The Map, The Territory
When I think back to being a teenager, the first image that comes to mind is of sitting alone in my room after school and experimenting with my Tascam 4-track. I was a social enough guy, certainly not a loner. But I was also an only child with an active imagination, and I found the perfect outlet for my daydreams and fantasies in building my own world of experimental pop songs: A self-contained universe, referencing a web of interconnected characters and landscapes, all explored in the strange and tuneless singing of a boy who mostly listened to Stereolab and They Might be Giants.
At some point in my early 20s I got a laptop and some pirated recording software, offering an exciting expansion of possibilities (most notably, more than four tracks to work with). But in switching to digital, I also noticed a subtle transformation within my own psyche; I found that the interface of pro tools affected the way I conceived of the sounds I was creating. Recording had previously been an act with no visual reference point, but the tracks I made were now represented by colored blocks on a screen. They had been plucked from the air, turned into ones and zeroes, then regurgitated to me as something with a sense of physicality. And while that physicality, that digital object-ness, allowed the sounds to be easily spliced, copied, pasted, and shifted in relation to other sounds, it also contained and codified something that was formerly formless. The sounds were no longer something ephemeral, they were a thing.
The map had become the territory. And once that happened, I realized couldn’t even recall what had been going on in my mind during those early days of four-tracking. What images had been floating in my brain as I organized sound on top of sound, before I had any reason to associate the ethereal nothingness of music with colored blocks that were stacked and staggered on top of each other? How did I even conceive of what it was I was creating? I couldn’t remember. And furthermore, was this shift objectively bad? Not necessarily, I decided. But it did feel like something had been lost.
If you’ve followed me on Instagram (of which I was a voracious user, and which I recently quit - at least for non-business reasons), you’d be surprised to learn that I first engaged with it warily. That’s actually been true of any social media platform I’ve used, after the initial novelty of Friendster. Beyond understanding my own addictive personality well enough to be cautious, this trepidation has largely been based on similar worries around the map and the territory. If I join instagram, I wondered, will I start seeing the world differently? Will my life become a series of potential moments to be captured and displayed? Will I be further displaced from my experience of the present? Will the form of my thoughts themselves begin to change?
I joined anyways, and the answer to those all those questions was: yes of course, obviously. I compromised beautiful moments by needing to take a photo, then ruined them more by mentally disassociating in order to think of the perfect caption. I automatically began to look at objects in my room or the world as something to be displayed publicly, rather than enjoyed personally. Like a lab rat, I noticed what kind of content got more likes, then provided that content. And I was fully aware that all of this was happening, yet deemed it a worthy tradeoff for the social connection and sometimes great conversations generated from a successful post.
Is that bad? Again, I’m not sure I can say. Our expressions through media have always been partly defined by the tools available to us. Orchestral lines are written to the ranges and strengths of particular instruments… the form of the rock/pop single goes hand in hand with the amount of sound available on one side of a 45. And plenty of artists - particularly writers - have been famous for mining and even manipulating the circumstances of their lives to produce “content;” of being simultaneously in the stream of the present and mentally elsewhere. Of course, I’ll state the obvious and say that in the case of instagram, this was not for the sake of art, but so that a giant corporation could leverage my desire for connection and approval in order to harvest personal data to be sold to various private and governmental entities. Still, like my experience with digital recording, I can’t say that anything was necessarily wrong with allowing my brain to be changed by an app. Only that, again, something was lost. The magic of the unseen, the undefined.
When it comes to the territory of the psyche, the largest map we have is language. Erasing words is the first step toward erasing ideas, of making the world smaller and dumber. And so it has been heartbreaking to watch the current presidential administration try to do just that in the past couple of weeks. I’ve watched in disbelief as a trans friend has expressed her panic on social media: Is her passport still valid? If she goes to Europe, will she be allowed back in the country? The level of cruelty being inflicted on some of the most vulnerable people around us is shocking. And a lot of it is a blunt attempt to massively shift our perceptions, our maps, of what is real, what is possible, and what is to be valued.
On a practical level, I don’t know what to do beyond renewing my commitment to making Avalon a place that brings people together and resists this kind of bullshit through our programming. But on a personal level, I also want to commit myself to resisting anything in my life that makes my own psychic map smaller, like apps that force me to think in character limits. Because at the end of day, if we can manage it for even a fraction of a second, we are still after some sort of direct experience of the world, right? Something unfettered by the awful men in distant places who seek dominion over our thoughts and feelings.
