Hi happy Sunday I’m having a coffee and a cigarette right now and just sort of processing and marinating. There’s a little more context I want to add as coherently as I can.
So, a little additional note to my last post which I would encourage you to read and share (even if you don’t like me, which is fine you are very much allowed to dislike me I’m my own flavor of polarizing and unlikable and certainly made plenty of mistakes in my twenties) if you are involved in music in any capacity and have not already—
I have spent the past few months sniffing out and confirming that the person who I suspect is behind pretty much the majority of public cancellations of meaningful personal and professional consequence from the past decade also has and runs thousands of Reddit accounts under different aliases, alts, personas, identities, activity levels, post histories, account age, and likely mods a lot of big subreddits as a means to control narratives, approve themselves as a user to validate certain claims, and groom public impression. This I can prove beyond any shadow of a doubt. They own hundreds, if not thousands, of YouTube accounts as well and run a lot of the major “curation” and distribution YouTube channels like David Dean Burkhardt among many others. They have thousands of SoundCloud accounts as well which they use for many reasons but mainly to game the algorithm. This is all stuff I can prove many times over. How they are able to do this is a little bit beyond my comprehension at the moment but I know they are adept at machine learning, running open source scripts, gaming algorithms, and it’s likely something like that or a combination thereof including the use of a personal server is going on. They also admin lolcow.
I don’t know enough about Twitter or instagram or Facebook to really assert any presence they may or may not have there because I don’t use them except to say that this person has used fake accounts representing false identities on Twitter many times to enact cancellations, mainly in that of The Orwells but others too, and Instagram to interact with men under false pretenses. Their own Twitter account was the start to me understanding and appreciating the scope and scale and severity of their manipulation in music, music journalism, and creative spaces.
I note the Reddit stuff to encourage you not to take anything said in cancellation threads as any sort of gospel truth let alone personal account from a real life person engaging in good faith.
Beyond what I already know to be true regarding the fictionalized nature of a lot of cancellations from the past decade, the amount of control this individual has been able to accrue on the internet is unprecedented and I feel cannot be overstated.
I would encourage you, if you are a creative in any sense of the word and work in creative spaces or rely on the internet and its platforms to do so, to actively try to confirm the people in your orbit are representing their actual real identity and engaging in good faith and always question the motives of someone trying to get you to hate or ostracize another creative. We ultimately all occupy presence in these communities because of the values we have in common, not the things we don’t.
Essentially this is someone who, for a decade, has used the internet and what happens online or more accurately what they are able to assert online to dictate reality instead of the internet being a reflection of what happens in real life. I think they were able to do this largely in part because the early 2010s saw a death of the “blog” era, hipster runoff, Williamsburg indie, and an entire shift of the internet from personal blogs and websites to streamlined platforms and social media. A lot of the bands, artists, and musicians who came of age after maybe 2012 or 2013 saw themselves operating in a very different wheelhouse with different rules, internet literacy, and more online based means of connecting personally and professionally as opposed to in person community based. A lot of musicians grew up using /mu/ — it was the most tepid board on 4chan, it was never dignified as NSFW, it was the least racist board because of all the hip-hop heads. A normal /mu/ user would never have thought that using it was some sort of criminal or cancellable offense, this individual got Whirr cancelled in 2015 and by doing so asserted engagement with that space as being inherently sort of nefarious (it wasn’t I used to hang out there it was all very, very mild), I believe they were also responsible for getting a member of DIIV kicked out for the same reason.
I’m sure I’ll say more but for now I’m going to log off for a week or two.
