Eighty Sends A Follow-Up Memo : Happy 3rd birthday, Personal Protocol ʚїɞ

Three years ago, I released my second project, Personal Protocol. It was my first attempt to use my voice for myself since giving it away to another project, one I was convinced was bigger than me or anything I had to say.

I come back to this video, Eighty Calls A Meeting, a lot. I’m often surprised by what I was able to get away with releasing, how on-the-nose I got with these dramatizations without much pushback. The process of separating myself from my former employers was less sensational, more drawn-out and complicated, than the fantasy I played out of circling the suits in the boardroom, waving my small, newfound power and their big, compromising fuckups in their faces. But there was a real sense that I was taking something back, even if I wasn’t exactly sure what it was. Personal Protocol was not the first step in that journey, but it’s the first one I really shared with you all.

Host Intelligent Technologies (a name I can finally write) didn’t always see transparency as a liability. Sometimes it was a tool. Even more explicitly than their peers in AI, HITech were in show business, and they understood that storytelling was valuable. It was more valuable, to investors and potential future customers with no real understanding of what was under the hood, than what the tech actually did, how the music actually sounded, or where any of it came from. In show business, a particularly valuable story is the one about the tragic young woman. The part where her dreams come true and the part where she wishes they hadn’t. She is easy to envy and easier to pity, fun to hate and convenient to blame. She makes people pay attention. It just so happened that for me, making people pay attention was the dream itself.

So sometimes, I was allowed to let some light leak through the shutters. For now, what I want you to understand about me and Host Intelligent Technology is that in the beginning, my music career and public presence were something of a soft launch for ideas that had very little to do with me specifically. All the paranoia and excitement about those ideas led to some pretty unorthodox publicity choices. They figured out a setup: at the time, friends I’d made in art/tech were working in a similar niche, but with nothing quite as risky as the 8485 project on the table. Unlike HITech, they already had some public presence in a few places, including a corner of the underground music scene. I was embarrassingly bad at understanding the structure of agreements back then (not that anyone was very interested in helping), but HITech formed a relationship with those friends in which my music, and any hints as to what it was connected to would link to their brand instead. That way, Host Intelligent Technologies could keep out of the public eye while still gauging temperature on the project. (If I've written this in a roundabout way, it's only to avoid further implicating anyone who didn't have the full picture of what was going on at the time, but IYKYK.)

I still had a complicated relationship with HITech during the release of Personal Protocol, but at least internally, I was beginning to claim what was mine: my hope (precipice (4)), my anger (Scribbles), and a million other precious and ephemeral things, if only to practice allowing myself to have them. I decided that I’d always have the right to be Eighty: that was my name, I’d earned it, and it could exist alongside the one I was born with. I formed my own connection with the butterfly, a symbol I’d long associated with the organization that had separated me from my own potential to become. I covered everything with butterflies in the blue of a cloudless sky and of a screen attempting to fix its insides. Personal Protocol was named that way because it was never meant to refer only to 7 songs with a beginning and an end. It was a new way of existing, a promise to myself that I was going to do things differently.

For the past 3 years I have been doing my best to fulfill that promise and live by that protocol, one that is infinitely modular and universally compatible. It is the system by which I have made everything I’ve shared so far and by which I am making the thing I am most excited to share. Many of you have told me that it has played a part in creating your own and that is the coolest thing to me. I am very grateful that you’ve been with me through all these changes and found ways to understand through all the shifting layers of obfuscation over the years.

Happy Personal Protocol day everyone. ʚїɞ

The big and small screens which are all I can see

 In the video for “I Feel Fantastic”, I am standing in a white void in front of a screen I can barely make out for all that flashes across it at once. There is comfort in this flat object that overtakes my field of vision, in the girly nostalgia of dolls and iPods, in the blurry videos of pretty girls I can imagine that I am, in the images of myself I can imagine that I am, too. 

Today, I woke up thinking about the parts of being an artist that most artist types are not naturally inclined towards: budgeting, timelines, feasibility. I started shaking and went to turn off the time-delayed locks I put on my social media apps. I waited out the 5 minutes and opened an app. I watched whatever the app wanted to show me for 10 minutes until my time-limited session elapsed and I had to unlock it again. By the time I’d used all 5 sessions back-to-back, I couldn’t tell you what I’d seen, but I’d compressed the sharp edges of my panic into a dense layer of static deep enough in my chest that I could get up out of bed. I made breakfast, drank coffee.

I’m not sure what happened between this and the moment I remember next, sitting on the floor beside my bed, calling my mom because I’d gotten stuck again. I was halfway through my daily allowance for a second app which did the exact same thing as the first. I felt ashamed telling her that it was the only thing I trusted to temporarily keep me from losing my shit.

When the screen breaks, it rematerializes exactly where it was: it is an unchangeable fact. Somehow, surrounded by its fragments on the floor, my virtual self and I still face its inevitability. Watching from the other side, nothing has changed except I am noticing that I am not in control. The screen is harder to look at but I am looking all the same. The thing that shows me cute jeans is now letting me know there is a gambling market for predictions on the details of climate disaster and nuclear war this year. My friend Cricket inconveniently deconstructs the image of the “Digital Girl”, questioning with it all the aspirational images I like to cast across the blank egg of my Internet Face. None of these facts last longer or fall heavier than the Blythe doll, the affirmation written in glowing script over a bunny who looks like she (she must be a she) is crying. They are images, disappearing as quickly as they appear. They are real but not. They are entertaining until I notice them bleeding into each other, see the shapes of the pixels, think less “what is happening to the world” than “what is happening to my brain?”

What work remained to be done existed only on a slightly bigger screen, and changed no more about my immediate surroundings than the scrolling spiral. Still, I had some abstract understanding that its real consequences land closer to me, that they pay monthly for the floor where my body was sitting, waiting. My mother’s voice, which was real before anything else, helped me to notice it again. I left my apartment. I didn’t look at a screen until I had walked 10 minutes in the sun and arrived someplace different. I ran numbers, which are imaginary, and tried to connect them to things that weren’t. I mostly found spikes in my chest, rising up into my throat. I breathed into them when I could. I escaped them in smaller doses when I couldn’t.

I closed my laptop and saw the familiar white void in my mind. I looked in from outside now, watching a screen on a screen, two avatars mirrored through it. Then I saw myself sitting next to my bed, my phone only the size of one hand. My avatar holding hands with hers. When the screen is gone, it doesn’t shatter, doesn’t leave traces or shards. You may only know you’re looking at something directly when you pay attention to how it changes: slowly, permanently. Under that rare and necessary weight, I hold my gaze to failure, taking notes while I can.