Trad culture in the digital age

’m not really a huge proponent of the whole “trad culture” movement we see on socials. This is mostly because I think most of them are frauds. They are doing the same thing that the rest of are: they are leveraging the digital age to find a paying audience. The real trads I know around here (there are quite a few) don’t do squat on social media besides maybe Facebook to keep in touch with family.

The husband works a blue collar job, maybe self-employed doing home renovations or something like that. They have a bunch of kids, goats, chickens, and maybe a couple of cows. But what they don’t do is show off their $100,000 kitchen on IG. Mostly because they don’t have a $100,000 kitchen.

The trad grifters might be my least favorite variety of grifters, come to think of it. Yeah, the right-wing politics grifters are bad, but it’s pretty easy to block them out. But trad grifters? Preying on a growing swath of the average population who are tired of wading through vagrants and perverts just to take their kids to the local ice cream shop downtown—a downtown that was perfectly safe at night just 5-10 years ago. But I digress.

Trad grifters are particularly low specimens. There are a lot of people who are now incensed with the trajectory of culture society, and want to do something about it. Moving out to the country and building a farmstead up from scratch is really hard and a ton of work (ask me how I know), not to mention expensive. Playing it off to the camera as if it is natural to possess all of this stuff and its just your way of life (while you have 2 million followers) is wrong. If you buy a property with all of the facilities built to handle livestock and birds, it’ll cost you. Either that, or you will have to move so far from polite society that it is practically impossible for the average person to purchase now (my exact property an hour or two farther out in the hinterland runs a good $100k less than).

Anyway, to feed off of people and present yourself as something that you probably are not is low. I know this is lumping a lot of tradfluencers into one camp, and that is probably unfair, but coming for rural America I know that the local farmsteaders do not do it for clout or clicks. They do it because it is what they do. They quietly go about their lives gardening, canning, preserving, and raising animals and kids. You don know they exist because they are quiet and would rather not be known.

Sorry for the rant today, but grifters really get under my skin. If you have something worth selling, then sell it! But passing yourself off as a self-made what-have-you while it is obvious that you have a team outfitting your kitchen/farm, writing your content, and producing it, too, is disingenuous.

Now, to tie it into what I do.

These people are obviously doing what they are doing because it sells. My wife sends me tradfluencer IG reels about canning and jarring, so I check out their profile. This unassuming trad housewife has 1.3 million followers. There are a lot of people looking for this kind of content, and it is funneled to big accounts who play the game.

With that said, I think that the real trad farmsteading families should take a page out of this playbook and try it out for themselves. If you aren’t leveraging digital real estate, you are leaving money on the table. you should write about and create content around the life you live and things you know and understand, because there are lots (think millions) of people with an interest in it.

Keep a close eye on my Gumroad profile. In the next few months, I have a full line of products coming out that will help you

• Start a freelancing career
• Build a pricing structure
• Build and audit basic SEO campaigns
• Basic keyword research processes and templates, using the least expensive tools on the market.
• And a content repurposing guide so you can write it once and use it 5x, 10x, or however much you want.