Safe Spaces
On the Road With Amanda Palmer — Part 4
Words: Jack Nicholls
Photographs: Gabrielle Motola
[Part 1: Us and Them] [Part 2: Revolutions] [Part 3: The Art of Asking About Abortion]
When the coronavirus pandemic dissolved the boundaries of our world, Amanda Palmer was already positioned in New Zealand — long considered the go-to destination for wealthy Americans looking to wait out the apocalypse.
In March, on the day that New Zealand announced the closure of music events, Amanda was in Wellington prepping to play the final show of her year-long There Will Be No Intermission tour. Six months later, the whole world is in intermission, and Amanda is still in New Zealand. Travelling with her child, she had to make the hard decision whether to return to her community in a United States crumbling under the pandemic, or stay in a country where case numbers hovered near zero. She stayed, safe but alone, as the borders snapped closed around her.
Since then, from a rustic farmhouse that must be the most beautiful prison in the world, Amanda has communicated with her 15,000 patrons across the world in a series of blog posts cast out like messages in a bottle. In May she wrote,
last night we watched the local new zealand TV news, and there was a spot about what’s going on in america. i broke down crying, seeing miles of lines of automobiles in line for food in a macy’s parking lot. i know how safe i am here and i feel so helpless.
Safety has been a refrain for Amanda Palmer since long before this pandemic. In 2010 Amanda announced she would do something then almost unprecedented in music, she would leave her record label and build her own safe space: a website where fans could pay micro-transactions directly to Amanda in exchange for new songs or videos, and speak to her and each other in the comments. A place where everyone, especially “outsiders”, could feel safe. This was the seed for her Patreon.
Now that “stay safe” is our mantra and we are all living through our screens, you would think that the times are suited to such a musician. But 2020 was also a year for toppling statues and Amanda, who started her performance career as a living statue, has been dragged down to earth as well.
While travelling with Amanda on her European tour, photographer Gabrielle (Gaby) Motola and I witnessed first-hand a series of incidents in which Amanda’s misjudgements triggered a maelstrom of rage and pain. It was very on brand for Amanda Palmer, who has been described as “The Most Hated Woman on the Internet”. But this time, it was Amanda’s own outsiders demanding change.
Amanda’s persona is built on an intense, radical honesty with her fans. She is selling authenticity, and as someone who has known Amanda for ten years, I know that she is authentic. Her public persona is her private persona. But how we display our authenticity to an online audience of thousands of strangers is still a form of performance. Amanda can’t make art without money and she can’t make money without attention. And so she encourages a relationship with her fans built on the idea that she cares for you, which is absolutely true; but also that she can be your friend, which is not.
When Amanda Palmer jettisoned her music label to become a crowd-funded musician, she declared that she was finally free. But when I look at her, I see a woman who is not just trapped in New Zealand, but trapped trying to straddle the chasm between the gated community of her Patreon and the cyber-badlands beyond. And the combination of hypocrisy and narcissism that this engenders goes some way, I think, to explaining why Amanda Palmer finds herself so viscerally hated, out of all proportion to her supposed crimes.
Some people hate Amanda Palmer. Others hate on her. There was a moment in our time together that she made me as angry as I have ever been, when she dragged me into an internet spat she was having with journalists. The predictable result was a brief whirlwind of hate directed towards me as well, and what hurt the most was the accusation that I was dishonest because how could I write honestly about someone who was paying me? And even if I was honest about my feelings, why should anyone else believe it when there is such an obvious conflict of interest at play?
It hurt because it was partly true, I’d asked myself the same question. Of course there is a conflict of interest, at the nexus of art, money and friendship. But what was interesting about that, I thought, is that the same applies to Amanda Palmer’s relationship with you, her patrons.
It’s not just Amanda. Every YouTube influencer, every journalist hunting for clicks, every teenager composing their selfies, is torn between their desire to be true to themselves and their need to conform to what their audience wants. And right now, at this frozen and anxious moment, what we all want is to feel safe. But if my time with Amanda taught me anything, it is that the internet is not always a safe space. Not for Amanda, not for her detractors, not for her fans. And not for me.
