In 2019 I was literally ghosted by an employer. I had recently begun transitioning, had just started HRT and was beginning to attempt to feel less uncomfortable presenting effeminately in public. After I asked the people I was working with to call me by the name I was going by at that time, I was no longer given a schedule and they would not answer my messages. It was very clear to me what was happening here, marking the first time I would be discriminated against in the workplace for my transgender status. The increase in laws that supposedly protect LGBT individuals in the workplace are nonexistent and only exist to make cishetero liberals feel as though they’ve accomplished something and help nobody because employers always have the option of simply inventing probable cause on the spot.
Doing my best to seek similar work, I was employed, and underpaid, by an audio/visual company that worked primarily on stage rigging for arena events, concerts, and corporate events. Those employed by this company were part-time workers on paper, but were mostly given full time hours, in order to make sure that the company could supply the least amount of benefits possible. The nature of the work would soak up most of my time- I would wake up early in the morning and commute into the city to set up the event, leave, and come back in the middle of the night to tear it down, only to do it again the next day. This was worse as someone who at the time had undiagnosed ADHD. Instead of being given a schedule ahead of time, you were sent individual job offers on the barely functional company website a day or two before the job would take place, which allowed the company to freely control the amount of hours being sent to individual employees and cut them at will when there were less events.
The company employed hundreds of people who would be sent off to different locations, leaving you to almost never work with the same people, and because I did not yet having any semblance of “passing,” my work experience was oftentimes downright miserable for this reason. People I worked with, yet had never even seen before frequently made me the butt of transphobic comments and slurs, so far as getting called something by a WWE stage crew member that he explicitly made up just for me.
Leading up to the initial Covid-19 lockdowns, my job began to progressively cut down on the amount of hours I was being given. Because of the terms of my employment there was nothing I could do about this, until lockdowns neutered the job market and I was once again ghosted by my employer. The phenomenon of “ghosting” has become lot more apparent over the last decade with the increased presence of this behavior being used to suddenly cut contact with someone on dating apps, and has extended into the job market to an uncomfortable degree, where lazy or immature employers find it easier and more comfortable to simply cease contact entirely with an employee with little to no notice rather than firing them, or with hiring managers being entirely unresponsive even after flooring them multiple interviews in a row. As the employment process further moves to the internet, this only gets worse and worse.
Nearly every single time in the last 5 years that I’ve walked into an establishment in order to speak to a manager, give them my name, and take home an application in order to have a better shot at getting a job, I have been told the following words that I immediately came to dread:
“Apply using our website.”
It’s no secret that applications submitted online have barely a slim chance of being even glanced at, whether applied to high grade tech jobs or just menial labor. In the case of high paying jobs, most applications will literally be thrown in the trash before being seen at all. In the case of menial labor, it allows employers to further curate who will be underpaid to do low skill work. Chances of finding jobs that pay even less than $15/hr become increasingly slim as employers demand more skilled workers and more experience for jobs that will train you anyway. Maybe I’m being paranoid but it feels as though the job market is gearing up to require external education, certifications, and degrees to do things as simple as waitressing, cashiering, and over the counter food service.
Since I left my last long term job in March, I have submitted more than 400 applications for retail, restaurants, OTC food, forklift, and warehouse positions online via company websites, Indeed, and Ziprecruiter. Less than 1/10th of them responded in any capacity, and less than 1/20th actually interviewed me at all. Many low paying positions immediately filter out everything but the best of the best candidates via phone interviews because they can no longer put in the effort to at least meet someone in person. Because online applications allow employers to filter out people based on experience, I have been denied low level food service jobs for lack of experience, and I have been denied an office receptionist position for lack of experience despite my proficiencies with phones, computers, social media, graphic design, and forklifting, because they wanted me to be able to do all of these for for some reason. The American job market has a habit of being incredibly dishonest about the nature of the work you are applying for. That or stringing you along through the hiring process only to tell you that they were never hiring for that position in the first place before offering you a lower and shittier position.
At many interviews now I no longer get asked about having reliable transport, but only about having a car. Having a personal vehicle is a requirement of meaningless wage work now.
I hate being forced to lie. I hate going against my principles.
My girlfriend does not have a cell phone. Coordinating interviews becomes much harder when you have to use a family member’s phone, as well as smartphones specifically being required in many menial jobs now for the sake of things as simple as scheduling or clocking in and out. At one point she managed to land an interview. I took her there and there was no interview. Nobody knew what was happening. She was given the interview by an automated system. “We need to take that job offer down I guess,” they said. Months later it’s still up.