Anyways, I apologize to anyone who started following me here because I promised to post my meme dumps. I do obviously love frivolous and silly things, especially as a distraction from the heaviness of the news, but that just hasn’t been my energy this week. Don’t worry, I still think that music is important, fun is important, and dumb memes are important. And I’m looking forward to continuing to find ways to connect with my friends online. Thanks for listening 🐸😘
Dear Liam, Great post. So interesting your subtle longing for the days when music was etherial sound made on your 4 track. I’m from another generation and as a visual artist I was delighted to be able to “see” the music. I had been struggling with 4 track cassette and then spent a painful amount of money on 8 track reel to reel etc.. When I saw the computer music with "colored blocks that were stacked and staggered on top of each other” I was done with tape. (Fortunately I kept my 8 track, and it is still working!)
I agree that where/how we play/publish our music/art it does influence the forms that our music/art takes. David Byrne has written a whole book about this phenomenon (mostly about venues where bands play) called “How Music Works.” Nice book about how cool venues, being on tickets with other cool players, cool record labels, cool music communities, all force the musical forms to be… cooler!
I think the apps and streaming services have robbed us of some of that cool inspiration and motivation. Also they have created pressure to produce “content” all the time. To be able to post our music/art instantly to the “whole world” is magical, but somehow leaves us in an odd vacuum. We still desperately need community to grow and thrive as artists. Thank you Avalon Lounge.
Obviously giant corporations and now our own government leadership have turned into surging demonic empires driven mindlessly by power and greed. My only hope now is that a new underground “rebel alliance” will form, and somehow someday we can take down the Death Star that is now running our tiny smoldering planet.
Please keep writing and stay with "what is real, what is possible, and what is to be valued.”
Musho
Thanks for sharing these thoughts. The social media thing got us all. For a certain type of person, it's great, perhaps even healthy, but for most people I think it is all the bad things we have assumed it to be psychologically and yet most of us continue, either for practical reasons or reasons perhaps unconscious or, worse, due to addiction (for which I like the simple definition of "continuing to do something even though you know it's bad for you").
The companies are evil but it's not what informs my desire to not use social media (much anyway, I post once or twice a year for movie related things). What informs it is the psychology of it. In our deepest moments of suffering, we are most empathetic and as I work through the suffering I have the deepest reflections, ones I often feel compelled to share with others. Something that might be helpful to someone out there, maybe even multiple people. The thought forms and then I begin to imagine sharing it with the world and then I feel a strong signal that social media is not the place for it. At the very least Instagram is not. It's not for thoughtful reflections or substantive discussion. It's for pics and cat videos and "check out what I ate at the picnic" and, generally speaking, "isn't my life great?." I remember back around 2008 my good friend from college going on a Europe trip and posted a Facebook photo album of him climbing mountains and so on and he titled it "Your life sucks". This was the very awful next train stop after "isn't my life great?" and I'm grateful, at least, that he's the only person I know that got off there.
The reality is that the internet is great for reaching many people you know. Theoretically we could all feel tremendous freedom and excitement to express things in a way that feels authentic and healthy and useful and reasonably free of judgment, but the norms that form around the apps are generally not conducive to that. I do know one somewhat older guy in town who does long-form Facebook posts on a regular basis (ranging from reviews of movies or TV to reflections on eras of history to experiences he had walking his dog in Catskill) and these posts keep coming whether they get acknowledgement or not. I love reading them and it is the only reason I go on to Facebook, so I now call Facebook "Kurt's Blog" in my head. So, some are liberated from the norms, but I think most feel pressure to adhere and posting is more calculated than casual.
Instagram is kind of like TV where every channel is your friend. Whereas I think what I want is more akin to a really good letter from a friend every once in a while (and of course good time spend together in person). In other words, ideas, not snapshots. Which is why I think the substack thing is great. I am curious how the experience feels for someone like yourself who is, of course, used to the dopamine of a quick post and flood of likes.
As someone who has been much more of a lurker than a poster, I am happy that now when I mindlessly open instagram on my computer, I see the page and just close it because I don't care and it's not what I want. I've been reading books for the first time in years and have been writing some stories. I think that the less I engage with the internet outside of the work I need to do on it, the more space there is for ideas to spark and ideas to grow. When there is room enough to get a little bored, there is room for something unexpected to come in. I suspect for most of us that the best model is, simply, do your own thing and every now and again share something meaningful (as opposed to share often and have that sharing be built into the rhythm of your life).
More to say but out of time. I will say it is much easier to post a cat pic than to write this long reply to you, but it feels much more meaningful. Thanks for writing and I will keep tuning in.