Anyway, you paid for these essays. So the least I can do is turn the focus to you. You are, in a way, my patrons.
PARIS
The concept of the “safe space” really took off about six years ago, as a physical or mental space where people, especially marginalised people, could gather free of judgement and low-key hostility they might normally feel in the world.
Amanda Palmer approved and was determined to make her shows feel safe for her audience. She fought for gender-neutral and accessible bathrooms, her crew were alert for attendees who needed help and in the foyer you could stick pink ampersands to your shirt showing if you wanted social interaction with strangers or not. And it paid off. “Amanda makes a safe space to feel,” was the most common response I heard from you when I asked what drew you to Amanda Palmer’s concerts.
But one woman’s safe space is another’s boxing ring. And it all came apart in Paris.
In September 2019, Amanda was performing in the Bataclan, the most famously unsafe theatre in Europe. In 2015, Islamist terrorists had carried assault rifles into a death metal concert and opened fire on the audience. Ninety people had died, including colleagues of Amanda’s crew that night. Amanda knew this, of course. She wanted to play the Bataclan as a gesture of solidarity and because she believes that art has the power to “heal and transform.” That was the whole point of her new album.
I hadn’t expected to be affected by this piece of history, but I was tense from the moment we stepped into the ballroom. The Bataclan was so much smaller than I had expected — the corridors twisting in on themselves backstage, the windowless dressing rooms. The people here had thought it was a safe space, and then it hadn’t been.
Amanda felt the tension too and said she “needed to address the psychogeography of the place”. She was scribbling changes to her set-list right up to the curtain. Midway through her performance, she broke her flow to say, “I want to play you some songs I haven’t played in a long time. But they felt like good songs to play here.” And she played a song called “Strength Through Music”, and she played a song called “Guitar Hero”.
To my ears, they were neither great songs, nor bad songs. Both released in 2008, the first explored the psyche of a school shooter, while the second somewhat incoherently linked adolescent male fantasies with American imperial violence from the perspective of an amped-up killer. Amanda wanted to acknowledge a tragedy, and so with the logic of the sleep-deprived she chose to sing from the perspective of murderers, on the site of a massacre. It was a needlessly provocative decision from a woman who knew that something needed to be said, but perhaps in this case had nothing helpful to say.
Nonetheless at the time the response was no different to her other songs. There was applause, some cheers. The only obvious tension that night came from Amanda’s decision to push past the venue curfew. While a scowling French promoter lurked very obviously in the wings, fingers twitching as if he wanted to snatch Amanda offstage, she began a riff about her Patreon:
“I’m just trying to work out how to make art with the most liberation possible. With the Patreon, there are no algorithms, there are just people speaking to one another with respect and kindness.”
That respect and kindness was about to disappear. A few days later I joined Amanda’s official Facebook group to see how her fans felt about the world.
It was like lifting the lid to the Underworld and hearing the screams of the damned.
What I, and many others, had not even registered in the Bataclan was that “Guitar Hero” uses the phrase “sand n****r” as a throwaway slur, in a song that performed a toxic masculinity. Although the song was twelve years old, many of her fans were clearly discovering it for the first time, and were horrified. Some Patrons defended transgressive art, pointing to the context of the Bush Era, the Columbine Massacre, and American state violence in Iraq. But for other fans, especially younger ones for whom Iraq was barely a memory, there was no artistic context in which they considered it okay for a privileged white woman to use a word that hearkened back to the horror of American slavery.
The Patreon is a gated community, and like many such communities, it is also very white. The argument came down to a simple point: who exactly was Amanda’s safe space for? People that looked and thought like her? Or was everyone welcome? Jayem Charlie Wolf, a fan I had previously spoken with on tour who had praised Amanda as someone who created a “safe space to feel emotion,” gave me the perspective from the trenches:
“It’s about the fact that the official Patreon group, with over 9000 people in it, is not a safe space for People of Colour. They tell us that it’s not a safe place! They tell us that they don’t feel seen or heard, and there are still so so many white people who justify a racial slur. The last five days were full of threats. It felt very uncomfortable. And it would start over and over again.”
