Beyond the Six String Nation #40: Early Adopter for the Long Haul?

How to Seize a Moment (or not)

The original Apple Macintosh desktop computer, 1984.

In fairness, mum and dad did have a decent (Canadian designed) Clairtone console stereo system in the living room. In the basement rec room there was first an RCA black and white TV, followed by another B&W behind horizontal rolltop-desk-style doors that also concealed an AM radio and a drawer with a turntable on it. But we were definitely the last people on the block to get a colour TV (a Zenith Chromacolor II, when it finally arrived). When all my friends started to have Pioneer receivers and Technics turntables and JBL speakers, I had an Eaton’s-brand Viking turntable with detachable speaker. We were perennial late-adopters as well as frugal and generally trend-averse.

Then, in 1984, something strange happened.
My mother, who had been in the workforce from the age of 15 or 16 in her native England and then again immediately upon moving to Canada at age 20, enrolled in a part time bachelor’s degree program at the University of Toronto – which made her eligible for the student discount on, among other things, the then-new MacIntosh computer. Not sure what that discount would have been but the regular price was about $3500 CDN – over $10K in today’s dollars. This extravagance seemed very much unlike my parents but evidently they had received the message that personal computers were going to be an important part of work and home and education not just for them but for my sister and me too. I remember it came with an audio cassette that lead us through the brand new processes of clicking and dragging and emptying the trash.

From that point on, I became an early adopter. Before they were quite available in Canada, in 1980 I gave a friend of mine who was going on a class trip to New York $200 to pick me up a new thing called a SONY Walkman. Notice that that first model came with two headphone jacks. So I carried a spare set with me so I could offer to share music with cute girls on the subway. It transformed my way of moving through the world – especially on walks around the neighbourhood alone at night looking at the stars and the Toronto skyline from the park behind Ranchdale Public School. I even saw the northern lights one time while listening to Brian Eno.

Original SONY Walkman, ca. 1980

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At an annual gathering of a small group of high school friends in 2005, I and my friend Steve – the other early-adopter among us – emptied our canvas shoulder bags of all the gear we were carrying with us onto the small table at C’est What? on Front St.: cell phones, digital cameras, PalmPilots, iPods – must have been two thousand bucks worth of gear each. “This is insane” we each complained to the other. “Why isn’t all of this just ONE device?” Then, on January 9th, 2007 at MacWorld in San Francisco, Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone. I promptly switched phone providers so I’d be eligible for the new device when it debuted the following June. When it was finally in my hands, it was everything I’d wanted it to be… and more. Every other technological development had been merely a digital iteration of an existing analog thing but this felt like the future we’d been promised might actually have taken physical form and arrived. For what seemed like the longest time, I was the only guy on the subway with an iPhone in a sea of Blackberries.

When Six String Nation debuted in 2006, our then-publicist, Heather Kelly, encouraged me to open a MySpace account. So I joined “Tom” and a few million other people on the platform to promote the project, microblog our travels and connect with musicians and fans. Later that first summer, our beloved advisor David Neale told us that his daughter had just joined a platform that had recently been expanded from University-only use to welcome the general public. It was called Facebook. So I was in the first wave that joined that one too and started connecting and posting in tandem with MySpace. It was only for individuals at the time, so no business or project pages, but I have such a memorable first name that as Facebook became ubiquitous the people we met at festivals across Canada could find me easily and I quickly amassed what seemed to me a huge “friend” network. Twitter followed soon after. And YouTube. And Instagram. Each offering some new feature that seemed purpose-made to build the kind of community I was hoping to assemble around Six String Nation. All these new tools put such power in the hands of regular folks to connect directly with and grow audiences.

By now, you will have read Cory Doctorow’s essay on Enshittification – or at least heard the term or become familiar with its precepts. The basic idea is that platforms grow by offering amazing value to users – often operating at a loss funded by venture capital to do so – and quickly become an indispensable tool for many people. The presence of those many locked-in eyeballs is attractive to advertisers whose paid participation can start to move the platform’s ink from red to black – so the attention of the platform shifts from the individual user to the business customer. And if that means you see a few more ads or if the algorithm starts to direct your attention to certain things or more of your data is shared so that the content you see is “more relevant to you”, it’s a little bit worse for the user but still quite useful and much, much more useful to the advertisers. And for them, it becomes an indispensable tool for reaching large and infinitesimally parsed customers. Now that these corporate customers are just as thoroughly hooked into the system, the original investors and shareholders can smell the elusive 100X or 1000X return on their investment so the screws begin to turn on the business customers – extracting premium fees for ever more finely diced access and pitting them against one another in order to reach those valuable captive consumers. So now, things are worse for the business customers and much worse for the individual users who gave the whole thing momentum in the first place. But it’s still useful enough to everyone involved – and represents such a massive sunk cost of time and attention and resources from everyone involved – that it just limps along until something else comes along that everyone thinks is worth jumping ship for. At which point the whole thing is stripped for parts. Until then, it exists in a fine and maddeningly unsatisfactory balance.

