In 2007 I wrote a post titled, Stop Saying The Word ‘Viral’, (“Seriously, just stop. It’s not hip; it just makes you sound antiquated. This is not the 90′s. It’s over. Deal with it.”) Last year I co-authored a presentation titled, The Ugly Truth About Viral Marketing (“Stop trying to spread viruses. In fact, go wash your hands right now.”) But comic as my crusade against the word may be, it belies a deep-seated distaste for a certain type of attitude that runs rampant among marketers: a penchant for referring to content as “viral” simply by virtue of it being on the internet at all, an inability to comprehend the fact that just because they make it share-able does not mean it will be shared, and a general arrogant disregard for the underlying mechanics of human behavior that drive sharing.
So you can imagine my joy when I discovered The New York Times Consumer Insight Group, in association with Latitude Research, had published the results of a study on The Psychology of Sharing. As the New York Times Insights Group writes:
There has been an abundance of research on social media, but to date, no one has asked in a comprehensive way: why do people share? The Psychology of Sharing reveals groundbreaking research that fills this knowledge gap.
Yahtzee!
So stick this in your “we have to make it go viral” pipe and smoke it:
When I was producing music festivals and nightlife events, Facebook changed its membership policy, opening up beyond just the collegiate community. Hundreds of people I didn’t know requested to add me as a friend. At first I balked at the idea of letting complete strangers into a space that had previously been the walled-garden escape from the mess Myspace had already become. Ultimately, however, I came to terms with the benefits of accepting friend requests from potential ticket buyers. Facebook became a sort of digital Grand Central Station that friends, colleagues, business acquaintances, vendors hawking their wares, strangers I couldn’t pick out of a lineup, and the inevitable crazy person talking to himself, all loudly traversed on their daily commutes through my online social world. It was really fucking noisy.
Then, at the end of 2007, Facebook introduced a feature to specifically address this noise issue, as they wrote on the Facebook blog:
Today Facebook lets us connect and communicate with people that we are connected to in all kinds of ways — friends from school, family members, long-lost high school sweethearts of yesteryear, and weird people. They’re all here.
This all begs the question… what does being friends with someone on Facebook mean today? We pondered this for a while, and then decided that there just wasn’t any single right answer.
So instead, we’ve built and launched Friend Lists. The new Friends page lets you create named lists of friends that you can use to organize your relationships whichever way works best for you. These private lists can be used to message people, send group or event invitations, and to filter updates from certain groups of friends.
Pretty much everyone I am connected to on Facebook has been assigned to one list or another depending on the context of the connection. In a previous incarnation, Facebook offered the option of setting a specific list feed to be the homepage view instead of the default friend feed. Later that option was removed, so I’ve created a workaround to simulate the functionality: I have the URL for my preferred Friend List set as a bookmark on my browser toolbar and when I want to go to Facebook, I just click the bookmarked link. Typing “facebook.com” into the address bar hasn’t been the way I access Facebook for years.
So when I heard that Google+, the web giant’s just-launched social network, was based on grouping connections into “Circles,” I was instantly curious. Ever since Friendster first appeared almost a decade ago, there have been certain disparities between being social online and being social offline that we have come to accept. We’ve become so accustomed to these differences, we hardly even recognize they ever seemed unfamiliar. The fetishistic, collectible-card type quality to online “friend acquisition,” for example. This is not at all how we understand the process of “making friends” to work offline — aside from high school, maybe. Online we have learned, sometimes the hard way, that what we do and say is “public by default,” private with effort, the direct opposite of how it works in the analog world. And we have come to accept, despite the paralyzing plethora of privacy options Facebook offers, that we can’t expect control over social context. Online we are in all contexts at once. Friends from school, family members, long-lost high school sweethearts of yesteryear, and weird people, as Facebook lists them, are not only all here, but who we are within each of these different social groups, our identities in each of their different contexts, all exist simultaneously. Online, we are contextless by default.
But what if online sharing worked more like your real-life relationships? That’s the question posed in the video introducing the Google+ Circles feature:
Of course, it’s not a new idea. As I mentioned, this is a functionality Facebook has offered for years. It’s just that the platform has never really cared about it. As Mark Zukerberg, Facebook’s founder, inisisted in a 2009 interview: “You have one identity. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” For Facebook, Lists are literally an add-on feature. For Google+, however, Circles appear to indicate an understanding that context is as important as connection.
Consider the case of an Iranian business-woman shaking hands with her Western male counterparts. In Iranian culture, shaking hands with a male colleague is neither customary nor appropriate. This situation entails behavior that is unfamiliar and also in conflict with deeply ingrained cultural values.
[Or] consider the case of a Chinese student attempting to participate in an American MBA classroom discussion. The norms for appropriate behavior within this setting in the United States encourage and require students to express themselves, as well as reward them, even when their opinions are controversial or conflict with those of another student or even with the professor. Norms for classroom participation in China are quite different. Having been socialized to respect the “wisdom, knowledge, and expertise of parents, teachers, and trainers,” Chinese students are discouraged from voicing personal opinions in class discussion. American norms for classroom participation, therefore, are quite discrepant from Chinese norms for the same situation; these norms demand a significantly different type of behavior than what the typical Chinese student is used to.
