Which films were better than the book?

From today’s trending Twitter hashtag, #TheFilmwasBetter.

I have to admit that in most cases, I like books better than movies. But there are at least a few films in which the Hollywood creation was more entertaining than the source material:

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

This teen classic of 1982 was based on a nonfiction undercover exposé of teen life at a San Diego area high school.

I’m not sure if that original book is even in print anymore. But the Hollywood version (which was considerably embellished, of course), is still popular….for a nearly 40-year-old movie about teenagers, that is.

View Fast Times at Ridgemont High on Amazon!

True Grit

I wouldn’t exactly call Charles Portis’s 1968 novel, True Grit bad, but I prefer the film adaptations. True Grit has been made into a movie twice. The most recent film version, starring Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon, is the better of the two.

Here are a few more examples in which the Hollywood version of the book was better (or just as good):

Little House on the Prairie

Game of Thrones

Deliverance

Cloud Atlas

Hey, while you’re here.…Check out my free online serial, The Consultant. This is the web serial that everyone’s talking about….the story of an ordinary American trapped in North Korea. (And best of all, you can read it for FREE…no sign-up required, no strings attached!)

The Consultant

YouTube and digital sharecropping

The Verge reports that with YouTube’s newest algorithms, independent creators are greatly disadvantaged over large corporate brands:

YouTube creators need to get millions more views than late-night TV shows in order to appear in YouTube’s Trending section, according to a study conducted by a YouTube channel popular among creators. The Trending section appears on YouTube’s homepage and can potentially direct thousands of views to a video, but YouTube seems to make it far harder for individuals to be featured than for large brands.
Using data scrapped from 40,000 videos, the study found that creators, like Logan Paul, need to reach about 11 million views on a video before it hits the Trending section. Comparatively, segments from TV shows like The Tonight Show only need a couple hundred thousand views.

Small YouTube creators and their fans built YouTube from nothing. But free video hosting is one of the most low-margin activities there is–without advertising bucks.

For a while, YouTube/Google execs seemed to honestly believe that they could build a viable, long-term business model based on “long-tail” ad revenues from thousands of small creators.

That dream ended for good in 2017 and 2018, when a variety of political controversies and publicity stunts (the jackass who filmed dead bodies in Japan’s “suicide woods” comes to mind) made small channels anathema for paying advertisers. From the advertisers’ perspective, there was simply too much risk involved.

So YouTube pivoted. They demonetized small- and medium-sized channels, and tightened the criteria for acquiring monetization in the future. Although YouTube would never admit it, part of the motive was to disincentivize small creators, whose behavior is difficult to monitor.

And now, YouTube has overtly changed its algorithms to favor big corporate brands.

This is the danger of digital sharecropping–building your creative enterprise on someone else’s platform. I understand that video makers face special challenges in this regard; but it is never a good idea to spend much time making content for social media sites that you don’t own and control.

This is why I more or less shuttered my YouTube and Twitter accounts. My Facebook account is a shell, too. I only use these sites for posting links. And I have no intention of wasting any time on Reddit.

There is nothing wrong with using Facebook to keep in touch with your high school classmates. If you’re a creator, though, never build your platform on real estate that you don’t own.

Luk Thep: Chapter 6

“Sure,” Jane said. There was no point in denying this, no point in feigning ignorance. For generations, Thailand had had a reputation as the chief fleshpot of Asia. Prostitution of the most blatant, open kind was widely tolerated here; and the economics of the situation had long made Thailand’s red-light districts a bargain for the pleasure-seeking Western male.

Even in the corporate realm, where talk of such subject matter would ordinarily be the ultimate taboo, there were whispers and innuendos about Thailand. Jane had noticed that some of the male engineers at TRX had shown a suspicious level of interest in visiting the Thai branch. This might have been nothing more than a coincidence. But well, as they said: circumstantial evidence…

“Things are so free and easy here,” Khajee went on. “So many women available. So many options for men. It’s hard to find a good man in Thailand.”

“Hard to find a good man in America,” Jane replied, by way of commiseration. 

Of course, she had found a good man, hadn’t she? Jane thought of David Haley, the man she had been seeing. Her boyfriend, she supposed.

Until five months ago, when she met David, Jane would have largely agreed with the sentiment that she had just uttered. Jane was tall, fit, attractive, and well-educated. But she had seemed incapable of finding her Mr. Right.

She had gone from one semi-serious relationship to another, dealing with Mr. Not Ready, Mr. Keeping His Options Open, and their various friends. Already well into her thirties, Jane had begun to resign herself to an inevitable spinsterhood. At least she still had her work! And her cat! 

She had enumerated such considerations with a sort of gallows humor. She also reminded herself that she worked a lot of hours. Maybe that was part of the problem. Perhaps she needed to change her entire life, she thought, before it was too late.

Then a friend had dragged her out one night to a party that she really hadn’t wanted to attend. At that party she’d met David Haley. Her life had been different since then.

And then David had left—but not for long. David was presently working on a corporate assignment in Germany. The distance had not seemed to dim his ardor—or hers. Jane was eagerly looking forward to David’s return, now just a few weeks away.

Khajee seemed very interested in David, Jane had noticed, although the two had never met. On several occasions, Khajee had asked to see David’s picture, pointedly noting how handsome he was.

“Yes,” Khajee said now, “but you’ve found one—a good man, I mean.”

“For a long time, I didn’t. Couldn’t.”

“But the point is, you did. Things are very different in Thailand. Also, the country is changing because of globalization and economic development. Fewer people getting married and having children all over the country. Very different now, even compared to my parents’ time. Did you know that Thailand has the lowest birthrate in Southeast Asia?”

“No, I didn’t,” Jane replied. 

“Well, it’s true. Lower than Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, or Malaysia. The birth rate here is about the same as in Japan.”

“I see.” Jane had read and heard about low birth rates in Japan. A dwindling, aging population now threatened the long-term vibrancy of the Japanese economy.

“Anyway, with so many childless women, there’s now a market for dolls that contain the souls of dead children.” Khajee shrugged, as if not sure what to make of that herself, as if realizing just how bizarre that sounded.

Jane felt an involuntary shudder ripple through her body, despite the heat. She looked again at the doll—the luk thep. The “angel doll” or “spirit doll”. What had Khajee named her? Lawan. 

“And think about the other side of the equation,” Khajee continued. “There are so many little ones who have died young, especially in this part of the world. I like to think that my little Lawan contains the soul of a sweet little girl who never knew a proper mother.”

Jane found herself seized by a sudden desire to change the subject. She didn’t want to speculate about the nature of the spirit that might inhabit the doll. She glanced again at the doll’s macabrely realistic face, its artificially cherubic smile. 

Jane shuddered, and hoped that Khajee wouldn’t notice her reaction. 

Although Jane wasn’t superstitious, she also hoped that the central sales point of the luk thep doll—the supposed spiritual infestation—was the myth that she (for the most part) believed it to be. For if a spirit were inside that doll, Jane suspected that it would not be angelic in temperament.   

“You can never be sure about such things, can you?” Jane replied. (What else could you say to a notion like that, uttered by a colleague whom you didn’t know all that well, late at night in an office thousands of miles from home?) “Well, it gave me a little bit of a start, that’s all. Come on, we’ve almost finished going through the data. Then we can both call it a day—and hopefully get some sleep.”

