I’ve been very conscious, in the last couple of weeks, of the distinction between making things and circulating them.
The kinds of things that I mean are, of course, the kinds of things that I make myself. So I don’t mean widgets or washing machines or ice cream cones or garden gnomes – I mean books and articles and podcasts and videos.
I’ve been thinking about this partly because I’m always thinking about the kind of making I do, and about why we do it, about how it works, about what those kinds of makings do in the world. I’ve also been thinking about it as an extension of the reflections on social media that went into “Creating Through the Crisis #3.” And I’ve been thinking about it because I’ve been working on…well, I can’t really say yet, but let’s just say that I have been reflecting on a series of questions over the last couple of weeks related to the future circulation of a major piece of work that I’ll be able to say more about – and, indeed, probably won’t shut up about – starting in a few months.
The core of what I’ve been thinking about is a recognition – not a new one, but newly reinforced – that while those of us who want to do so have some minimal but real space to make things that are anti-capitalist or otherwise substantively opposed to the existing social order, our capacity to circulate what we make is much more limited.
The distinction between making and circulating is not always a sharp one, though sometimes it is. As I write this post, I am making. The act of publishing it on my site is also, I think, making. But if I were to post a link to it on social media, that would initiate the process of putting it in front of eyeballs, so it would count as circulating – though as I described in “Creating Through the Crisis #1,” for the moment I’m not making any effort to circulate these posts. Similarly, if I were to write a post or a thread directly on Facebook or Twitter or Bluesky, or film a video and post it to TikTok, the writing or filming would be an act of making, while publishing it would be both an act of making and an act of circulating, because those host platforms themselves automatically push their content out to people (in a highly uneven, algorithmically determined way). Making things that have some sort of offline reality – books or magazine articles, say – is less automated, so there are generally more people who are obviously involved in the process, as well as more observable steps. Writing the book is making. Editing the book is making. Printing the book is making. And there is all sorts of work that goes into marketing, promotion, and distribution, and all of that is circulating. Some of that work, of course, is also social media-based, which connects offline publishing to the same practices and networks touched on above.
The part of making that you do yourself – the melody you compose, the photograph you take on your phone, the words you write – faces no limits but those of your imagination, medium, and tools. Which is not the same as saying that it faces no limits whatsoever – all of us have been shaped by the social world that produced us, and while we can certainly innovate, we do so starting from the raw imaginative, cultural, and linguistic resources that surround us, not from a completely blank slate. That aside, though, as long as what we’re making stays sequestered in our imagination or our notebook or our drafts folder, we can make what we want.
The other side of making takes that work and turns it into some sort of finished object, physical or virtual, that other people can engage with. Sometimes, these two aspects of making happen simultaneously, like with a painting. Other times, they are distinct, but we are able to turn our making into a finished object with a single click, like I’m going to with this post. In both of those kinds of making, we don’t need to engage directly with anyone else as we do it. We don’t need approval. No one will edit us. No logic other than that of our own analyses, desires, and imagination need to be factored in.
For yet other kinds of making, though, turning our creation into a finished object requires collaboration with other people – often people socially organized into some sort of organization, like a book or magazine publisher, or a movie studio. This is most obviously true in instances resulting in a mass-produced object, like a traditionally published book, but it’s also true of lots of other non-self-published media outputs as well, including online publications. In these situations, in order to get published, our making has to be consistent with the mandate and the logic of the organization that we want to work with.
It almost always takes money for an organization to exist in an ongoing way. The need for money brings an organization into the vast web of relationships in our social world that are mediated through money. We are constantly fed the lie that relationships mediated through money are in some deep sense free and divorced from power, but of course lots of us recognize that money is actually one of the key ways that power operates in the world today. And that means that most organizations with any lasting existence and capacity to act in the world are either directly or indirectly subject to the discipline of the capitalist marketplace. This discipline takes a lot of different forms, sometimes brutally direct and at other times much more subtle, but it shapes what organizations can and will make.
