The Corporate Thought Police

I remember the time back in the early 90's when I had a show on a local college radio station.  After coming home from having just done a show consisting of a string of especially unpatriotic musical selections, I picked up my land line (which back then was referred to as "the phone") and rather than hearing the familiar dial tone, I heard three beeps followed by a recorded message:

Because you have violated community standards, your phone line has been disconnected for thirty days.

And then they gave me a toll-free number to call if I felt I "had received this message in error."  I couldn't call the number from my disconnected phone, of course, but when I went to a friend's place to use their phone, I was disconnected every time after being on hold for two hours, and never got to talk to a representative of the phone company.

Did this ever happen to you?  If so, I'd love to hear about it.  But it never happened to me.  I just made that up.  What did just happen to me is in every way identical, except that Facebook is an unregulated monopolistic corporation, rather than anything classified as a public utility like phone, broadband, or electricity.

What I woke up to two days after my 51st birthday, four days before I'm flying across the Atlantic to start a tour of Europe, was yet another message from Facebook that I was banned from the platform for a post from years ago that no one will ever come across sharing a song by the satirical London-based band, the Commie Faggots.  After the last ban a couple weeks ago I tried to delete all posts related to the band, but apparently I failed, and one came up and randomly got me banned again, this time for 30 days.

Whether satirical band names should be flagged as hate speech is one question.  Whether such posts should get you banned from publicly posting to the platform is also a question.  But I think it's important for people out there to understand that when someone gets banned from Facebook, they are not only banned from making public posts, but they also can't reply to private messages.

There have been a variety of questions that have come up in the recent Congressional questioning of Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg.  One of them was related to whether Facebook was capable of policing its own content, whether Facebook was capable, for example, of telling the difference between satire and hate speech.  The answer, clearly, is no.

Another question that's perhaps far more relevant that came up is the question of whether Facebook is a monopoly.  I suppose the answer depends on how strictly the term is defined, but if we go with the definition of a corporation that is singularly dominant in one or more major forms of public and private communication, then Facebook is clearly a monopoly.

Many people who are not professional journalists or professional artists may not realize that when Facebook changes their algorithms this can (and often does) have a clear, measurable impact on how many people are likely to see different kinds of posts.  Years ago, Facebook devastated musicians around the world when they changed their algorithms so that all of a sudden posts related to gigs or tours would hardly be seen unless you paid to boost them.  More recently, Facebook changed their algorithms again, supposedly to deal with the problem of fake news.  With their new algorithm, progressive websites such as Counterpunch and Alternet suddenly started getting far less traffic, and with that, fewer donations.

Facebook is like other massive, profit-driven, predatory corporations, but far bigger, and they buy up or mimic the competition, swallowing much of it up, becoming so dominant that if you want to communicate with many people privately or spread the word publicly about gigs, tours, albums, protests, or whatever else, you can do this without Facebook, but you won't reach or stay in touch with nearly as many people.

My own numbers seem to be typical as far as indy artists go, and they clearly show what a dominant platform Facebook is.  Notwithstanding the fact that there is of course some overlap between platforms, the numbers are still revealing.  I wrote a post last week where I listed ten good alternatives to Facebook -- that is, ten platforms that do the same things Facebook does, or better.  Which is great for people who want to live without Facebook for one good reason or another.  And it's great in terms of the quality of these alternative platforms in terms of user-friendliness.  But in terms of scope there is no competition.  Between "friends" and "followers" on Facebook there are around 15,000 people.  If you combine everyone who's on my email list with everyone who follows me on all of the other platforms I mention in last week's post, only when you add them all together do you approach the number from Facebook alone.

I wonder how many people out there who aren't artists realize that when you post a link to a video on another platform such as YouTube on Facebook it will get far less attention than if you post the video using Facebook's video-posting application.  Post it directly and it gets the eyeballs, at least comparatively speaking -- even if you don't pay to boost it, unlike announcements related to gigs, tours or albums.  For example, I posted a song on April 8th about the most recent Land Day massacres of children in Gaza by Israeli soldiers.  After uploading "Land Day" to YouTube and posting about that on Facebook and other platforms, the song on YouTube has so far been viewed 360 times.  Since uploading the song on Facebook the same day, without sharing the fact that the song had been posted to Facebook on any other platform, it got several times as many views -- 1,600 so far.

Because two billion other people are on the platform, including most of the people I know, Facebook is extremely useful.  But the algorithms they use are very destructive in many ways.  The fact that billions of dollars are invested in thousands of brilliant people who spend all their time figuring out how to make the platform more addictive and thus more profitable results in a platform that seems to cause as many problems as it solves.  In a weird way, I have found this phenomenon to play out directly in the numbers.  I only just realized that although I did successfully use boosted posts on Facebook to slightly increase attendance at gigs to the extent that I made around $2,000 more last year than I made the year before, I spent over $3,000 in Facebook advertising.  Maybe I'm just bad at advertising, but it had become clear that non-boosted posts about gigs were not being seen.  I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the folks at Facebook have figured out how to make their post-boosting function just barely useful enough to keep people doing it regularly.

It is very obviously a tragic thing that we have gotten to this stage, where what could have been (and what briefly was) a free internet became such a destructively corporate-dominated space.  We clearly need to either strictly regulate Facebook and social media in general so that it behaves in the public interest as the public utility that it has become, or we need to leave the platform en mass.  While I can't effect either of these developments myself, I'm going to experiment with deactivating my Facebook account at least while I'm banned from posting, commenting or messaging on the network.  While I'm banned from doing these things, it seems like the most sensible move, since I don't want people thinking I'm ignoring them for a month when I don't respond to their comments or messages.  My hope is people who want to find me will have the wherewithal to look me up on the web.  Realistically, with people being as they are, some will and some won't.

While I am absent from Facebook, please rest assured that although I'll miss some of the comments and conversations, I'll overall be happier with less noise, and I can easily be found by anyone who wants to find me, which I hope will be more than a handful of people out there who manage to notice through all the noise that I'm not there anymore.