I knew why it was starting over and over. This was a fight happening among Patrons, but by and large it wasn’t happening on Patreon, it was happening on Facebook. Amanda had triggered this firestorm, but it was Facebook that was fuelling it.
I experienced this along with the patrons in the group. I traditionally have a quiet relationship with Facebook, but suddenly my phone was buzzing with notifications about complete strangers. The back-and-forth was triggering Facebook algorithms to spread word of the conflict, like an excited kid at a school punch-up. There’s a popular post you may have missed in AFP Patreon-Land my phone told me, in what I imagined was an sly whisper. Did I know that people were fighting there? Did I? Did I? Did I?
The chaos was exacerbated by the fact that Amanda had flown straight from Paris to the United States, and was blissfully unaware of the swelling mutiny. When she found out, her response was an object lesson in how NOT to douse an internet firestorm and clearly reflected the lack of a label-supplied publicist. Hurriedly composing a post from a bathroom, Amanda acknowledged the hurt and promised to never sing the lyric again, and had she ended there, perhaps it would have been enough. But she added that she’d discussed it with a black trans woman at dinner and she’d told Amanda not to censor her art.
For a moment, all was silent. Then someone posted, “Amanda, did you just play the ‘black trans friend’ card?”
At this point, the discussion went supernova. Amanda started trending on Twitter and among fans opinion hardened that Amanda must be, in fact, mentally ill. For example, “Robert”, writing,
I choose to rationalize Amanda’s behaviour by telling myself she is suffering from a very difficult to treat illness that in many people becomes abusive. In her case I tell myself she is surrounded by good people and she has a good heart and desire to get past it. That doesn’t mean she can do what we do.
Jayem, and scores of others, announced that they were cancelling their Patreon membership. Loyalist fans fretted that Queen Amanda always meant well, so therefore she must have bad advisors (the social media moderators). A more Maoist faction demanded an immediate self-correction display — that Amanda must descend and express her contrition. She owed them that.
The thing is, when Patrons said that Amanda owed them an apology, they were absolutely right.
Amanda likes to talk about her Patreon as a great experiment in democracy, but historically there is nothing equalising about patronage. Patron is a slippery word — we often use it to refer to a consumer, “a patron at the bar”. But the Latin root is “father”, and historically, a Patron of the Arts was a figure who bought art, or rather, bought artists. Patrons held the purse-strings, and so they told artists what to do — which usually meant art that was safe. A flattering portrait or a crucifixion scene with the patron painted into the corner like a sanctified Where’s Wally?
Amanda leads her Patreon like a Prime Minister leads their country. But both only hold their position at the whim of the people. You, the Patrons, are the ones holding the purse-strings, and so in liberating herself from Roadrunner Records, Amanda exchanged one boss for fifteen thousand. And your politics do not always mesh.
“I do not believe in the progressive orthodoxy,” Amanda told me. Like all would-be revolutionaries, Amanda assumed that when history was made, she would be on the right side of it. She came to prominence during the early 2000s and positioned herself as part of the counterculture to that sordid, stupid and violent era. That meant being outspoken, being provocative, and giving a punky middle-finger to Dubya and his cronies.
But, largely in backlash to that time, progressivism has changed radically. After twenty years of wars built on lies, an economic collapse triggered by financial crimes for which nobody was indicted and what seems a cosy bargain among our leaders to destroy the planet in exchange for a few more decades of growth, it’s no surprise that people have had enough. Morality is back in fashion in a way it hasn’t been since the 1950s. Only now it is the youth pressuring their elders, sometimes gently, sometimes with puritan aggression.
For all human history, social values have been passed down generationally. Children learn norms from their parents, teachers or rock stars, and by the time they are adults their beliefs are usually fixed. But around fifteen years ago, we began a mass migration to living online, and more than ever before, culture began being made and passed horizontally. The anonymity of internet posting can give a fifteen-year-old the same gravitas as a sixty-year-old, and our stratification across apps by age groups mean that the voices each generation hear are, primarily, their own. This lends itself to radicalism and that has been good. It has seen a new generation decide that no, they aren’t going to accept horrors such as the institutional racism that was background noise to so many people in the 20th century.
