Semaphore signals in the age of digital erosion

But first, a quick note for my Auckland and Christchurch friends. The Terror-Fi Film Festival is on this week in the 09 and next week in the 03. I cut the trailer, which was fun. Come check it out, if you can!

And now, to the business at hand, which is mostly an exceptionally long read in which I quite successfully bury the information that my band, The Sea Plus, has two shows in November and is putting out a music video. Scroll down if you care about that but not fourteen paragraphs on the failures of digital platforms.

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The phrase “enshittification” was introduced to me not long ago, via Cory Doctorow’s piece on TikTok, mandatory reading if you wish to understand why every digital platform you once used is so gobsmackingly useless (give or take The Platform Formerly Known As Twitter, which is a spectacularly unique faceplant). I have not engaged with TikTok, because I’m old, but you don’t need to have to see the pattern everywhere.

This platform here is no exception. Somehow, I stopped receiving Substacks as emails, which is how I kept track of them, and managed to go ages without clocking it. I created my own Substack as a way to keep in touch with people, with missives heading to their inboxes; instead, Substack is bound and determined to get people in their app (where you can’t even compose posts!), using “notes” and other sub-Substackian divisions of content that I don’t really comprehend, which are great if you’re Substack and/or living in Substack, but not so great if you just want to reach out to people every now and again, say hi, tell them what you’re up to.

Something I only very recently grew to fully appreciate this way is that this is, for digital services, inevitable, because economic growth is anathemic to “provide a useful service and maintain it to a stable user base”, even though most of us who *use* said digital services tend to be quite happy with the core of the service that we watch, helplessly, become enshittified.

Take Bandcamp. When my new band The Sea Plus got to the point where we were entering the public sphere, my initial thought was that our Bandcamp page would be our only digital interface with the world. I knew it wasn’t perfect - and perhaps would have to be augmented with the stray Facebook event and/or an email list - but it’s, historically, pretty great and a very cool community, even if a subset of our potential fans might find it a bit esoteric.

That word. Historically.

For those not up to the minute, this article summarizes the current state of Bandcamp, now on its second acquisition, first to a games company and now to a company whose interests are entirely misaligned with the company’s focus on the music community. Already, half its staff has been laid off. Where it goes from here, who knows. For the moment, I’ll maintain some sort of investment - follow there for recommendations for Bandcamp Friday, and announcements of new IPs - but it feels like building a house on a coastal property prone to erosion in the time of global warming.

So, in advance of two gigs in Auckland at the Wine Cellar this month (9 November with Solenoid; and as yet to be officially announced as support, but 18 November for the album release show for A Crude Mechanical; both gigs with Crash Teslas) we created a Facebook page. You can follow us there; in my experience, band pages often consist of posts saying “TONIGHT! OUR GIG! PLEASE COME!” appearing in my feed two days later. But maybe it’s better than nothing? Or maybe it’s a timewasting exercise for Meta to try to cajole money out of me? (I’ve already been informed how I can spend money to have the post of our profile picture reach hundreds of additional people, which perhaps explains the dressmakers from Canterbury appearing in the feed for The Sea Plus.)

We also created a YouTube channel. We’ll be officially launching our video tomorrow, which means sending press releases to something like three places in New Zealand, but here’s a sneak preview for you friends:

I guess, in the end, these are all just signal flares, small ones across a digital sky overwhelmed with countless fireworks competing for attention. And this is the world we live in.

I’m thinking about that “wave” speech from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas a lot these days, and trying to think when the utopic notion of the Internet peaked, the idea that we would eventually have a digital interface that would bring us what we wanted to know, in safe communities, and not a bunch of algorithmic nonsense we neither asked for nor wanted. The only thing that is clear to me is that the wave continues to recede.

The future, after the fall of the Tower of Babel, is probably a series of individual fiefdoms you have to travel to. The optimistic version appears here, and perhaps I should invest on being on the leading edge, setting up a killer web presence for The Sea Plus with the latest and greatest web tools for enhanced interactivity between microblogs.

But at some point, all of this which is not making music or doing other creative endeavors or spending time enjoying those or being with people that you love in real life fades in significance. And I am not deluded enough to think our wee improvisational duo will earn a significant enough income to merit treating it as a business. We just want to do what we love for people who might enjoy it.

See you soon, maybe.