A brief rundown of ways to keep in touch with me that are also dynamic and interactive like Facebook is:

• Go to www.davidrovics.com, where you will find links to all of the platforms listed below, and where you can also get on my email list -- email lists are great!
• Follow me on Twitter @drovics -- www.twitter.com/drovics
• If you follow me on YouTube, that's where I post songs I just wrote -- www.youtube.com/drovics
• Most of those phone-made broadsides also end up in audio form at www.soundcloud.com/davidrovics
• Whenever I put out a new album, it first appears on Bandcamp -- www.davidrovics.bandcamp.com
• At www.songkick.com you can follow artists you like, and hear about when we do gigs near you
• Whether I'm home or on tour, hanging out with my kids or at a protest, I post a lot of pictures at www.instagram.com/davidrovics (I know, it's owned by Facebook)
• My phone number is +1 503 863 1177 and I can be called or texted directly or via WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and other messaging platforms
• There is a David Rovics app you can get for your phone or tablet on the Google and Apple app stores, which allows me to send you relevant, occasional push notifications
• I blog at www.songwritersnotebook.blogspot.com

If you want me and other indy musicians to be able to keep making music, don't ever say "I'll look out for you on Facebook."  In recent years, if you saw a post of mine in your feed on Facebook it's probably because I paid to boost it.  This is not how Facebook used to work, when it first wormed its way into everybody's frontal lobes, and it's a far cry from the great possibilities that the internet still offers -- potentially -- for us humans to interact and learn about each other and the world we live in.

Life After Facebook -- Ten Suggestions

A lot of people lately are more fully realizing the many down sides to Facebook.  Yes, it's only one of many massive corporations dominating much of the globe's online communications, but it's an especially problematic one on many levels.  With billions of users, it's so dominant it's almost impossible to ignore, especially for certain people, such as artists who need to be able to communicate with their audiences.

I'm not going to announce here that I'm joining the #deletefacebook movement.  It might be good for my mental health if I did so, but I'm not sure if my career would be able to take the hit.  And I say that despite the fact that in order for any significant number of people on the platform to hear about things like my tour plans or upcoming gigs, I and other artists like me more often than not have to pay to boost the post, since Facebook changed their News Feed algorithms years ago.  Ma Bell also really sucked, but deleting my Facebook account today seems a lot like living life without a phone line in 1980.

However, I've spent most of the past couple weeks being banned by Facebook for old posts related to a satirical London band called the Commie Faggots (mentioning their name is considered hate speech on Facebook, where satire is allowed but unrecognizable by whoever or whatever decides who gets banned on the platform).  It's been nice listening to the crickets, though more than a little inconvenient to be unable to respond to Facebook messages, less than two weeks before I embark on a tour of Europe.  And the experience has got me thinking about all those folks out there who have just deleted their Facebook accounts and may be wondering how to proceed now.

Mainly to all who have left Zuckerberg's corporation behind I say, take heart.  You may lose touch with a lot of people you probably didn't want to be in touch with so much in the first place, since so many people never leave Facebook, but you don't have to be like that.  And most of the things that Facebook was actually useful for are done better elsewhere on the web.  Rather than being a passive recipient of how Facebook's latest redesign or change in algorithms affects your life -- what you read, who you communicate with, what you hear about -- you can spend a little bit of time figuring out what you want to keep track of in life, and do it all without Facebook.

Here are 10 alternative ways to do some of the things you you might have been doing on Facebook, but better:

• Songkick -- among touring independent artists, this platform is very well-known and well-used.  You sign up to follow artists you like, and then when they are doing a gig near where you live, you'll be notified by email and with notifications on your phone and/or on your Google calendar if you have one.  Artists and labels also generally sync their Songkick gig listings with Bandcamp, Spotify, and other platforms, so people can see where their upcoming gigs are when they're listening to their music.  There is no need to hope you'll notice a Facebook Event invitation, at least when it comes to following artists who list their gigs on Songkick.
• YouTube -- yes, I know it's owned by Google.  The point for now is it's not Facebook.  When it comes to following independent artists of any kind, they may be posting videos and other content directly to Facebook, but they do that because it's more likely to be seen that way than if they post a YouTube link.  They are probably also posting all that stuff on their YouTube channel, where they may also be doing live broadcasts just like on Facebook Live.  You can follow channels on YouTube so you'll receive a notification by email or on your phone when artists you follow have just uploaded a new song or are doing a live broadcast.
• Bandcamp -- when most artists that I know of make a new album, they release it on Bandcamp.  It's another for-profit corporation to be sure, but it's a popular platform nonetheless, and if you follow particular artists on Bandcamp you're unlikely to miss any new releases from them.  You can also Subscribe to artists on Bandcamp, and automatically receive all of their new releases on the platform while financially supporting artists.
• Soundcloud -- this German company isn't nearly as well-known as Facebook, but among artists it's a household name.  Most artists that I know of who put songs up on Facebook and YouTube also put them up in some form on Soundcloud.
• Twitter -- it's more than just a big social media platform that isn't Facebook.  It's also used by pretty much every journalist and artist on the planet (in countries where the platform is not banned), so if you're into following journalism or music, it's at least as good as Facebook.  Plus, it seems to lend itself much less to endless debates that don't go anywhere.  Either that or I haven't figured out how to notice the ones that may be happening.
• Instagram -- yes, it's owned by Facebook, but if you don't link your Instagram account with Facebook, at least you won't be banned from Instagram when you get banned from Facebook, I've discovered.  Also with the editing tools, the photos look better.  And many of the people you might be wanting to keep in touch with are quite likely on the platform (including me).
• Blog -- one of the things about Facebook that tends to cause depression among users is the phenomenon of scrolling through one's News Feed.  But many of the people posting truncated, Facebook-friendly stuff are writing much better and more interesting things in their blog.  Find out what platform they're using, and follow.  Of course you can still miss posts when you're overwhelmed by TMI and don't see emails notifying you about new stuff, but at least you're exerting some control over what comes in to your new, self-made feed.
• Mobile Apps -- many artists, news outlets and other entities have mobile apps (including me).  Downloading their app can be the best way to reliably see notifications about breaking news (in the case of apps like the Guardian or AP) as well as for announcements from artists about gigs, new songs, etc.  With mobile apps it's also often possible to only receive notifications relevant to your geographical area.  This sort of feature is very handy in the age of TMI, you may find.
• Email List -- At the bottom right on my website, as on many other websites, you can sign up for my email list.  Even in the age of social media, marketing professionals still talk about how email lists are the most effective communication tool.  Not everyone you want to keep track of maintains an email list, to be sure, but many people still do.  Since Google divided the Gmail inbox into three categories people often don't notice emails from people like me that get relegated to the Promotions folder.  But if you click the little box to the left of the sender's name indicating emails from this sender are Important, those emails should in future arrive in your Primary inbox.
• Websites -- yes, many websites of many artists and organizations have become disused or disappeared altogether, as we all have probably noticed at some point.  Others, however, are still there, and regularly updated, often very nicely, as more and more people learn the ins and outs of Wordpress and realize the importance of taking more control of their online presence and being more independent from Facebook.  There's all kinds of cool stuff on my website that don't exist on any other platform, much of which I put a lot of work into and put up there recently, such as my Musical History section.  And I'm not alone like that.  You won't have probably seen anything about it on Facebook, unless you happened to see a post about it on the day I posted it.  And if you did see that post, it's because I paid to boost it.

