In the Twittersphere, or at least on Furry Twitter, AD stands for “After Dark”. These accounts are for anything from venting to nudes to esoteric interests one doesn’t trust to the public. Often, they are locked, meaning you have to request direct access from the account owner before you are admitted any entry. My AD was born from my earliest ventures into mature artwork and writing, publishing the parts of myself that were always there but always hidden. The locked and controlled space gave me practice in trusting others in a new way. Initially, this was shared with my Black Hare Patreon tier, where I felt anyone endorsing my journey monetarily would be the kind of people I could trust. And I think, for the most part, that I was right to extend that trust.

The first person to leak my tweets was a repeat client I had really enjoyed working with for years. But he was angry with me after I turned down his commission proposal. He had broadcasted my AD at a party, and one of the friends at the party posted it to one of those edgy chan-type sites, where another edgy friend let me know about it. Once I realized the leaker was this client, he lied about being involved before finally admitting that it was because of him, but he wouldn’t say who the leaker is. I told him that I don’t tolerate cowards, but maybe I could buy him a drink at our next shared convention. He met my criteria for blocking. A couple months ago, someone else leaked my private account, and one of my friends knew who it was but felt telling me would betray the trust of another friend that first saw the leak.

I live without regrets, mostly. But one of the few negative things I wished I had never experienced was going through a list of trusted people and, one by one, asking, “Could this person betray my trust and then lie to me about it?” It didn’t get easier the second time it happened. I didn’t have anything new to learn from that happening to me both times, just that it sucked.

After two leaks, I treat that account as semi-public, and have a much tinier AD with a much tinier base, exclusively of mutuals and locked accounts. If that one gets leaked I don’t know what it’ll mean to me. I can safely say that I’m tired of feeling betrayed by those I choose to trust. I've been living as if everything I've ever done or said could be leaked at any moment, which makes it easier for me to operate and also, sadly, more difficult to ever imagine true privacy. Perhaps that's something I will never have. Perhaps it's something I never should have.

VII. The Science Of Trying To Be Likable

For this section, I revisited the analytics of Twitter, and found this feature that put me on edge.
I did not plan having both of these features in the same screen capture, but it really is a perfect illustration of my relationship to Twitter.

On the right, we have a business element, my “Top Media Tweet". Success, in this case, is referring to Impressions. “Impressions” refers to people who had the image appear on their screens, including people who absentmindedly scrolled by while waiting for an oil change or attending a funeral. “Engagement” is the next step. That’s reading the tweet, actually clicking on it to make sure you have access to all readable text and/or an uncropped image. As @jonathanvair is also a business account, this is actually invaluable information that doesn’t cost me that much emotionally. It’s a bit disheartening to pour your soul out into art and then have Twitter ignore it, but once you learn the basics of Social Media engagement, optimizing allows you to work smarter and not harder. Seeing immediate fruits of that labor is actually pretty cool, even if it’s a guaranteed uphill battle. 

Now back to the image. On the left, we have this Dokuta Wolf fellow, serving as a social element. I was already familiar with this account thanks to my AD. He’s probably a nice-enough person, and I find some of his photos to be pretty hot. On this page, however, it’s his follower count, not his creations, that Twitter has highlighted to me. He is on this page because Twitter assumes I want to know who the most “popular” person is that followed me this week. It’s a shame, because the most important parts of Dokuta’s being have nothing to do with his follower count.

If influential people do decide to follow me, it offers potentially useful insight into the demographics of my bizarre feed. While I appreciate the tools that summarize this, it’s not a reminder I need. I think about it all too much. As a professional personality and creative, entering into the space of social media sometimes produces anxiety. I’ve learned that this is not a thing I can reliably turn off. For the hyper-empath, this anxiety is a feature and not a bug. Other people with different relationships to their careers and their fellow man can probably exist in that space without the same baggage as me. And while I’m better at not spiraling from seeing a single loved one unfollow me, my empathy is just too extreme to cleanly compartmentalize and tap-dance around suffering. Even without the anxiety, I don’t like being bred to care more about people because of their follower count in a place that is ambiguously social and professional.

