Why An App?

Since I announced I was making a David Rovics app – available now for free on both Google and Apple app stores – a lot of people have asked me why. My short response has been “the ability to send geographically-targeted push notifications.” For many people, this response does little to answer their question in a way that makes much sense to them. So, for anyone interested, here's a more thorough answer to the question.

Mainly I thought I'd run through this because it's interesting. That is, society, people and how we communicate is interesting. And how all of this has changed and then changed again multiple times in the past two decades is of particular interest to me.

The pros and cons of modern forms of communication are familiar to most of us by now. In a nutshell, we can now communicate more or less for free with most people from most of the world (pro). But we are so overwhelmed with Too Much Information that our ability to communicate with so many people so easily has many of us in a state of shell shock, and we end up having superficial relationships online with lots of people, rather than the deeper kinds of relationships that are an essential ingredient in the making of a happy human (con).

Everything may change by next month – my abilities as a futurist are extremely limited and I have no idea if that is or isn't the case. But I do have some understanding of how things are now, and how things have changed over the past two decades or so.

Communicating by email became extremely popular by the late 1990's, and pretty soon musicians like me stopped sending out postcards to our mailing lists, which is one of the main ways we used to tell our fans about our upcoming tours, new albums, etc. Sending out all those postcards was expensive. And for a while, sending these tour or album announcements to our email lists seemed to work almost as well in terms of the feedback, album orders, etc., of the people receiving them.

Over the next few years, as most people became inundated with more and more email communication, email lists, etc., reaching fans via email for us musicians became less and less effective. Then Google started doing email (Gmail), and soon around half of email users seemed to be using it. When Google later changed the default settings for their email users from the normal chronological list of emails received to a three-folder system, relegating anything on a list to the Promotions folder, my experience was that my email list suddenly became about half as useful, overnight.

Just to get into this point a little more, for Gmail to start dividing their users' inboxes into three folders made a lot of sense from the perspective of the TMI phenomenon. Now people could just look at their main folder, containing the most important stuff – emails written personally to them, mostly from people they actually know and want to hear from. And they could check out the other folders if they had a chance, or just ignore them completely, which seems to be what most users have done. Mostly I don't think they consciously chose to do this – they do it because it is the easiest thing to do under the circumstances of TMI and not enough time or desire to stare at a screen longer than necessary.

Now, these settings can be changed. There are various ways around the three-folder system that Gmail has adopted, for people who have the time, knowledge and organizational tendencies to set their inboxes up differently. The fact that settings can be changed doesn't seem to matter much, because most people tend to do whatever is easiest and simplest. Your spam filter works, but you're still on too many email lists, half of which you didn't even sign up for on purpose? You can unsubscribe from each list you don't want to be on, you can choose the ones you really want to pay attention to and set it up so that they appear in your Primary folder, etc. But that's not what most people do, as far as I can tell. They do what's easiest, and ignore their Promotions folder.

As these changes were taking place within the email world, at the same time, Facebook was becoming massively popular. In the beginning, the News Feed for people with Facebook accounts was chronological, as with their email inbox (as Twitter still is). Musicians like me who have thousands of people on our email lists soon had thousands of Friends and Followers on Facebook.

Posts can go viral, and this was the case in the earlier days of Facebook as well. But in the earlier days of Facebook, if you had thousands of followers, a significant percentage of them were likely to see your posts, especially if you timed your posts for hours of the day when many people tend to check Facebook. But then Facebook introduced their mysterious system of algorithms, so that which posts you see in your Feed are not necessarily related to who you're following or when someone you follow posted something. Suddenly, I had the same experience many other musicians had when Gmail introduced the three folders – the floor dropped out from under me again, in terms of any kind of reliability as far as who might see my posts.

Of course, the situation we're in, whether we're on the marketing end of the equation – such as musicians trying to tell our fans about our upcoming gigs -- or the consumer end – people wanting to keep up on their email inbox and their Facebook feed without being overwhelmed by TMI -- most of us are in a situation where two megalithic corporations control our main platforms of communication, and change them at will. Unregulated global monopolies have a massive degree of control over every aspect of our ability to communicate with each other – how we communicate, who sees our emails or posts and who doesn't, what kinds of posts we see and what kinds we don't, etc.

