Yes, that repeat of the word ‘special’ twice was on purpose and was not a typo ;)
I’ve invited Christopher von Roy of the Substack The World According to Von Roy back as the first guest poster to post a second time.
Because Chris is a medical writer with a masters in immunology and a huge music fan, we had a lot of DMing back and forth about the recent news that Neil Young asked Spotify to choose between his music or Joe Rogan’s podcast, which Young (and many others) have claimed to be a purveyor of COVID misinformation, and that Spotify seems to have chosen Rogan over Young.
Within the discourse on Substack, I found Tom Moon of Echo Locator to have one of the strongest posts in favor of #deletespotify, which you can read in full here.
While Glenn Greenwald on his eponymous Substack had perhaps one of the strongest posts in favor of not deleting Spotify, which you can read in full here too.
And Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day with perhaps the most nuanced, least polemical take, which you can read in full here as well.
I will perhaps return to their posts in ‘my’ half of the collaboration with Christopher to come.
But first a more formal bio!
Christopher vonn Roy writes weekly stories in The World According to von Roy using his background as a medical writer and hobby polemicist to capture opinions as widespread as immunology, mental health, pop culture, politics and philosophy. He is a ghost writer and has authored5 books to date. He is working on a podcast and has already interviewed the New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern as well as the MIT Media Labs engineer and voice specialist Rébecca Kleinberger [and me, whatever I am, Dave Cowen, LOL) He is also a founding member of FACT Aotearoa (Fight Against Conspiracy Theories).
Now, without further adieu, take it away, Chris!
Damage done.
Imagine you're at a dinner party and on one side of the table sit Christopher Hitchens, Werner Herzog and Neil Young. Facing them, on the other side of the table, are Donald Trump, Joe Rogan and Kid Rock.
The topic of the covid vaccination arises. Joe and Kid go full bore into conspiracy lala land. The sweat starts dripping off of Joe Rogan’s bald head as he recounts his success story with Ivermectin, Kid Rock meanwhile is standing behind him doing air guitar riffs and banging his head screaming "Fuck yeah, Americaaa". Donald Trump shifts nervously in his seat wedged between these two lunatic asylum seekers. He feels surprisingly out of place.
While Christopher takes a sip of his whiskey, Neil turns to Werner and goes "you should make a film about these guys" ... whilst shaking his head Werner rebuts "Yes, but what do they dream about."
This imaginary dinner party came to me this morning whilst in the shower. I was wondering who would be the best and who would be the worst to invite. Stephen Fry and Patti Smith were close to making the cut on the good side. Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson on the bad.
I started deliberating this idea because of the news that Neil Young had given Spotify an ultimatum, that he didn't want his music to be associated with a streaming service that doubles as a bull horn for right wing conspiracy garbage in the form of martial arts commentator Joe Rogan's infantile podcast. I wanted to know what drove Neil to take this courageous stand. I decided to let my YouTube Red Neil Young song mix shuffle it out.
Maybe I could find the answer randomly in one of his song's a la Dave Cowen's Shuffle Synchronicity:
"I sing the song because I love the man I know that some of you don't understand Milk blood to keep from running out"
Seemed like the perfect answer. Neil Young's beautiful capture of both his humane motivation in being a musician juxtaposed to the evil greed of the dairy farm music industry, milking the musician for all they got.
The CEO of Spotify is worth $3 billion dollars. Joe Rogan was paid $100 million for his show. Have you got fledgling indie musician friends who have music on Spotify? Ask them what their last royalty check said. I guarantee you it is peanuts. I am an independent writer and am not the biggest fan of Amazon, but one thing I can say for that organisation, at least they pay writers fairly and on time.
The genius commentator and cultural vanguard Maria Popova (of The Marginalian - formerly known as Brainpickings) so beautifully wrote this morning on her Instagram post:
"They call him a curmudgeonly old man. They indict him for not having released a popular song since 1989. However make no mistake. Here is a person of rare countercultural courage. We used to call them heroes."
So true. Gone are the days of the student revolutions of the 1960s. The very political movement that bore the inspiration for many of Neil Young's most heavenly creations.
Harvest Moon has got to be one of the greatest not only albums but pieces of music ever written. Up there with Tchaikovsky's 1812 and John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. It is not often you listen to an album and like every single song straight off the bat. Like, I can still remember listening to the whole album, I was in my dorm room in Bristol with a good friend of mine who had just bought the vinyl album and we both sat there with our headphones, mouth agape, in total and utter awe. I love listening the hell out of songs that I like over and over again. In fact I used to ruin my cassette tapes because I would rewind certain songs constantly. Two songs I distinctly remember doing that with were Hendrix' "Castles Made of Sand" and Marley's "Duppy Conqueror."