And Amanda, who prides herself on her connection with her fans, seemed not to have fully comprehended the shift until it blew up in her face. “I grew up in a very white bubble,” she acknowledged to me. “What I did was inconsiderate. Literally, in that it was not considered, and also in that it was unkind.”
Behind the scenes, Amanda was exhausted and contrite, nervously drumming her fingers on the table as she watched her safe space turn into a war zone. Strangers who embraced each other at concerts were calling each other monsters online. “This is terrifying,” Amanda said. She knew an authentic response was required, but what does authenticity mean? I watched Amanda draft furious messages that she later deleted and they were authentic reflections of her defensiveness and hurt. Then she published an apology, “so it’s crystal clear: i made a mistake using the word, and i’m sorry,” and this was an authentic reflection of her shame.
I wondered why more people didn’t just tune out and move on from Amanda, rather than devoting hours to arguing about her. But for many lifelong fans, Amanda was more than just a singer, they thought of her like a friend. And when your friend hurts your feelings, you don’t drop them. You call them out.
PATRONS
From LiveJournal to MySpace to Facebook, Amanda has always used whatever tool that allowed her to connect to people. In turning directly to crowd-funding to finance her music career, Amanda was an economic pioneer but perhaps not in the way she had dreamed. Amanda described Patreon as a place where she could build a long-term relationship with her fans but that relationship is fundamentally a one-way intimacy nurtured by Amanda’s emotional openness. In the 1950s, this sense of connection to a celebrity was seen as pathological and called parasocial. Today the internet runs on parasocial relationships, from Twitch streamers to fashion vloggers.
David Franklin is a martial arts expert and artist who has been friends with Amanda Palmer since her Boston days, twenty years ago. He sees Amanda’s use of social media as an attempt to recreate the fun and safety of that artistic community she had in her twenties.
“She does deserve her reputation as a pioneer in social media. She was ahead of the curve. When she started blogging, people were saying why do you want to expose so much of your personal life in a public forum? But whether or not it was conscious, Amanda knew that these communication tools have the potential to be dehumanising and she tried to humanise them from the beginning. And part of humanising them meant exposing things about what was on her mind and what was happening in her life.”
Is this really any different from thirty years ago, when people bought CDs from boy-bands they had crushes on? Well, yes, because Amanda is not just selling music. She is selling you her poetry, her philosophy, her unrelated projects like this essay. She’s relying on you being not just interested in her music, but interested in her life.
In return, Amanda is interested in yours. I watched her linger after every show, to embrace those who needed an embrace and exchange a whispered word. When Melbourne fan Guy Jukes died last year, Amanda wrote a post about how sad it made her, that “he was such an ongoing part of being in Melbourne.” When another fan was dying in Ireland, Amanda spent an afternoon playing ukulele by her bedside. These acts of kindness had to stand in for all she couldn’t do for the thousands of others who wanted her attention.
Because, for most of you, the big lie of Amanda Palmer is that she is your friend. She would like to be your friend; I’ve rarely known someone speak so warmly of people in general, or to get so much out of interactions with strangers. But there are 15,000 of you, and only one of her. So she broadcasts her love — Amanda begins her every missive with “hello loves”, and ends them with kisses. It is not a lie, but it is a half-truth. You are special, and you would be special to Amanda if she knew you. But, most of the time, she doesn’t.
But it’s no surprise that when a celebrity expresses love, people will love them back. Throughout the European tour I kept seeing the same face in the crowd. When we met properly, she introduced herself as Orly Kessem, a woman in her mid-twenties from Israel. Orly was a hard-core Amanda Palmer fan, and had booked a European holiday to coincide with Amanda’s tour dates. When we spoke in Paris, it was Orly’s tenth concert in three weeks.