When you are a minority it is much harder still to find employment. Because anti-discrimination laws are not real, employers have no reason to not hire you on account of being black, transgender, muslim etc. Many times I have walked out of interviews with an understanding that I will not get the job because I was clocked as transgender and they didn’t like that. You can see it in their eyes, their body language. What’s left is the smartphone app gig economy. Many days while working a gig economy delivery job I would make $5>/hr and still have to pay for gas.
For five months I worked in the bakery of a bougie grocery store which was severely understaffed in every department. It’s not like applications wouldn’t have been pouring in, given that applying was readily available online and that the jobs paid more than minimum wage, but it’s that they simply weren’t hiring. Covidworld brain parasites crawled into the nonexistent minds of employers and told them this- It’s far easier to maintain profits when you intentionally understaff successful businesses because you don’t have to pay nearly as many employees. Because of the understaffing, the people in my department were frequently stressed and burnt out because of the amount of expectations that are placed on you when you are given the work of two or three people by yourself. I would generally be closing by myself alongside a laundry list of stuff to complete that you could only finish in time by the skin of your teeth. I was often left alone on busy holidays doing the work of 3 or four people by myself, leaving me to get yelled at by entitled rich twats with more cash in their pockets than in my bank account. Besides understaffing, the expectations of menial wage workers have increased substantially over the past two and a half years, burning them out faster, and allowing employers to cycle through workers like a revolving door (keyword: fast paced work environment). By March I had become too burnt out with the job to continue doing it so I put in my two weeks with intent to job search during that period. I (a fucking idiot) made the stupid idiot mistake of saying something about the job being bad for my mental health, and the same day I was met with a surprise- a wellness check, with cops, at work! I was called into the manager’s office only to be met with two cops asking me invasive questions. I was confused and scared and was (rightfully) very rude to them. I was fired rather than being able to finish my two weeks of work. In my manager’s words, “you'll be fine, everyone’s hiring.” I don't know if she was feigning ignorance or if she was plain stupid, but she was wrong. I received calls from my county’s mental health services for weeks, leaving me in paranoid fits.
A few years ago I was sexually assaulted. The toll that CPTSD takes on your life is immeasurable. I developed a dissociative disorder that was then fed by three years of accumulative traumas, both extreme and mundane. It got worse and worse. I depersonalize or derealize 19/20 days, and for most of the day. It makes doing mundane tasks difficult and scary, and information harder to internalize, and is much more anxiety inducing while away from home. It’s incredibly disabling.
Attempting to find employment where you can be accommodated for this is impossible because accommodation no longer exists. I tried cannabis trimming because I thought it might be meditative and they actually hired me. The windowless white rooms, fluorescent lights, heavy machine noises, and repetitive motions triggered my DPDR symptoms. After a couple days in I was expected to be able to work extremely quickly. Most facilities will monitor the productivity of each worker, and my boss liked to post everyone’s numbers in a group chat. I asked to be accommodated and excluded from these things. I was denied. I quit because I cannot have a job that makes me so anxious during moments where I do not even feel as though I am real. It would put me in the grave. I tried to get a job at a nearby grocery store and after being strung along for weeks was denied the job for not being able to work on the sabbath because I am Jewish. I managed to land a job at a gas station which I thought might finally be something doable for me. The clientele was mostly cartoon republicans who were regulars at the store because it was the only white owned gas station in the area, and the thought of this made me feel disgusting at work. Going in the cooler would trigger my DPDR symptoms, and this was the last task I would have to do before doing a ton of bookkeeping, money, and computer related stuff, which I cannot do efficiently while my symptoms are triggered. I quit after 3 days. I have a job lined up for next month and I’m just hoping it won’t be so bad.
I'm just so tired
- Weaver
Even after a successful $67,552 IndieGoGo campaign in 2015. Rate Your Music/Sonemic as a website has not changed very much in functionality. While there are certainly new features, such as the interview section, a more advanced search engine, and two separate albeit extremely rough websites dedicated to film and video games (respectively titled Cinemos and Glitchwave), the functions of the site remain largely the same. Most active users are still locked directly into the routine of rating and cataloging near everything they hear, just as its been since December 2000 when the site originally launched. But this is a post about how RYM has changed. And despite how little site users would feel it’s been altered, it really has become Sonemic.
Now it’s rather important here to make a distinction between what Rate Your Music represents versus what Sonemic does - RYM is a music cataloging platform, and Sonemic is a social media platform with the functions of the former. While the original site somewhat functioned with social activities with a topic based discussion forum, lists, and comment boxes on release pages, it now serves as a frequent companion to other social media platforms.
