Perverse Bots

and a duet with Karl Blau

Hello again.
NOTE: There’s a paid-subscriber-only unreleased recording at the bottom of this email.

what’s been up?

I hope everyone is having an excellent January. It’s a stark time of year in the northern hemisphere, especially further north where I live. Short days without much light, face to face with your own self more than during the seeing-people-all-the-time part of the year. I like it. For me, this is when the ideas come up and get nourished. The roll of song work has continued and I’m looking forward to someday releasing a new thing. For now, I crouch through the afternoons in headphones and nobody has heard any of it but me. I’ll stay like this for quite a while.

I’m working on setting up a few Mount Eerie shows for the coming months. They’ll be solidified soon and I’ll announce them here in the next newsletter. (Subscribe if you haven’t already.)

Oh and, real quick, just a giant thank you again to anyone who took my songwriting class at School Of Song back in November. I got the extremely sweet surpise book you all put together. I’m very touched. Thank you everyone.

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my topic today:

You know the website “instagram”? It’s a place where people take square pictures of themselves and then do inane commenting about the pictures using a special language of symbols and abbreviations. There are all kinds of arbitrary limitations. Shockingly, it’s become basically the main website on the whole internet. Many peoples’ entire economic and social and personal situations are so intertwined with the company that they don’t feel it’s possible to exist without it. It’s nuts. I mean, it’s the internet, it’s normal now for people to have outsourced their whole existences to an online parallel. But to me it’s nuts that this clunky photo app has seemingly become the dominant force, almost like if Quiznos became the most powerful corporation in the world. When it first came out it seemed so obviously awkward and not functional to me. I was not an early adopter and I still don’t use it.

I didn’t mean to go on another tirade, oops.

Recently someone let me know that the most popular version of myself on there is an imposter with many thousands of followers. There’s an account named “Phil Elverum” (username @rjphil0), verified with the blue check mark as actually being me somehow, posting only pictures of me with ridiculous disjointed captions, dumb stuff I would never say.

“Music fills the infinite between two souls” it says I said.
No it doesn’t.

“Singing with my heart…”
ugh, barf. “Thats good, lol.” responds robertsonjacob82, a real person.

“Sitting peacefully outside…”
Hi everyone. Excited to share this picture of me glowering on a stoop. Guess what, I’m sitting peacefully outside. See? I would never say that.
(I like how Mr Kajal says “Good luck”, like, what’s happening here where I need luck? Scary.)

and most perversely:

“Us…” with an old picture of me and Geneviève (RIP) at the merch table at some show.
”Funny” is a very weird reply.
It’s messed up. It’s not thaaat invasive because presumably all these photos were found online in public places, but it’s messed up to put words in my mouth, to do a false representation of me that’s kind of aiming for accuracy but getting it so wrong tone-wise. It’s a bad translation. It’s aggravating, and slightly funny in its dumbness.

It must be a robot, right? Why would a human being be behind this shoddy impersonation? And in this case, even though this fake me has quite a few followers (55.1k as of now), it also appears that almost all the commenters are also bots. Is this a robot talking to other robots, all pretending to be us? Pretending by using the most saccharine and idiotic versions of emotional expression? “Awesome 🙌🙌🙌”. I’m sure there are reasons why bots are taking over our virtual social realms. I don’t know what these reasons are but it’s safe to assume someone is benefiting from this seemingly empty fictional chatter. Or maybe it’s the singularity already avalanching down on us.

(If it’s not a robot, and the human behind this account happens to be a reader of this newsletter, PLEASE DON’T BE DOING THIS.)

This isn’t the only time this has happened. There have been a bunch of times, and sometimes it’s way worse. It’s happened on instagram, twitter, facebook, etc. Just now a quick search showed there were over ten Phil Elverums (not counting my real dormant account) on instagram alone. Some of these have been gnarly. People have told me that someone posing as me was harassing women, for example. An actual nightmare.

But I didn’t want this to be about “oh poor me, I’m so noteworthy I have people pretending to be me”. I think there’s something more interesting to notice here.