Khajee took the hint; and for that matter, the Thai woman was probably tired, too. It had been an awfully long day. Khajee leaned forward in her chair, clutched the mouse once more, and the two women resumed their confirmation of the data.

Khajee said no more about the doll—Lawan—but Jane remained aware of it. At one point Jane considered asking Khajee to cover it, for the simple reason that it was distracting her. But there was no way to make such a request politely—certainly not in another person’s office.

Chapter 7

Table of contents

Wattpad and digital sharecropping

Last September, the folks over at Forbes wrote a story about Wattpad and its highly exploitive (though completely voluntary) business model:

Wattpad has more than 4 million writers, who post an average of 300,000 pieces a day. The company brings in an estimated $19 million in revenue, mostly from ads on its site and from stories sponsored by companies like Unilever who want to advertise alongside a specific writer or genre. Nearly all its writers are unpaid; several hundred make money from ad-sharing revenue and 200 of those also earn from writing sponsored content and inking publishing deals with Wattpad. That lean business model means Wattpad is profitable. It has few costs beyond bandwidth, its 130 employees and the Toronto offices. The model “is a great way to seek talent without having to pay huge amounts for it,” says Lorraine Shanley, a publishing industry consultant.

Forbes, September 2018

4 million writers, and only a minuscule number (about .005%) make any money for their efforts. 

Wattpad is a textbook example of digital sharecropping.

I have nothing against the concept of web fiction, web serials, or posting fiction for free on the Internet. Much of the content of this site, after all, is web fiction. (I have my own little Wattpad going on here.)

But the defining characteristic of digital sharecropping is the socialization of effort, and the privatization of rewards. Wattpad earns $19 million in revenue, because writers choose to post their fiction there, rather than writing on their own sites

I can already anticipate your “but….” rebuttals.

Yes, I realize that only a handful of these writers, if they created their own web presences, would garner any appreciable audience, or earn any real revenue. But let me ask you: How much chance do most writers have on Wattpad, amid 4 million other writers, posting 300,000 pieces per day?

The odds of genuine success are about the same either way. The writers who are standing out on Wattpad could, with a bit of effort, stand out on their own online platforms. And then they would make a whole lot more money than Wattpad is paying them, you can be sure. Even more importantly, they would control their own platforms. 

Digital sharecropping works because too many creative types are desperately slavering for any form of immediate recognition, like a thirteen year-old boy hopelessly infatuated with an eighteen year-old girl.  

Look at me! Look at me now!A like on a Facebook post! A retweet! A like on a YouTube video! Oh, any form of recognition will do! Pleeeeaaase!

The owners of the social media giants understand this weakness of all creative people, and they eagerly exploit it. 

Resist. If you can’t afford your own independently hosted WordPress site, then start a free blog on Google’s blogger platform. 

Yes, Google ultimately controls Blogger. But there you at least have some independence. (You can also run your own affiliate links, and eventually qualify for Adsense revenue).

Whatever you do—if you’re a writer—don’t post your fiction on Wattpad. Don’t be a sucker. 

Just as Facebook and Twitter have become the cancer that destroyed blogging, so Wattpad has become the cancer that threatens to destroy independently published web fiction. 

Don’t fall for the scam.

Revolutionary Ghosts: Chapter 38

We finished breakfast without further outbursts. My mother’s pancakes were delicious, as always.

As we were all clearing off the table, my father’s mood visibly brightened.

“How are things going with the Bonneville, Steve?” he ventured.

I decided that the time had come to eat crow, to come clean.

“Not so well. To tell you the truth, Dad, the car leaks oil, just like you said.”

“I have noticed the puddle on the concrete, over where you park,” he said. “Tell you what. What say you let me take a look at the situation, then the two of us can head over to Bauer’s Auto Parts?”

I felt my own spirits lift along with my father’s. I had been at a loss in regard to the Bonneville. And now it seemed that my father was going to bail me out.

“Yes, Dad,” I said. “That sounds like a good idea. Please.”

We opened the garage door, and Dad and I put the Bonneville up on jacks inside the garage. My dad slid underneath the car on his rolling creeper. He needed only a few minutes underneath the car to diagnose the situation. 

“Well, son,” he said, as he stood up from the creeper. “You’re in luck. The oil pan isn’t cracked. That would have been a fairly major repair. What you’ve got is a leaky gasket. We should be able to get a new gasket at Bauer’s Auto Parts.”

Once again, I felt the clouds lifting.

They would not remain lifted for long.

We drove over to Bauer’s Auto Parts. Much like the Pantry Shelf, Bauer’s Otto Parts was an independent store, not affiliated with any national chain. The auto parts store was located inside a long, grey building constructed around the turn of the twentieth century. The building had originally been a small factory or a warehouse.

Otto Bauer was around my father’s age. A second-generation American, he was the son of German immigrants. Otto had also served in the Second World War—on our side, of course—as a battlefield interpreter. 

Otto was standing behind the counter when we walked in. He hailed my father and me, but he seemed distracted, maybe a little glum. 

“Where do you keep the oil pan gaskets?” my dad asked. 

Unlike the surly clerk at the Sunoco station, Otto was immediately helpful. He walked us back to the location in the dusty store where the oil pan gaskets were kept. 

“You should find what you need here,” Otto said. “I’ll be waiting for you at the counter. Let me know if you need any further assistance.”

As Otto walked back to the front of the store, I turned to my father. 

“Something wrong with Otto?” I said in a low voice.

My dad shrugged. “Can’t say. Maybe.”

Otto also had a ne’er-do-well son, who was a former classmate of my brother. Jack and Dan Bauer had even run around together from time-to-time. Unlike Jack, Dan had managed to avoid military service completely during the Vietnam conflict, by staying enrolled in classes at UC, and keeping his grades barely above the passing level.

Maybe Otto was having similar problems with Dan, I figured.

We—or rather, my dad—selected the particular gasket from the ones hanging from pegs. An oil pan gasket, in case you don’t know, is a long, oddly shaped piece of rubber that seals the oil pan to the engine block. On the way over to the auto parts store, my father had explained to me that the gasket currently on the Bonneville was warped and cracked, hence the slow, constant leak. 

As we headed toward the counter, I started to remove my wallet from my right rear jeans pocket. My dad put a hand on my arm.

“No, son. This will be my treat.”

“Really? Dad, you don’t have to—”

“I know I don’t have to. But I want to. Next time, though, please take my advice on automotive matters.”

“Sure thing, Dad. Thanks.”

Otto was waiting for us at the counter, looking sour-faced and distracted as ever. 

“Find the one you needed?” he asked. 

We both told him that yes, we had, and Otto rang up the purchase on his mechanical cash register. 

Now my father had taken notice of his mood, too.

“Anything wrong, Otto?” Dad asked. “You don’t seem quite yourself today.”

“Yes, now that you mention it,” Otto said. “Dan.”

I figured that Dan was involved in some kind of predictable trouble. He had been arrested for drunk driving or drug possession, maybe. But that wasn’t it.

“Dan’s gone missing,” Otto said. 

“Missing?” I said. 

Ja,” Otto said. Though Otto spoke perfect English, he had grown up speaking German at home. “Dan took off on his motorcycle three days ago,” Otto went on, “leaving his girlfriend’s house. And he hasn’t been seen since.” 

“You’ve reported him missing, of course,” my father said, more a question than a statement.

“Yes.” Otto nodded. “They already have their hands full with another missing persons case. Those two other young people.” 

“What other young people?” my dad asked. “Someone else is missing?”