The first thing to note and by far the largest is the major shift in audience. As mentioned before, Rate Your Music launched in 2000. In its earlier stages, the site was more easily able to curate a more secular audience primarily built up of users spanning from the ending cutoff of the Boomer generation and Gen X’ers. This is still very visible with the way a lot of ratings on the site formed. The site being largely full of older rockists skewed the site’s averages and most popular albums towards the rock and metal that was popular in their youths. This is surely still noticeable while looking at the top rated albums on the site, and while looking at the number of ratings for many sorts of pre-21st century guitar music. Because the internet is the internet, the spread Rate Your Music had in the 2010s of the site was MASSIVE. From the end of 2011, the site had a listed 370,000 users and it’s more than doubled since then. No longer is it a safe, secular haven for the guitar legends of past generations, but a worldwide phenomenon with little room considered for the origins of the site. But where the hell are all of these users coming from?
Let’s consider the demographics of the site and where they’ve come from:
Music blogs such as Pitchfork and The Needle Drop being so successful presented audiences with easy ways to discover music online, as well as unfortunate avenues for reductive criticism. I am of course talking about the 1-10 rating scale, and how music discussion online slowly shifted away from discussion and into aggressively shit-flinging numbers into each other’s mouths. After all, the easiest way to talk about a piece of art is to not actually talk about it at all. Pitchfork’s decimal rating system and The Needle Drop’s “high number or low number” system have had undeniable influence in the way people discuss not just music, but other media forms too. RYM functionally provides a quick and simple way to approach non-criticism and non-discussion and continue on the endless train of media heroin.
Alongside the audience gained from music publications, during the mid 2010s RYM had gained a visible user base being imported from 4chan’s /mu/ board, as well as Subreddits dedicated to independent music. A good deal of these users were using other social media at the time as well, most notably Twitter. Twitter being as broad of a platform as it is, and with media spread being so fast, using RYM and making “Topsters” favorite album charts became more of a new normal than anything else, with a later noticeable influx of more typical radio music listeners entering the sphere.
Especially in the last few years, there’s been a noticeable shift in RYM’s demographics into a younger, and most importantly queerer audience. If you’ve ever heard someone online mention that every platform becomes Tumblr eventually, keep it in mind very seriously. Tumblr’s ban on NSFW content in 2018 saw massive amounts of users who call themselves “refugees” of the site quickly flooded into just about every other younger community on the internet. Being that queer teenagers were such a large demographic of Tumblr, the tenderqueer persona became a standard archetype you can find just about anywhere. No matter what platform you’re on, it’s incredibly easy to find Piccrew avatar sporting tenderqueer teens and young adults. Twitter is Tumblr, as are Instagram, Reddit and most other media platforms, not to mention that Tumblr itself still has a large active user base. Tumblr leaking everywhere at once and changing every community gives several more paths to music listeners ending up on RYM.
Many younger users of Rate Your Music are still using the site in nearly identical ways to the original demographics, but there is a massively important distinction to make between the site’s younger versus the older users:
Modern technology and the hyperreal of the spectacle have conditioned most of Gen Z for media heroin addiction from the very beginning. As the first generation to prominently grow up with smartphones in our hands, most have a near constant need for more and more rapid fire media to perpetually consume. Rating based sites like RYM and Letterboxd are an easy way to feed media heroin addiction and the sugar rush of watching your numbers increase. Everything online eventually meshes. Sites with more specific functions end up serving as companion pieces to the overarching narratives of mainline social media sites. The plexing of websites together means everyone is everywhere in any interest. For internet-using, media-consuming Zoomers, having accounts for several websites like RYM or Letterboxd is a norm. The idea of “social media companions to a bigger picture” is also exemplified by neo-homepage-esque websites like Carrd, where a user might display links to their accounts on all of these other sites.
Besides its frequent use as a companion app, there’s still a large amount of discussion within Rate Your Music itself. The forums are still used regularly, and users are endlessly making lists of their favorite albums to feed the void of links that nobody looks at. With a younger, internet weaned audience, there’s also far more discourse than there has been in the past. Teenagers fighting with each other in the forums is nothing new though, I suppose.
Another thing to bring up is the rather active communities of listeners using Rate Your Music in order to engage with artists who themselves use the site. The last few years has brought in a great influx of artists to RYM and RYM users who themselves start to create their own music of all sorts. This easily allows for cult followings to be created among subgroups, and has caused some artists to attain a certain level of success inside and outside of the site. Some notable cases of this are Patricia Taxxon, Fax Gang, Them Airs, and Avenade, who have all “blown up” in the RYM community.