But here was an album that I didn't rewind or play any song on loop. Because every frickin’ song was PERFECTION.
"I hit the city and I lost my band I watched the needle take another man Gone, gone, the damage done.."
Again, very prescient in light of the whole Spotify/Neil Young debate. I understand how this is polarising. When I told my dad about what had happened with the Young boycott, his first response as an ardent Neil Young fan was, well, why doesn’t Neil go on the Joe Rogan podcast and have a debate with him about the topic? I admire this optimism, but I have to add that my dad hasn’t listened to a single Rogan podcast and as such might not quite know how the whole thing would manifest itself. Nonetheless a very diplomatic solution.
On this issue I am slightly less diplomatic than my father and even less tolerant. I remember the philosopher Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance - especially when extended to Germany in the 1930’s when the Nazi’s rose to power and instigated countrywide antivaccine mandates, resulting in the reemergence of typhoid and rabies among other life-threatening microorganisms. Popper maintained that if you tolerate the intolerant, the intolerant will end up taking over. Quod erat demonstrandum is Germany. I believe that what Spotify are doing is a form of enablism and are conduits in one of the largest misinformation campaigns in history. As someone who has spent a lot of time researching, writing and debating with antivaxers, my tolerance to them has waned considerably. Hence why I applaud the actions of Neil Young. Many more should follow, especially the large swathes of independent musicians who are not making much money off of the platform.
If Jimi Hendrix were alive, he would be all over this and would be standing behind Neil Young and his decision. There would be solidarity, just like the day they hotwired and stole a van to drive it to Woodstock together - where they both performed amazing anti-establishment music sets, protesting everything from the Vietnam war to racism. Just like Spotify should be doing right now
We’ll let Jimi carry us out of this for now..
“Many moons passed and more the dream grew stronger, Until tomorrow, he would sing his first war song, And fight his first battle, but something went wrong, Surprise attack killed him in his sleep that night”
Christopher! Thanks so much for coming back on with this inspired idea and brilliant contribution.
It’s funny, this Substack very rarely engages with hot takes and of-the-moment issues, yet, you were right to propose the idea.
Because this Substack is so fundamentally related to Spotify.
I can’t help but wonder if what I am about to write in response is biased and colored by my somewhat conscious but perhaps mostly unconscious partiality to what Spotify has meant to me over the years and especially vis-a-vis its relationship to learning how shuffling playlists can lead to spiritual synchronicities.
It’s not lost on me that this #deletespotify movement was started by Neil Young on 01/25/22, the day of my last post of the 365 days ;)
While I imagine if I moved over to Apple Music and used their ‘genius shuffle’, the results would be the same because God or whatever you want to call the ? is in everything.
I’m a bit lazy, LOL, and don’t want to find the now over 50,000+ songs on my Spotify Liked Songs list in Apple’s library instead.
Especially because I am not sure Apple is ‘better’ than Spotify.
Now you perhaps rightly criticized in a DM that Greenwald’s title for his Spotify take, The Pressure Campaign on Spotify to Remove Joe Rogan Reveals the Religion of Liberals: Censorship, is more than a little hyperbolically incendiary.
Clearly, censorship happens ‘on both sides now’ to quote Joni Mitchell, who became the second major musician to request to pull their music from Spotify unless they end their relationship with Joe Rogan.
For instance, The New York Times published a piece about how books like Art Spiegelman’s Maus graphic novel about the Holocaust is being censored in schools by conservatives as well as LGBTQ+ content.
But then again Greenwald goes on to talk about how ‘liberals’ are not just going after Spotify but also after Substack:
The same attack was launched, and is still underway, against Substack, also for the crime of refusing to ban writers deemed by liberal corporate outlets and activists to be hateful and/or fonts of disinformation. After the first wave of liberal attacks on Substack failed — that script was that it is a place for anti-trans animus and harassment — The Post returned this week for round two, with a paint-by-numbers hit piece virtually identical to the one it published last year about Rumble. “Newsletter company Substack is making millions off anti-vaccine content, according to estimates,” blared the sub-headline…
…This Post attack on Substack predictably provoked expressions of Serious Concern from good and responsible liberals. That included Chelsea Clinton, who lamented that Substack is profiting off a “grift.” Apparently, this political heiress — who is one of the world's richest individuals by virtue of winning the birth lottery of being born to rich and powerful parents, who in turn enriched themselves by cashing in on their political influence in exchange for $750,000 paychecks from Goldman Sachs for 45-minute speeches, and who herself somehow was showered with a $600,000 annual contract from NBC News despite no qualifications — believes she is in a position to accuse others of "grifting.” She also appears to believe that — despite welcoming convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to her wedding to a hedge fund oligarch whose father was expelled from Congress after his conviction on thirty-one counts of felony fraud — she is entitled to decree who should and should not be allowed to have a writing platform.