“Yes,” I inserted. “Two twenty year-olds. Robert McMoore and Donna Seitz.” Dad looked at me as if to ask: How do you know? “I saw a missing persons flyer,” I added.

“Oh,” my father said. “So we now have three missing young adults in the area.”

Otto paused to think. “I wonder if they’re connected. I hope they’re not connected. I hope that my Dan has simply gone off on a binge somewhere, and that this McMoore fellow and his girlfriend have eloped. Not an outcome that their parents would like, perhaps, but much better than some of the alternatives.”

“I hope so, too,” Dad said. “Good luck finding Dan, Otto. We’ll keep your family in our thoughts and prayers.”

We were driving home in Dad’s pickup truck. Otto’s bad news had put a damper on my relief at discovering a simple solution to the problem with the Bonneville. 

“Now you see, son,” Dad said, “you see how much is going wrong with our country. When I was in my early twenties, we had the war, of course; but we didn’t have serial killers. Young men weren’t found in the woods with their heads cut off; and if young people did go missing, it was almost always temporary, and it was almost always because they’d eloped or just run off. Do you know when those other two were last seen?”

“More than two weeks ago,” I said.

“That means they probably didn’t elope, then. It also means that there probably isn’t going to be a happy ending for them and their families.”

Chapter 39

Table of contents

Revolutionary Ghosts: Chapter 37

I made it to Sunday morning without any further incidents.

I wouldn’t have described my parents as especially devout, but they were regular churchgoers. In the morning, I accompanied them to services at the small Lutheran church we attended.

I daydreamed through the service. When I left the church, I would not have been able to recount a single sentence from the pastor’s sermon to save my life.

My mind was otherwise occupied.

When we arrived home, our Sunday copy of the Cincinnati Enquirer had arrived, too. I took my time skimming through the paper, pausing only briefly on stories about the ongoing national headache of stagflation, and the upcoming presidential election.

Then I saw a story that did catch my attention.

“Headless bodies found near Zanesville”

In the wake of several young men going missing in the area, Zanesville authorities made a grisly discovery in a wooded area just beyond the city limits last Thursday.

The partially decomposed, headless bodies of two young men were found in a ravine…”

The story went on to include quotes from local law enforcement officials. There were speculations of a serial killer, or perhaps organized crime.

Zanesville was a small city in central Ohio. No more than a few hours from Cincinnati.

How many more coincidences do you need? I asked myself.

“Looks like an article there has your attention,” Dad said. Sitting on his La-Z-Boy, he was busy reading the sports section. The Cincinnati Reds were going gangbusters this year. The local sports media was already hyping the possibility of them winning the World Series (which they did, in fact, win in 1976—though I would have little interest in baseball that year).

I told my father the gist of the article. His reaction caught me off guard.

“What else can you expect?” He practically shouted. “With the way so many kids are using those damn drugs today, losing all control, it’s no surprise that things like that happen!”

I didn’t know quite what to say. We had not discussed Jack’s visit the prior night. Nevertheless, no major feat of interpretation was required to discern that my father’s words were a reflection of his frustrations and disappointments with Jack.

And I, for my part, was no fan of Jack’s lifestyle, for the rest of the hippie drug culture. But I wasn’t sure that I could so easily ascribe those headless bodies in Zanesville to the ongoing problem of young people getting high and dropping out.

More and more, I was coming to the conclusion that Harry Bailey’s article might have an element of truth to it.

But this was a conclusion that I was still fighting.

My mother had been in the kitchen, making the three of us pancakes, as was our usual after-church Sunday ritual. 

She walked out into the living room, drawn by the sound of my father’s outburst. 

“Is everything okay?” She asked.

My father smiled at her, obviously struggling to calm himself down.

“Everything is just fine, Marge. Steve and I were just talking, that’s all.”

My mom looked over at me for corroboration.

“Just a disturbing article in the newspaper,” I said. “Some young men murdered in Zanesville.”

“Do they know who killed them?”

“Not yet.”

“Oh,” my mother said. “Yes, that is a shame.”

My mother didn’t bother to ask why such a news report would have provoked my father to shout.

Thanks to Jack, yesterday had been a stressful day for them, as well as me.

Chapter 38

Table of contents

Engel Coolers

Revolutionary Ghosts: Chapter 36

That night, I did manage to go to sleep. For a while, I lay awake in bed, listening to my parents arguing with Jack.

I don’t know if they gave him yet another handout that night. Eventually, though, he left. By then I was asleep.

Late that night—or early the next morning, I should say—I awoke from a dream. 

The dream itself was routine enough: a mishmash of random scenes and events from my daily life. First I was at home with my parents, then I was going to classes at West Clermont High School. In another segment of the dream, I was working at McDonald’s. 

The dream was subject to the usual distortions and inconsistencies of the dreamworld, but it contained no content that was especially memorable or disturbing.

And then some force invaded the dream.

The dream images of daily life abruptly dissolved, replaced by total darkness. I was awake now—but not quite awake. Paused on the boundary between sleep and full consciousness. 

And I wasn’t alone there.

A presence was leaning over my bed. 

I dared not open my eyes. As is often the case in this in-between state, however, I was capable of some version of sight, or what I imagined to be sight. 

Lying on my back, I could sense the vague shape leaning over me. 

It terrified me, whatever it was. It was horrible and seductive at the same time. 

The thing was trying to speak to me. But before I could make out the words, I pulled myself out of this in-between state.

 

Fully awake now, I sat up in bed. Looked around my darkened bedroom. 

I was alone. But I noticed something: The door of my bedroom was slightly ajar.

I had closed it when I went to bed, to drown out the sound of Jack’s rambling pleas for charity, and my parents’ frustrated but half-hearted responses. 

But now the door was slightly open. 

Not good. 

It was just a dream, I told myself. Just a dream.

Another part of me perceived that it hadn’t been a dream, though. The scenes of school and home life and McDonald’s—yes, those had been dreams. But I had been at least marginally conscious when that thing visited me.

I struggled to figure it out. The thing had appeared as nothing more than a mere shape. 

Or no—more than a mere shape. The shape had been distinctly female. But no longer female in the sense that Leslie Griffin and Diane Parker were female. 

The shape had once been female, it occurred to me. My visitor carried femininity—and humanity—as distant memories. But it was something else now. 

Marie Trumbull, were the words that sprang to my mind. 

Ridiculous, I told myself. You were not visited by Marie Trumbull, the executed Loyalist spy. You’re letting your imagination get the best of you.

I lay there, for perhaps an hour or more, before I finally willed myself to go back to sleep.

Chapter 37

Table of contents

Revolutionary Ghosts: Chapter 35

At several points in this narrative, I’ve alluded to Jack’s service in the military—such as it was. Perhaps now would be an opportune juncture to tell you exactly what happened.

Jack was eighteen in 1967, which made him prime draft material. Jack wanted no part of either the military or the war in Vietnam. Despite his lackluster academic performance, he perceived that a student deferment offered him the best chance for avoiding all that.

He could have attended the nearby University of Cincinnati; but he convinced my parents to fund his enrollment at the Ohio State University, located two hours away in the state capital of Columbus.

Jack was no more of a scholar in college than he had been in high school. Freed from all sense of restriction and structure, he was worse, in fact. To make a long story short, my brother required only two semesters to flunk out of OSU.

