Image: Kevin Kelly photographed by Jamie Tanaka

I was speaking to a friend of mine yesterday who makes YouTube videos and has a good size following. We were talking about different ways that people succeed or not on the platform and some of the different approaches people take, wide vs deep, creating long series or not, and so on. In the discussion I mentioned Kevin Kelly’s article 1000 True Fans. He hadn’t read it, and so I shared it with him. I think of this article as a classic of audience building advice but of course each generation’s classics are their own, and so he hadn’t heard of it. So it occurs to me that although many of you may be aware of it, it’s worth sharing here. It’s also worth noting that Kelly, who is one of the founders of Wired magazine, has updated the article for inclusion in Tim Ferriss’s Tools of Titans book, which I also recommend.

The core idea of 1000 True Fans is that in the era of the web a creator does not necessarily need millions of fans to earn a living. Instead, they need a small number of highly engaged people that they interact with directly. These two characteristics are worth examining. High engagement in this case means people who are willing to spend significant amounts of money on your output each year, the number Kelly comes up with is $100. The first question this raises is: do you even have something that such fans could buy? This is probably a good prompt for many creators, to make sure that in addition to for example, the regular music album they can buy or stream online, there is also a deluxe collectors edition which comes with a booklet and poster, or similar. It may seem presumptuous in a sense to offer something like that, but you may be surprised to discover that there is a small percentage of your audience that is passionate and wants to demonstrate their passion by buying something like this. Another approach is simply having enough things like an album, a t-shirt, a poster, a concert ticket, a fan club membership, a package of stickers all available that if a supporter decides to buy all of them then it makes a difference for you financially. Highly engaged fans will behave differently from casual fans and should be given good opportunities to do so.

The second part of this equation is that true fans want to interact as directly as possible, and want you to benefit from their support. The best case for both you and your true fans is that you sell things directly from your own store or site and capture as much of the profit as possible. Your true fans will gladly go to your own site, enter their info and buy. The more casually interested will not, so you want to have things available for them on the big stores, but your true fans will often actively seek out a way to buy direct out of a desire to support you. As a musician I would have fans ask me where to buy so that I would receive the best value possible when I released something new. For musicians I recommend Bandcamp for this purpose. Cliffski of Positech games has a very good article about the economics of selling games directly from your website and why you should do it. I don’t endorse everything he says as sometimes he seems to be provocative for the sake of it, but this article by him is highly recommended.

The other related note about this which came up when discussing with my friend was that while large platforms like YouTube are great for building an audience and getting traffic, they have a vested interest in you not directly owning that traffic or relationship with your audience member. YouTube will not, for example, provide you with your subscribers email or real name. If for some reason your YouTube channel gets deleted, your audience is deleted with it. This is why it’s important not to think of yourself as a ‘YouTuber’ but instead as someone who’s business reaches people through YouTube, and tries to move them off there onto your site, email list, or other community. I’m sure not everyone on here is an artist or creator trying to build an audience so this may not be relevant for all, but if you are, I hope this helps.

I first started sleeping with loud rain sounds when I moved to a strange, crappy apartment in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood about five years ago. The back of my bedroom was a thin, haphazardly placed sheet rock wall which abutted onto my neighbor’s living room. They were the kind of family that left the TV on 24 hours a day. As a result I was sleeping with my head next to a TV every night, on the other side of the wall. There wasn’t another good place to put my bed in the apartment, New York apartments being what they are and so I started putting on various sounds to drown out the TV and help me sleep. I tried a lot of different things. Interestingly there is a whole universe of sound recording files on YouTube, like the one below “Noise of heavy Rain in Night Sea”. You can probably find eight or ten hour loops of whatever flavor of rain you want. City rain, forest rain, country rain. You can find recordings of vacuum cleaners and washing machines, of ‘outer space’ which is usually some kind of filtered white noise. At times I’ve created my own noise generators using various software synthesizers to create long, smooth uninterrupted noise sequences.