But you could also say that our same ‘anti-trans’ and ‘anti-vax’ Substack platform that we both use is also pro-vax and pro-trans as it also hosts some of the best LGBTQ+ graphic novelists including Molly Knox Ostertag who is matching Substack subscriptions with donations to trans charities, and Emily Oster’s ParentData which has kept parents advised about how to handle covid for their children scientifically.
So, clearly, censorship is not just the religion of the left or the right.
But then again Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day points out that the Spotify/Neil Young/Rogan situation might not be merely a matter of censorship.
The real issue here for me is that, in May 2020, Spotify paid $100 million to become the exclusive home for Joe Rogan’s podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. Spotify and Joe Rogan have what is technically a “licensing deal,” but it involves Rogan’s entire back catalog and is exclusive to Spotify….The Joe Rogan Experience is, in every sense that matters, a Spotify production.
And so it does seem fair that since we are ‘rocking in a free world’ as Neil sang, he and we can choose freely to exert financial pressure on Spotify to stop capitalizing on money made from musicians in order to use it on non-music content especially because instead, they could, or should, be paying more royalties to musicians.
This may be a quixotic ideal though, which even Broderick complies with:
So, make no mistake, if you work with or at a company like Spotify or you use a platform like Spotify — which I still do because they’ve eaten the market away to a point where there’s no real alternative (RIP Grooveshark) — there is no question as to what that company values.
But to talk about what we ‘value’ some more.
To me, LOL, Christopher Hitchens would be on the so-called ‘bad’ side!
His atheism or anti-theism, I might argue, is even worse ‘misinformation’ and even more ‘damage done’ than Joe Rogan’s.
"I am not even an atheist so much as an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful." - Christopher Hitchens.
Personally, I wonder, without religious institutions keeping alive many of the texts of mysticism, what would that have done to our societies?
Further, while I like Werner Herzog and his work, you could argue that some of his behavior way over-crossed lines of consent in art (much more than me LOL).
He spent two years in the Amazon jungle trying to haul a steamboat over a mountain for Fitzcarraldo. Earlier, while filming Aguirre, the Wrath of God, the star of that film, the late, totally insane Klaus Kinski, threatened to leave the project. Herzog said he’d shoot him, and Kinski stayed put.
And what about Neil Young himself? You mentioned that famous story of how he got to Woodstock with Jimi Hendrix. But from another perspective, we could be talking about the entitlement of the rich and famous to do things that other people would go to jail for years for.
“So we’re standing at the airport with Melvin Belli [an attorney] trying to figure out what to do. And Melvin Belli steals this pickup truck parked at the airport. So it’s the three of us in this stolen pickup truck trying to get to the Woodstock concert to play—Jimi, Melvin and me. That’s what I really remember about Woodstock.”
Or we could just point out that clearly I am really just doing a what-aboutism.
But what-about what-aboutism?
Is that so ‘bad’ LOL?
Because though I would probably keep Tucker Carlson on the so-called ‘bad’ side, I would put Jordan Peterson on the ‘good’ side as I have learned quite a lot from him, especially his transmission of the more theistic side of psychology.
Take, for example, this quote on your own Substack from Carl Jung:
What do we make of Peterson saying:
Is this a ‘what-aboutism” pointing out that Jung and Peterson sometimes kind of basically teach the same thing?
To be honest, though I don’t dislike his comedy, Stephen Fry might even replace Peterson on the so-called ‘bad’ side.
I actually think you could argue Fry’s documentary about Manic Depression has so much 90s/2000s era pharmaceutical misinformation, specifically the lack of a biological basis of mental illness, which we both seem to agree on in your podcast, that it might be harmful at this point to keep it available for view as it might convince people to get on another version of drugs for life until the damage is done.
Or in meme form:
I also read the article you linked to about The Paradox of Intolerance, and unless my reading comprehension is off today, which is quite possible, as you will see in a bit, it seems the author is arguing for the opposite of an intolerant approach to intolerance.
The Paradox of Tolerance often pits me against those very people I want to support and help, because I have to stand firm against public shaming and bullying, or lose that very inclusive society that I strive to foster…
…This recent article about Professor Loretta Ross and her plea for calling people in, instead of calling people out, resonated with me in its advocacy of a better path to understanding and social change, through intimacy instead of public shaming…
So I guess I would say that I would have to go with your dad on this one and encourage people like Neil Young to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast and talk to him.
