I’m coming up to a year of being freelance and I have nothing original to say about it. Everything you read about it is true—peaks and troughs, more freedom, no employer pension contributions, an incredible opportunity to work with loads of different people and the overwhelming importance of Already Being Known and Networking.

The ‘being known’ thing is why I always tell early career people to talk about their work. Someone at the Museums Association told me they get very few pitches for talks on social media despite there being tons of people out there with stories to tell.

Whether you work in a small place where you might be fixing a leaky roof one day and writing an Instagram post the next, or if you work in a big place dealing with lots of stakeholders and opportunities, we all need to learn from each other.

Speaking of which, I need to find interesting people to interview for articles so if you’re an interesting person or you know interesting people pls email me

Content of this week

I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe

• The old falling from a plane to kebab switcheroo which you could probably adapt by just stealing a clickbait video.

• Memes make interesting historical facts more fun to look at. A classic of the genre.

• This trend has been floating around for a few weeks but I like the British Library’s take on it.

• This is raunchy but could be a way of treating your artworks/plays/objects as…sexual objects? This is why I don’t work inhouse any more.

• This spoiler feature on Threads has potential.

The bullet point bit

• You can now repost stuff on Instagram. It took them 15 years to invent retweeting.

• Have you ever worked somewhere where everyone is too nice to point out bad ideas and just let them happen and everybody quietly seethes but they’re too polite to blow up about it, until someone does eventually blow up and gets sacked for gross misconduct? Then you may have worked in a UK cultural organisation. Ash Mann has a good article about the illusion of alignment and ruinous empathy.

• KPIs make me cry because social media performance is so unpredictable, so I love Gerorgina Brooke’s suggestion for a new, phased model that priorities experimentation.

• I’ve mentioned Amtrak’s social media here before, and now they’ve done an interview about their Brain Rot Strategy. (TL;DR: Experiment and listen to your community and also be good at memes)

Personal stuff I do for me and you can just skip this if you like

🎮📖 what I’m consuming as a consumer

Media can get so stuck in their formulas that when something truly unexpectedly different comes along it hits like an angel slapping you on the arse (in a good way). That’s probably too much hyperbole for Inscryption, but I went in expecting a roguelike deckbuilding game and what I got was an interactive horror film, escape room and detective story.

So yeah I’d recommend that.

🐕 Keith

Here he is