Jack returned to Cincinnati. He bummed around for a while at odd jobs. Without his student deferment, he knew that he was draft meat. He tried desperately to secure a spot in the Ohio National Guard or the U.S. Army Reserves. (During the Vietnam War—unlike the more recent wars in the Middle East—the National Guard and the reserves were not deployed abroad.)

Finally, Jack decided to take classes at the University of Cincinnati, with the hope of acquiring another student deferment. But by then it was already too late.

There had been complaints throughout the country that the very concept of the student deferment was unfair. The result of the student deferment system was to place the burden of fighting the war disproportionately on lower income youths, while exempting the sons of the wealthy.

In 1969, President Richard Nixon signed legislation that made all incoming male college students eligible for the draft lottery. So Jack couldn’t escape the war simply by signing up for classes at UC.

Shortly after that, Jack’s draft number was called. 

Jack briefly toyed with the idea of going to Canada. But while my father might have been willing to bankroll Jack’s abortive attempts at scholarship, there was no way he was going to finance an illegal flight to Canada. 

Bowing to the inevitable, Jack enlisted in the U.S. Army. In the days before he left for basic training, Jack seemed to turn over a new leaf. 

Maybe he would even like the Army, he said. In a rare moment of self-reflection, he went so far as to say that the discipline might do him good.

That attitude, however, didn’t last.

Jack was sent to Vietnam. No big surprise there. But he wasn’t sent out into the jungles, hunting down Vietcong. Jack had—with uncharacteristic wisdom—selected the Quartermaster Corps, which handles the Army’s supply and logistics operations. 

The U.S. Army sent Jack to Vietnam to serve as a low-level warehouse clerk in Saigon. He was stationed at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, just outside the capital city of South Vietnam. 

The assignment might have afforded Jack an opportunity to serve out his enlistment in relative peace and safety. But this was Jack; and with Jack, things could never be simple or easy.

He became involved in a scheme to export narcotics from Southeast Asia to the United States. By this time, an illegal market for recreational drugs was already booming in the U.S. Jack’s role in the Quartermaster Corps placed him in an ideal position to transport the Southeast Asian contraband to U.S. destinations. (Keep in mind, this was before drug-sniffing dogs, and the draconian airport security of the post-9/11 world.) 

Jack wasn’t the only one involved in the scheme. There were two other conspirators from the Army, and at least two from the Air Force. But this assembly of halfwits didn’t equal one full wit, apparently.

Once again, I’ll make a long story short: The scheme was exposed before the cabal ever sent a single shipment of hashish, heroin, or other intoxicating substances to a single American port. All of the men were arrested, placed in the stockade, and told to prepare themselves for court martial procedures.

Then someone in the Army hierarchy learned who Jack was. Or rather—who his father was. That changed everything for Jack.

By the early 1970s, the nightly news was filled with footage of antiwar protests. Public sentiments about the war in Vietnam had reached a low point. Several incidents, moreover, made the situation even worse. 

In 1970, we learned that a rogue group of U.S. Army soldiers had massacred over three hundred Vietnamese civilians in the South Vietnamese village of My Lai in 1968. (We also learned that another group of American soldiers, members of a helicopter crew, intervened on behalf of the villagers. The helicopter crew threatened to turn a machine gun on their fellow countrymen, should they continue to murder civilians.) 

That same year, a raucous student protest at Kent State University, in northern Ohio, took a tragic turn when National Guardsmen fired on rock-throwing protestors. Four students were killed and multiple others were wounded. 

One of the dead, an ROTC scholarship student from Cincinnati, wasn’t even involved in the protest. He was on his way to class when he was killed by a stray bullet.

These were dark days for the American military—for the entire country, for that matter. 

But the men who had fought in World War II were still largely revered as heroes. Especially the ones who had participated in the big, historic battles. All of the men in my dad’s division had been decorated for their actions on June 6, 1944. 

In the atmosphere of the Vietnam era, the last thing the Army needed was a news report of a decorated D-Day veteran’s son being court-martialed for engaging in a conspiracy to transport illegal drugs to the United States. 

Or that, at least, was the conclusion that the Army brass eventually reached. The Army dropped Jack’s court martial and sent him packing with a dishonorable discharge. 

This was a mixed outcome for Jack, but it could have been much worse. On the plus side, Jack avoided a lengthy term in the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The Army, meanwhile, avoided yet another lurid public scandal.

But Jack was not truly a veteran, in the sense that my father was a veteran, in the sense that all the other young men returning from Vietnam were veterans. He had been drummed out of the Army under a cloud of disgrace. 

Jack returned to Cincinnati. Where else was he going to go? 

There were inevitable questions and suspicions about Jack’s hasty return from the service. But the story of Jack’s debacle never made the papers. We were therefore able to get by with vague explanations. No one outside the family knew the whole story—so far as we knew—but I’m sure that plenty of people suspected something near the truth.

You might now ask me why my parents didn’t simply disown their elder son at this point. Jack had, after all, disgraced them, even if that disgrace never made the news.

I didn’t understand their forbearance at the time, but I understand it better now, since I’ve had children of my own. 

My son Mark, and my daughter, Patty, never sold drugs or engaged in other forms of criminal behavior. But they did at times disappoint me, and try my patience in various ways.

Even if they had done worse, though, I don’t believe that I could have truly disowned either of them. That is a difficult step for any parent to take.

Chapter 36

Table of contents

Revolutionary Ghosts: Chapter 34

My heart was still pounding. But at least I had reached our neighborhood now. 

I saw no sign of the skeletal figures that I had seen in the bushes, no sign of anyone on horseback. 

I permitted myself to wonder if I had imagined it all—what I had seen and heard on the drive home. 

Today had been an emotionally charged day, filled with various circumstantial evidence of the weird and supernatural. 

I had foolishly allowed Keith and his friends to goad me into taking a hit on the reefer. 

I didn’t believe that a single hit of regular marijuana would have altered my senses. But how did I know what was really in that joint? I had heard stories of people lacing ordinary marijuana cigarettes with LSD and hallucinogenic mushrooms. 

If that had been the case, then there was, indeed, a logical explanation for that most unusual drive home from McDonald’s.

Keith Conway had set me up. Maybe I would deck him the next time I saw him, consequences be damned. 

Then our house came into view, and I forgot about Keith Conway and the last five miles I had driven. 

Jack’s red Corvair—the one that Leslie and her girlhood friends had been so fond of—was sitting in the driveway. 

Or to be more precise, Jack’s red Corvair was parked in the pull-off space, the one that Dad and I had made—for my car.

I was immediately tense. But tense for an entirely new set of reasons.

I parked on the street. Otherwise, I would have to move the Bonneville again in order for Jack to leave. And I didn’t want to delay his departure by even a minute. Hopefully, he would be on his way out already.

But Jack wasn’t on his way out. Jack had just arrived, in fact. 

My brother was sitting in the spare recliner in the living room. Dad was sitting in his La-Z-Boy, Mom on the couch. 

The television screen was dark. In 1976, there wasn’t much to watch late at night. Most of the networks signed off around midnight. 

And anyway, my parents had a visitor—an unwelcome one, I thought.

Jack was wearing blue jeans and a black tee shirt. He wore his hair and his beard long.

Jack had never been much for cracking the books. But as a high school student during the 1960s, he had been a respectable baseball player. Back then he’d been clean-cut. Now he looked like a cast member of the musical Hair

“Hello, little brother,” Jack said. 