I’ve only listened to or seen Rogan’s podcast once, which was an episode where he had Kanye West on.
And I found ‘good’ things in it and ‘bad’ things in it.
‘Good’ things like perhaps Rogan giving Kanye a platform to talk about the role of psychiatric medicine side effects on his life.
And ‘bad’ things like Rogan perhaps not questioning Kanye’s seemingly unlimited capacity for New Age positive thinking.
But, then again, who am I to say what’s a right or wrong consciousness for him, Kanye, or the audience.
It all reminds me of a talk I saw/listened to on Spiral Dynamics
Spiral Dynamics is a model of the evolutionary development of individuals, organizations, and societies.
It was initially developed by Don Edward Beck and Christopher Cowan based on the emergent cyclical theory of Clare W. Graves, combined with memetics as proposed by Richard Dawkins and further developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
A later collaboration between Beck and Ken Wilber produced Spiral Dynamics Integral.
Dawkins, of course, was a pal of Hitchens, Csikszentmihalyi, is the author of the Positive Psychology book Flow, and Wilber, the pioneer of Integral Psychology.
So ‘good’ guys, right?
I tried to summarize all of its ‘memes of consciousness’ just now but it messed with the flow of the piece.
Suffice to say the teacher of the talk specifically talked about how she views covid misinformation from the ‘yellow meme of consciousness’.
In contrast to the 'lower’ ‘green meme of consciousness’ who want to care for everyone in the way ‘they’ more ‘objectively’ see fit, ‘yellow meme consciousness’ trusts that there’s an order in seeming chaos and, though, they care for others and advise them, it’s not at the expense of the others’ sovereignty.
However, just when you think this ‘yellow consciousness meme’ is ‘better’ than the ‘green consciousness meme’, the teacher informs us that the next levels of consciousness seem to be:
Turquoise, where we choose much more to self-sacrifice things for the benefit of the all (planet, animals, humans, etc.).
Sounds okay and necessary, right?
But then there’s another consciousness meme after that, which is:
Coral, where according to her…
“What we know from coral is that people who live in coral will be the people who decide who gets to live and die. Because the planet is coming to such a place, according to this theory, that we can't continue to support all human life forms, certain populations.”
That’s where I LOLed.
This ideation, which was, I admit, so fascinating for hours of listening, seemed to culminate with some sort of fascism?
But one at a level of consciousness where it’s ok?
I had also looked up the word ‘discourse’ because it’s so popular as a word to talk about what we are doing, which is talking about something.
It comes from a Latin word, discursus, which means a ‘running to and fro’.
Isn’t that what we have been doing in this discourse about Spotify?
‘Running to and fro’?
So then I thought…
Have I been doing that all along on this Substack?
And should I stop doing that???
And, so, I have decided to pause for a month.
Not really only or even that much for that reason.
But because we reached post 365 last week, which was the initial goal.
And though post 366 had some good stuff in it, I also probably rushed into a new sub-Substack idea about memes.
Further, I am starting the SubstackGo program tomorrow from February 1st through the 28th.
So I want to use that time to figure out what I want to do next with Substack and with Shuffle Synchronicities.
I gave 30 day free extensions to anyone who has a paid subscription.
Free readers feel free to remain subscribed to the free option ;)
Because I do hope to come back in March with more than just ‘running to and fro’.
Even if at this moment it’s kind of hard to imagine what that will be.
Lastly, I did do a shuffle of just the remaining Neil Young songs on Spotify.
And got:
“Star of Bethlehem” by Neil Young
It’s a song about Neil after the breakup with the mother of his child of which Songfacts.com notes:
~He’s discussing how friends, dreams, lovers, and every other worldly thing has abandoned him, and how nothing and no one seems trustworthy. So what is there to rely on?~
You might wonder who I can turn to On this cold and chilly night of gloom The answer to that question Is nowhere in this room
~But in the final verse, Young makes a religious and/or spiritual appeal. They say there are no atheists in foxholes. Maybe there are no atheists in heartbreak, either.~
Yet still a light is shining From that lamp on down the hall Maybe the star of Bethlehem Wasn't a star at all
And, so, I thought, from whatever my ‘level of consciousness’ happens to be, maybe I don’t know if Spotify or Substack or any of my ideas about them are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.
And maybe I don’t know what will come of this Shuffle Synchronicities project or my use of Substack and/or Spotify.
But I do believe something to the effect of what Neil Young seems to believe in at the end of that shuffled-to-song.
That:
Yet still a light is shining
Or perhaps we end on the words of a choice of what both Christopher I might consider a ‘good’ person, Carl Jung, who has said…
“In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.”
Okay, that’s the three hundred and sixty-seventh Shuffle Synchronicities.
