What isn’t Medium?
A response to the The Atlantic on the grey area between is and isn’t
When I began expending effort on contributing to Medium, I frankly wondered why I was doing something for nothing. What is this point? Will anyone actually read this? Does anyone care? After ascending to Editor’s Picks more than once and with over 5,000 views in the last two weeks, I’ve experienced a sort of punch-drunk euphoria from a combination of agonizing self-induced slavery writing for free and a certain sense of accomplishment from watching a bar graph transform into something reminiscent of the Manhattan skyline.
The internet is a numbers game. As much as none of us like to admit it, anyone who is someone in the new economy of technology and media is simply a numbers chaser— almost sexually aroused by bulging databases and curvacious trend lines, they experience a sort rabid eroticism from seeing a number with more than six zeros. I, on the other hand, am a very cheap date. For me, a hundred views on a post is a milestone. Medium, you see, is what you make of it. It’s a reflection of all of the efforts and interactions of the people that define it.
In the meat space, I didn’t have the opportunity to share my self-important ideas with anyone. I gave the double birds of “fuck you” and “eat a bag of dicks” to my old life wasting away crunching numbers for car dealerships and auto-repair because I was feeling intellectually and emotionally unfulfilled. On Medium, however, you don’t need to be popular to be popular. On a good day, I may have had three or four brief human interactions unmotivated by money. For those of us relegated to disconnected lives, social media can be overwhelming when you have little more than 20 people on your Facebook who you actually speak to. If the internet were personified, it would be that menacing popular girl from high school who secretly has some really sick fetishes.
As I’ve sat waiting for someone to buy the amalgamation of pearl-colored metal and barely function machinery I claim in a Craigslist ad to be an automobile, I’ve done a fair amount of introspection about moving to the city where I will more than likely end up destitute and homeless. How does one make it in fields with such enormous roadblocks to entry? In the new economy, doing is more important than being especially if you don’t have any connections past the cesspool that’s Florida. I’ve had, albeit one-sided, 5,071 conversations totaling 24,087 minutes of considerably wasted time with individuals ranging from some of the smartest people on the planet to nobodies like me.
For me, Medium is somewhere between an intimate conversation with a few friends and standing on a soap box preaching to strangers. Medium is a place to learn; it’s far from a university but better than the community colleges none of us will admit we attended. Medium is a place full of smart people saying dumb things. Likewise, there’s a collection of absolutely unqualified people penning some of the most absolutely brilliant pieces I’ve ever read.
I am a hack— I’ll admit to this. I am not a total nobody, anymore, but I’m not popular either. And that’s okay because I’m somewhere in the middle between big and small— medium if you will.