Netiquette In the Age of Facebook

I haven't heard the term "netiquette" used in decades, so I figured I'd just date myself with the title.  I've been actively using the internet for 20 years now.  What has become known as social media for about 13 years.  I was very impressed with the organizing potential involved with all kinds of things that came along -- email lists, file-sharing, web-based media.  Social media -- particularly MySpace and then Facebook -- always seemed fraught with problems.  Largely related to the tight and ever-evolving corporate control of these completely corporate-controlled platforms of communication.

As these platforms of communication -- ultimately, really, just Facebook -- came to become dominant, I was always hoping that it would be a phase that would be replaced by something at least slightly more useful and less oriented towards endless displays of "mommy, look at me" in one form or another.  But, unfortunately, Facebook is the new way that most of us seem to do most of our communicating -- because everybody else is on there, and if you're not, you're basically in the dark.

Of course if you are on Facebook, you're also in the dark, for the most part.  You can try various techniques at communicating with your base, or at finding out what's happening that you actually want to know about, but for me it's a lot like finding a needle in a haystack.  A haystack where the needles you're looking for seem to be buried in the algorithms -- where the most useless bits of hay get systematically pushed to the top.

I have been told repeatedly by people in their twenties that Facebook is a generational problem.  That they know how to navigate it better, and find what they're looking for, than older people do, generally.  If this might actually be the case, I'd appreciate any enlightenment on the subject anyone might be able to provide, especially those of you who grew up online, which people my age obviously did not.

In any case, as this very imperfect medium has become the dominant one, I have only recently realized that I have to stop treating it like a necessary nuisance, and start really engaging with people out there using the platform, as best I can under the circumstances.  To that end, I have finally realized that what some of my younger friends have been telling me is true -- that is, Facebook and various other places online where interactions between humans take place are not best seen as forums for some amorphous notion of "free speech."  Which always seemed to be a default position for me.  Which in retrospect seems very strange.

Facebook and other interactive places online, such as comments beneath YouTube videos and blog posts, I have decided, are best treated as forums for friendly discussion between basically like-minded people -- far from a place where anything goes as long as it's protected by the First Amendment.

It took me years to even figure out how to get notified (in places that I would notice) when there was a new comment on a Facebook post or YouTube video.  Once I got that figured out, my initial orientation towards these comments was that I should read them, and acknowledge them, perhaps react to them in some way.  After much urging from various young, more web-savvy friends, I started policing these spaces to some extent, by deleting comments that were obviously racist, sexist, transphobic, etc.

Much more recently I came to the conclusion that this wasn't enough.  That these forums for discussion needed to be treated more seriously and respectfully than that.  I started trying to think in terms of what if this were a discussion happening after one of my shows or in some other social environment in the physical world.  How would I want to treat people, or try to guide the conversation in that space?  Not that I have the power to do that, necessarily, as one person.  But as the administrator for my own Facebook pages, YouTube channel, etc., I decided on certain courses of action.  It's too early for me to tell if this will have a positive impact, after all the damage that has been done by my laissez faire attitude up til, well, last month.

It was the way Facebook essentially caught fire during the first half of November that finally prompted these realizations, around the 2016 US elections.  Since then, on an average of every other day or so, I have been blocking people from commenting on my YouTube channel and blocking people from seeing me on Facebook (which also blocks them from commenting on my otherwise public posts).

Not just for saying things that are obviously offensive anymore, but for slightly more subtle reasons.  Such as anyone who comments with what is clearly a snide or insulting tone, regardless of what they are saying otherwise.  If it's not in the spirit of friendly, respectful discussion, they get blocked.  This has applied to both people who agree with me and people who don't, though probably more often for those who don't.  My goal is not to squelch a diversity of perspectives, but to promote a friendly, nontoxic atmosphere for discussion, for making friends, for solidarity.

I think it's extremely rare for anyone to benefit or learn anything or change their position because of an argument, whether the argument takes place in a bar, a living room, or a social media post.  It's just not the way people work.  If it were, then the toxic atmosphere and the microaggressions involved might be worth putting up with.  But they're not.

It's obvious when people are approaching a discussion with an open mind.  In such cases, differences of opinion can be useful.  But if people just seem to be venting, that's not helpful to anyone, in my newly-adopted view.  That includes me.  I stopped.  I no longer respond negatively to the negative comments -- I just block those people now.  I don't know why I ever thought I should engage with them in the first place.

I haven't decided yet, but I might even start blocking those people who habitually respond to my posts before they take the time to actually read or listen to them.  If I post a song, I'm very interested in what people think of it, who have taken the time to listen to it.  I don't want to know what you think of the title of the song, when it's obvious from your comment that you didn't take the time to listen to the actual song in question.  I think that kind of stuff is just useless noise, and very disrespectful in its own way.  What I feel like we need on Facebook -- as in society as a whole -- are more people who capable of truly listening, giving honest feedback, and engaging in respectful discussion.  Anyone not into that sort of thing can find somewhere else to yell at each other.

