If the Feed is Fake, Are the Fans Fake, Too?

Everything started falling apart for the indie rock band Geese when the cofounders of Chaotic Good Projects, a digital marketing company, appeared on a podcast and explained how they used social media to simulate the sensation of popularity for their clients. Clients like Geese.

As Wired explained:

Essentially, the firm creates networks of social media pages (typically on TikTok) and uses them to drive the band’s music into the recommendation algorithm. Songs are dropped into the backgrounds of videos. Live clips are shared. Sometimes, burner accounts, comments, and whole ecosystems of interactions can be fabricated out of digital cloth, stoking—and in some cases, completely manufacturing—discourse around an artist. These ginned-up interactions push the songs and the discussion about them higher up a platform’s algorithmic rankings. And social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube are, increasingly, where (real) fans discover new music.

The article is titled: “The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Was Actually a Psyop.”

Calling the band’s popularity a “psyop” implies that Geese only got popular through sinister, CIA-level tactics. The crime here seemed to be that, by generating artifical engagement around the band’s music, Chaotic Good Projects, ahem, goosed the algorithms until people simply started listening to the music because they thought it was already popular or because, at least, the algorithms thought that it was popular.

Is Geese actually making good music? Wired seems to think that this part is irrelevant. It’s the tactics that are wrong. But who gets to moralize what’s “authentic” in the age of the algorithm in the first place? Everything we see, hear, feel, and experience on the internet today has gone through our new gatekeepers in some way. And our new gatekeepers are, first and foremost, bots.

Are bots worse gatekeepers than MTV? Record labels? Radio stations? Depends on who you ask. Queen would say that MTV was a lot worse. As their drummer Roger Taylor explained in a (video) interview, 1984’s “Radio Gaga” was a defense of radio in the dawn of the music video, which he thought emphasized the wrong elements of music:

That’s part of what the song’s about, really. The fact that they [music videos] seem to be taking over almost from the aural side, the visual side seems to be almost more important.

Someone from the TRL generation like me, on the other hand, might miss the days of the daily countdown that decided which music videos made it to the top of the charts. In a way, faking a bunch of comments and fans to get your music to the top seems like a more noble - or at least democratic - way to get past the gatekeepers.

What choice do artists have? The battle for attention is constant and unending. According to comedian and former Daily Show host Trevor Noah, even artists like Drake have to get through the noise by way of trend simulation in a post-gatekeeper era.

Music used to be a very different game… The way you used to get an artist to blow up was defined by the labels.

In some sense, we all have to know that the feed is fake now. We see ads, we see influencers, we see product promotions. Maybe the betrayal we feel is that, at least when it comes to art, we want our artists to be organic. We want the cream to rise to the top. But if the cream rises and no one pays to get it to the top, does anything rise at all?

Is a fake feed any different than paid search terms and broadcast and news corporations and record labels and radio stations and yellow journalism and propaganda pamphlets and rallies and marches and operas and symphonies and Shakespeare and King Arthur and missives and myths and testaments and Gutenberg and sermons and tales around the campfire and hieroglyphics and constellations and tides and storms and old gods and new gods and forgotten gods and cave paintings?

Is it so wrong that our icons pay to make an impression?

Are our beliefs really so delicate that we need to know that everyone else already believes it for it to be true?

Want to know the difference between what’s popular and what’s a psyop?

Just close your eyes and listen to the music.