Cross-cultural code-switching is the act of purposefully modifying one’s behavior in an interaction in a foreign setting in order to accommodate different cultural norms for appropriate behavior.
But the setting doesn’t have to be as foreign as you think. For immigrants, or anyone of mixed racial or cultural heritage whose identity is inextricably linked to different communities, code-switching is an inherent part of navigating everyday life. To children of divorced parents this will likely sound familiar as well. We actively modulate our behavior even among the closest people in our lives. In writing about the tactics we use to maintain context control while engaging in a public online space like Facebook, social media researcher danah boyd describes “social steganography,” a practice of creating messages that communicate different meanings to different audiences simultaneously:
When Carmen broke up with her boyfriend, she “wasn’t in the happiest state.” The breakup happened while she was on a school trip and her mother was already nervous. Initially, Carmen was going to mark the breakup with lyrics from a song that she had been listening to, but then she realized that the lyrics were quite depressing and worried that if her mom read them, she’d “have a heart attack and think that something is wrong.” She decided not to post the lyrics. Instead, she posted lyrics from Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” This strategy was effective. Her mother wrote her a note saying that she seemed happy which made her laugh. But her closest friends knew that this song appears in the movie when the characters are about to be killed. They reached out to her immediately to see how she was really feeling.
“We used to live in a world where space dictated context,” danah writes, “This is no longer the case. Digital technologies collapse social contexts all the time. The key to figuring out boundaries in a digital era is to focus on people, roles, relationships, and expectations.”
Relationships are all about context, but for Facebook, this nuance is something that has never quite made sense. All along, Facebook has staked its claim not by adapting to existing social behavior, but rather by insisting that we adapt to the behavior the platform defines for us. As Zuckerberg said in a TechCrunch interview last year, in regards to the assertion that privacy is dead, “We decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.” As far as the platform is concerned, managing contexts is a nuisance for the user. With every “privacy” violation, what Facebook has actually been attempting to do is outsource managing context to software; to switch code-switching with code. At this point we’ve become so accustomed to the inevitable, resulting intrusion we don’t even make too much of a stink about it anymore. Case in point: Facebook’s new facial recognition functionality — which automates the photo-tagging process by suggesting the names of friends who appear in newly uploaded photos — has caused less of fuss for how uber-fucking-creepy it is, than….. wait, what was the previous fuss about? I forget already.
Facebook’s helpful way of nudging us towards this manifest, post-identity complexity destiny is to devise ever more features to destroy our control over social context. This has created a gap which Google+, with its aim to “make sharing on the web feel like sharing in real life,” seems squarely poised to fill. Not that Circles will be the panacea for online context collapse, but this is the first attempt by a mainstream web property to directly address this disparity between the online and offline social experiences, and offer a way to bring context back to our contacts.
Charlie Sheen is not crazy. Or, at least, he’s not crazy the way you think he is. Charlie Sheen may finally be admitting that he’s lost his mind — exclusively to Life&Style, of all places, if we are to believe it — but that’s something that would have already been a long, long time in the making. What’s been happening over the past few weeks is not Charlie Sheen going crazy. Although it’s certainly easy to get confused. No doubt, Charlie Sheen wants you to think he’s crazy. After all, the boring recovering-addict Charlie Sheen Show — or the boring functioning-addict Charlie Sheen Show, depending on your preference — is much less interesting to watch than the “Crazy” one. And we are still watching….
In the course of this production it’s hard not to think about the film I’m Still Here, the cinéma vérité chronicling of Joaquin Phoenix’s “retirement from acting.”
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For a year and a half, the twice Oscar-nominated Phoenix gained weight, stopped shaving, and tried to start a career as a rapper while his brother-in-law and fledgling filmmaker, Casey Affleck, came along for the ride to document this seeming descent into madness. Phoenix even famously came on Letterman in the course of I’m Still Here‘s production, disheveled and incoherent — an appearance that, by the end, prompted Letterman to say he owes an apology to Farrah Fawcett, til then considered his most disastrous guest of all time.
Of course, in the end it turned out this was not just another overindulged celebrity losing his mind. Nor, even after it was revealed that Phoenix’s “retirement” and subsequent actions weren’t exactly the plot of a straight “documentary,” was it all just simply a hoax. Back on the Late Show a year and a half later, now clean-shaven, and charming as usual, Phoenix explained:
We wanted to do a film that explored celebrity, and explored the relationship between the media and the consumers and the celebrities themselves. We wanted something that would feel really authentic. I’d started watching a lot of reality shows and I was amazed that people believed them; that they called them, like, ‘reality.’ I thought the only reason why is because it’s billed as being ‘real’ and the people use their real names. But the acting is terrible. I thought I could handle that. Because you don’t have to be very good. You just use your name, and people think that it’s real.