My ingredients for creating a nice noisescape for sleeping with a synthesizer are to start with a white noise generator as your sound source. Remove high frequencies to taste, or depending on the frequency content of the noise you are trying to block out. If there is a lot of high frequency content in the noise (it’s mainly tinny or shrill) you will want to leave the highs in the noise you generate. I sometimes add some gentle band pass filter movement on a sample and hold shaped low frequency oscillator to give the sound some light random fluctuation across the frequency spectrum. This can create sounds that are similar to howling winds or similar noise based randomly changing natural sounds. This kind of synthesizer noise can be useful when the sound you need to block has a bass vibration, since white noise contains an equal, random distribution of frequencies across the spectrum. So there is bass and sub bass frequency content in white noise and if you turn it up loud you can use it to block out annoying music from neighboring apartments. Surprisingly you can turn it up really loud and still sleep quite well once you get used to it. I also have used rain with thunder YouTube clips to mask outside noise pollution with bass content as well. I put it on and turn it up loud. Importantly you need speakers which can reproduce sub bass for this to work. One of the good things about living among the predominantly Caribbean immigrant population of Crown Heights is that they like to play loud music and so will never complain or call the cops about the booming thunder coming out of your apartment at night.

As someone who spent years tormenting my neighbors with my own bedroom music production activities I will never complain or call the cops about music or noise coming from adjoining apartments. There’s a kind of karmic balance to the fact that now most places I move to I have some kind of noise or music going when I try to sleep. Nowadays in Berlin I sleep above a bar in an apartment that faces onto a busy main street with trams and ambulances passing. Luckily I am generally not a very sensitive sleeper having grown up in Manhattan and lived in Brooklyn for many years, so the noise of the city is very familiar. Lately I’ve narrowed in on various YouTube clips of rain noise as my sleep sound of choice and I find it helps me to fall asleep more quickly and to sleep more deeply. My kids enjoy it too, hearing the rain falling in my bedroom.

Image: Desert Market II by Sparth

The only thing I feel confident about is that what comes after this will be very different. We’ve been on such a radical path of accelerating change over the past fifty years, I think the future is incredibly difficult to anticipate. There are some big, turning point questions like whether it will be a future of more energy or less, and how we will choose to organize our economies, or even the role of the money economy in our lives. The thing which caused me to start thinking (and worrying) about these questions actively was becoming a parent. I have two boys, eight and nine, and I care very much what the future they live in will be like for them. Funnily enough I am less worried about myself. I’ve always been reasonably able to change and adapt and plan to continue doing so.

One of the things I want to cultivate in my children is this willingness to continually start again. To respond to the actual reality around them and act accordingly. Many of us are living inside narratives which are created by others for their own benefit and even still are out of date. For any narrative to permeate the culture in an era of rapid change it’s almost out of date by definition by the time it has sunk in. The whole dominant story in the west of prosperity of ‘going to good schools to earn credentials to get a good job’ is the latest dominant narrative with regards to children and child rearing. In America, less so in Europe, the preposterous system of indentured debt slavery to un-bankruptable student loans is rapidly eroding the plausibility of that narrative with regard to higher education. The choice will be up to my children when the time comes but personally I will strongly advise them not to go to a private American university or take on any significant debt for schooling. It strikes me as an absolutely terrible choice at this stage.

Another narrative which we as parents wrestle with is the narrative of improving material conditions among the following generations, or the lack thereof. I am part of a series of steps downward in the material conditions of each generation, though still very comfortably middle class. My grandfather was much more conventionally materially ‘successful’ than either me or my father. My children, I predict will be less so still. This experience of the declining material conditions of subsequent generations is experienced much more painfully for people starting lower on the social ladder. For families that only achieved a degree of middle class comfort in recent generations seeing that slipping away from their children is a great source of unhappiness. I believe this loss of perceived (and real) material status and the sense of identity which came with it is a great source of the powerful political anger we are experiencing in the west.