Jack smiled at me through his dark, heavy beard. I recall thinking that there was something wild and dangerous in my brother’s eyes; and that was the impression I had had of him since as far back as I could remember.

Jack had never laid a hand on me—with the exception of some harmless roughhousing during our brief time together in our parents’ house. But I was afraid of him, nonetheless.

That might have been the moment I first faced that realization head-on. After a day of so much that was unbelievable, I was facing up to a mundane truth of my childhood, a truth that I had lived with my whole life—and yet—evaded to the best of my ability.

I feared my brother. 

And I hated him a little bit, too. 

“Hello, Jack,” I said. 

Jack appeared to be moderately intoxicated. But Jack always seemed to be intoxicated back in those days. 

“A little late for a casual visit,” I said.

“Really?” he asked, an edge in his voice. “Might I remind you, Steve: I was here ten years before you were. If one of us is the interloper here, it’s you.”

I felt a tide of rage welling up inside me. I wanted to tell him off, to tell him to leave. 

But my father intervened before I could.

“That’s enough of that kind of talk,” Dad said. “Your brother was out working tonight, Jack, which is more than I can say for you.” 

“I have been working,” Jack said. He looked away from me, dismissively, and back at our father. “I’ve been working as an assistant at Hal’s Body Shop, over in Batavia.”

“You’ve been doing that about five hours per week,” Dad scoffed. “You spend the rest of your time screwing around, getting drunk, getting high. Which is why you’re twenty-seven years old, and still unable to support yourself.”

Although Jack thought nothing of using harsh words with me, he knew better than to attempt a frontal assault on our father. His tactic was always to make some allowances for Dad’s criticisms, before attacking stealthily from another angle.

But this time Jack’s modus operandi backfired.

“I know I need to do a better job of getting my act together,” Jack conceded, with what I took to be contrived humility. “I’ve been working on myself. Try to have some sympathy, for me, please, Dad. Some understanding. We’re both veterans, after all.”

I saw the color rise in my Dad’s face. My mother’s eyes went wide with alarm. 

Jack shouldn’t have said that.

“Please, Jack,” my father said, with an obvious effort to control his sudden anger. “Don’t say things like that. I served my country in combat, including D-Day. As you well know. Your time in the military wasn’t anything like that.”

“I know,” Jack said, hanging his head dolefully. “I was just saying—”

“Well, don’t say things like that.”

Jack raised his head again. “Everything you’re saying is true, Dad. Every word of it. I really need to work on myself, like I said. But I’m in a jam. I’m behind on my portion of the rent out at the farmhouse.”

This was the living arrangement that Leslie had mentioned, which I had dismissed as a “hippie commune”. Jack shared space—probably not much more than a cot and a corner of a room—at a farmhouse farther out in the country. He lived with a group of six or seven other guys, all of them dropouts in one way or another.

“And so now you’re here for money,” my mother said.

“I’m here with the sincere hope that my parents will be willing to help me out when I’m in need.”

“Jack,” Dad said, “your mother and I have already given you handouts, or ‘tide-me-overs’ as you like to call them, on numerous occasions.”

I had heard versions of this conversation multiple times in the past. Today had been a long day. I was tired and shaken by the events of the day (though partly buoyed, too, by my pleasant interactions with Diane Parker.)

Under ideal circumstances, I would have liked to have talked to my parents about my day, to have made them understand—if it were possible to break through their understandable skepticism—what I had experienced since noon.

I was almost certain that I had seen something in the bushes. Those hoofbeats, moreover, I had heard for at least two miles. 

Could all that really have been mere figments of my imagination?

But Jack was here, and so Jack’s needs, Jack’s deficiencies, Jack’s addictions, were going to dominate the conversation.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m going to head to bed now, if that’s okay.”

“Of course, Stevie,” Mom said.

My father echoed a similar sentiment. 

I headed toward my bedroom.

As I was leaving, Jack gave me a sardonic, “Goodnight, little brother.”

I didn’t answer him.

Chapter 35

Table of contents

Revolutionary Ghosts: Chapter 33

Most of the route home consisted of secondary two-lane highways that cut through farmland, woods, and open fields. Country roads, in other words. 

I passed the Sunoco station where I had stopped for oil. I wondered about the clerk. Was he sitting behind the counter now?

And what had he seen, that provoked such anger in him when I asked him about hoofprints, and seeing a horse?

I rolled down the window on the driver’s side. The Bonneville was equipped with an early version of air conditioning; but I didn’t want to overly tax the car’s capacities until I had the oil leak fixed—another worry on my mind that night.

The wind blowing in through the open window was sharp with the smells of cow pastures and tilled fields. I glanced to my left: I saw a field of early corn, still less than knee-high, and behind that the dark hulk of a wooden barn. There was a three-quarters moon tonight, and I could read the words, CHEW MAIL POUCH TOBACCO painted in white against a black background on the side of the barn that faced the road. 

This sure was a lonely spot, I thought. I passed a farmhouse. The little white clapboard structure was at the far end of a long gravel driveway. A single light burned in what appeared to be the kitchen window. 

But for all practical purposes, I was alone out here. 

When I first heard the distant clatter of hoofbeats, I immediately went into denial mode. I told myself that I was hearing nothing more than the echo of the radial tires against the blacktop. 

Then the hoofbeats grew louder.

I pushed down on the accelerator pedal. This two-lane country road was narrow, and the narrow berm left little margin for error. But at least I was on a straightaway. 

The hoofbeats faded.

And they grew louder again. 

I took a quick look at the speedometer. I was driving 60 mph in a 40 mph zone. If a cop happened by, I would be more than deserving of a speeding ticket. 

That would be fine with me. Red flashing lights in the rearview mirror would have been a relief. 

But when I looked in the rearview mirror, I was looking for a horse. 

Which made absolutely no sense. There was simply no logical explanation for my being pursued by a horse along this road, at 11 p.m. on a Saturday night. 

The sound of the inrushing wind was so loud that it wouldn’t have been possible for me to converse with a passenger, if I’d had one. 

I pushed the accelerator again. 66 mph. 

I was almost home. Only a few more miles to go.

I was coming up on the secondary road that led to our neighborhood. A sharp left turn. 

I could still hear the clattering hoofbeats behind me.

I released the gas and touched the brake—just a little. 

I pulled the steering wheel to the left. Hard. Tires squealed on the pavement. 

As the Bonneville made the sharp turn, I overshot the far side of the road by a good foot or more. 

One of my tires slid on the gravel that covered the berm. 

I had only a split second to correct the car’s trajectory, lest I take it into the ditch. 

My only option was to pull the steering wheel to the left again. But that meant the risk of overshooting the road in the opposite direction. 

Somehow, I managed to yank the wheel to the right. But not too far to the right. 

The car swerved back and forth for a short distance until I was able to stabilize it. 

This road was heavily wooded, and curvy. A speed of 65 mph simply wasn’t an option here, no matter what was on the road behind me. 

I slowed the car to 25 mph as I neared a sharp curve that sloped upward. 

I looked behind me. Nothing in the rearview mirror.  

I sighed with relief. I was only a few miles from home now. 

And I couldn’t hear the hoofbeats anymore.

Something caught my attention at the side of the road—to my right.

There was movement in the thick underbrush at the front of the tree line. 

I saw manlike shapes, bearing long rifles.

No—muskets. 

At least, that was what I thought I’d seen. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

I thought that I’d seen a flash of the manlike shapes’ faces, five or six feet off the ground. 

