The Compression of America: Why Live Experience Is All That's Left

From Sinatra to Soundbites

A long time back in American history, in a pre-internet, pre-social media, pre-(what I'm going to call in this essay) "compression" era - I want you to picture a young Frank Sinatra, standing on the waterfront, overlooking Manhattan and singing, "If I can make it there I'll make it anywhere."

Imagine it. The hope. The courage. The agentic-liberty of "if I can do this, I can do anything." We should call this the Hoboken of history. This weird point in time when that feeling about America was everything and everywhere.

Because bring it forward to today and ask yourself: where exactly is "If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere" right now?

First off, it's probably only that line and not the rest of the song, which is perfect for TikToks and YouTube shorts, but more honestly, where's the sentiment of the whole song, complete with the waterfront setting and weight of the times, and not just the snipped quote of the point we want to make with it?

I don't think we, re: America, lost it. I think we compressed it. And, expanding my own compressions here, I think we compressed it and forgot how to liven it back up again.

Oh, and I think I can help. Or at least talk about it. In a helpful way.

Some background first on why (including why I'm thinking about this). Ben Hunt and Rusty Guinn of Epsilon Theory have a new company/project/software called Perscient. It's a way to look at narratives, i.e. stories, and how they're being told in and over time. AI made it way easier to see them at scale. It's really cool.

When we were looking at all the narratives to track they'd come up with over the years and loading them up into the new software, one thematic subset that really stuck out were these "America is" statements. They're a kind of Sinatra soundbite-ism of their own accord.

Ben helped introduce "the widening gyre" to a lot of us, as a way to explain the polar arguments social media makes way easier for people to commandeer to their benefit. The result is a compressed, re: flattened, "great ravine" of a lived experience, where a few polarly opposed buzzwords dictate how we talk about everything. Binary debates that work great for soulless algorithms and their platforms, and terribly for soulful humans and their communities.

I'll give you two that set me off into wanting to write THIS essay. Two widening gyres, yes plural, that worry me for how wide they've gotten, but also, that excite me because this is an essay about hope.

Take a look. Here's "Americans are risk-takers" - a narrative that's been pulled between extremes, swinging from celebration to anxiety and back again, and currently spiking to some of its highest levels yet.

Or try "America is the most free country" - an ideal that's now dominating discourse after years of relative quiet, surging to peak intensity in recent years.

These aren't steady beliefs anymore - they're volatile soundbites that spike and crater, and right now they're both hitting extreme levels that reflect how impossible nuanced conversations have become. If you're not already on social media arguing for one side of these, you're probably watching others get pulled into the binary while wondering where the nuanced middle went.

"If I can make it there," "Excuse me sir, where exactly?" "Uh, THERE. I was singing about - over there." "Yes, I thought so, but have you looked back here? Because here probably isn't everywhere if you really think about it, and I'm not sure if your there includes here. I'm pretty sure you're wrong." "Argh. And, ugh. I just thought I could… never mind."

We've been living in it since the Hoboken of history. Every ideal, once expanded, slowly being flattened into extreme soundbites, one technological ratchet at a time. Music predicted it.

To which I answer, music predicts what to do about it too. Music can't get rid of awkward Thanksgiving conversations, and I certainly don't want it to prevent some future drunk uncle SNL bit. But, music has been here before, and has ways to take us out.

I've been a music fan my entire life. If there's one thing this sometimes consuming, other times sideline obsession has taught me, it's that every profound musical movement is always sourced from something smaller than what it eventually becomes - from local scenes, from shared experiences, from communities that refuse to let their stories get flattened into soundbites.

It doesn't happen isolated in a computer. It happens live in a community. America, today, is compressed - but music has the answer on how we liven this place back up.

The Raw File

Just because we Americans are increasingly online doesn't mean there can't be aspects of our virtual lives that don't devolve into politically polarized hellscapes. It's hard to believe. I know, I'm online too, but, I'm saying - it's possible.

