Image: Abandoned mattresses and hurricane tents at the incomplete site of the Fyre Festival.

I watched the Fyre Festival documentary on Netflix called Fyre. I recommend it if you haven’t seen it and if you were aware of that whole madness when it went down on social last year. Basically the short version is: someone made up a completely fake music festival that was ‘Instagram come to life’ on a private island in the Bahamas and then when people showed up it was actually Lord of the Flies. As a piece of insane performance art it’s probably one of the great works of the 21st century, but as the film shows, it was also an incident in which many innocent people were scammed and hurt. As much as we enjoy mocking the gullible people who paid thousands of dollars to live the ‘influencer lifestyle’ for a few days, many innocent Bahamian laborers, equipment rental folks and others were also massively scammed and harmed, which is not funny at all.

The main reflection I have after watching the film is how representative of a certain strata of New York life it is. It’s a strata that I have come into glancing contact with, having been acquaintances with various idle rich folks who spend great amounts of time and money dreaming up things involving famous people, huge sums of money and unlikely outcomes. This kind of scamming is almost a sport in New York, where people cultivate images of being connected and influential and play that image off against everyone around them. Usually mountains of cocaine are inextricably involved, this was one of the key details I found unrealistic in the documentary. As someone who never used cocaine I had a kind of natural immunity to some of this bullshit, but nonetheless I got swept up in my own stupid share of it. Having been a musician in New York for years, this behavior is central to a certain part of the music business, particularly the night life.

The grift is basically this: cultivate social capital and parlay it into the acquaintance of one influential or famous person. Find other connected or valuable people in the network and overplay the degree to which you are connected to the first person. Introduce those people to each other while making both think that you are closer to the other than you are. Build an aura of being connected and influential, which sort of shimmers into reality the more you repeat the process and weave more and more people into it. Then, take that fake/real network and use it to execute some business, usually in the media and entertainment field.

This is very clearly the playbook that Billy, the protagonist / villain / sociopath in chief of Fyre Festival is running. He has cultivated a marginal celebrity in Ja Rule, and uses him to parlay connections with famous Instagram models. Behind the scenes he is probably scamming investments of cash out of various rich people who want to be around the action. He uses the social and financial capital he has accrued to pay off the various parties. The models get money, he gets the aura of being around the models. Maybe the rich investors get to hang out with the models and take pictures. He creates photographic and video evidence of all this happening and uses that as the capital to launch the next scam, in this case the Fyre Festival. What is amazing about Billy’s case is that he is a true, unbound sociopath who is so divorced from reality that he makes wild promises which can be definitively verified in objective reality.

The art of the scam is that the glimmering future is always around the corner but can justifiably evaporate at any moment, without blowing back on you. Billy was crazy enough to promise something that would very clearly either exist or not, which is where it all tragicomically blows up in his face during the film. The truth of the matter is that you cannot turn around in a certain kind of New York night club without bumping into a person exactly like this, running the same scheme. The difference is only in scale and audacity.

Update: If you like me were particularly offended by the stories of the stiffed Bahamian locals who worked hard on the festival and weren’t paid, one of them has a GoFundMe page which you can donate to.

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I had something which I started to write and decided it wasn’t good. How often do we do things just to fill space? Say things to fill silence out of social discomfort? Sometimes it’s better to leave a blank page. See you tomorrow.

If you read this site or my Twitter feed you may have noticed that both are slowly (not that slowly) morphing into full-time Alexandria Ocasio Cortez fan pages. The rise to prominence of Cortez, or AOC as she’s is acronymically referred to is hope inducing for me. She represents a validation of political ideas that I believed in but didn’t see expressed in American politics. She’s anti-corporate, raises small donor funds, has an aggressive plan for climate change and speaks and acts like a real human being, as opposed to a poll-tested robot. Importantly as well she has a serious leftist, democratic socialist agenda for American politics including medicare for all and a green new deal, both policies I whole heartedly support. Those of us out to the left of the Democratic party have believed that the problem with them is that they were not left enough, that their politics of civility, bipartisanship and centrism were the problem, not the solution. In AOC’s meteoric rise we see a validation of this thesis, that a smart and charismatic young politician with strong leftist policies can get attention and move the frame of the conversation. AOC of course builds on the momentum created by Bernie Sanders, who I see in the same terms.