VII. What do we owe others online?

Just like Chet, if you have an active social media presence, you played a part in forming it. Material will only make it into the crop if it is relevant to your aims. This normally comes in the form of inviting validation: material seen as funny and/or engaging, or cool and/or sexy. Your soccer mom and grandma are cultivating Facebook profiles too, even when that’s only pics of cats or grandkids. As older populations, I’d assume they’re better equipped for leaving social media behind than Millennials. Most of them did not need the internet to have a uniting dimension of relevance and resource. In contrast, my being raised on the internet made me feel like I had a chance at being understood, celebrated, and not being alone. I didn’t have to settle for fitting into the shapes of whatever small Midwestern town I was born into. In adolescence, my truest self often took shape online and not offline. More immediate still, certain medical and accessibility needs can only be met through the internet.

In an online world, where so much of our energy seems to be about figuring out shit for ourselves, how easy it is to forget that we’re always sharing ourselves whenever we interact! Imagine you have a following of thousands of people. To those who have a huge following, especially if you’re already creating sexy art or engaging writing, anything you endorse or broadcast will be established as neutral at worst. Should we hold everyone accountable to making good choices? Yes. Should we make unhealthy things more attractive and accessible? Nah.

If I make evil attractive and desirable, go ahead and de-platform me. I have no interest in using my platform to condition people to think edginess or cynicism is a worthwhile identity. I won’t bark at any one person directly, but I think it’s a real shame that popular creators of all mediums and cultures don’t use their platforms to bring people together in positive ways. A conversation I had at a room party at the last MFF included someone trying to use their furry presence to have important discussions. They have a popular furry friend who wants to provide more than entertainment, but they are rightly concerned of losing followers once shifting to more important topics. Chet has a brand.

So what’s more important—maximizing followers by being lowest-common-denominator, or enacting deep changes by speaking to the core of what someone needs? I think the moral imperative here is pretty obvious. The world doesn’t need more fun. The world doesn’t need more escapism. The world needs you (especially you, readers with sizable followers) to share what you need, and to be curious about the needs of others.

VIII. “Why did you unfollow me? I thought we were friends.”

A List Of Why I’ve Probably Been Unfollowed  

I’ve had artists and game composers, family and dear friends that I looked up to follow me on Social media, then unfollow me months later. As I understand it, based on my own reasons for unfollowing others, here are reasons why a mutual could unfollow me:

1) I made them uncomfortable with something I wrote

2) Something they heard about me outside of Twitter made them uncomfortable with me

3) My feed is no longer relevant to their interests, especially through excess retweets. (I’ll add “forgetting who I am” here, because I can follow certain people out of personal investment and then forget their names/avatars later, ultimately unfollowing when the work isn’t relevant to my interests.)

4) A like or comment from me inadvertently pushed unwanted content onto their feed.

5) Someone I follow / someone who follows me makes them feel unsafe

6) They are trying to separate themselves from anything furry-related as a safety precaution

7) An error on the backend of Twitter (or an accidental click) triggered an unfollow without their realizing it.  

I saved #6 and #7 for last, because that’s probably the least painful reason for me to be unfollowed by someone I love and respect, yet those two reasons are instances that caused me painful anxieties for weeks on end before starting that awkward conversation with each friend,

“I noticed that you weren’t following me anymore on Twitter. You don’t owe me a follow on Twitter, but I just wanted to check in to make sure that I didn’t hurt or offend you, because I love and respect you so much. Anything I need to know about?”

If someone feels unsafe with furry connections in their feed, that’s understandable. And #7 may sound like a cop-out, but I choose to trust my friends are not lying to me.

