Watching the World Shrink While Booking the Next Tour

What does it feel like to be canceled by a thousand cuts?

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.

Spotify: Wrapped, Robbed, and Censored

It's #SpotifyWrapped time again, and this year's summary of my presence on the platform is especially Kafka Orwell.

Israel is killing everyone in Gaza, in a genocidal campaign of extermination of all babies, children, and adults in the Gaza Strip.  This is easy to verify in so many ways, since so much of the wanton slaughter is being captured live, on camera, and streamed to the world.  The western media, however, ignores almost all of it, and when they occasionally, randomly mention one of the daily atrocities against children and babies committed by drones and snipers, they always attempt to contextualize it with crazy talk about "Israel's war with Hamas," which is called disinformation by any reasonable observer.

Given this backdrop, nothing should surprise anyone.  Are masked police in England rounding up journalists, Jewish scholars of the Nazi Holocaust, and anyone else who speaks or posts anything that smacks of sympathy for people who are trying to fight back against the genocide they are experiencing?  Yes, they are.  Are they brutalizing said journalists and charging them with crimes punishable by up to 14 years in prison, for saying the wrong things on social media or in a speech at a rally?  Yes, they are.  Is the western media telling you this is happening, ever, at all?  No, they aren't.

If committing genocide in broad daylight against an entire people isn't newsworthy, and brutalizing journalists and scholars who say the wrong thing in that great citadel of democracy known as the United Kingdom is also not a story worth covering, the fact that the world's biggest music streaming platform is erasing entire albums from the internet and pretending they never existed, with no notification or explanation, and then in multiple ways lying about the Kafkaesque/Orwellian practice, is also not deemed worthy of a single mention by any press outlet, should surprise no one.

You are reading the words of a person who could be disappeared at any moment, effectively.  An artist whose work could be erased entirely with no explanation -- here one day, gone the next.  (Please don't tell me about alternative platforms.  If you do, you're entirely missing the point.)

Most people accept it as self-evident that just about all the world's music can be found, for free, on Spotify.  If anyone is left out of that massive pool of free music, there must be a reason, and after all, it's so few of them, overall, that it probably didn't matter, whatever happened there.  Just see what song the algorithm recommends next, it'll probably be a good one.

Yesterday was the day the global press celebrates as #SpotifyWrapped Day -- the day Spotify deigns to reveal a little bit of their massive, secret trove of data on all the world's creators and consumers of music and podcasts.  

The morning began for me as it did for who knows how many other artists around the world -- with messages on various social media platforms from fans sharing the graphics they received from Spotify to download, post on their platforms, and share with whoever, listing the artists they listen to most often, and which specific songs they listened to most in 2024.  It's a heartwarming flurry of messages to receive.  Perfectly understandable how #SpotifyWrapped became a thing, if my own experience of it as an artist is any guide. 

Later in the day, Spotify for Artists announced to us artists on the platform their version of #SpotifyWrapped.  Rather than telling us what albums and songs we listened to most, they tell us which of our songs were listened to most, which of our recent albums were streamed the most, how many listeners added our music to playlists, in which countries we had the most listeners, and all those sorts of fun statistics.

What I can say about Spotify's report to this particular artist is it was verifiably untrue -- somewhere between misinformation and disinformation, depending on your interpretation of these terms.  But certainly one or the other.

Their Wrapped presentation flows like a slideshow, with each slide presenting a different statistic.

95,000 distinct listeners from 149 different countries streamed songs of mine around 932,000 times on Spotify in 2024, they tell me.

In previous #SpotifyWrapped presentations they would also inform us where that placed us in the rankings of Spotify artists overall, but they don't seem to be doing that this year.  Perhaps it was too revealing for artists to discover, as I did, that being in the top 4% of all Spotify artists on the planet doesn't nearly cover the cost of your groceries.

They tell me my most popular song this year, as last year, and most other years since I wrote it, is once again "I'm A Better Anarchist Than You."  They tell me my music is listened to the most in the US, the UK, Germany, Canada, and Australia, in that order.

They tell me my most streamed album in 2024 was the second of the four new studio albums I've released since January, Bearing Witness, with over 8,000 albums streamed.

Sounds nice, except that this is a lie, an untruth, a piece of blatantly inaccurate and misleading information.  I know this because Spotify itself told me so.

