Pour The Coffee

I Don’t Want to Be the Product: Returning to the Tiny Internet

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I Thought I Had a Consistency Problem

I'm going to unload a little more today.

I have been wrestling with whether or not to shut Patreon down. Since Christmas 2025, all I’ve done there is bleed paid subscribers. I was growing steadily and absolutely thrilled about it. I went from 0 to 500 dollars monthly last year, which isn’t the most amount of money, but it was exciting to feel like I was on my way to making it as a self-employed numerologist working online, and that small subscription income made a big difference in my life.

Then December happened, and of course, what happens two weeks before Christmas — layoffs. Big layoffs. (Here comes the sidequest tangent within the larger tangent) I don’t understand why companies do this. Why wait until two weeks before the biggest holiday with the most financial and emotional attachments to cut your staffing by half? Why??? Why can’t you do it in the summer when people won’t freeze in their houses if they can’t pay the heating bill, while they’re looking for work? (Sidequest tangent done)

Every one of the exit interviews in my audience analytics dashboard said the same thing: “My financial situation has changed.” I was bumped down to $300 monthly. My rationalization was, “That’s still better’n a punch in the box.” I searched Google to see what other content creators were doing, and the answer was always: deliver more content at more value. OK. I was already putting out videos and at least two posts each week on numerology and Tarot, so what the hell was I going to do for more?

Now for some TMI. Gird your loins accordingly….

ChatGPT and Gemini had been my crutches earlier in 2025 when I was hemorrhaging with the Perimenopausal Period From Hell for nearly 8 weeks in May and June when my thyroid decided to go on the fritz again. So, I began to lean on AI. I created a summer-long series about the court cards of Tarot, then the planetary rulers of master numbers, then shadow work and the cards, then the four main phases of alchemy over the winter; I started exploring the history of numerology. I even entertained doing political readings to attract paid subscribers because that seems to be what all the other Patreon and Substack folks with lots of paid subscribers are doing, even though living as an immigrant in the US, with its current administration who forgets that the First Amendment exists specifically to both talk about and criticize the government, makes that somewhat dangerous for me. The numbers continued to dwindle. I was giving my formerly paid subscribers free subscriptions to the paid content because some of them were genuinely distressed to leave. They liked my writing. Well, it was not my writing anymore, not if I was leaning on AI to create that much content. I want to take it all down and rewrite it, all of it, but it’s so. damned. much.

At any rate, the camel’s back broke when I hit $140/month and said NO FUCKING MORE. At this point, Patreon had begun to compete directly with Substack, and I had the capacity to run not only a glorified blog with paid subscription level and a podcast, but also turn it into a newsletter, make short public posts called Quips, map a domain, and combine feeds so that everything is visible, just like at Substack. They changed the algorithm, too, just like Substack. My free subscribers grew from about 300 to now close to 500 very quickly. I had to lock up my chat rooms because spammers promoting iPhones and other such crapulence, like nasty sexual remarks, were dominating comments. I also got a bunch of followers that I think are about as checked out as they could possibly be. The old way, the slower way, the “You have got to check this person out, I think you’d like their work", is gone, and now even at Patreon, folks are just being fed a steady discovery feed where they’re following and scrolling and mindlessly consuming.

The promise of the personal-brand era

The great thing about social media is that the barrier to discovery was taken away. Anyone with a smartphone can become an internet celebrity. We no longer need an agent, publisher, television network, or any sort of powerful connection to get in front of people. This aspect of the internet genuinely opened doors for a lot of people because a knowledgeable and entertaining person could establish a presence, attract followers, and build a livelihood directly.

The premise was so simple: you are the product. Build the audience around yourself. Become recognizable. Let people in, let them see your life, let them know you — and then monetize that attention.

But the blessing is also the curse. Eventually, the business begins to require the person as its renewable resource, and you can’t clone yourself. There’s only so much of you that people can get before there’s no more to give. You need to go to sleep; you need to go out with your friends. The people closest to you probably don’t want their moments with you to be filmed and filtered, then uploaded and hashtagged for public consumption. They just want to be with you, no monetization required.

Sidequest tangent: in 2013 when I was living in Winnipeg, new neighbours bought the house beside us. They were a quiet young family with three little girls. The mother was trying to be Pinterest famous. She used to routinely stage photoshoots with her children out in the backyard, making them pile into an old hollowed-out tree trunk wearing woollen acorn caps, or stretch out on their bellies in the leaves with their chins resting on their hands while wearing matching maple leaf mittens and sweaters. I would hear the sound of small voices in protest drift over the top of the privacy fence as they were staged and posed again and again. Every time those children went outside to play in the yard, it was to be photographed and uploaded. I think about those little girls now and then. Sidequest tangent over.

But the business model as is requires access to you. Access to your personality is the product. The parasocial relationship is what sells things and keeps the machine going. Let me say that I am not rejecting personalities. We all have one. I enjoy people with opinions, particularly when they can express themselves in a memorable way. We all love a good storyteller. What I am rejecting is the idea that a creator must continually perform intimacy, availability, and relevance to keep the business alive.