A little over a year ago, I started recording introductions that I was making anyway, for a YouTube show I call Just Press Record. Let me emphasize this again - I was already doing this and would have done it anyway, but I thought, "What's the downside of sharing this and maybe making a game out of it, so long as everybody agrees?"

I'm over a year in and what I can tell you is - I am regularly taken aback with feedback about how starved so many of us feel to experience, or even witness these types of singular connections. We want a bar like Cheers and instead we get Twitter comments. Seeing people genuinely connect, over mutual curiosity, feels really, really good.

I had Morgan Ranstrom back on recently, with the idea of showing him a clip from another pairing to see what he thought about it, and he made the off-the-cuff comment that started me on this essay: "I've started to think of AI as compression. It's like when I listen to Spotify on my AirPods - you're just missing so much of the data, you know? What you hear live or - you can hear the touch of something, or you can hear and feel the amps."

You can see me react in real-time. I said: "This is the raw file. It is kind of the whole idea behind the show?! You might have just explained something to me." I said that because he did explain something to me. This was uncompressed connection. That's what I'm recording. That's what we don't see enough of anymore.

We, Americans (and all you global citizens too, don't think you're not baby Jessica-ing in this worldwide well without us) have gotten so caught up in looking at the national and global headlines, that it's become increasingly hard to hear, if not just listen to, the local and communal conversations.

The data shows how far we're pulled apart. Music's got a world of lessons to help put it back together. Live and with soul - I have some stories for you.

Jam Econo

Back in the early to mid-80s, when disco and stadium rock were disintegrating into punk and rap, there was a little band on the west coast called The Minutemen. They took their name from minute (mi-noot), as in small. They held day jobs and did music all their other available times. Around 1984 they coined the term "jam econo" - which, roughly translates to, (my words) "live life and make art with low enough overhead to always stay authentic."

But, before they settled on that philosophy, something helped crystallize their approach. In 1983, halfway across the country in the midwest, Husker Du released their (now seminal) double album Zen Arcade, which the rumor mills (re: zines) went crazy telling people, was recorded in just three days. The Minutemen were in awe. That "you can do that?!" energy. And, most importantly, they took that energy and turned it into a personal challenge.

They already had their next album more or less done, but they instead went and added 20-odd more songs within a month. As bassist Mike Watt later explained, "See how healthy the competition was - the community of it? That's where it was a movement, and not a scene. It was a healthy, thriving thing."

The result was (the also seminal) Double Nickels on the Dime - a two-record, 45-track release that cost them all of $1,100 to make. Compare that to what major labels were spending on ultra-slick stadium rock records, and you start to see the economics of authenticity versus the economics of scale.

If you don't need somebody to tell you "yes," then you don't need somebody to tell you "no" either. You really can just do things. And, you can be inspired by whoever you want to, too.

One of my other favorite Minutemen ideas that applies to modern life, is how they'd always ask: "is this a gig or a flyer?" Gigs, to them, were shared, live, and communal experiences. Flyers, again - in their definition, were promotions to invite people to share in the live experiences.

Everything The Minutemen did had a targeted purpose guided by the experiences they wanted to curate.

And this attitude stacks. It's all about what you're telling your friends about, what they're telling you, and how it raises the threshold of the entire community when you do it right.

As Watt would say, "We don't have a leader in our band - no leader, no laggards." That was their band-sized community philosophy on display so they could show others, "look at us, we're working guys and we write songs and play in a band. You can hear some song that the guy next to you at the plant wrote," and wow does that translate, demonstratively, into what is possible across other small-size, co-working communities.

The point of the Minutemen's art was not to scale. The point was to commune, solely, and to constantly return creativity back to the local community, in any room that would have them perform. You might think it sounds like a demo. But, look at their work as a demonstration.

Now, flash forward with me into the 1990s, and we're going to move up the California coast, from San Pedro to Vallejo.