I’m certainly cynical about the culture around rating music but at the end of the day RYM is at least a great multitool, and is easily usable as such while being able to completely avoid most of the social media aspects. That’s what I use it for and have always used it for in the past. I really don’t want everything to be social media. It’s exhausting. -_-
- Weaver
It’s 2021 now, and as our continuation into covid world persists, online concerts and festivals have simply become a norm. No longer is playing your show in Minecraft or Second Life innovative, but is simply a way of life. Not only has this allowed artists to perform despite lockdowns, but acts as a powerful vehicle for fans to interact with each other, the artists they like, and to raise money for charities. It’s increasingly clear that these sorts of shows are here to stay for quite some time, but how long? But as online shows become a norm, people are beginning to be less enthusiastic about these shows, corporate acts capitalize off of paid streams, and organizers have more opportunities to fuck up and make these shows fall apart completely. As I see more URLFests failing or ending up as catastrophes, I ask the question: Are these really the venues we have left?
What a disaster! The weekend of January 15th I played an online music festival, “Quarantainment 2.” This was a smaller online show that I, as well as several contemporaries, became involved with in October of 2020. After two delays, perpetually poor communication from the hosts, and multiple people dropping the show, it seemed as though there was no way for the show to actually go on, until it did. Quarantainment 2 was hosted on a twitch channel, “BenMonsterTv,” a channel primarily dedicated to streaming video game content. The channel themes itself around talking puppets and the people that use them, rather reminiscent of Wonder Showzen, and humor similar to that of other 2000s Comedy Central programs. During the stream, viewers and moderators had access to several emotes and “audio drops,” which would cause either an irritating audio file to play (including one that just says “sex” loudly), or would make the channel’s puppet characters pop up on the screen and dance around, or make fart noises. During an intermission, the channel’s creators played several sketches of their characters, which included multiple tasteless and insulting pedophilia jokes. How incredibly embarrassing! I had been reeled into playing what is essentially an advertisement for inherently offensive garbage. Having to negotiate with the hosts to ensure that all of these emotes would be disabled while I performed was frankly insulting, let alone the second half of the festival being played an entire half hour early. None of these things that would happen during the stream were at all conveyed to the artists beforehand. Trying to watch someone perform only to see a giant puppet pop up on screen and make a fart sound over their set feels almost overtly mocking. It's like getting a gig and finding out at the last moment it's at a fucking Chuck E Cheese!
Most of the URLFests I’ve seen being played are raising money for charity, are completely nonprofit, or are blatantly paid as artists still need to eat. This one however really served as a huge advertisement for the channel owners. Any money from subscribers during the show would go to the channel owners, not that many people subscribed during the show. During sets, while the Twitch chat was available on screen, the channel's moderators would plug links to buy channel merch. Truly, watching it slowly unraveling like this while being a part of the show was nothing short of humiliating! The event went over so poorly that we completely changed hosts for the second day of the event.
As a second example, several others and I were at one point scheduled to play a festival called “Witherfest,” an event using a Minecraft server as a venue, as many other shows have. Witherfest quickly amassed a wide array of performers before it all fell apart. After a long and stupid discourse between fans and performers and organizers over the booking of a certain act, a large portion of the roster dropped, including myself. The organizers acted incredibly immaturely, and quickly turned the event into something the scheduled performers were instead reactionary to.
Now of course this is all personal experience, but it’s not like I’ve been the only person to have catastrophic experiences doing these, and these aren't the only festival failures that there have been, or will be. Besides public failures, how many of these festivals just completely fall apart behind the scenes? How many of them never get past their rudimentary stages?
How long until poor host communication leaves artists being too fed up to agree to anything? The DIY no contract attitude towards URLFests can be something artists can relish in, but it also gives hosts and organizers much more space to make shows fall flat on their faces. For a lot of organizers, that may remove any sort of real obligation to act professionally towards their performers and fans. This of course is exemplary in both of my personal examples with organizers acting immaturely.
At least until a post-covid world online shows are here to stay, and in that sense are becoming far more corporate, with major artists performing in paid streams. While this becomes the norm, completely DIY shows will become much less common, and the frequency that they appear to be happening at has been declining. For so many people, this style of performance is purely novelty, and that novelty has worn off. Of course many of these shows go off without a hitch, but how long will it really be until the DIY aspect of the scene is no longer appealing enough for audiences? How long until the musicians can’t deal with organizers anymore and everything becomes even more secular? Are these really the venues we have left??
- Weaver
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