The art of “Anti-influencing” - City CastDC

Girls on the Internet. I'm also a co host for a podcast called The City Cast DC alongside my friend Mike Shaper, a columnist for Politico, where we dig into the everyday life of living in Washington, d C. To help folks feel even more connected to this city that we love so much. And if you don't live in d C, but you're thinking, wow, that sounds very cool. I wish they had a podcast like that in my city. They might, because there are city Casts podcasts all over

the country. And I wanted to share this episode with you because even though it's about Washington, d C, it hits a lot of the conversations that we have here on There Are No Girls on the Internet, Questions about what it means to be a visible woman of color on the Internet, the good and the bad, and the

everything that comes with it. In this episode, we talked to Jade, the human behind the super popular DC Instagram account clock Out d C, where Jade gives real nobs, never bought takes about what kind of events, restaurants, and bars are worth your time or not worth your time in the DC area. Working entirely by herself, Jade has built up a huge following and influence in d C, but along with it comes challenges that as a fellow Woman of Color creator trying to bootstrap by way in media,

I know far too well. So I hope you'll enjoy my conversation with Jade for city Cast DC and be sure to subscribe. You can go to city cast dot fm to find a city cast podcast for your city, and as always, thanks for listening today on city Cast DC. I'm not really an influencer, cool celebrity. I am Jade, your neighbor. Jade will Mack never expected her clock Out d C page to grow as quickly as it did, but here we are. She's got seventy followers and her

Instagram stories get thousands of views per day. Sounds pretty great, right well, as it often is on the Internet. With that success, came backlash, and Jade's here to tell us about how she navigates all of it. It's Wednesday, October. I'm Bridget Dad and this is City Cast DC. When we were talking about doing this interview, was like, boy, do I know a little something about the things that

Jade is saying? Um, so really decided to be connecting. Yeah, what does it feel like to be just one single person who runs this project that you just started out to be like a fun thing that is now blown up in d C and kind of taken over your life? What does that experience feel like for you? Well, the word cloud of this entire experience, we're probably like wild, grateful, surprising, and scared, like all the time scared, I guess. And yeah, it's been really fun though, I would say you always

are learning stuff. You meet so many people. But yeah, who knew? Who knew that this would be my pandemic hobby that just somehow like blew up And I started it before the pandemic and it just kind of just gained this momentum and steam and here we are now

seventy thousand followers later. Wow, Yeah, I mean it's gotta be Does it ever feel like a double edged sword where it's something that you're so grateful to have built and something so happy to have in your life, but also comes with this baggage that can be a real

particular experience to unpack. Oh, for sure, I think it's kind of like the stink that eats itself because you know, it's fun that you have to share this stuff to people about things to do in events, but that means that as you grow, more people see the stuff that you share. That means that if somebody doesn't like it, the more chances of they will let you know, and the more chances of you getting bullied or quote canceled or whatever that is. So the stakes get higher as

things build. I guess that being said, the impact you can have also gets greater too, So it's hard. I've had some really great instances where there is this woman, she was a recent Afghan vacuee and she messaged me and she was like, I never saw my culture until I moved to d C and I saw you shared an Afghan film festival. Thank you for letting these find

like a home in d C. Powerful amazing. The Armed Forces Retirement Home emailed me for etically because they had this volunteer group pull out, and I posted something asking, you know, my community, like hey, like we send Christmas cards to this group, does anybody want to help, like volunteer at this retirement home And twenty people from Instagram spontaneously helped this retirement home and they sent me a photo.

So the impact is like wild that, like people are willing to show up, do stuff, find their own a community and things. But that being said, if you share the wrong thing or people just have bad days, you can get cyber bullied and attacked very quickly and it

can go very south. I am just sort of in my mind internally vigorously nodding and something I noticed about clock out d C. You have been so successful at effectively building this platform and growing this audience that one might get the impression that you're working with a team, that you've got, you know, an assistant, a social media person, a PR person, but really it's mostly just a one woman show yourself, right, It is solely a one woman show.

For example, I sold these t shirts uh call of views on of my employer because it's kind of like a joke because I have a full time job, right and I have to shipped them, and like two nights ago, I was like, okay, great, So how to exactly do we print shipping labels? And how exactly do I put them in bubblers? And how am I going to drop

fifty envelopes to the mailbox? And I have to get a new supplier because my first supplier won't be able to make all a hundred shirts and cool, right, So I'm not only a content creator now, I'm also like a little like Amazon warehouse employee. Great, and so it's like one in the morning and my dogs looking at me and playing Celine diond like with packaging shape. So yeah,