Earl Stevens adopted the name E-40 circa 1986. His group, the Click, scored a quasi-hit in 1993 with "Captain Save a Hoe." Now, this song gets misunderstood a lot. It's not disparaging women (mostly, it's not perfect, but I have to say it). The song's supposed to be a satirical take on the kinds of guys who swoop in trying to "rescue" women who don't need or want saving, and then get burned in the process. It's a piece of cultural criticism with a very catchy singalong of a chorus.

So E-40 makes us laugh, makes us sing along, and basically describes a very familiar sounding situation where people swoop in to declare themselves the rescuers in a very performative sense, only to find out the people aren't even trying to be rescued in the first place, but they will take the performative gesturing to the bank if they can. You can make the political connections on your own, I'm just saying, E-40 is good at narrative studies, which is part of why he belongs in this essay.

When the labels came knocking, E-40 already knew the value of his musical product and his local scene. The story goes, Barry Weiss at Jive calls E-40 and his (business savvy) uncle out to New York to sign a record contract. E-40 and his uncle knew they could move 100k units in their region, at $7-$8 profit, without any label's help. They told Weiss he'd have to beat this or they'd walk, and once Weiss understood how serious they were, Jive settled on paying E-40's company $1 million, up front, for every album he delivered, in exchange for the privilege to distribute the record nationally (and additional economic benefits to E-40).

For context, I want you to think of the rest of the 90s alternative gone mainstream acts and what they were doing at the time. Everything was about maximizing mainstream popularity, and yet, here was E-40 keeping his music and profits tied back to himself and, as we'd soon find out, his local Bay Area scene. Big personality, yes, but minute-man energy all the way here.

Over the next decade, Stevens helped birth the hyphy scene that garnered even bigger mainstream focus in the early 2000s. While E-40 was putting his friends on to bigger exposure opportunities as everyone started chasing that hyphy sound for a minute, Stevens, again as a businessman, was re-allocating fresh profits into starting a wine company, building a food company, and organizing lifestyle media concepts - all locally focused.

These were long-term strategies with natural ceilings, but they also had very wide, and very local bases, that would show others what was possible, as well as help them create new opportunities to benefit.

E-40 and the Minutemen were following deeply similar playbooks. They were celebrating the local, they were building scenes out of the people who would show up live to commune with them, and they were dedicating their creative output to telling the stories of those people. They treated everything as a flyer to bring attention to the gigs their people put on. This way, when interest came knocking, they - and their friends - were ready to turn it into opportunity for their whole scene.

The Silent Majority

This is the secret to escaping compression. Small, live, community focused. The algorithms are going to take a lot of our attention, even if we do this. But they don't have to take as much of it.

So what do we do with all the people who don't know this (yet)? This is a real part of the problem. Music has clues here too.

We aren't all creators. We can't all be. And that's ok. Most people are exclusively consumers. The challenge is to not lose them from the non-creator culture we all benefit from being a part of.

I wrote a Cultish Creative post not long ago called "The Silent Majority" - and in it, I was sharing the stats about how 90% of people consume "content" passively, and yet we creators keep optimizing for the vocal 10% who engage with content actively. Online life distorts this. Massively.

It's not like you just have people bopping their heads along at shows who aren't buying any merch. Online, you have people who come to the show and then leave crazy comments on YouTube to sell crypto scams. If we pay too much attention to the commenters, we forget just how many people are in the non-commenter marketplace and mode.

The most popular, and mostly passive American activities, include things like listening to the radio, going bowling, and playing cornhole. This is what most of America is into. They aren't online relentlessly talking about it (although I am sure some are).

The reminder of that note was to myself, and you, but mostly me, to not miss the real audience. They're there, in between the ever widening gyres, passively and patiently not saying anything. They just want the next piece of content to come on that makes them feel good and like they belong.

People pay bills off of those communities. They are not to be mocked or laughed at or ignored. They are to be cultivated and we've forgotten how to address the non-commenters respectfully, where we help build confidence, so that they feel like the Mike Watt quote before, like they know somebody doing a cool thing and they're proud to know them.