When I see a tweet for the first time in a while from a mutual, I click into their profile in hopes of catching up with them. As I wait for the profile to load, the list pops up in my head, cycling through each potential at lightning speed. I brace myself for the grey “Follows You” rectangle to disappear as cached info updates on my phone. If the mutual has unfollowed me, I immediately come up with a narrative to justify it: I cross reference their feed with mine, then consider which reason on my unfollow list is most likely. If their feed’s content doesn’t thrill me anymore, I unfollow them to ease the pain of a now one-sided online relationship on Twitter. If we were never close or are growing apart on a personal level, but their content is still highly relevant to my interests, it’s easier for me to keep following without feeling bad.

But if they still follow many of my other mutuals… and if I still really like them and their work, and they have unfollowed me? It hurts me every time.

Is my work shitty now?

Did I get too crazy? Too immature?

Is someone lying about me behind my back?

Or even worse, did I wrong someone whom is now denying me the opportunity to rectify the situation by staying silent?

When my best isn’t enough to leave someone feeling loved and supported, and I learn they don’t like me anymore but don’t have the courage to tell me about it, God does it hurt. At least when people block me, it means they’re probably doing me a favour, but it still feels first like I’ve made a huge mistake.

The greatest irony of this, I’m sure a few readers have already anticipated, is that there’s a 100% chance I’ve put other people in this position by unfollowing friends for any of the reasons I listed above. Just yesterday I unfollowed an account after having no clue who they are or why I followed them in the first place. What if I was important to that person? What if we had an important interaction that I’ve since forgotten about? This must have happened countless times to friends I’ve made at cons. I have fun talking to them, we follow each other, then in months I completely forget who an account belongs to and why I followed them. Oh well. *click*

Back to analytics, if someone who follows me has a huge follower count while following a small number of accounts, and they follow me, it feels like I’m doing something right. And these human beings become entrenched into the part of my brain that grasps business, marketing, and yes, clout. In person, and at conventions, those with celebrity status has little sway over me. On a platform where the name comes first and follower/following count is second, I have no choice but to think about it. And because my career is weird, even by furry’s admittedly weird standards, I’m quite open about how I need a bigger following or I won’t be able to grow. The furry fandom is my favourite sphere to work right now, but my messages need to be shared with much larger demographics. Part of why my Twitter reach has improved is because a few people with +20k followers occasionally like my work enough to like or RT it. I just hope I get to build relationships with those followers so I’m not only considering them a social media asset. That’s usually up to how much they can safely share with me.

I have plenty of friends who started with the same follower numbers as me, and by now their following is quadruple what mine is. We need to be honest with ourselves, there are reasons for that. Most of them consistently produce high-quality art. A few gain followers far faster because it’s porn, or because it’s consistently in the wide appeal of cute/cool. Those examples don’t describe my feed, and that’s okay. I can’t gain popularity by shifting momentum in a direction I don’t want. Momentum isn’t something you can turn off.

Something I mentioned from the more popular artists out there: the majority of their tweets are usually art. There’s less deviation in the branding. Maybe a reliable plan for success is to stick to the art and shut up about your opinions, at least until someone respects you. Now that I think of it, I do have a friend whose work I appreciate almost as much as her tweets not related to art.

You can check out the entire thread here. 

On a technical level, Caraid’s art is beyond what one usually finds in the furry fandom. It’s more what we’d expect from fantastical realism and illustration. What makes Caraid such a great person to follow, rather than just an artist, is that she is constructive, offering neither platitude nor asspat. She offers encouragement on the realm of being an artist or taking care of yourself while doing justice to the pain inherent in being true to yourself. As outlined in that linked thread, this has a cost. To be constructive to thousands requires an inhuman amount of sensitivity, and it’s impossible that you’ll be all things to all people. I respect Caraid deeply for taking that risk, knowing people will inevitably misrepresent who she is.

Caraid’s case is unusual. I’m not used to people using their platforms to be substantial in both art and rhetoric. But sure enough, she does it, and that gives me hope. Sometimes I feel like I’m too unusual to gain traction anywhere. I’m amazed every time my esoteric interests manage to pluck someone’s heartstrings. Most people on Twitter, on the street, and in a furry con’s Dealer’s Den, will not care about my work. That can drive you crazy if you aren’t careful. If you want to grow a following without feeling hopeless, my first piece of advice is to avoid checking your number of followers. Just keep sharing what matters most to you.

