Free clown

This whole circus at unstory.eu has been running for over three months.

I had a website before. Maybe five people read it.

This shit is read by maybe 500.

It changes nothing.

There is nothing to sell here. No service, no product, no subscription, no ideology, no data, no audience to convert into money.

So what exactly am I doing?

Playing a clown for free.

There are practically two ways to exist online.

You extract something from other people, or other people extract something from you.

Money. Data. Attention. Influence. Status. Customers. Votes. Subscribers. Whatever.

If you are extracting something, your output eventually becomes performance. You don't necessarily say what you think, what you experienced, or what happened. You say what performs.

You write the shit that gets clicks, that gets shared, that keeps your audience. You write the shit that doesn't piss off the people who pay you.

In exchange, you get something back. Money is the cleanest version of the transaction. At least everyone knows what is happening.

The other version is more pathetic.

You produce content for free.

You write about products, companies, platforms, ideologies, politics, technology, culture, your breakfast, your cat, your feelings, your fucking journey.

You spend hours manufacturing little pieces of public existence.

Someone else owns the platform, gets the revenue, gets data, audience, the network effect.

And you get a little notification saying that somebody liked your post.

Congratulations. You have been paid in a colored number.

The unpaid writer is an unpaid intern for the attention economy.

People like to pretend they are doing it for connection.

I spent the last three months reading a lot of personal writing. Daily posts, blogs, personal essays, whatever people publish because apparently having thoughts privately is no longer sufficient.

I looked for something there.

There was nothing.

People say they like writing.

Maybe they do.

But the moment you hit "publish", the activity changes.

Writing privately is one thing.

Publishing is a performance.

You know somebody may read it. You know somebody may judge it. You know someone may respond. You know what kind of person you appear to be.

The imaginary audience enters the room. You may pretend it doesn't matter. People are remarkably good at pretending things don't matter immediately after doing them precisely because they matter.

People also say they want connection. Then someone sends them an email and they don't answer. Someone leaves a comment and they delete it. Someone actually tries to have a conversation and they don't have the time.

Hundreds of followers, thousands of followers, constant interaction. And no actual connection.

It is a substitute for connection. It looks vaguely similar from a distance.

The same thing happens with political and moral writing.

Someone spends years publishing manifestos on Mastodon or Bluesky. Hundreds or thousands of followers. People nod. Some argue. Someone gets angry. Someone reposts it with a comment.

The writer is convinced they are participating in something important. That they are doing something.

Maybe they are. But then what?

The person who is actually extracting money from the system is sitting on X promoting an AI-generated dashboard and checking his bank account.

He is not necessarily a villain.

He needs food and shelter too.

It is simply more comfortable to write about capitalism on a keyboard than to work a twelve-hour night shift in a warehouse.

The irony is that the critic and the thing being criticized can exist inside exactly the same machine.

One produces ideology. The other produces money.

The machine doesn't particularly care which one you are.

The free critic can even become useful to the person he hates.

He generates attention. Attention generates audience. Audience generates money.

The protest becomes another content category.

The system is wonderfully efficient at turning opposition into fuel.

This is why online content is mostly either marketing and propaganda or food for marketing and propaganda.

The distinction is often just who gets paid.

Some people at least get money for being clowns.

That makes the transaction honest enough. They perform. Somebody pays them.

Whatever nonsense comes out of their mouth is balanced by some amount of money entering their bank account.

But being a free clown is different.

There is something humiliating about producing endless public output while receiving nothing except the psychological reward of being seen.

You voluntarily enter the dopamine casino because sitting alone with your own mind is apparently worse.

You get followers instead of friends.

Engagement instead of conversation.

Audience instead of people.

Visibility instead of existence.

Then you complain that the internet has become shallow.

You are the internet.

I am too. This website included.

There are only two intellectually honest options once the illusion becomes obvious.

The first is to play it coldly. Treat words as code. Find the transaction. Write what performs. Exploit the herd. Turn attention into money, customers, influence, or whatever resource you want.

At least then the clown gets paid.

The second is to walk away. Stop publishing. Stop feeding the machine. Stop trying to manufacture an audience. Stop pretending that strangers on a platform are a community. Turn the computer off.

There is no third option where you publish endlessly into an attention economy while remaining completely outside its incentives.

You can tell yourself there is. Humans are very talented at this particular activity.

Maybe writing is valuable. Maybe publishing is meaningful. Maybe people genuinely connect through the internet.

Maybe.

I spent three months looking. I didn't find anything.

And 500 people reading this instead of five doesn't change the conclusion.

It only means the circus got a slightly bigger tent.