For a year and a half, Joaquin Phoenix lived the life of a character who shared his name and history and circumstances, both in private scenes and in the public eye. What then, truly, is the difference between what’s “real” and what isn’t? What does “hoax” even mean in the age of “reality TV?” I’m Still Here, along with the context around it, is a philosophical exploration of these questions.
“The world’s first street art disaster movie” tells the story of Thierry Guetta, an eccentric French-born shop-keeper living in L.A. whose compulsive need to record every waking moment, and a cousin who happens to be the street artist Space Invader, combined to lead Guetta to become the de facto documentarian of the street art scene, tagging along on late-night art missions with its luminaries, including L.A.’s Shepard Fairey and, ultimately, the elusive reigning godfather of street art himself, Banksy. About two thirds of the way through the movie, Guetta, who had never previously edited any of the mountains of footage he’d been obsessively recording, goes to the U.K. to present a first draft of his “street art documentary” to Banksy for feedback. Deflecting his true opinion of the unwatchable film, Banksy suggests that perhaps Guetta should consider becoming a street artist himself and sends him back to L.A. with the idea of putting on a small show. Banksy also requests Guetta send him his raw video footage so that he can reedit it himself. And this is where the movie becomes something like an Andy Warhol adaptation of the Blair Witch Project.
A few months before Joaquin Phoenix would be announcing his acting “retirement,” Guetta’s artist persona, Mr. Brainwash, or MBW, had moved from plastering L.A. with his own likeness — an image of a guy holding a video camera — straight to mounting a massive “street art” show, called “Life Is Beautiful,” in a 15,000 square-foot venue. Seemingly overnight, Mr. Brainwash was being positioned as an up-and-comer with the oeuvre of a Shepard Fairey or a Banksy — by then both artists, as well as many other leading names in the street art world, had begun having their art on display inside galleries as opposed to on the exterior of walls — except unlike these artists with years, even decades of creative evolution and refinement, Guetta had no experience. He’d hired an army of sculptors and designers to manufacture the pieces for his show, ripped straight from bookmarks in art books — even the illustration of Guetta holding the camera had been created by someone else.
The day of the show the line to get in stretched for blocks. Four thousand people attended the opening. By the end of the day nearly a million dollars worth of Mr. Brainwash art had been sold.
The story, at face value, seems so preposterous that the question of whether it could truly be real has dogged the film, as well as created the suspense that’s made it even more of a phenomenon. Could an amateur who’d never actually made art himself succeed at pulling off a show that so blatantly counterfeited and so quickly eclipsed those of the art form’s recognized heavyweights? And would they really release a movie about it happening? Or is all of it — the movie, Life is Beautiful, Mr. Brainwash — simply Banksy’s greatest prank yet? Theories abound. The New York Times labeled it as a harbinger of a new cinematic subgenre: The Prankumentary. “The whole thing, it’s clear now,” Fast Company insisted, “Was an intricate prank being pulled on all of us by Banksy, who has never publicly revealed his identity, with Fairey as his accomplice.” Their conjecture about what really happened: “Banksy… convinced Guetta to pose as a budding graffiti artist wannabe so he and Fairey could ‘direct’ him in real life — manufacturing a brand new persona.” Yet when asked at the end of the film how he feels knowing that he is in part responsible for Mr. Brainwash, Shepard Fairey laughs ruefully, “I had the best intentions. But sometimes even when you have the best intentions things can go awry…. The phenomenon of Thierry becoming a street artist, and a lot of suckers buying into his show and him selling a lot of expensive art very quickly, anthropologically, sociologically, it’s a fascinating thing to observe. And maybe there’s some things to be learned from it.” For his part, Banksy, even as his voice is scrambled beyond recognition, conveys unmistakable melancholy as he says, “I used to encourage everyone I met to make art. I used to think that everyone should do it….. I don’t really do that so much anymore.”
“This brutal and revealing account of what happens when fame, money and vandalism collide” could just be an L.A. story simply too bizarre to have been made up, and just as easily, it could all be a fabricated fable about what happens to an artistic movement when it becomes commercialized. From “selling out” to “cashing in” the concept is so mundane it’s a cliché, but Exit Through The Gift Shop‘s treatment is primarily to emphasize the absurdity of the progression of events rather than to make any concrete statement about them. As Banksy’s art dealer says at the end of the film, “I think the joke is on… I don’t know who the joke is on, really. I don’t even know if there is a joke.”
Which brings us back to Charlie Sheen. Not that what Sheen’s doing is any kind of joke or “prank.” This is all very much for real for him. And it is also a very deliberate performance. How did we get here? February 28, Charlie Sheen goes on Good Morning America, The Today Show, TMZ, Radar, Piers Morgan on CNN, 20/20 — basically, every celebrity interview news show he possibly can, and attracts a tsunami of flabbergasted attention for bein’ all ka-raaaazy. The next day he launches a social media empire.
which received over 74 THOUSAND! submissions in 5 days. Arguably no other celebrity has “gotten” the way social media works as fast. Even Conan had a slower uptake, though he’s undeniably provided a template for Sheen to work off of. (After getting canned from his TV job, Sheen did like MBW to Conan’s Banksy and announced he’s going on tour — the “Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat is Not An Option” Tour — just like Conan’s Banned From Television Tour last year in the wake of his own network debacle.) And, obviously, Sheen’s not doing it all on his own.
