So you want to contact Brian Eno? (2000)

But as those chunks [of time] get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly. What replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time, and that will, with luck, be read by many people, there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons, and a few speeches given at various conferences.

That is not such a terrible outcome, but neither is it an especially good outcome. The quality of my e-mails and public speaking is, in my view, nowhere near that of my novels. So for me it comes down to the following choice: I can distribute material of bad-to-mediocre quality to a small number of people, or I can distribute material of higher quality to more people. But I can’t do both; the first one obliterates the second.

There is some portion of famous people, particularly ones that have passed a bit into obscurity where a bit of fan contact would probably be welcome. Unfortunately it's hard to tell who and "a bit" would almost always be far less than the amount received if it got out that they didn't mind fan contact.

I've sent an occasional no-response-expected messages of thanks to the creators of stuff that I've liked-- as I've always appreciated receiving those myself.

I thought Eno's message in "exhibit 1" was thoughtful, well written, and worth the read.

I one read an insightful comment on reddit about the perspective of a youtuber about letting fans down at conventions because they didn't live their "on" youtube personality 24/7. It discussed how easy is is to disappoint people by just being human and what a tremendous responsibility having fans can be. From that perspective it isn't hard to see how just minimizing contact might be best for everyone. [Alas, I can't find it now to link to it here, as google has become substantially useless for searching for specific reddit comments]

Knowing his reclusion I wasn't expecting to get a response. Which was good, since I didn't receive one.

http://dokearney.blogspot.com/2016/01/a-beautiful-exit.html

Cast in this unlikely role • Ill-equipped to act • With insufficient tact • One must put up barriers • To keep oneself intact

[...]

Living in a fish eye lens • Caught in the camera eye • I have no heart to lie • I can’t pretend a stranger • Is a long-awaited friend

  Living in a fish eye lens
  Caught in the camera eye
  I have no heart to lie
  I can't pretend a stranger
  Is a long-awaited friend

I have never been able to successfully replicate this sequence of events with another musician though....

However, emails are an area where something better could be done. Imagine if you were a famous person and you had a definite idea of who you wanted to hear from.

Friends and family would be whitelisted. Amazon too.

Everyone else could then be spam filtered to 'reject' or 'discard' their emails.

At the server level you could reject everything in a foreign language. Or with an attachment.

You could also have your own stop words. So Eno could have 'Music For Airports' as a phrase that triggered the response 'no, sorry mate, thanks for writing though'.

Now what would happen if people did get stock 'don't bother' emails? If they were well written and had some politeness to them then I think people would prefer that to 'well, he never replied, sob, sob...'.

It is about using a customer service ethos, which could be hard to imagine if you are a famous person and therefore centre of the known universe.

There is an aspect of 'proof of work' with email as it is. DMARC is a thing, reverse PTR checks and everything else an email has to get right shows that your email has at least tried.

There are also 'header checks' for proof of identity.

Right now, if some producer at the BBC needed Eno to star on Desert Island Discs then they would be able to contact Eno's agent, give their BBC email address and title, then get a yes or no straightaway.

In this the 'proof of work' would be going through the agent who would obviously think 'yeah, Brian would like that' to forward on the enquiry. They would check the person was from the BBC and it would all be good. Heck, they would probably know the producer anyway and the producer would have LinkedIn and other credentials.

The agent might not be replaceable by a postfix main.cf/master.cf configuration but it must be possible to get something better than anonymity.

I also think that emails received - even if never replied to - is an important metric. Imagine you thought you were really famous and that everyone was wanting to email you for that to not actually be the case.

This does remind me a little of Twitter though. People in the replies just begging for a reply or RT from a celeb. People will say ridiculous things just to get even a negative interaction with a celeb.

Why do they care?

Interesting that it's old enough they didn't just say "spam" (and in fact don't refer to it as spam, though that word was already in use by 2000....)

[0] Canadian Tom Third. Sorry for that, Tom!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYX86SW9rcg

The whole In A Room album (with Harmonia Ensemble) is very good, one of my favourites.

I come away with the impression that this is someone whose work has fulfilled him, and he is someone who doesn't seek the benefits or potential paths that many people would try to exploit success for.

He's not using his name to seek fame, be really highly regarded, or make great wealth from it. His work just has happened to give him some of that as a side benefit in his mind. I wouldn't even say "he's made it in life" in the traditional way you might say about someone who reached monetary satisfaction. He seems to have reached the fulfillment of his purpose in life, and that is kind of refreshing.

Not satisfying for fans, but refreshing. And maybe he's right that some of the negative reaction to this kind of perspective shows exactly the stress and "badness" of fame that creates a sense of entitlement among your appreciators.

Today it seems that every media/IG/whoever is seeking the likes (even you or I do a little of this every time you post something, right)? And the dopamine hit, or doors that it opens to new, interesting things, which probably turn out to be less interesting after a while, or result in more stress after you see what it is you're really pursuing.

Great for him to have reached this point in life -- although as I said, unsatisfying for his fans. Maybe it is an aspect of the human condition that when you've reached satisfaction in life, you actually become a bit disappointing to others -- exactly because you no longer feel the need to engage in the behavior to be an excitement, inspiration, false role model to them. I wonder if he at least plays that role for his friends or family, the ones who he does want to expend that mental energy on?

He's given us so, so many excellent recordings already.

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