it's a one woman show completely. And so being a one woman show, I think it creates this attitude where people feel more entitled to message because you're so good at what you do. It gives the impression that, oh, she has a team, like they should be on this, and so they don't realize said in fact, that they're messaging one person with a full time job, you know, and so they might be like, oh, you didn't talk about this, or you talked about that in the wrong way,

and it's like, well, I'm one person. So I often feel like when you're a woman particularly a woman of color who creates something online, people feel a lot more comfortable kind of calling you out, and they don't realize that like you are one person who's a human. Right, You're gonna make mistakes, You're gonna miss things. I think it goes both ways. Right, as a person of color, as a soul entreneur, preneure, people are harp on because

you're an oppressed person. You should know better about how this affects us, and we would expect better of you to be able to learn quicker and to do better. I think that is the onus. Like white girl Jessica or whatever, we can just call this person, right, she should learn better because she should have read like some anti racist book. But you know, like you should know better because inherently, like you've been oppressed before and we expect this from you. I think that's where the burden

is more on. I agree, I agree, And I also think there's just something about being a solo woman of color creative entrepreneur based in d C that I definitely feel because like I rep DC, my Instagram handles, etcetera, etcetera, all like in d C, d C, d C, I think that DC is such a particular kind of city because we are really plugged in for the most part to like political and social conversations, and so even if you just started this project to be fun things to

do around the city, there is an expectation that you will be so plugged into what's going on in so many different socio political communities. I almost feel like it creates an impossible expectation because no one person can be plugged into, you know, every cultural and political and social

community and happening citywide. Yeah, no, completely agree. I think the nail on the head like there are so many causes to support and everything is also so nuanced to and so many events and things to do also share different purposes as well and spaces for them. Two, I personally won't share spaces where I wouldn't feel comfortable going to that event or I don't like those people. I'm not going to share that event. That's different than me being like I don't believe in this cause or whatever

or something like that. I think that's a little bit different. And I personally not comfortable with certain things and making the trudgment call on and I hope people aren't looking towards me to make that call for them. Yeah, I think that's an important line to keep of. Like I am not your conscious, Like I'm telling you fun things to do in the city. Don't look to me to be your like moral arbiter of what causes you should or should not support or champion. That's not what I'm

doing here. I'm doing something different. I think maybe it's partially because like the algorithm, and I know everyone says this word in the sky, like the algorithm, but because we're so used to seeing things that we like all the time. I we see something we don't like, they just go full fledge into attack mode on their net.

That's I think this is a common thing. And then the second thing too is that like on the Internet, there's a lot of like black and white, and people don't really have a lot of patients for nuance on the internet. Yeah, that it's definitely. I mean, this is something I know far too much about, but that's definitely

a true thing. That algorithms and platforms are biased towards polarized ways of seeing things and compartmentalized ways of seeing things, and so social media platforms are not set up to honor nuance or humor or you know, context and things like that. It's better at flattening those things out and

taking those conversations out of context. I guess I'll say, yeah, for sure, I will say just going back the more generally speaking, I was kind of surprised at how far I've grown for somebody who decided not to do ads. Why what? What drove this decision? What drove this decision? So I actually started the tire page because I was I don't know how much you know about my back story about this entire page. It was never like I'm going to one day wake up and be the anti influencer.

I was bartending Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays, and I found that, like the Tuesday Night section of the Washington Post with Washington and stuff, I didn't really have a lot that I was interested in. So I would start looking for my own events list. So I would just kind of start coming up with lists of things to do, and then I would send out this email to my friends, which and I eventually made into an Instagram and that's

what started this entire endeavor. But because I came from this as like I'm looking for things to do now, I want to give people like an authentic review because they probably only have limited time and money like I do, and they should have a real, real expectation going in.

I'm so grateful that's where you landed, because I have been burned on exactly what you were just talking about, this sort of cottage industry of influencer marketing, where I have been burned on sponsored social media ads that make certain immersive, artistic experiences in the city look dope, and I'm like, oh my god, like this looks amazing, I gotta go. And so then you buy the ticket and you're like, oh, there's a little pricing, but all right. Then you get there and you're like, oh, it's just

an Instagram photo opportunity. It wasn't really a really good event. And so your page is just so different because it allows for a little honesty to be injected into the conversation. No exactly, And like I think at this point, all the PR people and all the restaurant owners, we have a good repertoire where they know that if they invite

me to an event. Sometimes before there used to be kind of this disclaimer, like if we give you free tickets, there is an expectation that you have an Instagram post and three videos or something in exchange for these comp tickets, and I will always reply back sorry, I don't do exchanges like this. I will go as a media preview and I will give my fear honest opinion, but I will not do some exchange for tickets or I would rather just go and pay the full price with my

friends at a later date, so I think. And but I kind of just started the page in that premise, or I didn't realize that that people would really support that kind of a model and that it would grow so big under that premise, and it has. So that's I think that's really nice to note that that's what people want in d C. Yeah, because as you said, in d C, we work a lot. We might be working up side job or side hustle or passion. We don't really have a lot of time for whack events.