In Sheen’s 11-minute livestream episode, titled, “Torpedeos of Truth Part 2,” recorded on March 7th, 2011 — a week after his “old media” blitzkrieg — a terribly lit, grossly contrasted video in which a curmudgeonly, borderline belligerent Sheen looks like he might not have showered for days prior then rolled out of bed that morning, turned on his lap top, and started recording through the built-in camera above the screen, at 6 minutes, 40 seconds, when he ducks “below the frame line,” the camera moves. This is a recording made to look like it’s being done through a shitty built-in computer camera, but when it moves to follow Sheen as he ducks it’s suddenly clear there may be a camera person involved. If there is someone behind the camera, there could just as easily have been a lighting guy, a makeup person, but No! “Make me look as crazy as possible,” was clearly the direction here. By episode four it’d been announced that Sheen had officially been fired from his sitcom. The ante was upped. Suddenly Sheen, well-lit, made-up, looking as healthy as a marathoner — if not for the chain-smoking — in his sweat-wicking Nike shirt, was performing a soliloquy sounding like some misplaced Hunter S. Thompson diatribe. Clearly some writing talent may have been called in — if it hadn’t been already: consider that basically everything coming out of Charlie Sheen’s mouth becomes a meme — it’s been impossible to escape hearing someone say #winning (a hashtag in Charlie Sheen’s very first tweet) for weeks; then there’s #tigerblood, which is so meme-able it can’t even be summarized properly:
Right now 4Chan, the primordial ooze that has spawned everything from lolcats to Rickrolling to SadKeanu to every other Internet meme you’ve ever heard of, is looking at Charlie Sheen like Woh. The last guy anywhere near this unstoppably memetastic was the Old Spice Guy–
Something else you might notice — Charlie Sheen almost never swears. You have never heard him bleeped in any of the interviews he’s done on TV. There are no R-rated words on his Twitter stream. Every so often there’s some sprinkled in his livestreams, but for the most part The Charlie Sheen Show is all-ages. Where he could say “assholes” or “douchebags,” he says “silly fools” or “trolls.” These Playskool insults are unexpected, amusing, almost benign, yet nostalgically cruel. This is not the syntax of a man out of control.
“I don’t know,” he rolled his eyes, “They’re just words that sound cool together. Stuff just comes out and it’s entertaining and it’s fun and it sounds different from all the other garbage people are spewing, you know?”
Charlie Sheen doesn’t have Tourettes. He is deliberately saying these things to entertain and be funny and unique. And he’s good at it. Bret Easton Ellis — the author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho, as well as Lunar Park, a haunted house story in which the main character is a writer named Bret Easton Ellis who’s lived the same history as his eponymous creator (“It was always the A booth. It was always the front seat of the roller coaster. It was never ‘Let’s not get the bottle of Cristal’ … It was the beginning of a time when it was almost as if the novel itself didn’t matter anymore — publishing a shiny booklike object was simply an excuse for parties and glamour.”) or is it, rather, the life he was expected to have been leading? (“What was I doing hanging out with gangbangers and diamond smugglers? What was I doing buying kilos? My apartment reeked of marijuana and freebase. One afternoon I woke up and realized I didn’t know how anything worked anymore. Which button turned the espresso machine on? Who was paying my mortgage? Where did the stars come from? After a while you learn that everything stops.“) — writing in an article titled, “Notes on Charlie Sheen and the End of Empire,” calls Sheen, “the most fascinating person wandering through the culture:”
You’re completely missing the point if you think the Charlie Sheen moment is really a story about drugs. Yeah, they play a part, but they aren’t at the core of what’s happening—or why this particular Sheen moment is so fascinating…. This privileged child of the media’s sprawling entertainment Empire has now become its most gifted ridiculer. Sheen has embraced post-Empire, making his bid to explain to all of us what celebrity now means. Whether you like it or not is beside the point. It’s where we are, babe. We’re learning something. Rock and roll. Deal with it.
Post-Empire isn’t just about admitting doing “illicit” things publicly and coming clean—it’s a (for now) radical attitude that says the Empire lie doesn’t exist anymore, you friggin’ Empire trolls. For my younger friends, it’s no longer rare; it’s now the norm. To Empire gatekeepers, Charlie Sheen seems dangerous and in need of help because he’s destroying (and confirming) illusions about the nature of celebrity.
It’s thrilling watching someone call out the solemnity of the celebrity interview, and Sheen is loudly calling it out as the sham it is. He’s raw and lucid and intense…. We’re not used to these kinds of interviews. It’s coming off almost as performance art and we’ve never seen anything like it—because he’s not apologizing. It’s an irresistible spectacle. We’ve never seen a celebrity more nakedly revealing.