I feel like I've come to these conclusions very late.  I'd be very interested in anyone else's thoughts on these matters.  How do you deal with these things, and why do you do it that way?

Where Are All the Protest Songs?

Announcing the Song News Network

Once a year or so, some of the lazier journalists working for outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian feel compelled to ask this question in a headline.  Or it could be their editors who are responsible.  In any case, between the editors and the journalists, they generally fail to answer the question.  Actually answering this question in the form of a news article is left to little-known independent media outlets such as Australia's Green Left Weekly.

But the much-vaunted investigative journalists working for these aforementioned trend-making publications in the English-speaking world's capital cities might be forgiven for their ignorance.  After all, in order to find out where the "protest singers" (the term itself is a derisive sort of thing invented in the 1960's to discredit the art form in question, but never mind) are these days, you have to look beyond the Billboard charts and turn off your local commercial radio station.

If these investigative reporters in New York, Washington and London did look beyond pop radio hits, perhaps they looked to the premier independent media collaboration in the United States, as it bills itself, the much-loved daily news and information show, Democracy Now!.  But if they're looking to this immensely popular show to answer this question for them, they should once again be forgiven for their ignorance, since according to my own year-long study of Democracy Now! music breaks, 83% of the songs played during the period of my study were by Grammy-winners or people who had a #1 hit.  And a majority of the artists played were dead.

But rather than just incessantly whining about this sorry state of affairs, I decided to do something about it.  I've actually been working at this in my free time for months, without telling you.  But I'm telling you now.  On May 1st, 2016 I'll be launching the Song News Network.

What, you ask with bated breath, is the Song News Network?

Well, the sky's the limit, but what it will be to begin with is a daily news feed on Facebook (yes, I know, but there are reasons) consisting primarily of songs by independent artists.  Generally songs topically related to something that just happened somewhere in the world (whether it was covered by media or not) and songs about something that happened on this date in history.

I have been collecting songs from most of my favorite artists (living and dead, but mostly living) over the past couple months, and will continue to do this.  I'm scheduling posts that will go out on the relevant date for songs about things that happened in the past that we would do well to remember.  Obviously for the songs about current news, songs will go up as soon as I hear about them.

If you like this idea and you want to help make it a success, there are things that you can do:

• Like, follow and share the SNN Facebook page
• Sign on to the Thunderclap social media blast about SNN that will go out on May 1st
• Send me songs

In terms of that last request, just to be clear, this is not an open mike.  It is curated by me, and I have all kinds of high standards for what I'll be putting up.  But I welcome all kinds of submissions of songs about current or historical events.

Given that the internet is largely divided along linguistic lines, and given that there is only one language that I speak with any degree of fluency, the songs that go up will mainly be in English.  (Please feel free to steal all of my ideas here if you want to create a similar network in another language!)  Given my musical inclinations and background, there will be a lot of acoustic guitars involved with this, especially in terms of the initial spate of songs I'll be posting.  However, please understand that I'm just as interested in submissions of hip hop or punk rock material as I am in more folky stuff.

Feel free to message me, submit songs, etc., on the SNN Facebook page or by emailing me at david@davidrovics.com.

How Facebook Killed the Internet

Facebook killed the internet, and I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of people didn't even notice.

I can see the look on many of your faces, and hear the thoughts. Someone's complaining about Facebook again. Yes, I know it's a massive corporation, but it's the platform we're all using. It's like complaining about Starbucks. After all the independent cafes have been driven out of town and you're an espresso addict, what to do? What do you mean “killed”? What was killed?

I'll try to explain. I'll start by saying that I don't know what the solution is. But I think any solution has to start with solidly identifying the nature of the problem.

First of all, Facebook killed the internet, but if it wasn't Facebook, it would have been something else. The evolution of social media was probably as inevitable as the development of cell phones that could surf the internet. It was the natural direction for the internet to go in.

Which is why it's so especially disturbing. Because the solution is not Znet or Ello. The solution is not better social media, better algorithms, or social media run by a nonprofit rather than a multibillion-dollar corporation. Just as the solution to the social alienation caused by everybody having their own private car is not more electric vehicles. Just as the solution to the social alienation caused by everyone having their own cell phone to stare at is not a collectively-owned phone company.

Many people from the grassroots to the elites are thrilled about the social media phenomenon. Surely some of the few people who will read this are among them. We throw around phrases like “Facebook revolution” and we hail these new internet platforms that are bringing people together all over the world. And I'm not suggesting they don't have their various bright sides. Nor am I suggesting you should stop using social media platforms, including Facebook. That would be like telling someone in Texas they should bike to work, when the whole infrastructure of every city in the state is built for sports utility vehicles.

But we should understand the nature of what is happening to us.

From the time that newspapers became commonplace up until the early 1990's, for the overwhelming majority of the planet's population, the closest we came to writing in a public forum were the very few of us who ever bothered to write a letter to the editor. A tiny, tiny fraction of the population were authors or journalists who had a public forum that way on an occasional or a regular basis, depending. Some people wrote up the pre-internet equivalent of an annual Christmas-time blog post which they photocopied and sent around to a few dozen friends and relatives.

In the 1960's there was a massive flowering of independent, “underground” press in towns and cities across the US and other countries. There was a vastly increased diversity of views and information that could be easily accessed by anyone who lived near a university and could walk to a news stand and had an extra few cents to spend.

In the 1990's, with the development of the internet – websites, email lists – there was an explosion of communication that made the underground press of the 60's pale in comparison. Most people in places like the US virtually stopped using phones (to actually talk on), from my experience. Many people who never wrote letters or much of anything else started using computers and writing emails to each other, and even to multiple people at once.

Those very few of us who were in the habit in the pre-internet era of sending around regular newsletters featuring our writing, our thoughts, our list of upcoming gigs, products or services we were trying to sell, etc., were thrilled with the advent of email, and the ability to send our newsletters out so easily, without spending a fortune on postage stamps, without spending so much time stuffing envelopes. For a brief period of time, we had access to the same audience, the same readers we had before, but now we could communicate with them virtually for free.