The more I question the dominant social narrative the less convinced I feel that my children need to climb the economic ladder or cling to it in order to lead happy, secure and meaningful lives. In fact I think that the clinging to that system may be a great source of unhappiness for many of us, a kind of fighting against a powerful and inexorable tide. What will it mean to be happy in the coming future? What can we as parents do to prepare our children? The only answer I have is to prepare them to live among and adapt to change. As much as I feel that it is the parental role to provide a stable frame for child development, who are we to stay what that stability means in reality? Perhaps that stability simply means the presence and unwavering love of a parent amidst changing material circumstances, a kind of emotional bedrock. In many ways this is almost all we can reliably commit to providing, as the external world is outside our control to a great degree. In this case I have more questions than answers, but at least I can share the questions I’m asking, and perhaps you find them worth pondering too.

I’ve written before in these pages about Australian thinker David Holmgren. Holmgren is an environmentalist and anarchist, and is one of the co-founders of the Permaculture movement together with Bill Mollison.

In this short talk, Holmgren thinks through some of the possible responses to the threat of climate change and environmental destruction. In the US, we have seen one response this year, in the form of indigenous lead direct action against fossil fuel infrastructure, in the form of the Standing Rock resistance movement and it’s offshoots.

I believe that this type of direct action is a vital part of the resistance to the US petro-state alliance of energy capitalists and state actors. But not everyone is able to chain themselves to a tractor and be arrested. Holmgren offers another way, through withdrawal from the global capitalist economy, via a progression to local community economies, including on-site food cultivation using permaculture methods. He posits that if we can convince a significant percentage of the middle class that a richer, more humane life is possible by withdrawing large parts of their energy, labor and capital from the capitalist system and into local and household economies, perhaps we can significantly slow or disrupt the system.

The triggering of a new global financial crisis is one way to disrupt the ongoing release of fossil fuels into the air, even if it is something of a blunt instrument. It seems clear that no combination of informing, pleading or moralizing towards the state and private powers which control the world will make a difference. There is no lack of information about our future on the current climate trajectory. Even the oil companies have known for a long time what is coming, and built their critical infrastructure high above sea level as a result. It is not a lack of information. These entities, like the Exxon Mobils of the world, are simply not constitutionally able to stop doing what they are doing. It falls to us to stop them, and because they have such a powerful grip on the levers of political power in our democracies, the only options that remain to us may be a kind of individual or cultural divestment.

The existence of modern capitalist life is for most people an alienating one. If we could create a societal meme that a better, richer, more human life was possible, away from the market and its ocean of plastic consumer misery, perhaps we could begin to drain this beast we have allowed to grow atop our world of its economic lifeblood. Like a government, the global consumer system only exists through our participation in it. If we withdraw that participation, perhaps something else is possible.

As a child, I was lucky enough to be surrounded by parents and teachers who took great pains to make me feel smart and gifted. I was lucky to grow up in an environment surrounded by books and rich opportunities for learning. I was seen by others, and therefore myself as precocious and talented. If we combine this generally ambient awareness of personal wonderfulness with a million Cinderella-like fairy tales of the hidden princess or the boy who pulled the sword from the stone, we get a recipe for something more insidious: the hidden genius.

Somewhere along the way the stream of praise and affirmation I received mixed with our beloved societal narrative of the extraordinary individual and I begun to believe that maybe I was secretly a genius. My genius, of course, was latent. It was not immediately visible, but there were hints and suggestions. My genius was laying in wait for the perfect moment to explode into the public view and be showered with recognition and acclaim. Maybe there would be a parade.

Once this myth takes hold in the mind, it can become a secret drip of nourishing honey for the ego. We think “I may be getting terrible grades now, but that’s because school is stupid and I don’t care about it” or “This job is meaningless and below me, that is why my hidden greatness is unrecognized”. The idea that we may be carrying hidden genius allows us to rebut the feedback of the big mean world. It represents a kind of counter narrative to the cruel indifference of reality. The longer this narrative persists, the greater the stakes. If our genius remains unrevealed, the moment at which we reveal it takes on higher and higher stakes. The possibility that we will whip back the curtain and be met with yawns is a kind of existential threat.

The hidden genius narrative is self-perpetuating. In order for it to function, it must remain hidden. In order for us to remain an undiscovered Cinderella in our mind, we cannot try on the glass slipper even once, lest it be revealed that it does not fit. As you may imagine, this is pure poison. No one leaps from behind the curtain fully formed. Like babies, we all must stumble out, fall on our faces, poop in our pants and smear food on the walls as we make our first attempts at self-expression. We are not Athena who emerges fully formed and armored from the head of Zeus. We are humans and we are deeply imperfect.