It’s the contradiction we could never quite reconcile in I’m Still Here or Exit Through The Gift Shop; one we can accept in Lady Gaga because she’s not using her real name and we’re sort of OK with it when it’s just a “character.” Charlie Sheen is real and not real at once: a spectacle and a revelation. It’s meta-postmodernism. It’s existential performance art. Minutes before Charlie Sheen’s first livestream was set to start, the audio feed came on. You could hear Sheen rehearsing the rant he would perform that night, prompting the question: is this all an act? Of course it is! He’s an acTOR. From a family of actors, who’s spent his entire life performing. There’s no way he’d go on camera ever without rehearsing. Charlie Sheen’s whole life has been a performance, and this now is not so much different, just with a bigger audience and, as we say in the 21st century music business, cutting out the middleman. As far as Charlie Sheen knows, this is what real is. And as far a we know that’s what it is, too.
Ellis writes:
If you can’t accept the fact that we’re at the height of an exhibitionistic display culture and that you’re going to be blindsided by TMZ (and humiliated by Harvey Levin, or Chelsea Handler—princess of post-Empire) while stumbling out of a club on Sunset Boulevard at 2 in the morning, then you should be a travel agent instead of a movie star. Being publicly mocked is part of the game, and you’re a fool if you don’t play along. This is why Sheen seems saner and funnier than any other celebrity right now. He also makes better jokes about his situation than most worried editorialists or late-night comedians.
What does shame mean anymore? my friends in their 20s ask. Why in the hell did your boyfriend post a song called “Suck My Ballz” on Facebook last night? my mom asks. But nothing yet compares to the transparency that Sheen has unleashed in the past two weeks—contempt about celebrity, his profession, the old Empire world order.
Ellis’s “Empire” is a reference to Gore Vidal’s definition of global American hegemony, which Ellis dates from 1945 until 2005: the era that defined the 20th century. Post-Empire is where we are now. For Ellis, Empire is the lie, the having to hide who you really are, the keeping up appearances; post-Empire, on the other hand, is what Ellis calls, “aggressive transparency.” But his perspective has one flaw: for Ellis, both Empire and post-Empire are binary. It’s one or the other. It’s true or it’s a lie; it’s real or its counterfeit. The post-Empire reality, however, is not the end of the lie, it’s the end of the binary. Sure, “radical transparency” has become a 21st century marketing buzzword. Sure, Mark Zuckerberg believes that Privacy is Dead and has remade Facebook in that image. Sure, I wrote last year, what makes Iron Man the first 21st century superhero? His lack of alter ego; his unconflicted, absolute identity. But that all is only part of the Millennial story.
There’s an assumption that teens don’t care about privacy but this is completely inaccurate. Teens care deeply about privacy, but their conceptualization of what this means may not make sense in a setting where privacy settings are a binary. What teens care about is the ability to control information as it flows and to have the information necessary to adjust to a situation when information flows too far or in unexpected ways.
Just because teens choose to share some content widely does not mean that they wish all content could be universally accessible. What they want is a sense of control.
I’d argue this is, in fact, true of all of us now in the post-Empire. Not just teens. “What Sheen has exemplified and has clarified,” writes Ellis, “Is the moment in the culture when not caring what the public thinks about you or your personal life is what matters most—and what makes the public love you even more (if not exactly CBS or the creator of the show that has made you so wealthy).” Except that Charlie Sheen still very much DOES care. And so do all the rest of us in the 21st century. It’s there in every Facebook photo you’ve untagged yourself from. You had your reasons. It’s there in every location you pulled out your phone to check in at, and then decided not to. It’s there every time you hovered over, and then didn’t click the “Like” button. As tech blogger, Robert Scoble, writes:
The other day I found myself over at Yelp.com clicking “like” on a bunch of Half Moon Bay restaurants. After a while I noticed that I was only clicking “like” on restaurants that were cool, hip, high end, or had extraordinary experiences.
That’s cool. I’m sure you’re doing the same thing.
But then I started noticing that…. What I was presenting to you wasn’t reality.
See, I like McDonalds and Subway. But I wasn’t clicking like on those. Why not?
Because we want to present ourselves to other people the way we would like to have other people perceive us as.
I’d rather be seen as someone who eats salad at Pasta Moon than someone who eats a Big Mac at McDonalds.
This is the problem with likes and other explicit sharing systems. We lie and we lie our asses off.
This is the hyper-real version of Charlie Sheen. It is a role that Charlie Sheen is performing. And it is also who he actually is. Because how could he not be? Whatever Charlie Sheen does, that is who he is. This is the only way he has to take control over the flow of his information. For a celebrity in particular, as Ellis points out, that control is virtually non-existent. So how did Charlie Sheen wrest it back? By outdoing TMZ and the news shows and the magazines at their own game. He is no longer just a commodity of the tabloid industrial complex. He is the creator and star of his own show, the Crazy Charlie Sheen Show, and all the press is simply promotion.