Orly told me how, growing up, listening to Amanda had helped her understand her own identity. Her first kiss had been at an Amanda Palmer concert. “Because Amanda is so open and accepting within this world people feel safe. At her shows, when it’s dark and she is singing, I can cry. It’s safe to cry.”
Amanda loomed large in Orly’s imagination. And on this tour, they had finally met and exchanged a few words. “I’d imagined it so many times beforehand,” Orly said. “But when we met after a show, it was actually pretty weird. She wasn’t the Amanda I imagined; she was just a person. A little drunk and exhausted, and I basically felt like she was really annoyed with me. Maybe I was being too much? If she told me, straightforwardly, that I wasn’t wanted, then it would have been fine. But I don’t know. I don’t know. I couldn’t know.”
Orly was torn up inside wondering what her idol had thought of her. But the truth was, in the midst of an exhausting tour schedule, Amanda didn’t think much about her at all.
Alex Knight, the charming Englishman who managed Amanda’s merchandise and her Facebook fan group, told me that Orly’s story was a familiar one. He’d felt it himself,when he was a teenager.
“Because of the nature of Amanda’s music, it attracts people who are a little angsty, a little anxious and who feel emotions very deeply. And Amanda encourages this idea of a personal connection with her fans, but when they meet her after a four-hour show and she doesn’t want to have a ten-minute conversation with them, they feel rejected. They ask themselves, was it something I said, was it something I’ve done? But no, she’s just a human being.”
“But Amanda does have astonishing energy,” Alex continued, “and I’ve seen her, even after hours on stage, if you can say the right thing to pique her interest, she will still commit one hundred per cent to the conversation, and talk to you for hours.”
Every time Amanda signs off a post with love, she is both speaking truth and feeding a fantasy. If there was a dishonesty in Amanda Palmer, it was not in her beliefs, she has always been open about the need for artists to earn a living and how much she earns. The dishonesty of Amanda is only the dishonesty of our age, where artists have to offer a deeper connection than they can give, in order to monetise your emotions.
Artists always have. Only once, there were middle-men to shield them from that reality. But now we’re all forced to play the algorithm game.
PORTUGAL
One reason that Amanda so values you, her Patreon, is because the alternative is “the algorithm”. Competing for attention in a world driven by clicks. The Patreon is by its nature a diminishing pool — every month, a few people move on with their lives. So much as Amanda might like to live in that world, every so often she has to venture out from her gated community and drum up publicity in the wilds outside.
For years, Amanda has expressed her frustration at how she is treated in those wilds. She releases songs like “Mr. Weinstein will See You Now”, a 2018 response to the #metoo movement, and they sink into obscurity. Last week, Amanda released a new song, a duet with Rhiannon Giddens covering “It’s a Fire”, the 1994 song from Portishead. It sat ignored, and Amanda expressed her frustration on Instagram:
i hate you, instagram algorithms. i don’t hate you, people who use this platform. i just hate what things have become. i hate that i can slave with a whole group of international musicians and a world-class singer like @rhiannongiddens…and the post will sink to the bottom of the barrel, getting practically no traction. i hate that the musicians of this world have had to force themselves into ways of thinking that are poisonous for our creative process…i hate that even to get your attention with this post, i had to show my face, and i knew that upping the contrast on my face would mean that the post will get more attention…i hate that despite hating all of this, i still did it. i hate that the art will not be places above all. i hate it. i hate it. and now that i’ve got your attention, please listen to the song i put out today. that’s why i’m here.
Algorithmic content can be poisonous, biased and cruel — but it doesn’t lie. Algorithms distort like funhouse mirrors, but they are mirrors nonetheless, reflecting our preferences back to us. And the truth is that Amanda’s cultural currency is lower than it once was, as happens to any artist twenty years past their debut — especially a woman. This is normal, but for the artist it must be a source of extreme anxiety.
“I’m unwilling to feel unloved,” Amanda once admitted in an interview. And this need for positive attention is a reflection of our era but also the source of Amanda’s worst character traits. Because what works for Amanda in the Patreon, her openness, her sometimes neediness, do not work in the wider world.