A healthier narrative in my mind is growth in the public eye. Most sane and loving people love to watch things grow, to fall and get up again, and to break new ground, even if that is only new ground for ourselves. A baby’s first word is no less wonderful for the fact that it is not a new word entirely, or a poem, or a speech. The idea that we will grow secretly behind the curtain, and suddenly burst into view perfect is a kind of sickness, and more importantly an impossibility. To be seen is one of our great human needs, it’s the source of all human dignity, connection and love. The hidden genius is never seen, and will never be, because it doesn’t exist. To be truly seen requires an acceptance of vulnerability, and a willingness to be seen when we are weak and struggling.

Today, I went to Coney Island with my kids and my sister so that they could jump in the ocean, along with hundreds of other crazy New Yorkers of every stripe. It’s a yearly event called the Polar Bear Plunge. A friend of my sister’s has been doing it every year for ten years. She’s totally crazy (in the best possible way) so this all makes sense. I did not jump in, so feel free to call me a coward.

The last time I returned to New York after moving away I didn’t have a strong feeling of missing the city, but this time I do. Seeing the fat, thin, old and young people of a myriad of races yelling and running into the January water of the new year together is something incredibly of New York in the best possible way. Someone was flying the Mexican flag on the beach, and someone else ran into the water flying the Chinese flag as well, holding it up over the waves beside multiple American flags. Berlin on the other hand is white white white white and the immigrants that are there are definitely not running into the ocean flying their flags. So I miss that and am reminded of it being here.

After this, we went to eat fried chicken at the Popeyes restaurant on Surf avenue. Me and my kids love Popeyes. It’s the only fast food chain I unashamedly love. It’s food is horribly, dangerously salty, basically all deep fried and totally delicious in the worst best way. Feel free to judge both my parenting and my culinary taste, I’m here for a good time not a long time.

Fried chicken is something culturally charged in America. Popeyes has a whole ‘Louisanan Blackness’ theme that animates its decor and corporate mythology, including a middle-aged black lady that appears in various videos and commercials talking about the folksy goodness of Popeye’s chicken. Fried chicken is coded as black in America. It’s so strongly racially coded that if you pair it with its cousin in symbolic food racism watermelon you had better be making some kind of very well articulated and thoughtful cultural critique. In America these two foods are so steeped in ugly stereotypes and racism that serving them together in public is likely to set off an explosion. David Chang (of Momofuku fame) had a wonderful episode about the international meaning of fried chicken on his show Ugly Delicious, in which he interviews some black American culinary writers and chefs about why, for example, they feel self-conscious eating fried chicken in public. As if by simply eating this food they will be fulfilling a visual stereotype, and feel ashamed.

Fried chicken, like barbecue, is one of those alchemical miracles of poor, oppressed people taking unfancy ingredients and magically transforming them into absolutely delicious food. Food so delicious that it has effectively become the national food culture of the USA, or at the very least the American south. This is part of a pattern of cooptation of black and poor culture by the American mainstream, in which America serves as a kind of pressure cooker of misery and oppression. Under pressure resilient resourceful people survive and create powerful cuisine, music and culture which resonates with the entire world, and then this culture is coopted and monetized, or poisoned with stereotypical racism (or both). The unique and amazing contributions of black Americans are the bedrock of so much that is vital and good in American culture, particularly as it is exported to and experienced by the wider world. In many parts of the world American coolness and blackness are basically synonymous, yet here at home black people continue to be brutalized in the laboratory of systemic white supremacist capitalism.

America’s relationship to fried chicken is just one example of the deeply complex web of attraction and revulsion, exploitation and oppression that has tied black and white Americans together since the beginning of slavery. For two groups of people to live together for hundreds of years it is impossible for the culture of each not to affect and infect one another. One can assume that this closeness, and the human impulse to see one another as people was what gave rise to the brutal, legalistic system of white supremacy, in which borders had to be established and ruthlessly policed, in defiance of our obvious and self-evident shared humanity. None of this of course is written in hindsight. The position of black Americans has changed, and we can safely assert that it has improved, but white supremacy is still the unwritten law of America.

