I’ve got a show in Brighton next week! It’s being headlined by Jason out of Clearlake, who I interviewed here.

I’ve booked some clowns and written some songs about the end of the world, it’s going to be good.

Telling people about a thing is tricky nowadays, as far as the internet is concerned. Offline, the same old rules apply: word of mouth, friends of friends, and putting posters up all over town, mainly in record shops, vintage clothes shops, and cafes.

Online, things are distinctly weirder. Back in the early noughties, the internet still wasn’t really a thing for show promotion. There were a few specialist message boards and fan sites, but unless you were Belle and Sebastian it wasn’t really worth bothering with.

Instead, there were these things called listings magazines. Time Out was by far the most famous, but every city with a scene worth mentioning would have a few printed guides to what on earth was going on, and why you should care.

There were also local newspapers.

Facebook killed all of this. Even though it’s now a dying website, full of bots talking to boomers about an AI image of a child, as a decaying walled garden it and the other social media megaliths have largely replaced local news and events. This has had a profound impact on local democracy, but it is also a great impediment to local organising, art, and culture.

I haven’t been on Facebook for a dozen years, but Brighton is an unusually retro place in terms of social media. A lot of the local open mic and new material nights are listed on Facebook and Facebook only. It’s a strange and, in my view, unsustainable state of affairs.

And the local news and listings infrastructure is even worse. Those sites that exist are partially put together via large language models, and are peppers with the most awful pop-ups and other crappy adverts.

What’s worse is, having sacked so many journalists, there aren’t even any people to send press releases to. Instead, you are encouraged to write your own articles – genuinely. It’s the ultimate in outsourcing, and having grudgingly done this for one local news site, I feel pretty grubby.

The internet was never perfect, or even a net good. But the past few years seem to have rendered large sections of it almost entirely unusable. With the big boys like Google plotting far more AI and other auto generated bullshit to come, it feels like it might be time to turn the whole thing off at the mains and go for a walk instead.

Either that, or set up my own indie Brighton site…

[1] Today, one mod shop rejected the poster because the lineup wasn’t mod enough!