IX. Internet… has changed

Seven years ago I received a Daily Deviation for a portrait commission that only took me about an hour and fifteen minutes, from start to finish. I was a bit embarrassed that this particular image was chosen over the many stronger pieces in my gallery, but this was the Anthro Art category. Like Anime, Anthro was a category known for its… how do I say this politely… Daily Deviations in Anthro Art were typically unremarkable. Maybe I just killed the magic for myself after years, but my quick and experimental commission was not worth any award. My 8th grade self may have been excited by it, though, so I guess that’s the point?

I’ll be doing a future post on all the ways my old art ambitions no longer serve me, but first, I must write on this anticlimactic conclusion to the 8th grade dream of a Daily Deviation. If that left me so wanting, what should my current mark of success be? 

I’d say the greatest reward I could now receive is hearing that my work restored hope to someone who was too deep into darkness to ever expect a break. I’ve stopped people from committing suicide because I chose to share my brokenness in both art and writing. Giving hope is better than giving someone a distraction. It’s better than doing something just to be sexy or cool. Saving someone’s life is objectively more important to me than working in a AAA game studio, on my favourite musician’s album art, or being the most popular artist on any one website.

For success as a professional, I identify that as having freedom over my own schedule, and a constant balance between creating easy art and going outside of myself to do really difficult things. No need to schedule those modes. My emotions normally tell me when it’s time to change gears. 

Is it a hot take if I say that saving human lives with art should be more important to you, too, my reader, than doing a cool or sexy thing? It doesn’t feel right to thrust that on you or anyone else. I can say in confidence, however, that this path is the most Jonathan path I could take. There is absolutely value in the sexy, the cool, and the fun! …But seeing what I’ve seen, if I focus on fulfilling wants instead of needs, I’d be a steak knife being held by the blade and cutting with the handle.
 

Even my sexually explicit work is about the drive behind it, about what it costs me to be sexual from my context. Currently I’m riding this wave, with peaks of doing vulnerable and esoteric fetish work, and valleys of commissions and writing on navigating queerphobia. I publish most of that for free on this Patreon , by the way. 

X. The Pure Dad Boi, The Garfield of Our Generation

If you’re on Furry Twitter at the beginning of the week, there’s something I can almost guarantee you’ll see in a scrolling session:

“Don’t talk to him until he’s had his morning coffee” under art of a grumpy muscular furry (who is not cute, he says). This will be tweeted on a Monday morning, and by the end of Tuesday it will have +2k retweets. Sometimes seeing this cliché gaining traction takes the wind out of my sails. I’m not mad at any one artist or fan for being part of it. It’s just hard having to fight for a place in this twisted social media landscape governed not only by ever-changing algorithms, but by introspection and vulnerability not being as sexy as a grumpy pure dad wolf boyfriend.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not an old man yelling at a cloud of furry porn, here. I have plenty of friends who are porn artists, and though it hasn’t been updated in a while, my porn folder features plenty of their works. Hell, sometimes I’m a porn artist! I also advocate for the importance of sex-positivity—especially from artists afraid to create it—to make sure dialogue on sex and porn are expanded and not diminished. My appointments with my cherished mentees often includes supporting the porn they want to create, so long as their porn is an exploration of their intentions.

Now this Pure Dad Boi? It’s a meme. It’s pop music. It’s a snack food. It taps into the vein of plenty of furry’s most popular ideas. Those ideas are fun, accessible, and they deserve wide appeal for scratching itches that so many of us have. They can often provide breaks from an otherwise boring, painful, or unsexy existence. This is particularly valuable when treated as an exercise in absorbing confidence. If you feel more confident or capable because of a really hot or cool picture, try to deconstruct that feeling. Get to the core of what’s hot to you and why. The rewards for learning about yourself are vast. Don’t just settle for an eye emoji when you can have the whole eggplant.