This, for many of us, was the internet's golden age – 1995-2005 or so. There was the increasing problem of spam of various sorts. Like junk mail, only more of it. Spam filters started getting better, and largely eliminated that problem for most of us.

The listservs that most of us bothered to read were moderated announcements lists. The websites we used the most were interactive, but moderated, such as Indymedia. In cities throughout the world, big and small, there were local Indymedia collectives. Anyone could post stuff, but there were actual people deciding whether it should get published, and if so, where. As with any collective decision-making process, this was challenging, but many of us felt it was a challenge that was worth the effort. As a result of these moderated listservs and moderated Indymedia sites, we all had an unprecedented ability to find out about and discuss ideas and events that were taking place in our cities, our countries, our world.

Then came blogging, and social media. Every individual with a blog, Facebook page, Twitter account, etc., became their own individual broadcaster. It's intoxicating, isn't it? Knowing that you have a global audience of dozens or hundreds, maybe thousands of people (if you're famous to begin with, or something goes viral) every time you post something. Being able to have conversations in the comments sections with people from around the world who will never physically meet each other. Amazing, really.

But then most people stopped listening. Most people stopped visiting Indymedia. Indymedia died, globally, for the most part. Newspapers – right, left and center – closed, and are closing, whether offline or online ones. Listservs stopped existing. Algorithms replaced moderators. People generally began to think of librarians as an antiquated phenomenon.

Now, in Portland, Oregon, one of the most politically plugged-in cities in the US, there is no listserv or website you can go to that will tell you what is happening in the city in any kind of readable, understandable format. There are different groups with different websites, Facebook pages, listservs, etc., but nothing for the progressive community as a whole. Nothing functional, anyway. Nothing that approaches the functionality of the announcements lists that existed in cities and states throughout the country 15 years ago.

Because of the technical limitations of the internet for a brief period of time, there was for a few years a happy medium found between a small elite providing most of the written content that most people in the world read, and the situation we now find ourselves in, drowning in Too Much Information, most of it meaningless drivel, white noise, fog that prevents you from seeing anywhere further than the low beams can illuminate at a given time.

It was a golden age, but for the most part an accidental one, and a very brief one. As it became easy for people to start up a website, a blog, a Myspace or Facebook page, to post updates, etc., the new age of noise began, inevitably, the natural evolution of the technology.

And most people didn't notice that it happened.

Why do I say that? First of all, I didn't just come up with this shit. I've been talking to a lot of people for many years, and a lot of people think social media is the best thing since sliced bread. And why shouldn't they?

The bottom line is, there's no reason most people would have had occasion to notice that the internet died, because they weren't content providers (as we call authors, artists, musicians, journalists, organizers, public speakers, teachers, etc. these days) in the pre-internet age or during the first decade or so of the internet as a popular phenomenon. And if you weren't a content provider back then, why would you know that anything changed?

I and others like me know – because the people who used to read and respond to stuff I sent out on my email list aren't there anymore. They don't open the emails anymore, and if they do, they don't read them. And it doesn't matter what medium I use – blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Of course some people do, but most people are now doing other things.

What are they doing? I spent most of last week in Tokyo, going all over town, spending hours each day on the trains. Most people sitting in the trains back during my first visit to Japan in 2007 were sleeping, as they are now. But those who weren't sleeping, seven years ago, were almost all reading books. Now, there's hardly a book to be seen. Most people are looking at their phones. And they're not reading books on their phones. (Yes, I peeked. A lot.) They're playing games or, more often, looking at their Facebook “news feeds.” And it's the same in the US and everywhere else that I have occasion to travel to.

Is it worth it to replace moderators with algorithms? Editors with white noise? Investigative journalists with pictures of your cat? Independent record labels and community radio stations with a multitude of badly-recorded podcasts? Independent Media Center collectives with a million Facebook updates and Twitter feeds?

I think not. But that's where we're at. How do we get out of this situation, and clear the fog, and use our brains again? I wish I knew.

For more on my feelings about technology more broadly, you might like to read something I wrote here in Songwriter's Notebook in 2013, Kill Your Computer -- Why the Luddites Were Right.

One Life, Under Surveillance

Note:  Comments on your travel experiences, whether similar or dissimilar, welcome!  Links below are to songs related to the subject highlighted.

Ever since Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras interviewed Edward Snowden, government surveillance has been in the news.  Then there was a lengthy article in the New York Times in which Poitras' experience with flying, particularly with arriving into the US, was documented.  Then Jacob Appelbaum recounted similar experiences on Democracy Now!.  And Greenwald's partner was detained at Heathrow for just under nine hours, all his digital devices were confiscated by the authorities there, the Guardian's offices in London were raided, and the authorities forced people there to erase computer hard drives.  In something I read about David Miranda's detention at Heathrow, it was noted that 3 in 10,000 people who enter the UK are detained for questioning, and when detained, the detentions generally last under an hour.  When Poitras was detained in one instance, she developed a rapport with the official who was questioning her, who helpfully informed her that the US government had a system for scoring people for their security risk, and that her score was 400 out of 400.  Various people noted the Kafka-esque nature of all this stuff -- how the officials rarely tell you why things are happening to you, and you're generally left not knowing if you were part of a random sample or whether you were being targeted for some unknown reason.

All of these folks have experienced far more intense levels of scrutiny than I have, and generally they're all people who are involved with disseminating massive amounts of government secrets provided to them by organizations like Wikileaks and (heroic) people like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden.  But for being a topical songwriter with a more or less nonexistent criminal record (a few misdemeanors, all of which resulted in charges being dropped, all of them over 20 years ago), as I was listening to these various interviews, there were many instances where I thought, oh yeah, that happened to me, too.  And I'm just starting to develop the impression that, perhaps, the things that happen to me aren't quite random.  Recent experiences have led me to the pretty solid conclusion that although I'm definitely not scoring 400, I've got some kind of rating, and the experiences I've had with surveillance and government harassment of one kind or another over the past 13 years aren't random, and aren't normal.  I mostly tended to think, well, I travel a heck of a lot more than most people, so maybe my experiences are par for the course as a frequent flier.  I don't think that anymore.  I'm curious what other frequent travelers' experiences are like.  I thought I'd recount some of mine, for the sake of comparison.

