Find me if you want me, lose me if you don’t
I spent an unhealthy amount of time on Instagram and Tumblr from the moment I was allowed to have an iPhone. I was a small town girl (living in a lonely world) who had just found out she was considered attractive outside the bounds of her high school. Niche internet microcelebrities were becoming a thing around the time I graduated, and Instagram was a California goldmine for baddies who lacked the funds to relocate to New York or Los Angeles but wanted to be famous. Famous, famous, everybody wants to be famous, I hear in my head, though in whose voice, I can’t rightly say.
I say “iPhone” rather than smartphone because I’d technically had a smartphone since grade eight, but it was one of those squishy, poor kid Androids everyone made fun of. iPhones were the “industry standard” for this particular gold rush, and if you didn’t have one, it was best you stayed quiet and let the people with the good cameras speak.
This is a story I’ve told many times IRL, and a few times on my blog, but it always ends the same—I had a real “come to Jesus” moment at Sundance Film Festival (more on that next time), I got a flip phone, I deactivated Instagram, and my life got better. The end?
That’s an oversimplification, obviously, and also the real reason why I’m here, talking to you. Mister Magazine has been kind enough to invite me on board as a columnist, of sorts. Or, as I’ve told my team, “the Carrie Bradshaw of the attention economy.” I’m technically a “Charlotte,” if it must be said, but my point still stands.
What you can expect from me, moving forward, are lo-fi dispatches from the film industry—stuff I have permission to share, of course, I’m not Perez Hilton (is that reference even relevant anymore? Who’s our generation’s Perez?)—as well as candid ruminations on my switch to a more digitally minimalist life, ongoing divestment from “the socials,” and all the people I talk to who disagree with this decision.
If there’s any genre I could mark this under, it’d be anti-lifestyle, because I won’t tell you “I bought this product and everything magically fixed itself.” I’ll tell you “I bought this product and now I have two phones.” I’ll tell you why I’m doing something, where this “journey” takes me, and what I learn along the way. There might be some tangents while I try to parse out how we even got here, individually and collectively. Take everything I say with a grain of salt, or, as they say on Reddit, YMMV.
This is part one of a two-part introduction. Here’s where our story together begins, you and I, writer and reader. Thank you so much for coming to visit me.
My name is Shaawan Francis Keahna. If I could be paid to hang out with people I enjoy the company of 24/7, I would, but I can’t, so I’m becoming a filmmaker. Prepandemic and under a different name, I was a 4th World Media Lab and Big Sky Doc Fest Native Filmmaker Initiative fellow. Part of our fellowship programming included full rides to Big Sky Doc Fest in Missoula, Montana, Seattle International Film Festival in Washington state, and Camden International Film Festival in Camden and Rockland, two small towns in coastal Maine.
Despite what was, at the time, a socially inept addiction to my iPhone and an abusive online relationship carrying on over Kik and Tumblr, I longed for the life of a film worker. “It’s structured playtime,” I enthused, marveling at how much of filmmaking was just talking to other filmmakers about stuff that didn’t exist yet and may never exist. Meetings where I looked across cafe tables at directors only a little bit older than me as they scrawled in their pocketbooks, their Moleskines and their Leuchtterms, their Field Notes and their gas station spiral-bound impulse buys.
On the set of Better Half by Bambi Quinn of Meatcam Productions. Photo by Vega.
Since its beginning, the film industry has been a conversation. You enter the chat, to use an extremely online turn of phrase, and the more active you are in the chat, the more people remember you, for better or for worse. “Do you know [one of the many names I’ve gone by]?” has spilled out of more people’s mouths in these flickering rooms than I care to recall. People have called me a conduit, a bonding agent, or—and this feels sinister—a litmus test.
On day two of the aforementioned Sundance experience, artist Maya McKibbin and I were in line for the Obex party at the Dropbox building. Everybody froze outside because the party—which I’d been on the list for, as a certified Baltimoron—had gone viral on TikTok, prompting God knows how many unaffiliated industry people to wait in below-freezing temperatures for bouncers to let them in two at a time, like Noah at the Ark. Someone who may or may not become a recurring character in this column had just gone inside with his husband, leaving Maya and I alone with a woman who cornered us to evangelize the “game changer” that is generative AI.
“Think about it,” she said, off our blank stares. “You can make an animated movie just, like, by yourself. Like you don’t have to talk to or work with a single other person. It’s your vision, start to finish. All yours.”
Inside the party, my friends from Baltimore found me and hugged me, happy I made it, surprised I was even at the festival. The pro-AI woman, who had gotten her start at Georgetown, watched us with the furtive, trapped stare of a rat before pulling out her phone and taking a corner to wallflower.
Emboldened by this brazen display of tech dependence, I told every new person who asked for my Instagram that I actually hated Instagram. Everyone pulled the same pouty face, nodding in sympathy, before saying the same line, “I hate it too, but, like, we need it.”
After a fashion, I began to wonder if we really did need it, or if it needed us.
By the time Lent rolled around, I knew what I’d be giving up. Unlike previous hiatuses, I didn’t announce this one publicly. I posted nothing. I didn’t beg people to send me their numbers or to email me. Some time ago, I’d posted a short memoir comic called “Find me if you want me, lose me if you don’t.” That attitude carried over into this new lifestyle choice. Zuckerberg made it easy, I mean, Meta had posted that big long thing saying “transgenderism” and “gender ideology” should be fair game for debate on their platforms, that we were no longer a protected class under their hate speech rules. AI slop was starting to really crop up everywhere, but most of all in the White House, where Trump shared uncanny fancams of himself and Elon Musk colonizing Gaza. All the while, my generation made twee quips about “the horrors” and how we’re going to cope with them by, what else, getting ourselves “little treats.”
A suffocating sameness had fallen over my old haunting grounds like a thunderhead blots out the sun. Without fanfare, I deleted the app, and only returned at the end of the Lenten period to announce that I would not be returning.
Since deleting Instagram and spending more time with my chunky, Realtree camouflaged Cat S22 flip phone, I’ve been busier than ever. I’ve acted in two excellent short horror films (one of which I’m on the set of right now) and completed a grueling eight-week TV writers program through the Native American Media Alliance. Actor Anthony Ross Ocampo, writer Jeanea Blair, and I have started a nascent production company together in Baltimore that aims to act as connective tissue between our city’s vibrant theater scene, film and television studios, and writing communities in the wake of federal funding cuts to the arts (more on that to come in Mister Issue 4).
I also took a course on the Alexander Technique at Everyman Theater on Fayette Street. The Alexander Technique, within this context, is a posture technique for performing artists to better understand our habits. There’s a lot of discussion around our habituated responses to things, and an emphasis on “the means whereby,” i.e., the means whereby one gets from point A to point B. This level of physical awareness, what I call “ruthless embodiment,” draws a stark contrast from the dissociative fugue state that defined my late adolescence and early twenties. I find myself falling in love with my city even more as I walk around, eyes up, ears open. Or, in the text-messaged words of a friend in the arts I accidentally influenced, “I finally checked my phone usage and realized that I was spending more time on Instagram than breathing. So last night I deleted it. Already, life seems like an adventure.”
END OF PART ONE.
We’ll be right back…