Tegan,
The first time I suggested we erase our Facebook page was in 2007, while preparing to release our album The Con. I’d briefly enjoyed Myspace, and the labor of manually accepting “friends,” even though it took hours because my internet was grindingly slow. Accepting requests for friendship was the only way to ensure that “real fans,” and not trolls or porn sites, were gaining access to our page. I truly believed that I was helping to build an online community that echoed the fanbase at our live shows; a community that reflected what was missing from the tepid, sometimes hostile reviews of our music and band. I was an outsider, who suddenly felt like an insider.
The steady uptick of followers on Myspace reassured and comforted me, but that feeling soured quickly. Abundance of anything — fans, friends, spins, likes, sales — has always been followed by an onslaught of nasty comments, criticism, accusations of selling out, trolls or fake friends.
It is hard to articulate how new this feeling of ambient anxiety about digital life — so commonplace now — was to me then. It was as if I was living in a house where none of the locks worked, and the windows were constantly being smashed.
When Myspace was abandoned and everyone shifted to Facebook, I never fully adopted it. I was suspicious, fearful. Our official website was a house without doors or windows. It was a panic room. It functioned using rules that I understood well. It told people what we wanted to tell them, and it did not invite dialog between us and those people. This was the only way I understood how to keep the intruders out.
Of course, you had a different take, and your threshold for chaos was calibrated to balance my own. I sneered at the cascading requests for behind the scenes content from the record label that have come to dominate our offline work. I knew that no one (you) would let me scrub our band from the internet, so my disengagement must have seemed performative, leaving you with the burden of carrying us both. If I’d known how much worse it would get, I might have fought harder to pull the plug. I’m curious if the insidious ways that the internet has come to haunt your own life has cast that time in a different light. The spreadsheets, apps, calendars, and boards we use to organize and prepare the never-ending content required to populate our social media, are hell. The digital bed bugs we can never truly rid ourselves of have turned me paranoid. In the Guardian, I recently described our situation as such:
“Sometimes I wish the electrical grid would go down so I wouldn’t have to do it anymore. But we’re in the maze and I don’t know how to get out.”
As we prepare to release the first single from our tenth album, I already find myself depleted. Of course, I am willing to do whatever we must, to have our music reach as many people as possible. As teenagers, when we would complain about having to work, Dad used to say, “you could be digging a ditch.” Wandering in this digital maze does not require a shovel, but I would love a map. Or a chainsaw. I won’t fuck up what matters, but that doesn’t mean I will like it. All of which is to say, I posted a teaser video in the drafts for TikTok.
Sara
Chainsaw