Their faces were a bony, bleached white.

Skulls. 

I remembered what Harry Bailey had written, more or less:

“These soldiers appear as skeletal ghouls, as might be consistent with their undead state…” 

This could be a dangerous road at night, even at a slow speed. Nevertheless, I felt compelled to look backward, at the spot where I had seen them.

There was nothing back there now. 

I looked straight ahead, gripped the steering wheel with both hands, and continued home.

Chapter 34

Table of contents

Revolutionary Ghosts: Chapter 32

Diane, as a new employee in the training phase, wasn’t asked to stay for the “closing up” procedures. Jenny Tierney and I had that covered. Two was more than enough for the cashiers’ portion of the closing. 

We retrieved fresh boxes of condiment packets from the back storage room, and restocked the supply beneath the counter. In the customer dining area, we filled the straw and napkin dispensers. 

I walked out at not quite 10:45 p.m. My earlier estimate had been right on target. 

When I saw the boys gathered in the parking lot, under one of the big halogen lights, I groaned silently.

I had avoided Keith Conway for the entire evening since our initial conversation. But I was to avoid him no longer.

Keith was there with Jonesey and Scott Thomas. They were smoking a marijuana cigarette, passing the reefer back and forth between them.

They hailed me almost as soon as I came out through the main door.

“Yo! Stevie, buddy! Come here!” Keith Conway, of course. 

“Have a good night, Keith,” I said, as I approached them. I was about to veer toward the Bonneville. “I’m going home.” I nodded curtly at Jonesey and Scott. “I’ll see you later.”

There was nothing about my response that struck me as humorous, or even mildly ironic. It nevertheless occasioned giggling from Scott and Jonesey. They knew that Keith and I were not exactly best friends, and they saw this as another way to curry favor with him. 

“‘See us later’?” Keith said. “I was thinking you might want to toke up with us. Come on, Stevie. The Carol Burnett Show is already off the air.”

Jonesey and Scott found this hysterically funny. I recalled that Louis had said something similar. Why did everyone seem to think that I watched Carol Burnett? 

“I don’t think so,” I replied. I turned away from them.

“Ah, man. Can’t you ever just be one of the guys?” Keith said. “I mean like…for once in your whole life?”

I had no desire to be one of this particular group of guys. Under different circumstances, I would have told them so.

I was in turmoil, however. I couldn’t rid my mind of all the unusual events of the day—despite my conscious intention to focus on pleasant summertime thoughts.

It had occurred to me: If Louis has been having strange experiences, too, then it can’t be all coincidence. 

In the midst of that inner conflict, the needling from these three knuckleheads caused my temper to snap suddenly. 

They wanted me to be one of the guys? Fine. I would show them.

I spun on my heels and walked up to them. I saw Keith’s body tense. He was likely wondering if I was going to hit him.

And for a second, I was wondering about that, too. 

“Here,” I said. I snatched the joint from Jonesey’s hand. I put it to my lips and inhaled.

I had never smoked marijuana before. I had only smoked regular cigarettes on a handful of occasions, and I hadn’t liked the experience. One thing you may have noticed about the children of smokers: They either automatically drift into their parents’ tobacco habit, as a matter of course, or they quickly decide that they want nothing to do with the products of RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris. I was firmly in the latter group. 

I wanted to cough out the lungful of acrid, oddly sweet marijuana smoke. But that would give them undue satisfaction. They would have themselves a good laugh at my expense. 

So I willed myself not to cough. I exhaled the smoke slowly, luxuriantly, as if this was something I did every day. 

“Are you happy now?” I said to Keith. 

I handed the joint back to Jonesey, and then turned and walked in the direction of my car.

Now I had to drive home. I was feeling light-headed. 

Surely a single hit from a joint hadn’t affected me that strongly, I thought.

Nevertheless, I could see a little field of stars swimming before my eyes. I had experienced this feeling once before, when I’d played touch football, and another kid had tackled me from my blind side.

The placebo effect, I told myself. One hit on a joint is nothing. Keith and his moronic friends, after all, seemed to smoke bales of it. And they somehow managed to drive themselves around. 

I started up the Bonneville, backed out of my parking space, and began my journey home. I had a feeling that I hadn’t yet exhausted the day’s surprises. 

And I hadn’t—not by a long shot.

Chapter 33

Table of contents

Revolutionary Ghosts: Chapter 31

My fifteen-minute break period arrived some time later, as the twilight was fading into night. 

I didn’t want to hang out in the dining area, and the hourly employees were actively discouraged from loitering in the front parking lot during our breaks. Ray Smith didn’t want his customers to be intimidated by the sight of his employees skulking around outside the front door. 

There was an area behind the McDonald’s, directly off the kitchen, in the small rear parking lot of the building. Employees could go there to escape the constant gaze of diners during their break periods. It was kind of lonely back there. The rear parking lot wasn’t visible from the road, and vice versa. 

But I had fifteen minutes to myself, and I wanted to do some thinking. I wanted to think more about Diane Parker, and what possibilities might exist there. 

I didn’t want to think about everything else that had happened today. I imagined myself clipping out the vast portion of the afternoon: from my visit to the Pantry Shelf around noon, to that visit at the counter from the British-speaking, red-haired Banny. 

Banny, who had seemed to disappear into thin air….

My introduction to Diane Parker had been okay, though. I would keep that. 

I passed through the kitchen. Keith Conway and his friends were absorbed in their cooking tasks, for once. They either didn’t notice me, or decided to save their annoying banter for another time. 

The door to the rear parking lot was in the far corner of the kitchen, not far from the freezer. I opened the metal door and slipped outside.

The first thing that struck me was the impending darkness. The rear parking lot ended a stone’s throw from the back door. Beyond the parking lot, there was a little rambling field of overgrown grass and weeds. And beyond that, the woods. This late in the day, this close to full darkness, the tree line was black and monolithic, a jagged profile against the purple sky. 

The humidity lingered, but it was now at a tolerable level. The restaurant’s dumpsters were located back here, too; and they emitted a rancid effluvium. There was nothing even vaguely supernatural or unexplainable about that. 

That wasn’t the only odor back here, though. I detected the distinct odor of cigarette smoke. 

From the lower right corner of my field of vision, I caught the glow of a cigarette’s burning ember in the darkness. 

“Louis!” I said, startled.

Louis was sitting on an overturned wooden crate between the rear brick wall of the restaurant and the dumpster. 

He was smoking, of course.

“Didn’t see me, did you?” Louis smiled.

“You’re like a cat.”

He smiled again and took a drag on his cigarette. “Well, don’t be thinking that you’re going to put a bell on me. Because that isn’t happening.”

“You just startled me, was all.”

Louis nodded thoughtfully. “You seem to be hitting it off with Diane.”

“I think so,” I said. “Time will tell.”

“Well, don’t let too much time tell. Remember your competition.”

My earlier interactions with Keith Conway had been grating, as always. My time with Diane, and what seemed to be a genuine rapport between us, had buoyed my outlook concerning my prospects. I was waxing both hopeful and self-assured—maybe a little too hopeful and self-assured, even.  

“Diane is too smart for an idiot like Keith Conway,” I said. “But don’t worry, I won’t take too much time.”

Louis took another drag on the cigarette and raised one eyebrow at me. “Feeling confident, are we?”

“Like you said, we hit it off.”

“Just don’t get overconfident,” Louis advised.