Then again, it could be something much more simple. At Coachella 2008, Prince, headlining, kept demanding over and over, “Say my name, Coachella! Say my name, Coachella! Say my name, Coachella!” And like some epic call-and-response an ocean of 150,000 voices roared back: “Prince! Prince! Prince!” And I realized that if you’re Prince, there’s probably no way you can even get off anymore without 150,000 people screaming your name. Perhaps, if you’re Charlie Sheen, you can’t stay sober unless two million people are following your every move — just over two weeks after his first Tweet, it’s now closing in on 3 million.
“We’ve come a long way in the last two weeks,” Ellis concludes. “Sheen is the new reality, bitch, and anyone who’s a hater can go back and hang out with the rest of the trolls in the graveyard of Empire.” Like I’m Still Here and Exit Through The Gift Shop, what Charlie Sheen is doing is part of a continuum exposing the now inherent unreliability of the markers we’d previously depended on to tell the difference between what’s real and what isn’t. In some ways it’s as basic as the shift from the 20th century to the 21st; from analog to digital, from binary to exponential complexity. What, truly, does reality mean when it’s photoshopable? Or just another marketing campaign for some new movie? Not that reality doesn’t exist. Things are, out in the world; you can touch them. Earthquakes happen; nuclear reactors break; nations perch perilously on the verge of catastrophe. Reality exists, but it is no different from not reality. From the inscrutably contradictory government statements about radiation levels, from the fake Nuclear Fallout maps that spread like wildfire. Reality and not reality exist in the same plane now. It’s enough to make you go crazy. Unless you’re Charlie Sheen. In which case you’re not crazy. You simply are as your world is.
Guns N’ Roses backstage at the Stardust – Los Angeles, 1985 / Image: Reckless Road
Some friends came through town on tour, and sitting around in the dressing room backstage at House of Blues during the opening act, we started talking about the most epic-est, rock-‘n’-rollingest backstages we wished we could have gotten to been a part of. Guns N’ Roses, Mötley Crüe, The Rolling Stones. You know, the usual acts that had come to represent the platonic ideal of the Rock Star. This conversation was instigated by an admission from the main act himself about how boring it was backstage. Thinking back on the venues and the bands I’ve worked with, and even the vaudeville circus I used to manage, it occurred to me that (aside from a few exceptions working with music festivals — notably, on the production rather than the performance side — which only served to prove the rule) almost all the backstages I’ve ever been in were basically boring. Sure, there was always the inevitable adrenaline of last-minute chaos and ego trips and personality clashes and whatnot, but the debauched excess of the truly rock ‘n’ roll antics of yore? Even the folks on the tour, who would, that night, go on to rock the faces off twelve hundred screaming fans, noticed that all the examples of the epitomized backstages we were listing off had had their heyday before we were even old enough to get into any of their shows. This was not what MTV (back when MTV, actually stood for Music Television) or even Vice Magazine had promised us backstage would be like when we grew up. It looked increasingly less like the photo above.
It looked a lot more like this:
Mike Gallagher of the band Isis, backstage at the Trocadero – Philadelphia, 2007 / Image: Markphoto.net
And that’s when it dawned on me: the Internet had killed the rock star.
Well, first off, is there anything the Internet hasn’t already killed yet? Back in May, The Atlantic featured a piece about the Internet’s ongoing assassination of the music industry — a crime story a decade old now, but, like the JonBenét Ramsey of disruptive technology, undyingly over-covered. Other casualties in the Internet’s Edward Gorey-like murder spree have included music journalism, killed by mp3 blogs, pirate radio, killed by general redundancy, and even the mystique of the radio star (which, hadn’t video already confessed to killing like 30 years prior?) killed by too much exposure. At this point, to say the Internet’s done away with anything else when it comes to music is, admittedly, a cliché, but, nevertheless, I do think there’s one more, less-publicized casualty.
In an interview with NME earlier this year, Kasabian singer Tom Meighan was on to part of it:
It’s not like what it used to be like in rock ‘n’ roll. In the ’60s and ’70s you had the likes of David Bowie and Marc Bolan, and then in the ’80s you even had shit acts that were rock stars.
I think – especially in the last three or four years – the internet’s taken a stranglehold and killed off the myth of the rock star now. You know when you used to buy the records and there was the myth behind them? There’s too much on blogs now and I think it’s killed it off. Nobody’s surprised by an interview anymore or anything. It’s quite tragic.
There are so many rock stars writing these self pitying blogs and it’s not in the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll, it’s like ‘Wow, what rubbish’.