XI. Social Media Kills Me, And I Need It To Survive

Twitter, and most social media, is not designed for someone like me. Hell, it’s not designed for anyone. It’s designed to use us, to sell advertising, not to improve the quality of our lives.

Twitter, like most of social media, is designed for people to feel stimulation and then develop reliance. And what gets the most clicks in our Society™? Things that make you feel entertained, turned on, or angry. If it isn’t doing at least one of those things, your tweet isn’t going to do well. As an artist, as a business person, as a professional Tweet-er, you are not going to do well. As a person trying to feel something relational, you are not going to do well.

“Angry people click more” governs a whole slew of advertising. Extremes top your social media feeds for that reason, with no regard for the consequences. Hundreds of traumatic goings-on can reach our eyes in a few minutes of scrolling on a feed. Some of us start our mornings with that weight on our shoulders, so routine that we don’t even notice it anymore. Just because you’re used to it, it doesn’t mean it’s not real, and it doesn’t mean it’s not absolutely terrible.

Thank goodness, talking about algorithms is becoming increasingly common. Something you’ll always hear in the discussion is deviation towards extremes. Running content leads to marathons, which lead to Ultramarathons. A toddler on Youtube looking at roller coaster videos on autoplay can, in the span of 10 videos, be seated in front of roller coaster deaths. Republican talking points lead to the Alt-Right. And yes, these are all real examples.

In case you didn’t know, Twitter doesn’t have blanket bans on white supremacy because too many US Republican politicians would get banned by the same parameters. This is happening because, between honest-to-goodness fascists and people who mean well but unintentionally retweet said fascists, the space is very slim. Now it’s easier than ever to spread destructive content instantly without even understanding, to millions. You can’t expect corporations to protect the people that hate speech will target, until it becomes about making money.

—

Due to the bizarre quality of an online existence, I’ve had multiple people assume that I absolutely hated their guts, that I was a monster, or that I was using social media to self-aggrandize.

- Earlier this year, I had one of my tweets about Patreon fees go a bit viral. All I said was that a much larger percentage of your donations go to $2 tiers than $1 due to processing fees. For tweeting this and reaching over 1K retweets, like clockwork I was accused of being anti-poor people, being a bot account/brand allegiant for Patreon, and shaming people for wanting to be accessible and supportive to their friends. None of that was true, but it didn’t matter. Some people accused me of that and then expounded on how bad they felt on their private feeds.

- A family member and a friend both said I came off as conceited because I shared photos of people coming to one of my talks. I mentioned how grateful I was that a room could be filled with eager attendees. If someone shows me support or a good thing happens to me, I shouldn’t be shy of sharing it, otherwise the internet will never know it happened. This is part of my survival as a professional artist/writer/whatever the hell I am. If my work is valuable, and others treat it like it’s valuable, I need to treat that seriously and not be afraid of it.

“If good things happened to me or have been accomplished by me, is there a way to share that at all without appearing to be self-aggrandizing?” They both didn’t have an answer. Their calcified opinions of my character didn’t have room for that kind of nuance. That’s how memory works. It an act of creation, not clean referencing.

- One person called me a monster for assuming several things that I hadn’t even done, all of which could have been cleared up by just asking me, rather than bottling up resentment for years. They made that choice to view me that way, and there was absolutely nothing I could have done to stop it. Showing them care and compassion just hurt us both further, because they were too cynical to extend any trust me. After I tried to help, they attacked my character again in a professional context.

- One previous stream regular from years ago blocked me and accused me of kink-shaming them, because an artist who didn’t like one of their commissions had my art as their avatar. They remembered my art but not my screen name, superimposing someone else’s statement over my identity. We were consistently kind and respectful to each other in my streams, and I even looked forward to catching up with them at future streams. But that’s not going to happen now, because of a mistake they aren’t even aware of.

- Another artist in the anti-Jonathan thread with the stream regular (yes, there was a thread) said they hated the sketchbook commission I did, but never told me in person. I would have worked to rectify the situation, but I was never given the chance. That’s actually a part of why I don’t do traditional commissions anymore.