Then my boss abruptly changed the subject. He looked back at the tree line. Despite the mugginess of the June night, he visibly shivered.

“I’ve never been afraid of the woods,” he said. “Not in my whole life. But I don’t feel comfortable back here now. This is like, a very recent thing. I get the feeling that something’s watching, that something’s out there.” 

He paused, and looked up at me. “And I can’t explain it. Does that make any sense to you?” 

In that moment, I almost told him everything. Today I had seen two sets of very unusual hoofprints (coated with nasty black gunk!) where no hoofprints should be. I had learned that two young people, only two years older than me, had gone missing while on a routine Saturday-night date. I had seen something unusual in the hallway of my home. 

And then there was Banny—the disappearing Brit with the strange, nasty vocabulary. 

All of this, moreover, might have some connection to that article in Spooky American Tales, written by one Harry Bailey. 

I was seventeen, though, and I was seized by the conviction—more a general sense of things than an explicit idea—that my willpower could make the world go the way I wanted it to.

And I wanted no part of the things I’d seen today.

“It might just be your imagination, Louis.”

“I’m suggestible, is that what you’re saying?”

I shrugged. “You said it, I didn’t.”

Louis stood up and dropped his cigarette butt on the ground. He stamped out the butt, and then picked it up, before tossing it over the side of the dumpster. His break had come to an end.

“I’m going back inside,” he said. “I’ll see you.”

“Yep. And Louis—thanks. Thanks again.”

He appeared honestly puzzled. “For what?”

“Well, it hasn’t escaped my notice that you’ve kind of put your finger on the scale for me, where Diane is concerned.”

“Oh, that. No problem. All I did was put you in front of an opportunity. Making something of it is another matter. That’s up to you.  Remember: You need to strike while the iron is hot.”

“Sure, Louis. Got it.”

With that he opened the back door of the restaurant and disappeared inside. The door fell back with a sigh of the overhead pneumatic cylinder, and a sharp click.

I was now alone behind the restaurant. 

I stared into that impenetrable tree line. I tried to think pleasant thoughts, about the summer that might be ahead of me. 

The summer that would include some predictable unpleasantries, of course. There would be drama at home with Jack, no doubt, but that was nothing new. It was a bad thing, but I had learned how to live with it. 

I would spend a lot of hours working at McDonald’s. I had already learned, though, that work is life and life is work, and so I accepted that with equanimity. My McDonald’s paycheck had paid for my Bonneville, such as it was; and I was socking away money for college next year. My parents had already told me that they would help me out with tuition, but I would have to cover my textbooks and car expenses. 

It was also because of my job at McDonald’s that I had met Diane Parker. I knew the dangers of counting one’s chickens before they’re hatched—especially in matters of the heart. 

But I had my hopes up. Louis and I had both seen that Diane and I had hit it off.

These were the thoughts I was trying to focus on, as I stood there alone behind the McDonald’s, facing the dark woods.

But these thoughts wouldn’t stay in my head. I wasn’t comfortable, standing there. I had the feeling of being watched. From somewhere back in those woods. 

My break wasn’t quite over yet, but I decided that I had made myself as refreshed as I was going to be, under the circumstances. I turned around and opened the door to the kitchen. 

As I opened the door, I could have sworn that I heard something moving around in the woods. 

I didn’t turn around to look.

Chapter 32

Table of contents

Digital sharecropping in the social media age

Digital sharecropping is a term coined by Nicholas Carr back in 2006, when he described how the owners of online platforms had convinced millions of people to create free content for them…which they could subsequently monetize:

What’s being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value of content. MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It’s only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale – on a web scale – that the business becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy.

Nicholas Carr, 2006

When Nicholas Carr wrote the above paragraph, social media as we know it today was still in its infancy. The concept of digital sharecropping is worth examining in the context of 2019, now that social media has become the virtual cancer of the Internet. 

But before we delve into digital sharecropping, lets look at few exceptional situations, that look like digital sharecropping, but really aren’t.

Talking with your friends on Facebook

Like most of you, I have a personal Facebook account that I use to keep in touch with my old high school classmates and work colleagues. 

I write a fair amount of content in my personal Facebook page. I do not consider this digital sharecropping, because almost all of this content involves inside-group discussions that would have no meaning whatsoever to anyone who isn’t part of my various inner circles (school, work, family, etc.) 

Digital sharecropping involves content that you create for public consumption.

Writing for Wikipedia

Wikipedia, on the surface, is the purest example of digital sharecropping. Wikipedia contributors not only write for free, they write without any recognition or attribution whatsoever. 

Wikipedians aren’t in it for money or recognition, though. They are committed to the development of Wikipedia as a vast utopian project, and they don’t mind toiling away in anonymity. 

There seems to be an esprit de corps among Wikipedia contributors, which, quite frankly, I do not understand. (If I’m going to take the time to create content online, it’s going to be mine, with my name on it.) 

But they know what they’re getting into, and it apparently works for them. I suspect that Wikipedians are the kids who, in high school, eagerly volunteered to work on the class homecoming float.

Wikipedia, moreover, has no discernible revenue model. The head of whole thing, Jimmy Wales, has a net worth of about $1 million. 

Granted, this is a lot more money than many of Wikipedia’s worker-bee contributors have in the bank; but in comparative terms, it’s peanuts. Mark Zuckerberg has a net worth of $66 billion. Jack Dorsey (CEO of Twitter) has a cool $5.5 billion.

Whether or not an ersatz, mediocre online encyclopedia that clogs Google search results is the world-saving thing that Wikipedians believe it to be, Wikipedia clearly isn’t a nefarious money grab. The site seems to rely on an annual fund drive for voluntary donations, in fact.

(As the above paragraphs might suggest, I have some very mixed feelings about Wikipedia, but that’s another topic for another time.)

Follow the money

True digital sharecropping always involves money—usually ad revenues. In 2018, Twitter made $2.61 billion in ad revenue. Facebook made $16.6 billion serving ads during the same period. 

Once again: that’s billion—with a “b”.

It wasn’t so long ago that everyone who was motivated to write online aspired to have an independent blog that earned some money by serving Google Adsense ads…or maybe Amazon Associates link.  

That’s a tough way to get truly rich, but it’s not a bad formula for a respectable side income. During the 00s, I ran a website devoted to the study of the Japanese language. I didn’t get rich off the endeavor, but I did enjoy a monthly ad revenue in the high hundreds, sometimes low thousands, of dollars. 

Nowadays, anyone with a creative bent is flocking to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram (owned by Facebook). Writers are now telling each other that “blogging is a waste of time”. 

Creators no longer measure success by visits to their websites, but by their numbers of Twitter followers.

As Nicholas Carr pointed out back in 2006, creative types are motivated by attention, not money. The owners of the social media platforms grasp this—and are eager to exploit it.

We’ve all drunk the social media Kool-Aid, in other words.

How to use social media as a creator without digital sharecropping

Does this mean that the creator should avoid social media platforms completely?

Not necessarily. But as a writer (especially) you should never make a social media site the basis of your online platform. 

Think of each social media presence as an outpost or a method of outreach…nothing more. 

For example, I maintain a presence on Twitter.  About twice per day, I post links to new content at EdwardTrimnellBooks. 

I don’t have many Twitter followers; and I don’t get a huge amount of traffic from Twitter. But I also don’t put much time into it.