Sometime after the WTO protests in Seattle, but well before 9/11, I was heading up to Quebec City with a German activist to participate in the protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas talks that were taking place there.  Prior to that border-crossing experience, my experiences with crossing the Canadian border was usually one of being waved through after a quick ID check.  Until around that time, US citizens didn't even need to show a passport.  This time we were directed to go inside the Customs and Immigration building.  Our vehicle was thoroughly searched, and we were questioned separately for about two hours.  During the time we were being questioned, a number of other people were being sent back home, after they had gotten tired of answering the same questions over and over again.  We were also being asked the same questions repeatedly, but we kept on answering them, knowing that if we stopped answering their questions, this would be grounds for turning us back.  Eventually, they let us cross.

I have probably crossed the Canadian border a hundred times since then, either to visit friends or lovers, or to do gigs, sometimes gigs that required a work permit, other times gigs that didn't require one.  I have been waved through after showing my passport maybe once or twice, early on, but the rest of the time, crossing the Canadian border has involved a thorough search of my vehicle and some combination of waiting around and being questioned for between a half hour and two hours.  On one occasion the agents took my laptop and copied the hard drive, and they took a notebook and photocopied it.  They took these items into another room, but the door was open, and they were fairly open about what they were doing.  They forgot to give me my notebook back, and very helpfully mailed it to my PO Box a couple weeks later.

Prior to the G8 meetings in Alberta in 2002 I intended to cross the border north of Missoula, Montana.  The Canadian immigration agent was a nice guy, a fellow musician, and we talked for 15 minutes or so about music, Martin guitars, and musicians we both liked.  He was a fan of Martin Sexton.  I mentioned that I heard Martin Sexton playing on the streets of Boston back when he was a young street performer.  He said I was going to be able to cross, after they searched my vehicle.  But after they searched the vehicle, the agent looked very nervous, because he had just been handed a piece of paper that had come out of their computer system.

I'm pretty sure he wasn't supposed to show it to me, but he did.  I was pretty sure I wasn't supposed to photocopy it, and I didn't ask if I could, which I regret.  But what it said was that I was an activist with ill intent, and that they should basically throw the book at me and try to find a good reason to turn me away.  It didn't say I should be turned away for no reason, but that a reason should be found.  I don't know if the information about me on the paper originated in the US or in Canada.

The agent was visibly shaken by this piece of paper, and he told me very directly that he wanted to let me in, but he was afraid if he did, he could lose his job.  I was given an 8-day ban on entering Canada -- the length of the G8 meetings.  I was told there would be an all-points warning put out on me, and that if I attempted to cross the border anywhere else, I would be detained for 8 days.  After that time, he said, I would be free to cross the border.

On another occasion several years later, I had a gig that required a work permit, but I hadn't lined one up that time, so I made the mistake of saying I was just crossing the border to visit friends.  The agent at the crossing south of Vancouver looked online and found that I had a gig in a music club, and she turned me back and banned me from entering Canada for one year.

Even if I actually was just going to visit friends, having a guitar with me has always caused me to be treated as a suspicious character that needs to be questioned and searched.  At least I assume the guitar is a contributing factor.  I don't know, since I never travel without one.  On one occasion I was not allowed to enter Canada with the guitar, but they said I could enter the country without my guitar, so I left it on the US side of the border inside my vehicle, and got someone to pick me up at the border.

For two years or so, most of the time I flew within the US or from the US to somewhere else, my flight ticket would have "SSSS" printed on it, which means the person with that ticket needs to be thoroughly searched.  (This also happened to Laura Poitras for a couple years around the same time, according to the New York Times article.)  For some reason that stopped as suddenly as it had started.

On one plane, I had sat down in my seat, when a flight attendant sat down next to me, and told me I could change my (political) t-shirt or get off the plane.  I didn't want to argue, and I changed my shirt, because I had a gig to get to.  On a prior occasion, before I boarded a plane, an airline employee asked me if I wouldn't mind changing my (political) t-shirt because another customer had complained about it.  I responded that I had a strong belief in free speech and would rather not change my shirt.  She went away and came back with an offer for me to take a later flight and get $300 in credit for a future ticket fo rmy trouble.  (That worked out well!)

For a number of years, most of the time I flew a plane in the US or leaving the US, I had an empty seat next to me.  While this is not unusual on planes that aren't full, it very regularly was the case that the empty seat next to me was one of the only empty seats on the plane.  Too often, I suspect, for this to be random, but it's very hard to say for sure.

There have been a number of occasions during protests, such as the G20 protests in Pittsburgh, that me and some of my friends and fellow protesters at the event had very strange things happening with our cell phones.  Regardless of how much we rebooted our phones, a number of us experienced things like the phone could make outgoing calls but couldn't accept incoming calls, or vice versa.  When we did connect, there would be a very pronounced echo, and lots of clicking noises.  Sometimes it seemed certain key words would set off the clicking, such as the word, "explosive."

And then most recently, last week, I had six gigs booked in New Zealand, for which I had not lined up a work permit in advance, and I received a phone call on an airline worker's cell phone at Narita Airport in Tokyo from an immigration agent in Auckland who informed me that she had read my blog, made it clear that she knew all about my troubles crossing the Canadian border and the fact that I had been strip-searched on (false) suspicion of drug-smuggling at an airport in Norway, and that I would not be welcome to board the flight to New Zealand, even if I canceled all my gigs there.  A few days later I was denied a tourist visa to Australia, although after that I was granted a temporary work visa to Australia, as I had been three times in past years.

