The last time there was any kind of TV programming I was paying attention to in real time and religiously watching every episode was Star Trek: Next Generation, back in the 1990's.
There was one episode, which on a search I've just learned was titled "Clues," where the ship is hit by a wormhole of some kind, which swallows one of the crew. What the rest of the crew experiences is that one of their members is missing.
What the missing crew member experiences is much more like a terrible nightmare or a really bad acid trip, where bit by bit, all the people on the ship, and eventually large sections of the ship itself, are disappearing without a trace. When she asks the ship's computer about the missing people or sections of the ship, she is told that they never existed. Then (spoiler alert) when her world eventually shrinks down to a little bubble, she figures out what's going on and gets rescued.
That feeling of living in a world that seems to be shrinking, and being told it's not happening, really stuck with me. There are other Star Trek: Next Generation episodes that have had a similarly strong impact on my psyche as well. But lately it's that one that I feel like I'm living through in some form.
One of the strangest things about watching your world disappear one bit at a time is how it's only obvious that it's happening to the person who is subject to the phenomenon. Unless someone else is for some reason doing a really deep dive into the nitty gritty of your daily life, it's not the sort of thing anyone else would tend to notice.
One of the strangest things about being targeted in the way I'm obviously being targeted is that it only seems to be obvious to me. To anyone else observing any of this, each thing that's happening can be explained as an independent, unrelated, technical phenomenon, and even the act of thinking there might be a relationship between all these things that are happening seems to be an indication of irrational paranoia or feelings of inflated self-importance, some kind of narcissistic thing.
It occurred to me the other day that I don't think I've recently tried to lay out all the various things I've been experiencing in one place, and that seems worth doing, because maybe it points to a pattern.
The pattern is something like "cancelation by a thousand cuts," with each cut being one that's plausibly unrelated to the other ones, but with each cut being of the sort that adversely affects my ability to function as an artist and as a public figure.
I'll describe some of the notable phenomena that I'm dealing with lately, or at some point over the past year, and I'll try to avoid going into excessive detail, in the interest of providing more of an overview here.
Venue harassment
For years, but most methodically since February, 2024, venue owners or managers will regularly be contacted by people claiming that I'm an antisemite and/or guilty of other transgressions, and for public safety and other good reasons, the gig should be canceled. If the venue owner/manager is active on social media, the harassment may become particularly disturbing.
The impact of this sort of thing is unfortunately deep. At least one in ten venues contacted like this will cancel the gig. For many others, there is a pall around this gig, and any desire that may have existed to actively promote the gig is no longer present.
Social media policing
To those experiencing it who aren't me, it seems like the mention of my name on social media tends to piss someone off. This is what happens most often, rather than the mention of my name eliciting praise for my music or essays or something like that.
If you're me, and you're experiencing the pattern here, you see that what's happening is easy to explain. I'm not a famous artist, so naturally when my name is mentioned on social media, most people in a random place on social media won't know who the guy is who is being mentioned. The person who will always know who is being mentioned, however, is the person who is following any mention of my name on a given platform, so that they can chime in with an attack.
The impact of this phenomenon is to constantly make sure that anyone expressing affection for this particular artist will quickly learn about the artist's supposed character flaws or political transgressions. The tendency is to limit the artist's reach in many ways.
Social media trolling
Mainly between February and April, mainly on Facebook but also some on X, my accounts were deluged with pro-Israel, pro-genocide hate speech directed at me, any time I posted a picture of myself wearing something Palestine-related, like a Palestine flag t-shirt. The number of comments per month during that period were around 27,000.
I don't know what the overall impact of this kind of trolling has been, since my presence on Facebook, the main platform that was targeted, was already minimal, since Facebook changed their algorithms years ago in such a way that seemed to make me and people posting the sort of content I post basically invisible.
Facebook Event blacklist
One of the very few useful things about Facebook remaining has been Events. With Facebook Events you can easily invite local people to events. That is, when it's working properly, Facebook helpfully suggests to you the people you might want to send invitations to, based on the fact that they are Friends or Followers who live in the area where the event is taking place.
Most people in all the countries I tour in regularly use Facebook Events to promote events they're organizing. When it comes to my involvement with all that, however, for the past year or so, the Invite feature on Events is disabled. I just get the loading screen, and about 95% of the time or more, that's it. If I keep at it, sometimes it eventually works, so this can make it look like some kind of technical glitch, but over time it has become obvious that it isn't, it's basically that I'm banned from using this vitally important feature to promote my gigs, or anyone else's.
Censored on Spotify
Spotify removed my January, 2024 album about the Gaza genocide, Notes from a Holocaust, from my discography, and from the platform generally. In year-end statistics, the album doesn't come up, although it was my most popular release of 2024.
Spotify didn't notify me when they removed the album, and efforts by me and other Spotify users to get an explanation for the album's disappearance have resulted in getting nonsense explanations from a series of different support people, who tend to change every ten minutes.
Blacklisted on Twilio
If you want to have people be able to sign up to receive alerts from you by text message, and you want to be able to send batches of hundreds of text messages at a time, as you do with such a list, then you need to sign up to use this kind of service on a platform like Twilio, which is a multi-billion-dollar corporation that has more or less cornered this market, as far as I can tell.
Twilio used to work just fine for me to send texts this way, and cultivating a text mob (as we used to call these things 20 years ago) had been my main method for getting the word out about certain events in the Portland area in particular.
Since Twilio's rules apparently tightened up a bit, however, even with the able assistance of my web designer and us jumping through every hoop presented to us to become officially "onboarded" again and allowed to send texts to people who signed up to receive them, there is always one more elusive step in the onboarding process, and approval never comes.
What next?
Of course, for all of these obstacles I have to cope with, the examples are all around us of people who have had far more of them thrown in their paths. Whereas I get an album removed from Spotify, other people have had their entire YouTube channel taken down, accused of being Russian propaganda. Whereas my fans regularly get harassed for saying nice things about me in public forums, other people have been demonetized from financial platforms essential for the survival of so many modern freelance artists and journalists. Whereas I seem to be getting songs targeted for deletion because they violate Section 12 of the UK's Terrorism Act of 2000, other people are getting violently arrested for posting the same sorts of things on social media.
Seeing what happens to others, it's easy to see how my situation could get worse, my career even far more stifled than it is at present. Two nights ago, Google informed me they stopped someone who was trying to access my account.
These conditions are really not at all ideal for trying to run a career, but these are the conditions I've got.
If you happen to be in Mexico, the western or northeastern US, England, Scotland, British Columbia, or Australia, I'm booking the first half of 2025 now, as the world shrinks.
Alternative means of communication, alternative means of disseminating ideas, and alternative means of publicizing events all exist, and have long existed, since long before corporations, trolls, and secret police effectively took over the internet. What I wonder is when are we going to collectively abandon the corporate matrix we find ourselves in, and try something radically different, and will this happen before I'm forced to look for another line of work.
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