David Franklin has watched Amanda navigate this for decades, and explained, “Having a big ego comes with the territory of being an artist. You have to at least temporarily believe you are some kind of genius, because you’re making stuff that nobody else will see value in at the start. People have always seen negative things in her personality — self-centred, egotistical. The effect of social media is to amplify those. The tools are not neutral.”
They are not. Each app shapes its discourse differently. Reddit signal-boosts mindless consensus but Twitter signal-boosts controversy, which feeds off negativity and anger. Whether it’s JK Rowling or Amanda Palmer, once a person has committed enough infractions to be considered ‘toxic’, incentive grows for strangers to attack them more or less at random, to firm up their own moral credentials.
Twitter is the least safe platform, and it was where Amanda’s most revealing and cringeworthy infraction occurred midway through the There Will Be No Intermission tour. Faced with the crime of a disinterested mainstream media, Amanda threw a Twitter tantrum. Why, she demanded, was the world not paying more attention to her art? Why did she have to hire her own magnificent journalists, Gaby and Jack, to get any press?
When I read this, sitting alone in a Portuguese hotel room, I felt a surge of nausea. I was proud of the pieces I had written, but I had allowed Amanda to flatter me into thinking it was journalism, when I knew it was not exactly that. “No Amanda … stop,” I groaned, like so many before me.
Amanda’s tweets at various news outlets were not extremely inflammatory, but when Amanda attacks any organisation, however mildly, her words are laced with the threat that she could unleash you, a private army, to launch abuse and scorn. Knowing Amanda well, I am sure that this has never been her intention — but Amanda’s detractors were right to fear, because in the increasingly vicious Twittersphere, this has become a powerful tactic. Only a week prior to Amanda’s ill-conceived complaint, Taylor Swift had sicced an army of doxxers onto her ex-managers by asking her fans to “let them know how you feel”.
Psychological research has shown that when we feel anxious, we become more egocentric and less empathetic. And these days, we are all very anxious. Amanda’s judgement was impaired by her fear of losing relevance, but she should know better than anyone, Twitter does not feel safe. Whether you call it cancel culture, justice, or rough and tumble debate, the threat of emotional mob violence means that social media is an increasingly scary place for its users. And the abuse has an effect — to drive people, especially women, out of the public sphere and back into their safe spaces.
Amanda herself has called you, the patrons, a “15,000-headed hydra”. On Twitter, that follower number swells to a million, and Amanda seemed slow to realise that million-headed hydras are scary when they turn on you.
Hydras turned on me, briefly. I was a crook, a liar, a bad writer, and even an anti-Semite. And yet I could see it was only a mild shrapnel spray from the bombardment that was demolishing Amanda. Still, I had never experienced anything like it. A friend in Australia messaged me saying, “you’re in the news!”, and I dared not look at the link. For two days I wandered aimlessly through the rainy streets of Porto, watched by dark-haired men strumming melancholic guitar chords from their balconies. I didn’t eat. I had never felt less safe.
My own fury at Amanda was tempered when I met her and Gaby at the airport and saw how haggard she looked.
“How are you?” she asked. “What have you been doing in Porto?”
“Looking at 18th century churches and suffering terrible anxiety.”
“Me too. Not the churches. The last forty-eight hours have been some of the worst I have had since 2013.”
Amanda had booked this gig to get some sunshine, but she had been misinformed about the northern Portuguese climate. Rain poured down on us. We drove to Braga and checked into a hotel from which statues of painted saints clawed towards the dark sky. It had once been a hospital attached to the church of mercy, or in Portuguese, the “misericordia”. The word felt appropriate.
Over dinner, Amanda spoke, haltingly, about trauma. Moments of terror that were crystallised in her memory — standing frozen in her kitchen in 2012, realising that The New Yorker had published an attack on her Kickstarter, and wondering if it marked the end of her career. Sitting at her computer and receiving an email promising that its sender was going to “shove a bomb up your cunt”.
