So long and thanks for the news
Upcoming shows for January and February 2018! 1/26 - Brooklyn, NY @ Terra Firma, 1/27 - Somerville, MA @ The Monkey House, 2/2 - Trenton, NJ @ The Mill Hill Basement.
So it’s 2018, I’m not much of a new years resolution type, but to start off the new year right I deleted the facebook app off my smart phone. The results have been positive, I’ve noticed that several times a day I would look for it in my list of apps then remembered that I deleted it, and then thanked myself for doing so. I still use the platform for promoting my music and I log in on my laptop. But now I spend less time getting sucked into the mindless echo chamber that is facebook during brief moments throughout the day. I only wish that my fellow musicians and artists had the same desire to peel themselves away from the platform altogether and would start taking small steps to do so. Facebook is a platform that in one hand claims to promote freedom of expression and protect individual privacy, but engages in censorship, placing some users in “Facebook jail” for particular comments and have deleted or unpublished some accounts all together. Recently Facebook has been taking orders from the U.S. and Israeli governments to shut down various facebook accounts, which in my opinion sets a scary precedent.
More info on that via Democracy Now! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMhdkOVCtOE&t=740s.
It gets kind of tricky though because Facebook is a private company and isn’t subject to 1st amendment laws. But some would argue that FB has become so widely used that it is more akin to something like a public utility, and to deny someones access to the platform is to completely silence an individuals voice. You could also question FB’s choice of censorship, as you can still find a variety of hate groups still in existence on the platform, anything from white supremacists to religious extremists groups, but on the other hand accounts like that of David Icke have been banned or unpublished. Whether or not you know who David Icke is or agree with his ideas, his overall message is one of peace. He vehemently opposes war and tries to promote truth in journalism. He also had over 700,000 followers, and if you’re saying things that the state doesn’t like and you have that kind of influence I guess you’re bound to get banned.
FB has been caught in the past running social experiments on it’s users. Now Mark Zuckerberg wants to make a run for president, in one hand he will tell you there is nothing to worry about when it comes to your privacy. This is the same guy who just tried to sue hundreds of native Hawaiians so they could be vacated off of their land because it fell within the borders of his 700 acre estate. The reason why he wanted the the remainder of the lands surrounding his estate to be vacated was so they could be more private; to preserve the lands. Ultimately it looks like the lawsuit has failed because he had received a major backlash from the community and the general public. Many of his Hawaiian neighbors also resent the mile long wall he has built on one of his borders. Seems like a double standard to me when it comes to privacy?
Link to a guardian article on this https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/27/mark-zuckerberg-drops-hawaii-land-lawsuits, and a link to a piece by Jimmy Dore https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWY7XHSmH-c.
Either way it’s 2018, I say we slowly start backing away from the fascist social media platform and star looking for alternatives. There are a lot of sites out there for music, old dinosaurs like Reverb Nation (which I can’t stand), to other slightly less annoying resources like Indie On The Move. Bandcamp is, in my opinion the best site for DIY musicians to distribute their music. Do we even need a social media platform? We are all connected through the internet in various ways. Songkick and Bands On Tour are free resources for bands to use to promote themselves. Sites like dodiy.org still exist, and more could be made with the absence of FB. Music was distributed and information was shared in the days before the internet, bands toured before the invention of myspace? Just a thought, one platform shouldn’t hold a monopoly on DIY music and culture, especially a culture that prides itself on creativity and freedom of expression