Like I Care

Sometimes I go to my Instagram account and try to look at the unread messages. But it’s complicated.

To all the people who send me messages that probably deserve a response but that I never acknowledge, much less answer: I’m sorry. I am so confused by the inscrutable message file categories: “general”, “primary” and “request”. Also, my usual concern and paranoia about holding on to my privacy is always hovering. When I click on a “request”, for example, the machine asks me if I want to accept so-and-so’s message request or not, and I am simultaneously told or, rather, warned, in weirdly casual, awkward language, that: “If you accept, they will also be able to call you and see info such as your activity status and when you’ve read messages.” Call me? How do they know my number? Is my number posted somewhere public connected to this account and if so who made that happen?

And why does anyone need to know exactly when I read a message? They are (the Man is) monitoring me like an electronic ankle bracelet. I would never allow this kind of stalking behavior in a real relationship.

I almost never get to anyone’s Stories on time, before they have disappeared. I try to look! But they are usually gone by then; they are designed to self-destruct (which is, frankly, part of their charm, and I wish a lot of other things that are posted on the internet [or done in the real world] would go away). So when I go to look through the backlog of inbox content called “stories” I am usually told “story unavailable”. At those moments part of me always feels a little relieved, like I am off the hook for not reading all of my messages, because a big chunk of them disappeared after 24 hours (I think it is 24 hours). Not my fault!

I myself don’t even know how to create a Story of my own; Stacee makes them for me.

Regardless of my inability or unwillingness to get on board with this stuff, I thank you for all your kind and generous and sometimes funny and sometimes informative notes and thoughts, when I can manage to read them.

I still can’t even wrap my head around the idea of a “page” that doesn’t exist on paper.

I don’t understand how anyone can navigate all of the labyrinthine and convoluted systems and multitudes of areas and identities within every system. And it’s so strange that personalities are often flattened and generalized and styled to maximize views/engagement/popularity within these infinite systems; people (not to mention bots) are willingly reduced or distilled to types of people (people-ish people) with recognizable characteristics, with similar ways of speaking (catchphrases, trendy slang/codewords) and moving and wearing their hair and clothes and makeup.

I had a personal Facebook account briefly, years ago, when I had just self-released an album. Someone close to me, someone I trusted, who was media savvy and worked within the music world, told me I should have a Facebook account, as an artist trying to continue making a living. I needed to keep my name out there; I should crawl out from under my rock, from time to time. Read (the feed) and post things. Connect. So I begrudgingly gave it a shot. But I hated Facebook; there were no boundaries to it (I like boundaries, they make me feel safe); it went on and on infinitely, babbling, and everyone seemed to have bought in and it was often just boring chatter and unnecessary junk and it didn’t seem like it deserved to take up that much space in the collective mind.

The graphics were unappealing—-clunky and also ugly (the dumb “f”, and that boring blue, with all the white seemed …weak), and the damn feed that would keep coming and coming and coming, seemingly against my will, never stopping; it was like being punched in the side of the head over and over and over again and even when I looked away, the afterimage of the scrolling feed was still there behind my closed eyes, faded but visible, a haunting ghost reel stuck in my addled brain.

I quit Facebook not too long after joining. Or I tried to; they made it really difficult to negate my account. Another reason to hate the company.

Instagram—initially independently-owned but now run by the same conglomerate of money-hungry world-destroying power-mongers as “f”— seemed not as bad, in comparison; it was about photographs and image-sharing; it seemed more artistic and less about networking and gossip and questionable facts and worded communication (not my strong suit) between people. That—building and rediscovering and maintaining relationships with people—was its own problem for me, even before the social networks came into being. Social media hasn’t made it any easier. (I’m still asocial.)

Yesterday I went to try and look at messages that had landed in my instagram account, as I do every couple of weeks or so, and there was this:

He—or It—really likes my feed! Swell. And, yes, of course, why wouldn’t I want to be more like Justin Bieber, and model my self and my much-later-stage career after him/his and buy myself some fake fan pages? I mean, after I put together a management team. (For quite a lot of years now I have been telling people I am “between managers”, with a wink [not a literal one], if I am asked. At one point I invented a manager, named Valentine Hirt, and got him an email address for people to contact if they wanted to make any inquiries, but then I got rid of him. It seemed dishonest and also Val wasn’t getting much action.)