Cory has continued to write on this topic. And if you’re already familiar with the basic concept of Enshittification, I highly recommend this important follow-up essay on his reluctance to move to the BlueSky platform as so many have abandoned Twitter/X (including me – not that anyone would notice). Cory Doctorow is involved with these questions on a microscopic policy and practice level, knows many of the players personally, is comfortable looking under the hood and super-capable of assessing and executing any necessary moves in the space. Most of us are simply stuck. Here I am on Substack – about which everyone waxes poetic and which I very much enjoy using and which, like so many before it, promises not to ever let itself enshittify. But, as this follow-up essay points out, it’s not that anyone sets out to be evil – it’s a series of small compromises that add up to eventual collapse. People on this platform are amassing huge followings and generating six and even seven figure incomes. I earn just over $1300 annually. It is clear that I am not foundational to the future capitalization of Substack.

I have tried to pay serious attention to my “social media strategy” and practice over the years and none of it has moved the needle very much at all. I once paid for a course in “Instagram Marketing” and followed its directions meticulously. There was no significant bump in “engagements” and the follower-base continued to grow only incrementally – no hint of “virality” at any time. And when I found myself at lunch with an Instagram marketing professional and told him the steps I’d followed for better results, he said “Oh, nobody does that anymore!” Nevertheless, I cross-post over all my social media accounts and put links in my email signatures and on my website and created QR codes on cards and projected onscreen at live events to drive “traffic” to my socials. But these days, especially at school presentations, students come up to me afterwards and ask, “Are you on TikTok?” That’s where they are and that’s where they want to find Six String Nation. But I can tell you now I’m not going there unless I somehow afford someone to go there on my behalf. For one thing, that’s a whole other skillset I need to develop when I have other things I need to be doing. For another, the ever-shifting algorithm – different from but similar-enough to Facebook and Twitter and Instagram – isn’t built to deliver me to an audience unless I am finally tuned to its every development and shift. It’s built, ultimately, to sell stuff to large numbers of people whom advertisers have paid handsomely to reach. Like the American Dream, or the lottery, it’s not that it can’t happen to me – just that it’s not very likely.

But there’s another reason why I am not only averse to adding another social media arrow to my quiver but also reluctant to bother at all with the social media channels I do have that have enshittified to the point where it’s unlikely they can help me achieve the kind of community I naively thought I could build with their help when they first launched. And funnily enough, the reason for that was alluded to by Cory Doctorow himself in a couple of things he wrote about Six String Nation on BoingBoing back in 2009 (this is a link to the book review and that article includes a link to his previous piece – as well as a description of our adorable personal connection):

The impetus for the Six String Nation project in the very first place was to plug a kind of gaping hole in the perception of Canadian Identity. It seemed to me in 1995 – as Quebeckers weighed a decision to separate itself from the rest of Canada – that the heartfelt cry of opposition to that calamitous option was rooted in an extremely flimsy sense of who we are as Canadians, while Quebeckers sense of who they are as Quebeckers was certainly more robust. Quebec almost feels like its own country in terms of its size and population and language and music and art and cuisine and history and governance and regional variation and sense of itself. With the obvious exceptions, Canada is vast and underpopulated with a hodgepodge of attitudes and politics and cultural relics and aspirations. We are knit together – with Quebec lumped in there for good measure – with a thin skein of mythologies and emblems and vaguely understood regionalisms. But it hangs together well enough under that lovely and simple flag and comes alive in international hockey tournaments or when someone from Toronto or Burnaby or Cardston or Nepean or New London or Charlemagne or Hanna makes it on the international stage. We need those representatives and moments because we are spread so thin and come from such diverse backgrounds and perspectives so tenuously connected that it all seems a bit unwieldy without some kind of convenient shorthand. Six String Nation was meant to put a huge range of stories that captured diverse elements of our local, regional and national character and wove them into one object that could itself become a kind of living avatar – one that could both convey the stories baked into it and become a vessel for new stories that might come to it through the people who encountered it: musicians, storytellers, historians, portrait subjects, audience members. As a reader of this Substack, I’m going to guess that you might be one of these many thousands of people who have engaged with Voyageur in one way or another – in person or through the book or website or social media. Please know that each of you, in a very real way, has contributed to the project’s ongoing story – filling in large or small but always critical elements of the larger story of who we are as a country, of what it means to call oneself a Canadian, whether that’s as an indigenous person, a settler, a newcomer, a refugee or simply in spirit. The answer to that question is always reflecting back at you from within this guitar in a way that is unique to you.

That idea – that kind of layered synthesis of stories and identities isn’t soundbite-friendly. Each element might be on its own but removing it from its context obscures the essence of the project. It’s a struggle to constantly shift back and forth between highlighting each individual piece and immediately restoring it to its place among the other elements. As Cory Doctorow describes it, it is “a genuinely storied thing that is as much socially constructed as it is physically crafted.” That is a balancing act that is hard to convey in most of the tools we rely on today to communicate and the attention spans that have been cultivated in us since the dawn of television.

It’s also why it has been disappointing and even shocking – but not surprising – that, in spite of the number of people who have written to me in this particular historical moment that now is the time when, surely, Voyageur, meets that moment and realizes its highest purpose with “elbows up”, the phone has not rung, the invitations are not overflowing and it seems that we’ll have nowhere to be on Canada Day this year.

An exploration of that conundrum and what lies ahead will be the subject of my next post, coming very soon.