“In response, I just dove into my community who didn’t care about my scandals and just loved my work. And I kept doing the work, for five years, until I dragged myself out of the hell I was in.”
She was clearly, at least for that night, back in hell. And still suffering my own anxiety, I understood a little more about Amanda’s need to build herself a safe space.
Amanda went to bed with her phone, and the next morning she looked ten years older. I don’t know exactly what happened behind that door that night. I know Amanda had a panic attack, throwing up in the bathroom. I know she sang a mantra about aardvarks, to keep sane. And I know Gaby went in and nursed Amanda through the fear and pain, and she will keep Amanda’s secrets.
But the show must go on, and that night Amanda played to a packed audience in a gorgeous old theatre. A reserved Portuguese man brought her a glass of red wine. “I saw online,” he said. “People are cruel.”
Amanda did her best to give the usual performance, until she reached her song “Bigger on the Inside”, written in the aftermath of an earlier Twitterstorm.
“You’d think I’d shot their children from the way that they are talking, and there’s no point in responding because it will not make them stop.”
She broke down weeping then, and admitted, “I’ve had a really shitty couple of weeks. And I brought it on myself because I can be an entitled narcissist. But I am a person, with a context they don’t know.”
“Would you like a hug?” called an audience-member. She nodded, and then she came down into the aisles. Strangers embraced her, and other strangers embraced them, so that each person wasn’t just directing their hug to her but to everyone else in the room. And for a long minute they just rocked there.
That was her safe space, and she needed you as much as you needed her.
We walked back to our misericordia, Amanda said that she was going to turn over a new leaf. That she was going to get off Twitter forever.
She lasted three weeks.
PANDEMIC
Social media reflects ourselves. Gaby once said to me that the world is suffering increasing trauma, and social media is where we scream our pain. But social media also amplifies the pain back at us, until these tools that we built to comfort us become new sources of anxiety.
Art is also supposed to be a mirror of the world, but for the successful artist, the risk is that the world becomes a hall of mirrors. As witness to Amanda Palmer’s disasters, I couldn’t help but wonder why she didn’t learn? Why is she locked in a pattern of behaviour where she throws herself at the world, only to be impaled on its thorns? But for ten years, Amanda Palmer has been caught in a cycle where she swings between adulation and abuse, but always with herself at the centre. It is hard to learn from love. It is harder to learn from hate, which flood our brains with fear and defiance.
Amanda cannot make art without connection. She cannot connect without the internet. And yet the internet makes her unhappy. In other words, Amanda is the same as all the rest of us.
Amanda began her career as a living statue handing out flowers on the streets of Boston. She offered her art in silence, and the world came to her. That’s no longer true. In a competitive, attention-based, economy, silence means sinking to the depths of the algorithm. And so artists want their music to reach your ears, they have to scream for attention.
Screams and silence. For six months now, I’ve been hearing the one puncturing the other as the coronavirus pandemic confines us to our homes. I am under a curfew in Melbourne. Gaby is pacing a house in London. Amanda is sitting in New Zealand, trying to explain to her child why it is not safe for them to go home to America. That’s the silence. But there’s also the moments I have sobbed and scraped my face against the carpet. Amanda has sat in a bath under the stars, counting breaths to stave off despair. Gaby tells me of grinding through days in prolonged panic attacks. And I know that many of you are in exactly the same boat. We are all misericordians now.
For those of us lucky enough to be locked down with resources, our homes are the ultimate safe spaces. Safety is the bedrock of our happiness, but if this intermission has proved anything it is that safety on its own is stagnation. “I feel safe by myself,” Amanda wrote to her Patrons, “but fuck, I miss people.”
The pandemic is making us re-evaluate everything in our lives, and one of the things we are re-evaluating are celebrities. Confined to their rooms, singing cringey covers of John Lennon, they have been stripped of their glamour. Why do we need these people? What service do they offer?
And yet, Amanda carries on. When Amanda launched her There Will Be No Intermission tour in the distant past of 2019, she had about 15,000 patrons. After a year of running on the spot, she had 15,000 still. Today she has 14,856, and that is impressive. As a global economic depression hits us, 14,856 of you still want to pay a little money each month to be part of the Amanda Palmer Patreon. What service does she offer?