It makes me think of an earlier simpler time, early internet times, when the idea of messing with one’s persona was fun and innocent. Before the the manipulation of false identities was actually weaponized to change world events, elect very very bad presidents, undermine each of our relationships with factual truths, slide even closer toward baffled subjugated fascism, etc. It’s gotten bad. But do you remember how it used to be fun?

In my own little corner, with the songs I make, I am always trying to just be myself, describe my actual true experience, be real. It’s important to me to avoid facade and to get at what’s beneath. But pretty early on I learned that “real” is the slipperiest of ideas. No matter how accurate I can be with my aim toward authentic self-expression, total raw honesty, inevitably it’s going to be heard and interpreted in wildly varying ways by every single listener. Everybody builds their own understanding and nothing is solid. Plus, in general, I believe in the value of intentionally creating those illuminating surprise moments of disorientation when the thing you thought was happening turns out to not be, to find oneself floating in mid air for a second. The trick that happens in zen sometimes. So, since it’s all unpredictable and liquid, there is room to play.

I remember first discovering how fun it could be to goof around with presenting a joke version of myself. I sang about it in Microphones in 2020, the part about seeing Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and band at a truck stop in Italy, all dressed in matching track suits, presumably because they were in Italy and doing a funny joke about the common mens’ clothing style there? Then later when they toured the small towns of the west coast US they all wore beige coveralls, the same kind of localized tease. This was inspiring. Plus, yeah, being this Bonnie character instead of his actual self (Will Oldham). This was more full-on role playing than what I’m inclined toward, but it cracked things open for me.

In 2006 we had a bunch of friends camping in the yard during What The Heck?, a summer music festival we used to put on in Anacortes. During breakfast one morning a flurry of face-spraining joking escalated to us all gathering around a single laptop while Jason Anderson logged into Wikipedia (using my credentials) and deeply editing the entry for Count Chocula, the cereal. Then we did Booberry. Then I got banned from Wikipedia. It was so fun.

Jason continued exercising his immense gifts for writing very funny things that bent reality. “Ando-PR” was a fictional PR firm that was basically just Jason answering email-based interviews on behalf of his musician friends, including me. A magazine/website would send questions to me, I’d forward them to Ando-PR (Jason), he’d write hilarious and often horrible and embarrassing answers as a really skewed version of me, I’d send these back to the journalist. Not all the time, only when the interview questions were particularly formulaic. It was terrifying sometimes to press send on these emails. They often got published without any issue. Spend some time on this archive of the Ando-PR work, it is so brilliant. I actually released a letterpressed and handbound collection of this stuff in 2007.

Then there was the band PEACE that I “discovered” around then, releasing their ill-fated CDR before we had a major falling out.

From all this, the term “blosting” was coined and a whole big summer of joking flourished around doing fake news basically. Sounds so quaint now.

It’s been a bummer to watch this playfulness with reality evolve from something pretty innocent (maybe the biggest risk back then was creating an exclusion feeling for anyone who didn’t feel in on the joke enough) into something not funny or playful (people just straight up posing as a well known person online for nihilistic non-reasons or to attract vicarious pseudo-attention, for example) or worse, into something actually destructive (the erosion of the connection to reality itself that so many experience via online existence now). Were we being irresponsible young nerds to mess with the Count Chocula Wikipedia page? Was I on a destructive trajectory when I photoshopped a baby photo of my own face onto some random guy’s portrait and used it as my Twitter profile for all those years?

Now when I see this bot instagram page pretending to be me, putting shallow and off target words into my mouth, it doesn’t feel playful or interesting. It feels bleak. The fun potential of messing around in this zone now feels too fraught, the danger too real, not to mention played out.

So, here I am back to trying to write songs about saying my true thing as simply and as directly as I can, no facade, no secret joke. Here’s what I actually look like:

Thank you for reading this newsletter. It feels like a good way to return to reality.

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for paying subscribers:

I have a song for you that you haven’t heard. It comes from the archives.