That’s the victim no one talks about when they’re focusing instead on how much money the RIAA’s member organizations are losing due to the Internet: the “spirit of rock ‘n’ roll.” Cuz you know what those acts in the 60’s and 70’s and 80’s and, to a large extent, the 90’s didn’t have backstage? Email. Or Facebook or Twitter. There were no urgent texts that needed immediate replies, no forums of endless fan comments to be compulsively monitored, no hundreds of images from the previous night’s show to be sorted through and uploaded, no online profiles for potentially competing or collaborating artists to be stalked, no blog posts that needed to be written, or livestreams set up. Hell, there weren’t even any cell phones with which to call anyone during those hours and hours on the tour bus. Not to mention any of the normal things that even non-rock stars do on their computers, like instant message with their friends or watch the entire last season of Mad Men. Millennials — the generation whose older members are now of rock star age — spend almost 10 hours a day online. Add to that the three morehours per day that Americans now spend using the web on their mobile phones, and then factor in the completely-absurd-even-to-this-millennial FOUR THOUSAND texts that the average (AVERAGE!!) teenager sends per month — that’s six texts every waking hour — and all of that compounds into a LOT of time that the typical touring act in 2010 is spending doing shit that simply wasn’t there to have been done back in the day. Before we all developed these new digital compulsions there used to be a lot more time for, and a lot fewer pressing distractions from, the analog ones, namely the sex + drugs that = the “spirit of rock ‘n’ roll.”
Of course, being a rock star back in the 20th century, you could also get away with a lot more than you can now. Your drug-addled, sex-addicted, minor-fucking ways were not gonna end up on Twitter three seconds after some groupie snapped a photo on her cell phone, let alone on TMZ. To a large extent, truly rock star behavior used to be a lot easier to contain. Now, there’s really no buffer. And that increasingly permeable line cuts in both directions. Much as self-pitying blog posts are a definite cramp in the rock ‘n’ roll style, so is not being able to avoid your hate mail. In the past, your handlers would have simply made sure you never saw it. Now, not only does it take some herculean willpower to avoid the known hubs of haterade — and rock stars aren’t famous for their self-restraint — but even for the most disciplined musicians, messages letting you know you suck are like online porn: one in three of us has ended up with it in our face even when we weren’t looking for it. It’s why Trent Reznor quit Twitter last year…. Twice. The first time around, Reznor posted the following on the Nine Inch Nails forum by way of explanation:
When Twitter made it’s way to my radar…. I decided to lower the curtain a bit and let you see more of my personality. I watched some of you get more engaged because you started to realize there’s a person (flaws and all) back there, and I watched some of you recoil in horror because I’m not what you projected on me. All expected. I’m not as concerned about “breaking” your idea of NIN at this point. It is what it is and I am what I am. The relationship between artist and fan is changing if you haven’t noticed, along with the way we consume and experience music and even communicate since the internet arrived.
….But some people exist to ruin it for others – and they are the ones who have nothing better to do with their time. Example: on nin.com, there’s 3-4 different people that each send me between 50 – 100 message per day of delusional, often threatening nonsense. We can delete them, but they just sign back up and start again. Yes, we are implementing several changes to address this, but the point is it quickly gets very old weeding through that stuff.
Rock ‘n’ roll has never been scared of confrontation, but in the past it’s always been in-person, and visceral. Being able to settle things with a fistfight or a blunt and / or glass object is incredibly more rock ‘n’ roll-y than this new equation:
Of course, it’s undeniable there are significant advantages that all this new technology has afforded artists as well. From those just starting out to the ones with Stadium Status, the Internet has put a lot of new tools and resources directly into artists’ hands, allowing them unprecedented control over their own careers and their relationship with their fans. But it also means that handling much of what a label was once responsible for — and even more that they still haven’t even figured out how to do — is now part of the job requirement of being a successful musician. You have to be an expert in marketing, branding, community strategy, and user engagement; knowing how to write code, the meaning of the term “information architecture,” and a good web designer also help. “Engaging your fans” the old fashioned way meant spraying them with champagne in the green room. Now, replying to messages on Facebook is your second job. A couple of decades ago you wouldn’t have had to be giving a shit about anything called a website; now you have to anticipate you’ll be redoing yours every few years just to keep up with the rapid pace of change on the web. A friend of mine who’s in a band that just finished a tour of the U.S. followed by Australia, told me in the wake of the band’s website redesign to incorporate the StageBloc platform, a process that spanned several months, “At the time, I didn’t think that working at an internet startup was going to be helpful to my music career.” Which also speaks to the kind of personality the evolution of rock ‘n’ roll is selecting for these days.
Think about the best concert you’ve seen in the past five years. You know what the band did after the show? They checked a bunch of email, sent a bunch of texts, possibly also a bunch of Tweets, and generally stared at screens for a while. Cracked.com’s list of the 7 Most Impossible Rock Stars to Deal With, which features the likes of DMX, Keith Moon, Iggy Pop, Nikki Sixx, Ozzy Osbourne, and Eric Clapton — all people who were wreaking havoc by the time they were my age — includes absolutely no one who is my age now. (And aren’t we, Millennials, supposed to be the over-entitled spoiled-brat “Generation Me”?) While the barrier to entry into rockstarhood may have never been as porous (getting discovered on YouTube, anyone?), the competition has arguably never been more intense. Just being a talented performer and charismatic entertainer is not enough anymore. The same tools that are giving artists more control are also saddling them with more responsibility. The business savvy and marketing aptitude that once made Madonna an anomalous success are now prerequisite just to stay in the game. You simply couldn’t keep up if you are the kind of mess that the emblematic rock stars who defined the term got to be. Or, perhaps, as Cracked suggests, all the drug addiction and general nihilism were so rampant among rock stars in the olden days “possibly because no one had invented the Internet yet, [and] they got bored.”