We don't really have a lot of time to show up and be like, oh, I kind of got snookered into this event. That wasn't good because somebody online got free tickets somewhere and convinced me to spend my money which is limited to show up and go. That's always been kind of the biggest premises the pay to play, no pay to play and no no sponsor content. Let's get a quick break at her back. Yeah, so I know that you took a break from the project this summer.

What prompted that break? I was just getting very burnt out. I don't think people realized. For a period of time, I was probably I was responding to about I want to say, between two hundred or three d d ms a day because I don't know. I was like people fanger, like your famous I'm like no, Like I'm your neighbor, and like we go grocery shopping at the same store. So I just would started just dm ng a lot of people back, and then it just realized the point.

I was like, you know what, as this page grows, Like when it was a page of a thousand people and I had fifty d m s, that's a lot different now when you're a page of seventy thousand people and you have three hundred d ms. I think one day when I COVID in December, I responded to about eight hundred d m s in a day. That was

the most dms I responded. So if we think about one DM takes about one one minute to respond to you can imagine the amount of screen time I would have, And it just started to become very unsustainable, both to d M all these people back to both go to events, to reply, to find stuff, to the newsletter, to work at washingtony In on top of Rob Wade was happening,

Ukraine was happening. You know, there's just so many things right, and so every time there's an event, every time there's something terrible that happens, you share something, people get mad. You don't share something else, they get mad at you.

They emotionally dump on you, they yell at you. So it was just reaching a poor where I was just getting very burnt out and never still just get awful DM sometimes in the middle of the night, you know, you're terrible, You're ugly, you should go die, like you know, it was just like I wanted to leave my Instagram and then I just took the time to like really refocus on my friends and my family and my work

life and all these other aspects. And in June I think I also gained like twenty thou followers, and so I think that was also part of it. Where you go everybody dreams about going viral, but it's actually awful. It's just like literally it's just thinking like a tidal way, and I'm like, ah, like all these people like and

like crazy chaos, like too much, too much. Yeah. I always say, we're not meant to have access to stranger's opinions about us in that way, like a wave of tens of thousands of people at one time sharing their opinion about you. Humans are not Our brains are not designed to absorb that experience in a healthy way. Yeah. I so Natz Park has forty one thousand people, that's the capacity. And I remember I was there for like

Lady Gaga and Bad Bunny and I looked around. I was like, there are more people that follow my Instagram than are currently at this concert, And like the conceptualize that is wild. And like I remember one day there were like fifteen thousand people that looked at my Instagram story and one week when I talked about the hip hop party that the African American Museum was hosting, my reach was one million on Instagram analytics. That is wild.

I mean it's it really goes to show the sort of what you were saying, that double edged sort of this platform. How it's the impact of that and the fact that you were able to curate that yourself and build that yourself is amazing. But also that's a lot of people. That's a lot of people who are all have their expectations and their versions of you in their head that they feel that you need to be accountable

to you. So, now that you're back in action after your break, what are you doing differently this time around to make sure that you feel like that you can approach this work from a good place. Yeah, so I kind of made this large statement about I'm not your enemy, like I don't want to be your enemy. If you have a problem, email me and we will get coffee. That's kind of this has always been my house rules. Like with anyone, the second thing is emailing me. I

think that email allows for more breathing room. I think dms have more of this, like automatically you need to respond to And also I think that kind of creates kind of like what things are DM worthy versus email worthy. Less people have been deming. I think only like ten people have DM to me in a week. So just trying to limit some of those those ways of public facing interacting and also doing more events. So if people really want to hang out, like, there are places we

can go and do that in real life. Yeah, here's too, creating the conditions for savoring your real life while also being intentional about your online life. Yeah for sure, Jade. Where can folks I mean, at this point, who's not following clock DC? But just in case you're the one person listening, who who's not following? How can folks follow clock f DC? It's at clock out DC on Instagram.

Five and one people in Washington, d C follow clock out d C. The Steads every time you say one of these nuts are like, oh my god, that's so many people. Wow. Well it's a testament to what you've been able to build. Thank you so much for being here, Jade. It has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me. That's all for today here on city Cast DC. Be sure to subscribe to clock out DC on Instagram, and

while you're there, check out our page two. We're at city cast Underscore DC and that's also our handle on Twitter. We'd love to hear from you. We'll be back tomorrow morning with even more news from around the city. Talk to you then. But yeah, being on the internet, man, I never knew what read it was until like two years ago, and I'm like, has it improved my life? I don't know, like