It’s not quite friendship, and it’s not quite art and it’s not quite commerce. People are willing to spend a few dollars each month to get back what neoliberal society slowly degraded, and the pandemic tore away entirely. A space to just feel the presence of other humans. To chat, and exchange recipes. People present their hopes and fears to Amanda, their idol, but more often than not it is another person who replies.
It is a community.
Gaby and I were only transient members of your community, passing through to take a snapshot of it and offer it back to you. And what we saw and what we recorded, in every country, is good and brave people standing up to meet the challenges of what can seem a very dark time.
We saw hate speech against immigrants in Germany, but also the people offering music lessons to welcome them. We saw Australia burn in an unprecedented fire season, but we also marched alongside thousands of school-children, striking for climate action. In America we saw attacks on reproductive freedoms, while in Ireland we saw social media campaigns empower women to end decades of silence and shame. And now we have a plague, and what can seem a crushing burden of despair. But we also have our voices, singing to each other from screen to shining screen.
Getting through the next decade will mean organising, rebuilding and expanding our imaginations. To do that, we all need what the internet offers. Connection. But we’ve too numbly accepted the idea that if we want the connection, we have to take the misinformation, anxiety and abuse as a package deal. We have to remember, Facebook is only 16 years old. When it comes to social media, we are all adolescents.
The internet is our tool. We made it. We can change it. We can, in fact, change everything and anything about our society — and as the pandemic fractures old certainties, millions of us are suddenly realising that. The old world is not coming back and the current one is miserable. So be it, we’re going to have to build a new one. Somewhere between safety and screaming, we can find ways to connect without being just so damn unhappy all the time.
Amanda is trying, and she is opening some windows in the hall of mirrors. She has offered her Instagram platform to artists of colour, and she is forwarding Patreon funds to other musicians. And she is trying to coax her fans off Facebook, “which amplifies anger and rewards pettiness,” and onto her home-made forum called The Shadowbox.
For now, we remain in The Intermission. Amanda’s career began in silence and, for now, it has returned to a kind of silence. She takes her son to the beach. She raises chickens and busks at farmer’s markets. And in the evenings, once she’s put her son to bed, she writes to her Patrons, and she asks them to write back.
my patrons….you may not realize it, but your emotional support, over the phone, over text, in direct messages, and in these post comments….it’s all helped me. i cannot do it alone. i do not do it alone. and i do not take it for granted.
None of us can do it alone. In this time where we cannot even touch, I keep thinking back to that massive embrace in Portugal. Amanda was at the centre, but really the moment was about you. You were hugging each other.
I am deeply grateful that my last months before lockdown were spent as they were, meeting so many of you. It didn’t always feel comfortable, but it felt meaningful.
Stay safe.
This essay is the last in a series of long-form articles by Australian writer Jack Nicholls and British/American photojournalist Gabrielle Motola, completely funded by more than 15,000 of Amanda Palmer’s Patreon supporters. The other three chapters are available at:
Chapter 01: There Will Be Some Introspection: Us and Them
Chapter 02: There Will Be Some Introspection: Revolutions
Chapter 03: The Art of Asking About Abortion
Gabrielle Motola is an award-winning photographer who hasn’t quite defined what “type of photographer she is” because it is broad. But she’s working on an elevator pitch. She maintains a heartfelt and insightful Instagram account at @gmotophotos. Gabrielle mentors in photography and shares her process, extended stories and images on Patreon. If you’d like to become part of her community, learn from her, or support her work visit www.patreon.com/gmotophotos. Her website is www.gabriellemotola.com.
Jack Nicholls writes speculative fiction, poetry, and essays, all part of their attempt to chronicle the tectonic social shifts of the 21st century. They are interested in history, climate change, and the narrowing space in our culture between plausible science-fiction and implausible reality. You can find links to their work at www.jack-nicholls.net or on Twitter at @Jackofninetales.