These experiences with crossing or attempting to cross borders in Canada, New Zealand and Australia make me think that I am on a list that generally indicates that border agents should consider it their responsibility to look for an excuse to turn me away -- like it said in black and white on the paper the immigration agent showed me on the Alberta border in 2002.  Of course the surreal part is I can't prove that, and it is my fault for not lining up the right paperwork on every occasion when attempting to enter Canada or another country to do one or a few gigs.  Did I get on the international radar in all the Anglo countries for political reasons or for purely bureaucratic reasons?  I don't know, and can't know.  But if the paper the agent showed me in 2002 is not just a one-off thing, it's political.  Do other people have these kinds of problems?  Especially for those of you out there who travel internationally on a regular basis for work or leisure, I'd be curious to hear if you have or haven't had similar experiences to those I've outlined here.

Kill Your Computer -- Why the Luddites Were Right

I was out with a friend the other day, a very dedicated activist and highly effective organizer who I happen to know is on Facebook fairly regularly. When I asked her how she thought Facebook had affected her life, her emotions, her brain functions, her response was, “hm, I never thought about it.”

I don't know how many other people haven't given this subject much thought, but for me, the influence of all kinds of technologies on society, and on my individual psyche, is something I've been thinking about a lot. Especially since the internet came along, which happened when I was well into adulthood, and had lived without it successfully for a long time already. And then after having a child seven years ago, around the same time that Facebook and internet-capable (“smart”) phones became commonplace, more thoughts on this whole phenomenon were inspired. Probably none of these thoughts are new – thoughts rarely are – but I thought I'd lay out my thinking here, in case it might be of interest to anyone else. It occurred to me that it might be, specifically because I think it's fair to say that I am a good example of someone who has benefitted tremendously from the internet, as a professional independent artist. And yet, I still think we humans would be far better off without any of this stuff.

The advantages of interactive technologies for DIY culture

First, let me lay out the good sides, because that itself is controversial. Some of you reading this remember when artists like me would send out postcards every so often, announcing a new CD or an upcoming concert tour. Some of you remember making copies of recordings onto cassette tapes and sharing them with friends. The internet has made this sort of thing immeasurably easier and cheaper, and as a result of taking advantage of this medium – by giving away my music online – well over 2 million of my songs have been downloaded by many thousands of people who, I'm guessing, would otherwise never have come across my music.

The brilliant thing about the internet is it's an interactive technology that tends toward democracy -- although it's far from immune to the efforts of big corporations and governments to influence how it works and what happens on it. The fact that most Tweets are apparently related to what's on TV is an obvious case in point. Despite that, the phenomenon of free downloads has changed things in a significant way for independent musicians who take advantage of it. The music industry tries to convince us all that free music is theft, because it benefits them to do that. Many independent musicians believe this hogwash, to their own detriment. Those who see through the lies reap the benefits of this interactive technology that allows us to circumvent, to some extent, a broken and decrepit music industry.

In a nutshell, it goes like this: you put up your music for free. People like it, they share it. You gain fans. A small percentage of your new fans come to your shows. A much smaller percentage of them organize paying gigs for you all around the world. So if enough people like your music, you make a living, if you know how to communicate with people effectively. Is this an ideal way to do things? Maybe, maybe not – most of us DIY musicians doing it this way might happily take a major record deal and gain much more of an audience that way, but for the vast majority of us this will never happen and we are completely locked out of corporate airplay, so we make do with what's available to us, which is the internet.

OK, so you might say I like the internet, the democratic nature of it, and I've benefitted from it professionally. But every day I wish to live in a world free of screens, speakers, and everything else you plug into the wall.

How it was – the Luddites

The brief, historical movement of the Luddites in 1812-13 provide us with an interesting example. It was the early days of the industrial revolution in England, when most people in England worked the land, or made things with their hands. When some people started building factories to mass-produce the things people had, for millenia, been making in small workshops in little market towns, the artisans revolted, and set about to burn down the new factories in the middle of the night, when no one was looking. After a lot of people were hanged and the factories kept springing up everywhere, they gave up, and ultimately changed strategies, admitting the inevitability of mass production and the loss of their lifestyles and livelihoods, and the movement to destroy the factories eventually, you could say, transformed into the labor movement – a movement to make the best of the new situation, and at least get paid a living wage for this alienating, repetitive factory work people were being forced to do.

The movement was crushed violently by the state, as movements usually are, but it also fell victim to the idea that “there is no alternative.” The Luddites proclaimed they would destroy technology that was destructive to community, but ultimately had to accept this community-destroying technology, because the artisans couldn't compete with it – especially when the state was systematically forcing peasants off their land and essentially giving them no option but to work for starvation wages in smog-filled cities, where for the most part they died at a very young age of disease and overwork. For those who could afford to buy the mass-produced products created in the new factories, there were great benefits to be reaped, and as long as you only visited certain towns, you might think England was becoming a more prosperous place. But for the majority of the people, the industrial age brought only misery, alienation, and death, which can be illustrated through lots of statistics which I'm not going to bother with.

Kill your TV – and your radio, CD player, and record player, too

For the first decades of the industrial age – and for millenia before then – it was still the case that if anybody wanted to listen to music, they had to play it. There were some notable exceptions, but for the most part, there was far less of a division between “performer” and “audience.” Most people filled both roles. Still today, even in some of the more remote parts of Europe and North America – and to a much larger degree in many other parts of the world – you can find communities where it is the norm, not the exception, to be a stellar musician. It is the norm for someone to play multiple instruments, sing well, and have at their fingertips a thousand different songs and tunes. And then came the phonograph, and later, radio. And with it, the professional musicians.

One story I heard about (on the radio, of course – illustrating how life is full of endless contradictions) involved a farming village somewhere in the south Pacific. Every evening after a day in the fields, the people of the village would sit together and sing songs for a couple hours – everyone would sing. Then came their first local radio station. After that, every evening the villagers would sit together after their day of working in the fields – and listen to professionals sing the songs they used to all sing together.

Now multiply that story by a million, and you can probably see where I'm going with this. Eventually those villagers, and all of the villagers and city folk everywhere else, stop sitting in a circle to listen to the radio. Eventually they all get radios, and listen to the songs in smaller groups, or individually. Eventually they stop singing at all. Whereas before they all knew how to sing, just as they knew how to talk, after a while most of them forget how to sing. Those few people who are obsessed with music -- those few strange people who continue singing despite the ubiquitous radios and boom boxes that people now think of as a hallmark of their newfound “development” -- now become the “professionals.” Or at least, some of them do – in the new age of recording technology there's only room for a very few “professionals.” Some very few of them become “stars.” They get “big.” Everybody else sits around, listening to them sing, and wonder why they're so depressed all the time.