You can watch a bit of AOC speaking about it here.

Over the weekend, Twitch streamer HBomberguy ran a marathon stream of himself playing the video game Donkey Kong 64, with the goal of raising funds for Mermaids, a charitable organization in the UK who work to raise awareness about gender nonconformity in children and young people amongst professionals and the general public. The stream became a viral phenomenon and included call-ins from Chelsea Manning, AOC and others who spoke about trans rights via phone while Hbomberguy played Donkey Kong. There’s a lot to talk about here. First, with regard to AOC, this is one in a series of instances of her intelligently using modern, participatory media to connect with people, particularly young people. Her Instagram streams of her cooking and talking politics are another wonderful example. Social media have an incredible participatory and democratic potential and to see someone like AOC using them in such a fluid and native way is something I love and I think will be incredibly powerful. Importantly, for my generation and those younger than me, we grew up to a large extent online and so for our politicians not to speak and connect with us here represents a major point of difference.

Additionally, I am very happy to see AOC speaking up vocally recently on behalf of trans rights, both on this stream and in her recent speeches over the weekend. I have had arguments with older leftist people I know about the fact that they see trans rights as a distraction, a small issue and representative of the problem with (gasp) “identity politics”. There are two ways to approach this question, the first is simple and direct, which is that trans people are people and they deserve human rights, period. Once we get into a discussion about who deserves to have their human rights protected, we’ve already failed massively. We could leave it there, but for people who are unconvinced by this, I think it’s worth framing in terms that they may understand. Trans people are at the very bottom of the hierarchy of social power. They are among the most marginalized, at the greatest risk of violence and murder, and terribly afflicted by economic insecurity as a result of prejudice and exclusion. If you cannot recognize their simple humanity, you can recognize that they are a potent representative of the most powerless people in society. The powerful will do to trans people what they would do to you, if you were not protected by your social position. More and more my analysis of politics comes down to siding with the powerless against the powerful. The way a society treats trans people is a very clear indicator of how just it is to any marginalized group within it.

Image by Aram Balakjian from the linked article.

Words are coming out of my brain like thick sludge today, so I’ll keep it short. This piece called “Into The Zone: 4 days inside Chernobyl’s secretive ‘stalker’ subculture” crossed my feed today and I found it worth briefly responding to. The blocked off exclusion zone around the nuclear accident site creates a kind of permanent, ongoing disaster zone which attracts illegal visitors, including this subculture of young men who call themselves stalkers, naming themselves after Tarkovsky’s cult-classic film Stalker.

In a world that has been mapped, imaged and cataloged with satellite precision, the desire to discover wilderness becomes more pronounced. Modern normality becomes inescapable. The exclusion zone of Chernobyl represents a space off the map, an opportunity for wildness amidst the decaying ruins of the Soviet Union. I remember when the Chernobyl accident happened during my childhood, and the apocalyptic media images of a drifting radioactive cloud were potent fodder for my young imagination. The human imagination is drawn to disaster because of it’s rupturing of the normal, the feeling of possibility.

At the beginning of the millenium in New York we experienced two disruptive events almost back to back. The first was 9/11, the attack on the World Trade Center. I was present, and my childhood home was part of the evacuation zone. We moved out for two weeks. Not too long after there was a blackout, and the city was plunged into darkness. I remember experiencing complex emotions in both situations, particularly during the aftermath. 9/11 was a huge trauma for me, and I think I still have some mild PTSD from it 18 years later. But immediately after, and in the weeks following there was a feeling of community in the city that I had never felt before, and a feeling of the rupture of normal reality. It felt like anything could happen. The blackout which followed felt like a brief return to that strange space of possibility, even if it was much more banal. I remember playing frisbee in the street in the dark with a group of slightly random people who had come together for the night, unable to get home.