The cult of personality

Social media has created a landscape in which visibility, popularity, and authority are conflated. Expertise became something that had to be continually performed through constant delivery — “Post three times each day/At least five days each week/At 10 and 2 when people are on their coffee breaks” — polished branding (no more just you and your phone, now you need to buy premium editing tools), and repeated claims of expertise. More followers and more views do not mean that someone is better versed on the subject matter they are sharing; I mean, how many recipes or hacks have you tried because you saw someone promoting them online and they were absolute garbage?

The successful creator must remain:

You have to be, all at once, the PR person, the mascot, the product, the entertainment, and the customer service team. I want my personality to be present in my work, but I do not want it to have to carry the weight of my work, nor do I want to create the illusion of an intimate relationship with hundreds or thousands of people.

I hope people realize that I am critiquing the model, not the people within it. For some of us out there, this is great. They love being centre stage. But the fall, for the ones who love it and build up and have hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers, when they become disgustingly, messily, imperfectly human, that fall can be steep.

When I shared my vulnerability with my audience, and told them (the paid tier) what was going on with my health, and that I was working hard but things would be late, I lost a chunk of them. The exit interviews were exquisite: “This is not what I’m paying for”, “I expected more content”, “You need to make more content” — I just need folks here at bearblog to know that before I was using AI, I had actually written a good EIGHTY PAGES on the number three and its planetary ruler, Jupiter and that was a tiny fraction of what I was sharing with people. Not enough content, my arse. I built an entire occult library of every fucking little thing you’d ever want to know about numbers.

But this is what happens when we become the product. No one is actually looking through the library to read the information. They show up for what is new, and if you don’t keep churning out more, then you’re not worth knowing.

Faceless AI accounts and synthetic authority

The cult of personality people are panicking. Accounts are popping up all over social media full of cosmetically correct people passing on gems of life experience 24/7, except they’re not people. They’re AI-generated video characters selling “Fit and fabulous in my 50s” or doctors recommending supplements, political pundits with easily digestible hot takes — pick a niche, and they’re in it. They’re doing the thing that the humans couldn’t do; they’re available constantly for everyone, and they’re always perfect. They’re not going to get sick, they won’t need surgery, they won’t take time off because they’re pregnant, and they won’t feel compelled to monetize those moments so that they don’t lose the algorithm, followers, or money for being human.

My discussion of this is not “AI is false, and humans are authentic”, just so we’re on the same page. Human beings have been manufacturing artificial personas online for years now. What the influx of faceless accounts is doing is showing just how much of online authority has always been the performance, not the substance. I don’t care if you want to use AI. I know a lot of creators who use it intentionally, and it has helped them to create and share online. Some are physically disabled, some have learning disabilities, some are neurodivergent — I’m not getting on a soapbox and shitting on AI. Most of us are using it unknowingly, anyway, in spellcheckers, calendar organizers, photo editors, and a hundred other ways, I’m sure.

I’m not against technology. I’m against this miserable egregore that we keep feeding with unlimited output disguised as expertise.

Authority leaves evidence

Actual authority isn’t a tone of voice or catchphrase. It’s not a rose-beige aesthetic. It develops through study, experience, practice, original thoughts that get shared, methods that are tested, and the results/history of that work. Personality can help us to understand and remember the work, but it shouldn’t become the work.

The return of the tiny internet

MySpace is poised to make a comeback in its original form. Friendster is here again. I just put it on my phone. Spoiler alert: the app still glitches. I’m emailing back and forth with customer service to clear up some little oubliés. They’re back because people are fed up.

The tiny internet offers a different relationship between people, their work, and the people who want that work. Instead of turning us into automatons and dancing marionnettes, we are allowed to create a place, a space to put our virtual feet up, a place for our stuff. I was worried when I started blogging again that I would be screaming into the void at Bearblog, and it’s been the exact opposite of what I’ve encountered at “creator sites”. My pages are getting picked up by search engines I’ve never heard of. I’m being read by hundreds of people all over the world. I’ve had more wonderful emails from readers; many more than I ever get comments. And webrings! I found webrings again! I had an Anne Shirley moment of joy when I saw webring links on the bottom of someone’s pages.

I’ve got nearly 500 subscribers on Patreon, almost 4000 followers on TikTok, about 2000 on Instagram, 200ish on Substack, 400ish on Threads, and I think 300 or so on BlueSky, and my combined engagement on those platforms doesn’t come close to the amount of invisible activity that goes on here. I had briefly coded a Giscus comments section in my blog footer and then took it away because it suddenly occurred to me, “What if this comments section spells the end of these thoughtful emails I get?”

On social media, I had to manufacture proof of life every day to remain viable. On the tiny internet, my work can remain alive while I am somewhere else. Like maybe on vacation, getting groceries, or being ill.

I think it’s time to wrap this up because if you’re still reading, you might need to stretch and pee.

I’m not advocating a withdrawal from public life online or to hide my personality — I actually think my personality is more obvious here than it ever was on social media. And please stick with me, as I stumble through these posts to get my own written voice back.

I just want to change the relationship between my online presence and my livelihood. I want to keep writing books that people can own, courses with substance that I have greater control over, tools like the library and charting webapp I’ve been quietly building, becoming part of an online community that feels a lot more stable, and most of all, teaching in the real world. Living online like it’s the 90s again gives me time to actually go out and be with people who are interested in all these things right here in the community.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. As you were!

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