Of course, there’s still bands like Justice, whose trouble-making, euro-hipster decadence is entertaining enough for an hour-long tour documentary. But as you’ll realize if you watch the “A Cross The Universe” DVD, chronicling the band’s 2008 U.S. tour, the duo hardly spend time at their computers, aside from when they’re performing. And there’s no mystery why. The band doesn’t have a website, or Twitter. Their Facebook is a UGC Community Page created by fans. They basically just have a Myspace, which is maintained by their French label, Ed Banger Records. In a sense, Justice isn’t so much an exception as an appropriately ironic throwback. The documentary, hearkening back to when rock stars were legitimately so, effectively paints the laptop rocker duo in those nostalgically familiar colors.
There’s a reason that Aldous Snow — the rock ‘n’ roll MacGuffin played by Russell Brand in this summer’s Get Him To The Greek, the latest installment “From the Director of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and the Producer of Knocked Upand Superbad” — is referred to in the movie as “one of the last remaining rock stars.” When it comes to this 20th century Dionysian archetype, there really aren’t that many left. The Internet is making sure of it.
Remember a time when it seemed like the power of the new technologies suddenly at our fingertips was limitless? When lasers and floppy disks and modems were cutting-edge, and a whole slew of movies which took on the subject matter insisted that teenagers, especially, were capable of using these incomprehensible, futuristic phenomena to do things no one could even imagine? There’s 1982’s Tron, in which Jeff Bridges is a computer genius who hacks into an evil video game corporation and gets zapped inside the computer world, where he’s forced to participate in gladiatorial games; 1983’s War Games, in which Matthew Broderick is a high school kid who nearly starts World War III by hacking into a military computer; 1985’s Real Genius, in which Val Kilmer is a brilliant teenager who develops a laser for a class project and then has to stop it from being used as a government weapon, and another 1985 flick, John Hughes’s Weird Science, in which Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith are two geeks desperately seeking popularity, who use a Memotech MTX 512 to create their ticket to the in-crowd: the perfect woman.
The consistent, underlying premise of all these movies was that technology is a new, unexplored frontier, and no one could really say for sure what it could — or couldn’t — do. There was the pervading sense that the new wave of personal computing had put the power to create monsters right at teenagers’ fingertips.
Now, the Internet, iPhones, the rise of “digital natives,” and nearly 30 years later, it seems our conception of the unpredictability of new technology still hasn’t really changed all that much, and neither has the sense that, inevitably, teenage geeks will use it to create preposterous monsters. Case in point: The Social Network.
Facemash is really where it all started. It was late at night. Mark was having a few drinks….He was a master hacker and he hacked into all of the computers at Harvard and took all of the pictures of all the girls on campus and created a “hot or not” website where you could judge which was the hottest girl at Harvard. And this ended up [getting] 20,000 hits in about an hour. It froze the computer systems at Harvard. And he nearly got kicked out of school. That really was the genesis of Facebook, because for the next couple of days he thought about it, and thought, you know, “What if girls could put their own pictures up, and then we’d go and say ‘Hi’ to them, or whatever,” and that’s where Facebook started.
If this story sounds familiar it’s because you’ve seen it before. 25 years before, in fact, as Gary and Wyatt hack into the Pentagon mainframe, create a computer program that synthesizes images, “input” a bunch of photos of girls, and the result is a runaway creation that takes on a life of its own and very quickly alters the course of its creators’ lives as well.
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Cut to 2010, and the question in the Oingo Boingo song, “Weird Science,” which asks, “It’s my creation; is it real?” is no longer rhetorical. Computers are no longer the premise for teen science-fantasy farce, they are serious business.
It is about nerds. The kids who founded it — Mark Zuckerberg and his friend — were geeky, gawky kids, who were essentially trying to get laid…. And basically, these genius kids created the next generation in technology while trying to become part of the in-crowd.
Now, look at Gary and Wyatt:
Now, back to The Social Network:
In 1985, the most incredible thing anyone could conceive of a teenager creating on his computer was a woman. In 2010, it’s a billion-dollar company.
Though much of the history of Facebook is well documented, some of it in blog posts by Zuckerberg himself, the thing to keep in mind in the course of Mezrich’s book, and The Social Network movie, written by Aaron Sorkin, is that while many of the backstory’s supporting cast were interviewed, and directly participated in the recounting of this sordid tale of “sex, money, genius, and betrayal” that Facebook apparently is, the main character, Mark Zuckerberg, very deliberately, declined to be involved in any way. Mezrich himself freely acknowledges that it’s perfectly Zuckerberg’s right not to speak to someone that he doesn’t know, and, in the end, what really happened in some of the scenes he wrote in the story, only Mark really knows. Inevitably, some creative liberties had to be taken in the process of creating a book, and then a film, so, who’s to say where history ends and the weird science begins? Either way, we’re still telling the same story three decades later.
Image: Culture Wins