And then comes TV, and people not only forget how to sing, but they forget how to talk, too. They forget how to tell a story. If they try to tell a story, people tune out, and tell them they're talking too much. Or they talk while the storytellers are trying to tell a story, because people have not only forgotten how to talk, but they've forgotten how to listen, too. Because when music and stories – radio and TV – are no longer participatory, and they're constant, ubiquitous, 24/7, it naturally becomes “background.” So then those few people who continue trying to sing and tell stories have to attempt to teach other people what they used to know naturally – how to listen.

The more I work as a musician, doing hundreds of gigs every year, the more I find that the most difficult gigs are the children's gigs. But not because of the children. The children, for the most part, haven't yet learned what “background music” is. For them, everything is still so interesting. When the birds chirp, they look, and listen, and they're fascinated (the young children at least). When people speak, or sing, they find that fascinating, too. They haven't been turned off yet. So when I show up at a library to do a gig for kids, I don't need to tell them to sit quietly – they do that automatically, because it's what they want to do. They're ready for a story, or a song, they want to be transported to wherever I'm going to take them.

It's their parents who are the problem. It's the parents who are standing around on the periphery of the room, chatting, ignoring the music, ruining the gig for the kids. It's the parents who think the appropriate thing to do with a visiting performer is to “multitask” -- paint the faces of the kids while the performer is singing background music. This doesn't come naturally to the kids – it's forced behavior. The kids who learn to tune out live performance are the ones who always have the TV on at home, and even for them, it takes years of constant background noise before they learn how to ignore it.

People ask me what kind of music I listen to. I never know how to answer that question. It's like asking me what kind of people do I know. How do I answer that? Hard to put them in a box – thankfully, the people I know are a fairly diverse bunch. When people ask what kind of music I listen to, what they mean is, which CDs do you have in the background as you're doing other things. My truthful answer – none – is not the answer they're expecting, and also doesn't quite answer their question, really. Because it's not that I don't listen to music – I do – but not that way. I rarely listen to recorded music, and when I do, I rarely listen to the same CD twice. There aren't many people like me, I've found. But the few out there who are like me in that way are other musicians, those who somehow haven't learned to stop singing, despite the radios and TVs constantly, implicitly telling them to shut up.

The “golden age” of radio

Radio had a golden age, they say, at least in the United States, in the 1960's and 1970's. This is probably true, but only in comparison to what came afterwards. When the hopelessly corrupt Reagan administration – and every government in power since then – deregulated the media and allowed a few massive corporations to almost completely take over the airwaves, fire most local journalists and DJ's, and play the same 300 songs over and over again throughout the entire country and much of the world, ignoring the millions of other great songs out there, this certainly represented a low point. A low point which has been alleviated, you could say, by the existence of the internet.

And to be sure, in the “golden age,” when most radio stations were independently owned -- and, although commercial and profit-driven by nature, programmers had infinitely more leeway to play local music, and much more variety, etc. -- what they were replacing by the very existence of their independent radio stations, was live music. People lament all the radio programmers and journalists who lost their jobs in the 1980's because this happened within living memory for many of us. But what of all the musicians who lost their jobs when the radio stations figured out how to play records, and all the musicians before then who lost their jobs when the phonograph became a status symbol in most homes and businesses in the industrialized world? This was an infinitely greater loss. And greater still, the loss of community – the loss of all those “amateur” musicians who used to play music together in the pubs, cafes, barber shops, and sidewalks. Even in much of the “developing world” today, this is a thing of the past. Good luck finding the Buena Vista Social Club in Cuba today – all I found when I went there were people blasting Mexican salsa through shitty little boom boxes. During the three weeks I spent bicycling around the island, I didn't once see anyone sitting on their front porch playing an actual musical instrument.

Social media – connecting and disconnecting

They say now with Facebook and Twitter we're more interconnected than ever. In a sense, this may be true. That is, it is now more possible than ever to have superficial relationships with more people than you ever imagined being able to have superficial relationships with, all over the world, as long as they speak your language and own a computer or a “smart” phone. But what this “connectedness” has done has disconnected us from each other – from our real friends, our neighbors, people in the cafes next to us, our classmates, our coworkers – more than ever. Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, with the impact on our brains and our societies of TV and radio, then came the internet. The interactive nature of the medium is what is so attractive about it – same attraction that game shows and “reality TV” has for so many people, but multiplied – but the impact it's having on our society is to make us less connected with each other than ever before.

In the circles I travel in, a recent study reported in some media has made a lot of waves. Although the internet may have been helpful for those organizing the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere, it was only when the Mubarak regime turned off the internet that the streets started to really fill up with people. They couldn't see Tahrir Square on Facebook anymore – they had to go participate at that point. And for all of you technological optimists who think social media or the internet is essential for organizing mass uprisings, you are profoundly ignorant (sorry). Long before even books and magazines became widespread, in 1848, peasant uprisings spread across borders throughout Europe and overthrew every monarchy on the continent, with the exception of England and Russia.

I know, you're staring at your computer screen or your phone reading this, so in a sense I'm just contributing to the problem with every blog post, with each new song I upload to my YouTube channel. I doubt the solution for most of us is to stop using this technology completely. But we can at least be aware that its influence, like the influence of other technologies – radio, TV, record players, the telephone, the private car, nuclear power plants, even central heating and central air conditioning – is mostly negative. Mostly destructive of community, of society, and of our psyches. We can be aware of this, we can be aware of the fallacy of “multitasking,” the fallacy of “connecting,” of “friends,” and of the idea that the internet or the existence of other forms of media is bringing us together in any significant way. And we can consciously try to limit our engagement with it, and consciously try to increase our engagement with each other, in the real world. Because for the most part, our “connected” world is very, very disconnected.