I’m in Montreal this morning, having traveled here for work. It’s snowy and dark. I’m up early thanks to the time difference. On the plane over I read Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s memoir “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”. Like pretty much everything else Murakami writes, it’s great. In Murakami’s writing I love the pervasive sense of calm in the midst of the every day world. His novels, and his memoir are filled with images and anecdotes from a kind of placid daily existence that I find deeply soothing to read about. His descriptions of running, cooking and listening to music are a place I’m always happy to visit. Interestingly enough, the experience of reading this book, which is a kind of a hybrid of thoughts about running and thoughts about writing generates many of the same feelings. It’s full of beautiful, mundane moments rendered in Murakami’s unique, understated and direct style.

It’s a short book and so if you’re a fan of either running, writing about writing or Murakami himself, you’ll find a lot to enjoy. There are also a number of fairly deep and useful jewels of knowledge embedded within. One, which I think is one of the more valuable things I’ve learned in life and continue to relearn, is about suffering. To paraphrase Murakami early in the book, talking about running, pain is unavoidable but suffering is optional. This concept that we are an active participant in our experience of circumstances, particularly difficult ones, is one which I come back to, rediscover, relearn and re-experience throughout my life. Life is filled with all kinds of feedback and stimuli, many of which are uncomfortable, challenging or painful. We as humans have the tendency to narrativize our experiences (a kind of internal writing of our own stories) and within that process, we seek meaning and order in things which sometimes don’t have them. This leads to suffering. When we experience loss we ask unanswerable questions like “Why me? What did I do to deserve this?” and suffer under a feeling of injustice, that something wrong has happened.

A childhood friend of mine’s father died, not too long after my own father passed away and we were sitting shiva for him at their family apartment in New York. My friend asked me if I had any advice to share having been through the same process a few months earlier. I told him I didn’t, but what I could offer was the idea that although the loss of his father was painful, his father was an older man and that nothing wrong had happened. He’d died of natural causes at a slightly young old age. It was painful but there was no injustice or breaking of the natural order in what had happened. In hearing this he disagreed that I hadn’t had any advice and said he found the idea helpful. The death of a parent in the eyes of a child is a difficult, but relatively benign and natural occurrence. If the situation were the inverse, I think this narrative of being personally wronged would have been much harder to resist.

I’m not sure what Murakami’s personal spiritual or religious beliefs are but in this book, there is a great deal which connects to my own understanding of Buddhism. This perspective on suffering is perhaps one of the most clearly related. His description of the mental state he enters when running is very much related to my own experience of meditation.

He writes:

“I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void. But as you might expect, an occasional thought will slip into this void. People’s minds can’t be a complete blank. Human beings’ emotions are not strong or consistent enough to sustain a vacuum. What I mean is, the kinds of thoughts and ideas that invade my emotions as I run remain subordinate to that void. Lacking content, they are just random thoughts that gather around that central void.”

This makes me think that there’s something interesting to study about meditative states in all kind of activities which are not sitting still with your eyes closed. For me this a very good description of what it’s like to meditate by sitting still and breathing, the state of mind one enters.