What I refuse to do is spend hours composing glib, 280-character tweets that will be relevant for a few hours, at best, on the Twitter platform. Nor do I invest much time arguing with anonymous Twitter profiles about politics (or whatever). 

For me, Twitter is good for posting links, and not much else. 

 

Facebook is not even good for that anymore. Approximately two years ago, Facebook began to reduce the organic reach of publishers. This means that even if someone has “liked” your page, they won’t see your posts.

Unless—of course—you purchase ads. Increasing ad sales was the whole point of reducing organic reach at Facebook. 

Facebook is now almost useless for anyone who is a creator—except as a paid ad platform. 

 

What about YouTube? Later this year, I plan to record some of my short fiction, convert the recordings into MP4 video files with graphics, and upload them to YouTube. This will be the basis of my YouTube presence.

The audio files will be the same ones I’ll be using for a future audiobook project.

And I’ll be directing everyone who views them back to EdwardTrimnellBooks.

 

There is one social media platform that I refuse to have anything to do with: Reddit

Reddit has a so-called “10 percent rule”:

“….a general rule of thumb is that 10% or less of your posting and conversation should link to your own content…” -the Reddit overlords 

 

What Reddit is saying, basically, is that you need not even think about aspiring to anything beyond digital sharecropper status if you use the site. Every bit of your effort must be applied toward increasing Reddit’s ad revenues. (Reddit’s ad revenues will top $100 million this year in the US market alone….There’s no question what the “10 percent rule” is really all about.)

 

*     *      *

Social media has its uses. It is great for keeping track of your personal contacts. I know people who have found new jobs and new business opportunities on LinkedIn. 

But creatives should not invest hours and hours churning out unique social media content that a corporate aggregator is going control—and ultimately profit from. 

When assessing your social media strategy as a creative entrepreneur, think outpost, not home

Your online home should a space you own—where you set the rules, and earn the profits. 

Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey have plenty of money already. Reddit, moreover, will get plenty of page views without you adhering to the site’s manipulative “10 percent rule”—and working for them as an unpaid intern. 

Revolutionary Ghosts: Chapter 28

Leaving Louis’s office, it occurred to me that I hadn’t yet taken Keith Conway into consideration, and that yes, he might be a problem. 

But had Keith Conway even noticed Diane Parker?

My answer to that question was not long in coming.

“Hey, Stevie!” I heard someone shout. 

Speak of the devil. Or Keith Conway. Scant difference between the two.

Keith worked back in the kitchen area. I could see his tall, broad-shouldered frame between the metal shelves that the kitchen crew used to supply the customer service staff with cooked menu items, almost all of them fried. 

Keith’s long blond hair was tied back in a hairnet. He was smiling sardonically at me, accenting that dimpled chin of his, which I found ridiculous, but which I had once heard a girl at West Clermont describe as “the likeness of an ancient Greek god.” 

This same girl was quite intelligent. (How many high school students, when pushed for a metaphor, go instinctively to classical mythology, after all?) And I would have thought her amply capable of seeing past Keith Conway’s superficial charms. But I still had much to learn—or at least to accept—about such matters.

“Come back here,” Keith said, beckoning to me. He was standing over one of the fryers, tending a batch of the uniformly cut, uniformly cooked French fries that have always been a signature staple of McDonald’s.

I was torn. I should really have proceeded directly to my cash register. But I also wanted to hear what Keith Conway had to say. Ordinarily, I regarded Keith as a noisome presence to be avoided. But now I was in intelligence-gathering mode. 

The other two cashiers on duty had been watching me while I was talking to Louis. They were watching me now, too, as I talked to Keith Conway.

“Hey, Steve,” Jenny Tierney said, pulling some coins from her register’s cash tray to give to a customer. “Come on. We’re backing up here.” 

Jenny had just graduated from South Clermont High School. I didn’t know her well, and that was fine with me. Jenny had a reputation for being something of a tattletale, a goody-two-shoes who was always telling other people what to do. 

But in this instance she wasn’t being unreasonable: I looked out into the dining area and saw that there was, indeed, a line backing up behind both of the two cash registers that were currently in operation. 

“I’ll be right there,” I said. And then I stepped around the shelves and back into the kitchen area.

In contemporary parlance, Keith and I were what might be called “frenemies”. We had known each other forever, really—ever since our days of elementary school and tee-ball. But we were like oil and water together, and both of us knew it. We had never come to blows; and we maintained an external pretense of civility. We were teenage boys, however, and that pretense of civility occasionally cracked. 

As soon as I walked back into the kitchen area, two of Keith’s sycophants immediately fixed their attention on me, clearly interested in what was about to happen next. Keith was the unofficial leader of the guys in the kitchen on the night shift. 

Jonesey, a seventeen year-old who attended South Clermont, diverted his attention from his fryer to fix his gaze on his leader. Jonesey—whose actual name was Albert Jones—would seemingly miss no opportunity to curry favor with Keith. 

The other Keith Conway follower, a chubby West Clermont junior named Scott Thomas, was watching and listening, too. He was chopping unions on a metal table near the fryers, but that work was paused as I stepped back into the kitchen. 

“How are you doin’, Stevie?” Keith asked.

“Excellent,” I said. “Never better.” 

My mother called me Stevie, and that was fine. But when Keith adopted the diminutive form of my name, it was usually because he was about to annoy me. 

“I guess you’ve seen the new girl,” Keith said, jumping right to the heart of the matter. “Diane.”

“No,” I said. “I haven’t seen her.” I hadn’t yet, after all.

Keith made a noise with his lips that suggested I was lying. Scott Thomas and Jonesey simpered at their master, and sneered at me. 

“Don’t tell me you don’t think she’s cute,” Keith insisted. 

“Have you even heard me, Keith? I just got here. I haven’t seen her yet.”

“Well, when you do, you’re going to think she’s cute. And you shouldn’t get your hopes up. That girl is sweet on me, I’m telling you. She’s going to be taking a ride in the Love Machine any day now.”

This prompted much laughter and sniggering from the red-haired Jonesy, as well as the chubby Scott.

Keith drove a black 1971 Trans Am. He constantly referred to it as his “Love Machine”. 

And not entirely without reason. Plenty of girls found Keith attractive. Not only was he a big blond guy with an attitude. He occupied a niche between jock and outlaw that was uniquely possible in an environment like Clermont County. 

Keith played tight end for the West Clermont football team. He was also fond of smoking weed, and binge drinking. Keith had been arrested at least once for drunk driving. He saw no contradiction between these two modes of behavior. 

And many girls—including some otherwise smart ones—found this combination irresistibly appealing. 

“Steve—come on!” I heard Jenny Tierney shout from the cashiers’ area. “We need some help here.”

“I’ve got to get to work, Keith,” I said. “Later.”

Chapter 29

Table of contents

Mailbag: Wattpad

Today a regular reader of this blog asked me for my opinion about Wattpad, and whether I would ever consider posting any content there.

To cut right to the chase: I have nothing against Wattpad, but my content would be a bad fit on the site.

I’ve visited Wattpad. (I even have a member login.) Everything on Wattpad seems to be written for teenagers by teenagers–especially teenage girls.

I think it’s great that the younger generation is taking an active interest in storytelling (as opposed to the mind-numbing white noise of social media), and that they have an online place to practice their skills, and display their work.

I also think it’s best if people my age stay away from there. I graduated from high school 33 years ago, after all.

The writer should know his place; and my place isn’t Wattpad.