Many people say that Google and Facebook made these changes in order to encourage people to buy advertising and reach people that way. There is no question that this is a big part of the story, and that they are able to make these random changes that affect the lives of billions of people because they are unregulated monopolies. Equally, what's also clear is global society is suffering from, among other things, TMI. In order to continue to be popular platforms that attract lots of users who see lots of advertisements, Google and Facebook decided to change the way their platforms work. That's also part of the story.

It used to be that if you wanted to invite all of your Facebook Friends to come to your gig, you could do that. This created a situation where many people were getting a constant stream of invitations to attend events that were essentially irrelevant to them because they were happening far away from where people lived. Facebook changed it so that you could only choose up to a certain number of Friends to invite to an event, which probably helped a lot of people target who they were inviting a little better. Of course it also meant that if you wanted more people to hear about an event that you wanted to invite everybody to, you were left with the option of paying to Boost your post or event.

Other platforms came along that were trying to address the TMI reality, in terms of musicians and their fans. Platforms like Songkick and Bandsintown came along. Their strategy for cutting through all the TMI was and is very sensible. You join Songkick or Bandsintown, you choose artists you want to follow and you tell the platform what part of the world you live in, and then you receive notifications via your Google Calendar, email, or by other means, that tell you when a musician you're following is playing within 50 miles of your home (or 100 miles or whatever you choose as your parameters).

These kinds of geographically-targeted notifications telling people about things they actually want to know about are handy. As much as I encourage people to use these services, however, I find that my numbers of followers on them remains anemic. The main reason, I believe, is that most people are too overwhelmed by TMI to bother signing up for yet another source of yet more information, even if it's information they really want to know about.

Another reason, I suspect, is that there's no significant incentive to use these services, aside from the fact that they work really well for helping people sort out their TMI.

If an artist has an app, however, the formula changes a bit. At least that's my working hypothesis. How does it change? Well, you can do what Songkick and Bandsintown both do so well – that is, you can notify people about something happening near them that they definitely want to know about, in a place they are likely to actually see. Unlike with these platforms, however, an artist can give away all kinds of exclusive digital material of whatever kind on their own app, in addition to having the ability to notify people about upcoming gigs, etc.

How does an app like this cut through TMI? I'll explain – but bear in mind that this all may change soon in ways that I don't understand and can't predict. But as things stand now, the way the Android and Apple smartphone platforms (that dominate the world) work is people download apps in their respective app stores that they want to download. So, unlike with email lists and Facebook invitations, you're unlikely to download an app that you didn't intend to download.

Once you download an app, you are asked if you want to receive notifications from the app, that appear on your phone when you open it. And you are asked whether you give the app permission to know your location, so that the notifications you receive might be especially relevant to you (such as an upcoming concert in your town).

What has been the tendency since the internet became popular is for the corporations that run different platforms to keep trying to evolve in ways that get more and more people to use their platforms for longer periods of time in a given day or week, and to maximize their profits at the same time. These goals don't always go well together – MySpace collapsed under the weight of all the advertising they introduced, for example. The corporation's efforts to increase their profit margin resulted in achieving the opposite.

So they have to be careful, to be sure. But once they achieve the monolithic level of popularity that Google and Facebook have achieved, the formula here changes, and the corporations have a lot more flexibility in how they change their platforms in order to maximize their profits -- without their users effectively having the ability to abandon the platform in favor of another one.

So if DIY musicians and others having their own apps becomes a way that we are effectively able to reach our fans without buying advertising on Google, Apple or Facebook, these corporations will surely at least try to find a way to limit the usefulness of apps or otherwise find ways to make us pay for the number of people we are able to reach.

For now, however, I'm banking on the notion that it will be worth my while to keep spending the $400 or so per year required to keep my app functioning and available, in the hopes that the Freemiums I'm offering – hundreds of free songs and an upcoming ebook that will only be found for free on my app – will inspire people to download the thing, so they might get – and see – the occasional messages I send to their phones when I have a gig in their area.

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.