This documentary just came to my attention, and it’s great. UK Hiphop artist Rodney P traces the history of Grime music in the UK, back through sound system culture and traces the process through which UK youth started rapping in their own accent. I was involved with the grime scene for a number of years and had some great experiences being welcomed into it by some of it’s great practitioners, including artists Skepta and Jammer, who are featured in the documentary. For me, as someone who was involved in the early years of the jungle and drum n bass scene in the US as a fan and raver, and came from a hiphop background, grime was the perfect blending of these two threads. It’s raw, aggressive and DIY nature also appealed to the part of me that loved punk aesthetics. It was a terrific validation for me of the idea of hiphop as a blueprint for DIY culture, a way that people could speak about their local conditions and dreams in an accessible and authentic way. I never liked UK hiphop before when I perceived it as trying to sound American, it felt inauthentic to me. When grime came along, filled with unique slang and hyper local flavor, it felt to me like the beginning of hiphop had in New York (which I experienced the tail end of as cultural echos, being born in 1979). Now, years later, grime has survived it’s early surge of novelty and stabilized into a viable underground scene, with new artists coming through and existing foundational artists maintaining their position. I’m happy to have played a small role in exposing it to the wider world as I did 15 years ago, and happy to see people from within the culture examining and documenting the history in a thoughtful way.

This is one of my favorite songs by Atlanta rapper/singer Future and production outfit 808 Mafia. For those familiar with my own musical output you won’t be surprised to hear the combination of melancholic pretty strings, 808s and weird synthetic sounds. Future sounds great on it even though the lyrics are not particularly profound or interesting overall, there are flashes of vulnerability “I’m an addict and can’t even hide it”. For those unfamiliar, the song is about getting high drinking codeine infused cough syrup aka ‘lean’ or ‘purple drank’. The taking of opioids has permeated southern hiphop culture more and more intensely ever since 3-6 mafia sang Sippin on Some Sizzurp in 1999. Drinking lean has long been a part of the Houston rap culture as well, and has killed many rappers there via overdose, including Pimp C, Big Moe and many others. It’s part of a larger and ongoing pattern of opioid abuse which has been complicating the American narrative of the so called “War on Drugs” for years.

Historically the war on drugs could be characterised as ‘bad foreigners bringing illegal drugs into the country which can be combated by militarized police’. The opiates which are triggering this new wave of addiction are not actually imported by cartels, instead they’re produced by domestic pharma companies like Perdue and prescribed legally by doctors. I remember having an appointment to get my wisdom tooth pulled in my twenties and having my dentist prescribe me a bottle of 30 Percocet for the pain. I was high for weeks.

The fact that in it’s current phase the people who are despairing and overdosing on opiates are much more white and rural has undermined the existing narrative and shifted the story to one of a crisis which requires medical intervention, as opposed to during the 80s when black Americans were afflicted by crack cocaine (imported by the Reagan/Bush CIA as part of Iran Contra, we should note) and the response was harsh sentencing laws and the construction of a massive prison industrial complex. As recognition grows that white people use the same volume of illegal drugs that people of color do and a new generation of politicians take power we are seeing a fairly rapid crumbling of militarized drug enforcement as a viable domestic industry, with the outright legalization of marijuana and the focus on treatment with regard to white opioid addiction as the front of that wave.

Speaking to a friend who is a legal-aid lawyer in Brooklyn when I was home for the holidays she observed that with the shift in drug sentencing policy, there may be a lack of bodies to support the prison industrial complex as it has been constructed, and potentially this may be an economic motivation for the shift to focus on immigrant detention. With the lack of draconian drug laws to use as a pretext to lock up a seemingly endless supply of people of color, a new source of non-white politically vulnerable bodies is needed to maintain the businesses which administrate their punishment. This is an interesting lens to view the current US president’s repeated banging of the drum of illegal immigration, and the current government shutdown. Just as external national threats and enemies must be manufactured to support the finances of the military industrial complex, so must enemies be created to support the domestic prison industrial complex, including thousands of jobs in the Republican leaning areas these detention centers are usually located in.

Bonus extra credit listening for a more introspective Future, also terrific:

Yesterday, a friend sent me this article by Anne Helen Petersen. I read it while grabbing a quick fast food dinner in between two work meetings. It hit me like an arrow hitting a target, a shock of recognition. I felt incredibly seen. The article is substantial and there are many excellent points made that I probably will need a bit more time to digest, so I’ll just respond quickly here and potentially come back to revisit some further thoughts.