2018 felt like a year of acceleration. Although maybe every year will be such a year for now, until it’s not. The rise of an organized extreme right wing across the world, particularly in the US and England feels like a certain thread of the global system lowering its mask and baring its teeth more nakedly. Class warfare is less covert now. The response from the global left has been encouraging in places (like Standing Rock), if still inadequate broadly. The latest scientific data about climate change also tells a story of acceleration. We’re riding a curve that we may or may not be able to bend down in time, a curve of trapped heat, melting ice and acidification which no politician can negotiate with or defeat via a more effective media strategy. The human race has come to believe so much in our own self-contained reality that we’ve forgotten that there are external realities as well, facts that hold no alternatives.

The rejection in France by the Yellow Jacket movement sits at a complicated intersection of these two realities. On one hand, the people begin to reject the neoliberal arguments and withdraw their participation, a potent move which is more than a gesture. On the other hand, they do it in response to a gesture on the part of the French government to avert climate disaster. We can argue about whether focusing on the behavior of individual consumers at the micro level makes more sense than going after the largest polluters and consumers of carbon via legislation, but a canny politician watching the humiliation of Macron may well take the lesson that the imposition of climate reform via tax is a losing proposition. Humans, complicated as we are, resist moving in any form of straight line. Many now look to China, with its centralized system of control to pull the brakes on the climate cooker. But of course the Chinese communist party is also vulnerable to a failure of economic growth, and as we have seen, when the deferred threat of climate runs into the immediate threat of lost economic prosperity, short term thinking always wins.

The American president’s use of Twitter was also a hallmark of 2018, along with the disclosure of a series of terrible decisions by Facebook, and fears over YouTube’s devolution into a radicalization engine. We’ve reached a point in which social media has now become fully integrated in our society, and taken on government like institutional roles. This has prompted some thinking about what it means that these for profit entities now control algorithmically some of our most used windows onto the world. Jaron Lanier is probably pre-eminent in his criticism. What will happen next will be interesting, whether it’s led by consumers, governments, the platforms themselves or some mixture of all the above. With the maturation and increased centrality of these platforms, change must come. What will it look like? For me it’s totally unclear.

In my human-scale life 2018 was the first full year of living in Europe, in Berlin. That’s been mostly a good, if occasionally difficult and uncomfortable experience. Personally I feel that I’m on a path that’s going somewhere good, not just stewing in my own juices but being an active participant in my life and future. I don’t regret the choices I’ve made this year, which I think is not something everyone can say. I don’t believe in new years resolutions so won’t be making any of those, but do intend to continue writing here, publishing to my new newsletter, writing a journal and meditating. Habit wise those have all been very fruitful and are things I intend to continue.

If you missed my post yesterday, it’s because I am replacing one post a week with my weekly newsletter where I write a short note and then share a few links to things I’ve written or made, things others have written or made and usually a bit of music. If you’d like to receive that once a week, click here or enter your email in the side bar.

“I look to science fiction and fantasy as the aspirational drive of the zeitgeist” says Jemisin in her charming, eloquent, feisty speech accepting her Hugo award for The Stone Sky, which is the third novel in the Broken Earth trilogy. I’m currently reading her novel The Fifth Season and am back home in our shared neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn for the holidays. I haven’t finished reading the novel, much less the trilogy, so I don’t want to write about it (spoilers: it’s very good), so this speech seemed a good substitute.

In recent years, the more I think about politics, the more my belief has crystallized around the idea that I am against the powerful, and for the powerless. That the powerful always need to be resisted and pushed back against, and that one of the best ways to understand a society is to look at its treatment of the powerless. In every society, there is a group of people who are protected, included and comfortable, be it large or small. Most of written history and literature is the history and narrative of protected groups of privileged people. One of the aspects of power is to have a voice and to determine what is said about you, to control your own narrative.