Although the album, Notes From A Holocaust, which appeared on Spotify, Apple Music, and other streaming platforms in January, 2024, can still be found on the website of the distribution platform I use (CDBaby), and it can still be seen in the stats available to users that it made more than twice as much money and got more than twice as many streams as Bearing Witness did, #SpotifyWrapped informs me, rather, that Bearing Witness was my most popular new album.

The actual most popular new album, the one that sought to document the first three months of Israel's ongoing Palestinian holocaust, is gone -- erased, disappeared, unmentioned in end-of-the-year statistical wrap-ups, as if it never existed. 

Gone from the public record of the world's biggest music platform is my song about the acronym doctors began writing in indelible ink on the bodies of so many hospitalized children in Gaza -- WCNSF; Wounded Child, No Surviving Family (track #4).

Erased are my predictions that sometime in the future they'll open museums in memory of the genocide the western powers supposedly didn't know was happening, Once the Last Palestinian's Killed (track #6).

Gone is one of my actually most-listened-to songs of 2024, also from Notes From A Holocaust, in which I share the UN's predictions in the fall of 2023 that if this genocide continues then soon the number of Palestinians being killed by bombs and bullets will be vastly outnumbered by those who will be dying from Famine and Disease (track #7).

And presumably most importantly, from the vantage point of Spotify and the politicians and government agencies they answer to, is you will not find the most offensive composition, Song for the Houthi Army (track #15), on the album which has been disappeared into the memory hole.

I say presumably, of course, because Spotify has told me nothing other than obvious nonsense about changing metadata, with regards to the disappearance of the album.  If you contact Spotify, at no point will you be told anything else, either.  They apparently have a policy of total denial, with regards to whatever drives their decision to make an album vanish from the public record, as if it was never there.

But in one little corner of the internet you will find a version of the album on Spotify where your ability to play the tracks is disabled, but you can see the title and cover of the album, and a listing of the tracks on it -- except Song for the Houthi Army, where even the title is gone from the list, with just a blank space for track #15.

Presumably, this track was found to be particularly problematic, and is perhaps the actual reason for the removal of the entire album.

Why this track, amid all the other tracks, all of which the UK Lawyers for Israel Charitable Trust denounced last February as evidence of my antisemitism, in emails they sent to venues where I was booked to perform?

Because under Section 12 of the UK's Terrorism Act of 2000, the song is illegal, and could get me up to 14 years in prison for disseminating it online or singing it in public.

For people hearing these words who are dubious or confused, let me explain to you why my singing partner, Kamala Emanuel and I are very likely going to be arrested next time we're in England (which will be in March).  Which is for the same offenses that Sarah Wilkinson keeps getting arrested, or Haim Bresheeth, or Asa Winstanley, Richard Medhurst, etc.

In the US, people can go to prison for the rest of their lives for spending a dollar that goes through the wrong channels.  You can still hear my song about the Holy Land 5 on Spotify, I believe, if you want more information on that reality.

But we have the First Amendment in the US, so getting arrested for the kinds of speech crimes people routinely get arrested for in England and in Germany these days is less familiar to Americans.

So I want to be extra clear about how Section 12 has been repeatedly applied in England of late.

It is a speech crime punishable by up to 14 years in prison if you say something positive about a proscribed organization (which the Houthi Army, aka Ansar Allah, is, under British law).  So when we sing in the chorus, thank you to the Houthi Army, standing for the conscience of us all, when they say "no business as usual, while the bombs continue to fall," this is probably illegal under British law -- that is, it would appear to be as illegal as other statements made by journalists and social media influencers that have resulted in their being arrested and brutalized.  And this illegality, presumably brought to the attention of Spotify by a group such as UK Lawyers for Israel Charitable Trust, is presumably why the song seems to be particularly problematic for Spotify, and why they removed it and the rest of the album it was part of.

Once again, I say "presumably" here because all we can do is presume, given zero information or transparency on the part of Spotify or any of the individuals, "charities," politicians, government agencies, etc., that they may or may not be responding to.

What is especially depressing to note is, if recent precedent is anything to go on, if Kamala and I get arrested in London for singing the wrong songs, this will garner as much attention from the western media as Spotify disappearing albums and then lying about streaming statistics in #SpotifyWrapped -- none at all.