First of all, if you’re like me and feel constantly behind, like you’re never doing enough and like no matter how hard or long you work you can never get clear, you are not alone. There is a name for this condition and it is burnout. It is not unique to a social strata or income bracket, although some may be disproportionately effected. It is, as Petersen asserts, the default condition of the Millenial generation. I’m technically a few years outside that bracket, but I identify intensely with the condition she describes. There are a few characteristics which give rise to it. The first is economic precariousness. We in this age bracket have grown up through a period of changes which are designed to consolidate wealth among the wealthiest and generate or enforce precariousness among the rest. I will write this from the perspective of the United States because this is where I think these conditions are most manifest and it’s also what I understand best. Others around the globe are affected by this but I think if you want to see how bad it can get in a modern post-industrial allegedly-democratic country, take a look at the US. Particularly Europe, you all are not here yet but this may be your future.

The value of economic precarity to the ruling class is that it creates a group of compliant workers. Workers who know that they are one slip up away from falling off the economic ladder into extreme misery and danger. The point of the US system of mortgages, extreme student debt, credit cards and insecure job-tied health insurance is that it creates fear in the work force. If you are constantly running ahead of the economic steam roller trying to pay off high interest rates you absolutely cannot risk losing your job for any reason. This places you at risk of extreme exploitation by the powerful, in this case your employer. A work force of terrified people is easier to manipulate and control. This aids the goals of the powerful in consolidating wealth and power to the top of the pyramid.

The most effective tools of oppression and exploitation are those which the subjects use upon themselves. The psychological conditioning to precarity has been applied relentlessly to this generation, through societal narratives around debt, perpetual education, home ownership, hustle culture, life hacking and personal optimization, on and on. We have created a generation of people who work to exhaustion and beyond. We are constantly running in front of the steam roller of capitalism. We will run until we die, push ourselves beyond the point of exhaustion and keep running. This is the nature of burnout. You work until you can’t work any more, and then you work more. We’ve become a generation of zombies, desperately trying to achieve an experience of restful stability and safety which never comes.t

Image: Still from Yaeji – Drink I’m Sippin On

There’s something happening in Korea and amongst the girls of the Korean diaspora, and they’re making some really good dreamy house music. Are these two things connected? I have no idea. My colleague at work Stella put me on to Yaeji a few months ago and I’ve been really enjoying her music and overall aesthetic for a while. There are many great examples for Yaeji so I’ll let you enjoy falling down that particular internet hole, but I’ll highlight this one:

The video is a terrific blend of smooth, subby deep house aesthetic (or a kind of internet idea of deep house in 2019) and a cleverly satirical take on the YouTube makeup tutorial genre with text like “This product is called depression and it stays on for 24 hours”. It’s contemporary, witty and weirdly intimate. I don’t want to lump Yaeji in with this movement because I’m not sure of her relationship to it but the evocation of the makeup tutorial brings to mind an interesting recent feminist movement in South Korea called the “take off the corset” or “corset free” movement, a movement by young women against the oppressive culture of plastic surgery, makeup and conformist feminine expression which is very strong there. Many young women are destroying their makeup and cutting their long hair into the movement’s signature short bowl cuts. South Korea is the plastic surgery capital of the world and one could argue that there is a very real violence being inflicted upon these women by the male gaze and internalized misoginy. The fact that we are seeing a reaction against it and conformist gender identification is a hopeful sign in my opinion as Asia has long been a difficult place to be a woman or girl (not to say that the rest of the world hasn’t).

Another young Korean woman making great house music is 박혜진 park hye jin (which is confusingly the name of a male South Korean actor as well I think? Or so Google suggests). Again, I don’t know her political position, but the attitude and energy present in I Don’t Care feels rebellious. The track is great and the combination of Korean and English sing-rapping over deep house tropes is fresh and interesting. I’m enjoying it a lot.

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.