It feels good to be against something. It builds relationships, to hate a person together. There are many more stories like this. Most of them have no resolution. It’s easier for our brains to click into a definitive solution than consider that something may be complicated or misremembered. I chose to believe the ones who need to be in my life find their resolution with me eventually. The people who act otherwise are being anything from stressed-out to prideful, and some of them are even cowards. I don’t miss cowards in my friends’ circles, I try to tell myself.

The idea of people taking me out of context hurts me so deeply, but it’s like a rotten smell I can’t dig out of my memory. When the fears mount, I compulsively search any spelling variant of “jonathanvair” on Twitter to see if someone is trying to discretely shit on me. I take my searches to Google, too. Being reminded of how often it happens from my own research is self-harm. It costs me every time, so why do it? It’s likely to validate my paranoia, “I knew this was happening the whole time!” This kind of self-harm is about maintaining control, about coming to terms with a negative feeling you think you can’t shrug. Welcoming those anxieties, in my case, was welcoming the devil I know. This is not unlike the Jonathan of ten years ago, desensitizing himself to extreme content, that the world may not shock him as badly later on.

Part of me thinks, despite knowing better, that doing my absolute best will keep these things from happening again, but that’s not true. I can legitimately care about every single person I ever come into contact with, and that still won’t stop people from thinking I’m a designated negative force.

Let me repeat that. Your best is not enough to stop people from hating you.

And no, I don’t want you to get used to it. I want you rest with that suffering when it happens, because it’s so much better than the alternative: being too cynical to let anyone in. Don’t be too guarded to trust people. Don’t be too scared to be vulnerable. No, it’s not okay that life works this way. No, it’s not okay that Twitter and Facebook, by design, will make this happen more easily, and that you’re probably required to use them if you want to make it as a creative today. I know it hurts, but don’t give into the cynicism. For what it’s worth, I’m hurting here with you, and as you’ll read next, I’m still reaping the benefits of being vulnerable in a system that punishes it.

XII. An Unexpected Ending

For the longest time, I didn’t know how I wanted to end this. I like providing readers with something practical, perhaps a list of useful apps for time management, or some online counseling resources. When things feel hopelessly stressful, what could my ideal be? What should an empathetic online creator strive for? 

I’ve resolved to make it normal, to do something that’s probably good for me, even if it’ll make me feel uncomfortable.

I chose to message a friend after I felt some weird energy happened between us. A sequence of tweets showed me that I was possibly muted by them, so I messaged them on Telegram to see if I had hurt them in any way or owed them any apologies. They said they didn’t recall anything specific, but that there was something I shared between Twitter and Patreon that made them feel a sinister intent from me a few months back. They unfollowed me on all platforms and muted me on Twitter for their well-being. They admitted it was possibly an issue of their perception, and they didn’t recall specifics for me to check. They were hoping the mute would be quiet and subtle, and apologized for causing me stress. The tone was good—they’ve always been reasonable and balanced in online interactions with me. Twitter, I get. But Patreon, the space that’s designated for me to pour my heart out and help others? That really surprised me. They thanked me for reaching out, and said they trusted my intentions enough to un-mute me, and I thanked them for their time. Maybe we’ll get to do more than a hi at the next convention, which would be nice considering all the mutual friends we have that I still enjoy interacting with.

That interaction left me feeling spiritually raw, freshly cleaned of filth while experiencing the burn of sanitization. In that state of heightened pulse from overcoming my fears, I wondered what else I could do. I thought of another message I had been putting off for over 15 months.

After making a Twitter thread on personal accountability in Fall of 2018, one follower attacked my character without actually being constructive, even after I encouraged his criticisms. A friend I hadn’t talked to as much liked the comment that was attacking my character, and in seeing that one heart icon and attached Twitter profile I felt like I couldn’t trust someone I knew for several years. So I decided, 15 months later, to finally message him.