Slowly through human history, the marginalized and disenfranchised are finding opportunities to raise their voices and tell their stories to wider and wider audiences. Marginalized groups are becoming visible and heard, and entering their version of events into the historic and cultural record. Jemisin as a black woman sits at a unique intersection to observe our culture and chooses to do it through richly written, complex and strange fantasy novels. I have always believed that the wide-open nature of sci-fi and fantasy has made it one of our most potent vehicles of political imagination and allegory. Jemisin raises the question in her speech of who will be allowed to use these powerful tools to imagine the future and to comment on the present?

When we extrapolate forward and imagine what may happen, we start from where we stand. When we comment on society, we do so from our position within it. If the only voices which we lift up and amplify, or validate as part of the cultural record, are those of the children of the powerful, we blind ourselves to richer possibilities and imaginings. As someone joked on Twitter the other day “2018 was a long decade”, and boy were they right. But 2018 also included some victories, and moments to celebrate. Jemisin’s victory, and speech, are one such moment well worth savoring.

I’m back in Brooklyn this week visiting family for the holidays, back in the same house I lived in for many years. Coming home to America, New York and Brooklyn after living in Berlin for a year provokes complex feelings. On one level there is the simple pleasure of seeing family, especially my sister and her husband’s new baby. There is the comforting feeling of being in a familiar place with familiar landmarks. And then there are the strange feelings of disconnection and dislocation. Driving back into Brooklyn after being away, this time for about six months, I’m aware of seeing it through different eyes. The airport, the highway, the people driving crazily.

Compared to Europe, America feels a bit run down and ragged. Everything looks a bit dusty and bruised. Europe has these aspects too, but feels less shabby and neglected overall. Is this the corrolary to the freedom we love? To our mistrust of centralized government? A kind of extra swirling entropy, chewing at the edges of things? When you’re swimming in the water of America every day it’s hard to see, but coming back in, it’s visible and slightly shocking. New York is particularly this way, big, messy, noisy, dirty and sublime as it is. But I feel that somehow this is in our American DNA, this kind of sloppy dangerousness.

Before coming back, I was listening, partly in an act of homesickness for New York radio, to an interview by Krista Tippett on her On Being podcast. She was interviewing an ‘expert on ambiguous loss’ named Pauline Boss. Boss is a family therapist who specializes in treating patients who have suffered open-ended losses, like the disappearance of a loved one. The title of the show was ‘The Myth of Closure’ which is what got me interested to listen. Closure is one of those words that we throw around casually ‘I just needed some closure’ at the end of a romantic relationship, for example. But in fact what we are talking about is a desire for an end to sadness. Real sadness, however, never really ends, it just recedes into the background and becomes smooth and familiar. It no longer hurts in this startling arresting way that prevents us from functioning, but it remains. In recent years I’ve come to think of two groups of people, those who’ve experienced real loss and those who haven’t. Mainly it’s a way of thinking about how humble a person is. Real loss is humbling in it’s reminder of our powerlessness in the universe. That the things we love can be taken away at any moment. That we may try our best but still suffer and fail.

In the interview Tippett discusses with Boss the loss of home that immigrants experience, and this resonated with me. I have a real affection for Berlin, and do feel at home there in a certain regard. But New York City is my home of homes, the home of my dreams and my deepest self. Whether I’ll ever live here again I don’t know, but it will always be my home. And in that there is a source of persistent, if soft, sadness. The loss of home, of that familiar, comfortable place. The things I miss about New York, beyond the obvious like family and friends, are small but important. I miss certain foods terribly. I miss that comfortable and easy relationship to the city’s culture, the knowing of cultural reference points, music, fashion, the voices on the radio. I miss the radio station Hot 97. I miss that feeling of easy, fluid connection to a place that I definitely do not have in Berlin. Everything in Berlin must be puzzled out and understood. Weird German slang or idiomatic speech, the social meaning of neighborhoods, what’s on the front page of the newspaper? It’s all alien and therefore lightly alienating, a kind of cognitive overhead.

And then there is the strangeness of going back and forth. The immigration officer says to me and my sons “Welcome home guys” but we are not going home, although in one sense of course we are. And arriving back in Berlin is also strange. We have left one home to return to another. Do we feel relieved and comforted? Or something else?