When I moved my private networking activities to a live-recorded video-call setting, the one-to-one self-reported experiences of guests - it's off the chart. If I'm not building something to be Rogan-huge, I can make an entire episode for an audience of 3 (me and the two guests, so, audience of 2 and.. Oh never mind).

My instincts are my own algorithm. I just want the raw file, like Morgan said. And, the results are delightfully different. Every now and then when I get an email or a comment or a message from somebody watching, I know we're onto something.

I'm starting to see the show as a flyer for the gigs that are the rest of my work. It's a virtual version of hyper-local, but it's making for the most interesting ideas, and then if more like-minded people keep volunteering to be a part of it nationally - that's how stuff like hyphy happens. Or doesn't happen. But the scene - it's feeling right. It's feeling like we've raised the bar on what's possible for everybody who contributes.

It's really hard work to deliberately NOT make something that has to be scaled up. It's really hard work to create something so custom to you that it can't be replicated without everybody spotting the fraud. Courage, freedom, and liberty sound like singular ideas, like the old hit songs that everybody knows, but they're really just modes of confidence you can gather from the guy next to you at the plant. Step one is to notice.

Get Hyphy

You're not going to be surprised to know I feel this: Compression isn't killing meaning. It's distorting meaning, by reducing everything down to two ever-widening extremes, but - that's all compression is doing. And what music figured out is that whenever compression takes over, whenever we need an antidote, the local, live, communal experiences are waiting for us to show up and attend, or put on for ourselves and our friends.

I can't tell you what to do, but I can tell you what I'm doing. Rev your engines to double nickels on the dime and get hyphy with me. I can tell you these stories for days if I have to:

Keep your overhead low. Jam econo. Make art that doesn't require much to put in, but keeps all the emphasis on the experience. I don't need to make 2 million watchers have a great time, I only need to make 2 guests on the episode have a great time, and that is wonderfully liberating. Jam means fun and econo means there are no barriers for anybody to do it. All you have to find is some confidence.

Build real community, real locally. If and when you start earning money, spend it amongst your friends. Hyphy came from the originally negative slang term for hyperactive - meaning somebody you didn't want to be around. But, thanks to a shift in local attitudes, some "not bad meaning bad but bad meaning good" stuff, people flipped the word to signify just how alive they were. Remember that "no leader, no laggards" energy from the Minutemen? That's what real local community looks like - get people to share confidence and then share stories, and watch what starts to happen.

Let authenticity scale naturally. Don't worry about building to the moon. Worry about expanding who you are on your value set. Don't be a "Captain Save a Scene" - trying to rescue the compressed and distressed basket case commentators online who are just going to take advantage of your good intentions. Instead, build something so authentically yours that it can't be replicated without everyone spotting the fraud. Make a song out of it, and get others singing along. If enough others want to sing it, it will spread, naturally.

Those compressed American ideals - opportunity, courage, freedom - they're all waiting to come alive in your local community. They're probably all alive in your local community already, if you just start looking for it. The meaning of America isn't dying. It's stretching and being driven to extremes, but there's still a middle there, and the middle just needs some maintenance.

I believe in a deeply personal, deeply communal, and deeply creative middle. It's not a middle class, per se, and, thanks to the internet, it's connected all over the country and the world. All it's missing is more people who want to dig in to that connecting process.

I'm going to do my very small part. I'll keep introducing two strangers at a time. There's a big world out there and I'll never get to all of them, but I'm having too much fun plus now I wrote 3000+ words about how it's making the world a slightly better place so - why not?

Think about the raw file. Capture your own raw experiences. Most importantly, be present, and be alive in those experiences. Then, tell the tales to others. Share more of what you love, whatever it may be.

I'm giving D. Boon, the soul of the Minutemen who's no longer with us, the last word. If bucking compression can be reduced to one belief it's in this quote: "I'm not religious about God, I'm religious about Man."

Me too D. Boon, me too.