Don't Overinflate The Monsters

The last year has probably been the most creatively successful of my career. 24 D&D adventures edited. One major D&D book project going through late stages of editing. My novel manuscript on draft five, pretty close to try and send out.

"How could I be creative at a time like this?" It's a question I see on my social media feeds on a regular basis from creatives struggling to focus.

"How could I not be creative at a time like this?" I reply.

What am I supposed to do? Let the darkness consume me?

That's what fascists want. A major strategy of the fascist is to seem overwhelmingly powerful, so we all cower in fear and comply.

The monsters have limited capability, not absolute power. Part of their strength is knowing how to play on our fears to seem bigger and scarier than they are.

Every time people fight back against this regime, they win.

These victories are not complete. The regime is still in office. But every act of resistance blunts their advance.

Odds are, I'm never going to end up in one of these videos. Unless I'm in exactly the right place at the right time, I'm not going to get anywhere fast enough to do anything. I'm disabled. I don't have a car in Los Angeles, the most car-centric big city in the world.

If we're being honest, there are probably a bunch of us who realize that as much as we'd like to tell ICE to fuck off and never come back to our community, that's not a role that's going to work well for us. Maybe it's because you have kids. Maybe your work schedule doesn't allow you to be out on the streets. maybe your body limits your mobility.

But there are other things we can do. On June 26, ICE abducted Culver City's favorite local ice cream vendor Enrique Lozano. He was just walking down the street during the day, selling his ice cream, as he'd done for 20 years. His iconic ice cream cart was left on the side of a busy street, the most obvious visual evidence that the neighborhood had been raided by ICE. It was the first evidence I'd seen or heard of that ICE was in my neighborhood after weeks of raids in other parts of LA. To my surprise, I hadn't heard of any raid of the main place where day workers congregated in the morning.

Lozano's abduction became a flash point for the community. He was a well-known face who was able to call his wife to warn her that he was about to be detained, so word got out quickly. The community raised money to hire a lawyer to advocate on his behalf, as well as support the family, as Enrique was the sole bread winner.

Even his Congressmember Sydney Kamlager-Dove and County Supervisor Holly Mitchell came to the rally to support him a week after his arrest, making him the face of just how outrageous ICE's behavior was at the time, detaining a beloved member of the community with no warrant.

Because he had people to advocate for him, held in a freezing Texas facility, Lozano was able to get released and be granted permanent legal residency after four months thorough his wife.

There are lots of things people can do to fight back against this regime. Most of them are long, difficult struggles instead of giving immediate gratification. We've got to do what we can to keep pressing forward, instead of cowering in fear.

The monsters seem bigger and scarier than they are. When Lozano was taken, I thought there was no chance he'd ever be back to selling his ice cream at the nearby park.

I've spent less time on social media in the last year. It's been incredibly healthy. Not just for my creative juices, but for my overall well-being.

I learned how important it was to carefully limit how much time I spend following news when I covered my first election, before Facebook was invented. There's only so much actual information out there, but the volume of news coverage is like a gas, expanding or contracting to fill the volume of space it has to occupy.

I'm completely serious about this. The news media I grew up with, newspapers and television, had a certain number of column inches or minutes that had to be filled. They fill it with the top stories that they are able to cover, picking stories off the queue until they fill their quota. Outside of a few extraordinary circumstances, the quota doesn't change.

The quota started changing dramatically for local television stations in the late 1980s and early 1990s as they realized news is profitable. Yes, it took a generation and new wave of corporate ownership for someone to look at the books instead of just assuming news was an obligation that American stations had to do to keep their license. Turns out, local news broadcasts have always been more popular than nightly network news, and station owners get all the profit because they own the broadcast.

Half an hour of evening news before the national network news expanded to two or three hours. The number of things going on in our local communities didn't change, but capitalism changed the supply of news we got to fit the amount of space that capitalist networks allocated to news.

The biggest growth was in crime news. "It bleeds, it leads" became a slogan. What people didn't realize unless they were in the newsroom is that while some TV producers were deeply cynical and frustrated with this strategy, breaking crime news of the latest murder or burglary was incredibly cheap and easy to produce, because police worked hard to give stations everything they needed to quickly turn these stories around.

