I’m an artist/music producer and I’m wary of the whole security state so I have a hard time reconciling the contradiction of needing to make money under capitalism and also my political views, cause making money doing what I’m doing requires some degree of visibility. Are there any extra steps I should take to ensure that I’m not “too visible” so to speak? I don’t think it’s avoidable at all and the solution is probably to somewhat hide my power level.
My best advice would be to mainly separate your work identity (accounts, apps, devices, pseudonyms, etc) from your personal identity.
Ideally a person could have 3 “profiles” for interacting:
- a work one, where you should be as “mainstream” as possible while trying to not favour the bourgies
- a personal one, for family, friends etc, where you can be yourself but tempering some views that they might not be ready to understand
- a political one, where you can freely study, talk about and try to push forward the kind of society you strive for.
I don’t do that perfectly, since at some point I mixed my personal and political “profiles” for a while, but I do that compartmentalisation to better help me deal with different kinds of folks and avoid some privacy risks. I work with all kinds of people, but the only colleagues I expose to communist discourse and ideas are the ones I know for a fact are already lefties. Has been working fine. People can know I’m a leftist, but not everyone needs to know I’m a communist.
I would almost agree, though I disagree with the labeling of the “Personal” one, it should be the social one, your personal one, should just be you, and used for whenever you are just being you, in my opinion atleast.
That definition does sound clearer in regards to usage, I agree.
The way I labelled my “social circles” are because I’m focusing more on the distinction between people I know IRL but aren’t necessarily on the same political communities I frequent, and those communities. But for most people the labels you suggest make more sense indeed.
In that case I’ll definitely have to delete my reddit account cause it’s the same as my artist name 😭
I guess it’s hard now cause my artist name has also been my username for a lot of other things, but I haven’t really been open about my political views on my YouTube or in my Spotify bio, so maybe I’m safe for now, and keep all my political activity to lemmygrad.
That’s not a career ruining issue tbh, if someone “finds out” and the conversation isn’t favourable you can just pass it as “it was a phase of mine”. I used to do art for small games and commissioned paintings and signed some stuff with a pseudonym similar to this one before, no one ever minded it.
Most professional contacts couldn’t care less about random internet comments though, especially in the artistic industry. I’d be more worried if you were to work in a law firm or some IT defense contractor. And if a business that shouldn’t be this serious does such a thorough background check and finds issue with political views, it’s probably a red flag.
Oh okay well, I guess I shouldn’t be too nervous then. I appreciate it!