Isn’t it obvious that I could not care any less about “presence” or “growth”? Did this bot-person even look at the feed that it says it really likes? Did he see any of my drawings of unconventionally attractive, scarred women flipping the bird to the viewer? Or is there just some code programmed to reach out to any verified musical artist with a certain minimum number of followers?

I wonder sometimes: Why do profits have to always grow? It’s profit! Why does it have to get bigger and bigger all the time without it seeming to be a failure of the mechanism? Shareholders? Okay, that is a real practicality. But I have no shareholders! That is the beauty of being small and independent and commercially insignificant and culturally irrelevant. There’s no one to let down, except for the fans of my music. But I don’t worry too much about that (I worry some, always. I have confidence problems and I care about giving people good songs). People pay to consume my music, yes, and they could conceivably be let down by the quality of some new album of mine, but I like to think that that doesn’t really happen very often because I try not to release any shoddy product.

Why does anyone assume that I or anyone who does what I do (writes/records music) wants to be a “bigger artist”? With all the bullshit that comes with being a bigger artist. Some of us just aren’t built for the bullshit. The scheming and shmoozing and narrative-creating and the looks-maintaining and the campaign-building and the scandal-bandaging and the apologizing and the humiliation and the barbs and the jabs and the criticisms and the trade-offs and the sexism and the harassment and the self-defense and the thickening of the skin and the unraveling and the constant traveling and the electric shocks and the uncomfortable poking and prodding and the talking and the smiling and the misinterpretations and the explaining and the appearing and the surfaces and the engineering and performing of it all.

I just want to make my music and not be bothered while in the middle of doing it, and then on top of that I love for people—some people, certain people, the right kinds of people— to hear it and get something out of it. To enjoy it. I need this, actually. And I am so lucky to have it.

And yet, there are still people around me—one or two people— in the real world, in my orbit who try to nudge me, to convince me that I have more monetization optimization still in me, that I can still “grow” my audience…that I can utilize TikTok to my advantage (as if I’ve ever even browsed tik-tok or understand what it even is or what purpose it serves [isn’t it where people go to twerk?])…that I can game the systems or something; mobilize streaming so as to maximize my…whatever (streams). Use the algorithms to my advantage; tweak them, juice them…flood them? My “presence” can be stronger. My earnings. My profile. My catalog. My viral load.

But, oh hoh ho, I keep telling them, that ship has sailed. To try to pose or to pander at this point for more attention than I already have would go against everything that is human and instinctive and natural in me.

It’s like plucking my eyebrows… That torture? Never again.

And maybe I already have all the listeners I need.

But, okay, back to the instagram message I got: I have the “content”— I’m just “missing the surrounding presence, which can genuinely make a big difference in growth.” HA HA HA

I should start talking like that. (Like: “I’ve got the content, man. I’m just missing the surrounding presence, which can genuinely make a big difference in growth! Right?”) Like someone who gives a fuck. Like someone who believes in or cares about or listens to the opinion of anyone, especially anyone in any corporate collective of so-called experts in their fields of…selling…products like pop stars, or songs, or people-as-brands, to other susceptible people …to demographics. Like someone who hasn’t been doing this for more than three decades and cannot stress how impervious she has been to “growth” (the numbers kind), and how resigned to the basic futility and impossibility (in her case) of self-promotion.

And then there was this (Cameo):

She ‘noticed’ my ‘name’ (Julia [sic]) ‘trending’ in their ‘fan search history’. Did she, really? In my fan search history?

I’d do almost anything for $6M, but not Cameo.

And then there was this (sent to me recently [though it is now old news already] by a friend, an actual real person). I have never heard this band but I (like many others, evidently) have heard of them (Geese):

Virality used to be a bad thing; it meant disease. And an engineered virality was like Covid-19 being created in a lab. i.e. it was Bad.