Like a lot of others in the arts and cultural sector I have been a little flat out this week. Even so, I still managed a bit of reading and a bit of writing.
In preparing for AusArt Day I experienced Meta’s new two-link limit first hand and have been reflecting on it as rent-seeking stacked on entrenched use of Facebook by brands. This will have significant impacts on arts and cultural organisations.
I also found Alex Kelly’s insightful piece for Overland about AI and social movements really engaging. Beyond personal and organisational productivity, Kelly examines the erosion of ‘thinking together’ – an essential, messy, complex but productive process of collective reading and thinking.
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Rapid-fire
A short list of other things:
- Tomorrow is the second AusArt Day national giving day for the arts. Shoot through
- Noongar curator and artist Zali Morgan is the Artistic Director for Tarnanthi Festival 2027 and 2029. Shoot through
- Tahni Froudist will take on the role of CEO of NAISDA starting 30 November 2026. Shoot through
- Longtime Artistic Director and CEO of Playlab Theatre Ian Lawson has ended a 15-year tenure at the organisation for playwrights. Shoot through
- With X ⟨ or xAI or whatever name ended up as! ⟩ and SpaceX already merged there's talk that Tesla will be folded in as well. The idea is being considered be special committees at each company at the request of shareholders. Shoot through
WTF’s been going on?
Here's WTF happened this week:
Meta is rolling out a two-link limit on Facebook
Meta is limiting links on Facebook to two free links monthly to prompt Meta One subscriptions. This forces creators and arts brands to pay or pivot their marketing strategies.
In classic BigTech rent-seeking external links are now a paid feature on Facebook. Meta has begun an aggressive rollout of their Meta One subscription which limits Creator accounts and Facebook Pages to a maximum of two links in posts or comments a month unless you are on the Advanced, Expert or Max Meta One plan. If you haven’t already been hit by it you will soon.
As I wrote in a longer blog post this morning, the raft of exclusive features are a cover for a limit on links to force Creators and Pages to pay the monthly subscription. If you want to keep posting links you had better be ready to pony up nearly AUD $1,000 a year to up your link quota to 8 per month. If you need more links than that you will have to pay $2,748 annually for 20 links monthly or nearly $10,000 a year for unlimited links.
For independent artists and lean arts and cultural organisations this overt pay-to-play traffic model represents a major disruption to entrenched ways of doing arts marketing because arts brands have largely seen social media as traffic generation for their websites or ticketing platforms. Some arts brands may give in and pay, but others will need to pivot from anger to action, rethinking their use of links, consider diversified ad spend, double down on pointing people to a LinkInBio and focus the few links they have on bolster email subscription lists and other owned channels.
If you want to know more about Meta’s two-link limit check out my blog post about it.
Elliott Bledsoe
Alex Kelly on AI, social movements and 'thinking together'
Alex Kelly’s Overland essay adds a new dimension to critical thinking about AI. It warns that outsourcing writing and thinking to AI undermines the ‘thinking together’ of social movements and collective organising.
Artist, filmmaker and organiser Alex Kelly adds to the discourse around the social impacts of AI in an Overland piece considering how AI reduces ‘thinking together’ – collective reading, writing and learning – which is crucial to social movements and collective organising. It is an interesting point that I haven’t heard anyone else talk to. It contributes to commentary about the concern that AI is dulling our brains through overreliance, cognitive offloading, cognitive decline and a reduction of critical thinking.
There is a lot in the piece worth gathering up – and my reflections on it here are in no way meant to minimise or bypass Kelly’s work – including the power of solidarity statements, open letters, zines and reading groups, the relationality that ‘Only [comes with] time spent doing things with one another [that] stitches trust and comradeship’ and that ‘we need each other more than ever’ in this moment of ‘collapse, end-times fascism, the inevitable extension of white supremacist and colonial logics’.
Kelly reminds us that words matter. That is so true. And when we outsource our words to AI we trade genuine agency for a mere assumption of efficiency – whether we actively think about it or not. Kelly extends this thought to collectivism and social movements. ⟨ Pardon my crude paraphrasing but I took Kelly’s point here to be that ⟩ when we speak with shared words, how we arrived at those words together matters as much as the words themselves. In the context of AI, Kelly rightly asks , ‘what happens to our movements if we skip over the process of thinking together?’
Of course, the lure of AI makes sense in the capitalist drive to commodifiy time and labour. That is something Kelly takes up. The point is particularly poigniantly made when Kelly says:
This has created an impossible attention imbalance. If we use AI to cut down the time it takes to write something, why should we expect someone to take so much of their human time to read it?
This quote bridges the individual use of AI and the impacts of that on collective work:
The logic of urgency pushes us to do things quickly and do less research, rather than take more time to slow down, think deeply, make considered ethical decisions, have debates, argue, reflect, listen to one another.
For Kelly, the seductiveness of AI freeing us up to ‘get more done’ and ‘focus on the “more important” work’ is a thin veneer. Kelly warns that the dynamic of AI outsourcing bypasses the crucial, albeit messy, process of debate, argument, reflection and listening:
Time is the irreplaceable stuff of relationships and relationships are the connective tissue of life. Relationships are what will give us the strength and solidarity to navigate and respond to the many, compounding and accelerating crises we face.
A final point Kelly takes up that I will crudely paraphrase is that AI slop is a gak; a gumming up of the works. For all the negatives of AI, Kelly leaves us with a 5-point plan on how to engage/disengage with AI. It’s a good list.
Alex Kelly
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AI use
AI was used to generate a summary of listings and an introduction to this edition. Those summaries and that introduction were used to generate ideas. No AI-generated content was used verbatim.
The banner graphic (i.e. the first image at the top of the blog post) was adapted from vector graphics generated in Adobe Illustrator using Firefly 4 with 'Subject' content type selected and the lowest level of detail set. { Text to Vector Graphic prompt: Seamless pattern, very large simple shapes, 80s retro style, fluid organic elements, morphing, overlapping, blurred gradients, visible layers. }
Provenance
This blog post was first published on Wednesday 21 October 2026. It has not been updated. This is version 1.0.