“Hey, I thought I should tell you something really petty and sad that I did on my part.—“

I mentioned how I unfollowed him everywhere, and how I held onto those negative feelings for so long.

It continued,

“The act of liking a tweet is so passive, that I felt stupid for wanting to reach out, and felt stupid for NOT reaching out. […] But the irony is that you've always been straight with me whenever we've talked. I have no reason to believe you wouldn't have told me your feelings. I never gave you the chance to do that because I was upset and hurt. Back then, I felt like someone who could have liked that tweet probably wasn't my friend or worth my time. Now, I just hate that I could have had that same conversation in person and neither you nor [the person attacking my character] would have left me feeling the same way.

Fucking Twitter, man.”

His response also granted me closure. He didn’t agree with parts of my initial thread, and he saw now how that person was really unkind to me. He merely liked the tweet to say he didn’t agree with me, not to attack me as a person. He never knew I felt this badly. He did say that he’d been put off by things I’ve said in the past, and that I’m a charismatic leader type who needs to be careful with what he says, stressing how there are consequences to being influential. I didn’t take the opportunity to defend myself. I was just grateful for his time. I know if he read any of my recent work or heard any of my recent talks, he’d be treated to many disclaimers about personal accountability. It is my whole schtick nowadays, trying to get everyone to be more conscientious of themselves and their impacts.

I also wanted to say, without this article being worked on weekly for the last few months, and without a friend hearing me out while I was being uncharacteristically jumpy (thanks again, Norr), I wouldn’t have sent that message. I’m so lucky to have friends who call me out on my bullshit. 

That behind me, I messaged another friend about a weird interaction that had been bugging me since last July. Resolution reached. We’re good, we always were. This was about a friend who directly came to me in the past to say I was hurting them when I hadn’t realized it. They especially deserved a chance.

Aside from the biggest unwritten message I’ve been putting off for over two years, I think I’m out of people to message. 

…And I just sent a text to the person I wanted to message for over two years. We did a phone call the next day. It went well.

Okay, now I’m definitely out of difficult messages I knew I needed to eventually send.

This practice doesn’t refer to the people who leave me feeling unsafe to talk to. For some people, I am that person to be avoided, and I have to respect that limit. It also doesn’t apply to the people who haven’t reciprocated my efforts to catch up, because there’s any number of negativity keeping them from talking to me.

This is the absolute best way I can channel my pain towards my broken relationships into something healthy. It scares me to do stuff like this, but I look at it this way: would I rather face fears of someone’s response for a few minutes or hours, or would I rather live the rest of my life not giving someone a chance? Platforms like Twitter are designed to engineer negative interactions like the ones that kept me from messaging these people sooner. In some cases, it was the nature of Twitter that pushed people away from me when I didn’t even notice, and it pushed me away from others.

This is frustration is bound to be cyclical, don’t I know it, and I still won’t leave social media. However, I now have a plan.

Before the Winter Solstice, I’ll take the opportunity to reach out to every friend who I feel some weird energy between, providing I feel it’s my place to do the reaching.

I’ll redirect the negative energy I’ve accumulated from my time on the internet into something terrifying, painful, and cleansing. None of that hurt is going to follow me into the year 2020. Life is too short and precious.

I want to be stronger with every year, and if I’m going to ask you to be your best, my reader, I’d better damn well put in the leg work for myself.

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If you liked this content,  my Black Hare tier of my Patreon is where I publish my more private and sexual pieces first (and sometimes exclusively), all paired with artist statements. It's less than one latte a week, so you'll definitely get more than you paid for. The lowest donation tier is only 6¢ pennies a day. But any donation on my Patreon helps me do more work like this, so please offer what you can afford if these themes are important to you. If you can't afford but still want to follow posts like the one you just read, that's completely free.

You can also download BEOKAY: The Dark Art of Self Therapy for examples of my trauma repurposed into writing and artwork making a positive difference in the world. And if you can't afford the price tag but could use the support, you're morally obligated to message me for a free download code.

Thanks for reading, my friends.

Love,

-J