When I interned at Washington DC's top-rated local news station, someone had to stay at the police scanner 24 hours a day. Even at 3 AM, if that was your job, you couldn't take a bathroom break without someone to cover you.

As crime news started to soar, people became much more afraid of being crime victims. The monsters look bigger and scarier than they actually are.

This station had a 4-5 PM broadcast as filler, then their main editions at 5-6 and 6-7, along with a morning slot and their 11-11:30 show before late night comedy. No matter how many truly important stories there were, they had to fill those hours.¹

If you saw the station’s 5-6 show, you got pretty much all you needed from the 6-7 show, but correspondents still had to work to dress up their version of the story for the 6-7 show a bit differently. They all told me not to follow their line of work.

At the end of 2024, Will Tavlin asserted in n+1 Magazine that Netflix churns out low quality movies for people to watch in the background on their phones. The piece is heavy on critique of Netflix's economic model of not paying residuals — the creative team doesn't get any profit from a movie or show being a hit and shown over and over again.

This post flooded my feed. Panicked creatives ate it up. At a time of looming danger, it's easy to think of the monsters as bigger and scarier than they are.

As someone who tried to publish what it looks like to produce “casual viewing” news for academic journals based on first hand observation and working with industry sources, I knew Tavlin didn’t have direct sources on production teams telling him what it’s like to produce a Netflix show. Instead, he had an intellectual critique of capitalism and labor that appeals to creatives and other progressive, pro-labor sensibilities (which I agree with) so we want to agree with the rest of the anecdotal argument as well, which is based on criticism of poor Netflix work as if it’s all contemporary Netflix work.

Follow up journalism found a different story, as production teams denied any pressure from Netflix. But the unglamorous reporting of how things get done didn’t get as much attention as people pumping up the Netflix monster to look bigger and scarier than it is.

This makes me think of the difference between being in a viral video, shouting at ICE agents to leave, versus all the other work that it takes into keeping a neighborhood safe. Someone’s got to work on scheduling. Someone’s got to watch the kids while others can be out protesting. Someone’s got to feed people. These “support” roles may not be as glamorous or emotionally satisfying, but actually getting stuff done takes hard, unglamorous work. It’s not just about going viral on the internet.

When I was at the local TV station, sitting in the microwave transmitter van as correspondents put what they had into a news story, they told me they made news for the "casual viewer." For them, the average TV news viewer was someone primarily focused on making dinner.

How do you produce news for someone making dinner? Start with a simple base, describing what happened. Who, what, when, where, why if you know. 30 seconds max. Interview people off camera before turning the camera on, unless it's a scandal, so the interviewee has rehearsed what they want to say and can produce a clean sound bite. Toss emotional reactions on top of the base story like seasoning to make a meal. You save any question that may provoke tears for when the camera is on, using the off camera interview to learn those potential pressure points.

As the correspondents put it, there was only so much information that people needed to know in their story. I quickly learned that if there's more than a minute of need to know information, it's probably not going to be a story. The rest is what people want to know: emotional reactions and colorful appeals.

What we see today? Imitators.

The biggest imitator of these more manipulative imitators is social media. A social media platform doesn't have a limited number of physical pages or hours on television. Companies want you to passively sit back and spend as much time as possible scrolling through posts, checking out ads in the middle. It's a black hole. Emotional appeals are what suck people in. Both companies and large accounts know this.

If you sit back overwhelmed and keep reading social media, it will be full of posts about travesties going on in the world. The monsters seem bigger and scarier than they actually are, omnipotent and unstoppable, because outrage over them is everywhere.

I have nothing to contribute by trying to be a part of that space. I don't have a social media bullhorn. Don't want one either. I need to be able to disengage to keep my blood pressure steady with my heart condition.

I can't fight the monsters directly. What I can do is give something for a hundred or so people in my community to look forward to by editing adventures for our D&D conventions. Someday, if it gets published, my novel might give people a bit of respite. Even if it doesn't, the process of writing it gives me the strength to move on.

Years ago, as I was fighting the biggest monsters in my personal life, my therapist reminded me "you've got to put on your mask first before you can help someone else."

Spending time on creative pursuits isn't an indulgence during the most troubled of times. For many of us, it's what we need to do to be able to fight the monsters and not be overwhelmed by how big they puff themselves up into seeming.