Captcha culture

I’ve been meaning to write more posts to fulfill the promises of paywalled content for subscribers, but I have been inhibited by various doubts and misgivings. (What should differentiate paid from free content? Should it be “better”? Should it be more “personal”? Wouldn’t receiving more emails from me give more inducement to unsubscribe altogether? Where do I get off charging people in the first place?) But I was inspired to stop delaying by the ethos of compulsive poster Matt Farley, who was profiled by Brett Martin in the most recent New York Times Magazine. Farley’s philosophy is encapsulated well in the pull quote pictured above:

If you reject your own ideas, then the part of the brain that comes up with ideas is going to stop. You just do it and do it and do it, and you sort it out later.

As Facebook’s data scientists might say, I’ve been prone to too much self-censorship. Rather than sort out what paid posts are for, I should just start writing them and see what happens. And in this post I will write some more about Matt Farley.

As Martin’s profile details, Farley has posted thousands of songs to Spotify and earns a decent income from them, buoyed by his most popular tracks, “Poop in My Fingernails” and “I Need a Lot of Toilet Paper to Clean the Poop in My Butt.” This seems like Scharpling and Wurster’s “toilet rock explosion” bit come to life, but toilet rock is only a fraction of Farley’s oeuvre. He also has songs about celebrities, food, towns, holidays, girl’s names, and many other topics that somebody might search for, inadvertently or not, on Spotify. I can’t say I listened to many of these songs, but the ones I linked to in the Times piece reminded me of Tim and Eric sketches crossed with Van Morrison’s contractual obligation album.