That takes a pretty direct form in the case of for-profit private sector organizations. Public sector organizations can be somewhat isolated from market forces, though one aspect of the neoliberal era is that even when public sector entities are not privatized outright, they are often forced to be responsive to market forces as if they were in the private sector – and this includes organizations that do the kind of making I’m talking about, like public broadcasters. And not-for-profit organizations also can have a certain amount of autonomy from capitalist discipline, though the need to fundraise, win grants, and perhaps sell their products means they are still often subject to a modified disciplinary relationship with the market or with powerful institutions or individuals, which in turn shapes what they can publish. For specifically journalistic organizations, an additional factor in both the private and public sector are the set of historically contingent, socially produced norms and practices that have cohered around journalism as a profession – the exact impact of these norms and practices varies with context, in that sometimes they can be a basis for resisting other disciplinary pressures, whereas sometimes they are a way that such pressures function.
The fact that organizations that enable these kinds of making almost always face and enact disciplinary power that supports the status quo does not mean, however, that there is no space at all to make radical things. Sometimes, an opportunity to make money or a high level of social pressure from below opens up (usually limited and isolated, but sometimes quite meaningful) space in mainstream organizations – there were some pretty decent pieces about abolition in mainstream sources during the racial justice uprising of 2020, for instance. As well, it has almost always been possible for people with radical intentions to come together and create publications, publishers, and other organizations of making that do things in ways that are counter to the main currents of pressure from the status-quo. So you get grassroots media outlets that combine improved versions of journalistic norms and practices with a desire to tell stories pointing towards justice, you get independent book publishers that take on titles that that the Big Five would never, and so on. (Note, by the way, that this is not what is happening with right-wing pseudo-journalism – in that case, it’s not subverting money-mediated, status-quo-supporting power, but using (often poorly disguised) manifestations of that power to subvert the limited and imperfect but still sometimes important and useful safeguards on knowledge-making that can come with mainstream journalistic norms and practices.)
In the last 30 years, it has become easier to make many of the kinds of things I’m talking about here without having to deal with an organization. In more and more situations, not only the creative part of making but the act of turning that into a finished object that people are able to engage with can be accomplished by an individual seemingly acting on their own, without having to deal with all of the barriers and pressures of working through a formal organization. You can putter around on your laptop or your phone, make some sort of audio or video or textual something, click a button, and presto, it not only exists but is in a very real sense out in the world.
That is not nearly as liberating as it sounds, however. This is where the distinction between making and circulating is most stark.
It has always been harder to circulate things that challenge the status quo than it has been to make them in the first place, I think – even when it comes to making that happens in conjunction with organizations. This plays out in lots of different ways. Sometimes the work of actually distributing things, and definitely the work of marketing, promoting, and audience-building, require us to make use of networks of infrastructure that can only exist on a much larger scale than what is required for the basic making of, say, magazines or books. This means that such infrastructure is much more likely to be controlled by entities (states or corporations, usually) that are invested in the status quo. It also makes it much, much more difficult to envision how we might create counter-institutions that can do analogous work at the same scale.
There’s the illusion that the revolution of online making over the last 30 years has improved the scope for circulating as well. And, indeed, for awhile, things did actually improve. The internet emerged from military and then academic contexts, so it was never innocent, but even during the early stages of the mass engagement with the internet, there was lots of space to do things in lots of different ways. That included lots of ways in which content circulated outside of, or at least somewhat insulated from, the barriers to circulation that dominated the pre-internet era. It took capital awhile to begin encroaching on (enclosing) what some naive folks initially praised as the new digital commons, but it has most definitely happened. Over those decades, we’ve seen a process of capital figuring out how to make money online, and therefore how to impose capitalist logics on basically everything that happens online – this is the main basis of social media as a whole, and it is also the main reason for the “enshittification” of social media and pretty much every other online resource. (It’s also connected to the greater scope for fine-grained state interference than existed even a decade ago.) And what that means is that while online architectures of circulation work differently than their offline counterparts – though, honestly, they’re pretty integrated, at this point – both are completely in thrall to the status-quo workings of power and the various ways that shapes and disciplines what happens in the world. We think we’re circumventing the problem because we can make a thing, click a button to push it out in the world, and get a handful of likes on Facebook or TikTok. But with the partial exception of TikTok, platforms that used to give you a shot at building and then accessing a substantial audience just by consistently making good stuff mostly no longer do. And beyond that general suppression of the capacity for autonomous audience-building, you can find plenty of examples of targeted suppression of material that owners and managers of for-profit social media platforms dislike for political reasons.
All of which means that it is relatively easy to make stuff, but it is much harder to connect what we make with people who might want to see it…even though our online environments give us the illusion that it is easier than ever before.