Fans of NYC rock band Geese are nostalgic for the days when social media bots merely decided elections, writes Paddy Carey.
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In case you missed it, a subcultural shitstorm emerged last week from a WIRED article suggesting the success of Geese - the Coachella-playing, eye-bagged art rock group - was a ‘psyop’. The piece referenced a Billboard interview with Chaotic Good, a marketing firm hired by the band, who confessed to (or bragged about) their AI-enhanced methods for spreading the word. WIRED followed up with Chaotic Good, who then confirmed they’d used these techniques to promote Geese.
For the uninitiated, Geese is a New York City band who’ve had a sharp spike in popularity over the past eighteen months. Part of it has been their album Getting Killed, part of it has been a legitimately great solo project from frontman Cameron Winter, and part of it has been the memeification of their easily stereotyped fanbase. The Guardian went as far as calling them the ‘new saviors of rock ‘n’ roll’. Part of their rise, apparently, has also been bots.
In the interview, a rep from the firm was happy to explain they’d used bots to, among other things, flood social media with artificial comments, posts, and views on Geese-related content. The bots presumably said things like “keep rockin’, Geese” and “wow, more nice music”, in the evidence-based hope users would be influenced by vibes*.
The CEO of Fingerprint, a digital fraud detector, also told Fast Company these firms unleash AI accounts to listen to artists’ tracks; this manufactures extra streaming numbers, and makes the artist more algorithm-friendly.
To quote them directly, Chaotic Good wanted to ‘create’ enough impressions to try to ‘simulate the idea’ their music was ‘trending or moving’.
The findings were met with backlash, frontlash, and (ironically) a bunch of Internet commentary that’s pro-Geese. The timing was fascinating - it was the week before Geese played a Justin Bieber cover to a raucous crowd at the Gobi Stage, and Winter possibly debuted as Olivia Rodrigo’s boyfriend. It doesn’t take a galaxy-brained PR expert to join the dots; was Chaotic Good’s interview also manufacturing a scandal to ‘simulate the idea’ Geese was culturally ‘trending or moving’ ahead of a huge week for the band?
Some outlets minimised the controversy, with particular scorn for WIRED’s clickbait-friendly label of ‘psyop’. The snarkiest retort was Paste’s, who patted WIRED on the back by saying ‘Congratulations, you discovered marketing’. The outlet saw Chaotic Good’s strategy as an understandable means of music promotion, and following a lineage of non-digital means of creating hype.
Further, it’s unclear if Geese had their finger on the trigger at any point - and it’s also unclear why WIRED singled out the band in particular. The Billboard interview never mentioned them, but was happy to name-drop former indie darlings like Tame Impala.
It was all a predictable cocktail of outrage and eye-rolling. Like most culture wars, the loudest voices were either conveying anger or passivity. In this case, the authors were probably communicating deeper feelings about the hellish soup we consume every day.
Last year, for the first time, bot traffic exceeded human traffic across the Internet. Bot presence increased eight times faster than verifiable human presence, as more and more artificial users make comments, book hotels, and wage cyberattacks. We’ve naturally learnt this, but our suspicion has often been toward “Pauline for PM 🟠” comments, or that recent Karl Stefanovic reel that honestly hurt my feelings. Our mistrust was reserved for serious stuff, and not for legitimate artists.
Vindication goes to fans of Dead Internet Theory, a conspiracy suggesting everything we read online is artificially manufactured. The theory has different tiers of severity. The strongest is that everything online has been created by a totalitarian entity, surveilling and controlling our every move. The weakest is that everything seen online has been created or manipulated to influence consumer habits. Bingo? At this point, your Internet fun (music, memes, recommending art) is just as AI-contaminated. Your shift at work has stopped being real, and so has your lunch break.
If there’s anything seminal about the story, it’s a mild (and possibly naive) surprise that AI slop has invaded ‘authentic’ parts of culture. WIRED were nonplussed by mega-acts Travis Scott or Coldplay hiring Chaotic Good, but were bothered by Geese doing the same. It appeared shocking to them that greasy-haired, beautifully rat-faced musicians were willing participants.
What we do with this information is unclear. Analog and human-to-human discovery of art is still possible, but it’d take a soul with great fortitude to resist all algorithmic suggestion. We’re adjusting to life on a dying Internet, and may need to make friends with the tools used by artists who are still performing with real guitars and real vocal cords.
In the meantime, enjoy Geese’s really terrific ‘Baby’ cover. Just don’t look closely at the images they put in the video.
* Readers should be assured I discovered Geese because I organically know all music, and have immaculate taste.
About the author
Paddy Carey
Paddy is clinical psychologist living in Naarm/Melbourne. He is also the writer of Australia’s best weekly quiz, The Weekly Fifty.
hard agree: these stories were much ado about nothing except contemporary marketing. someone from ATC, Radiohead’s management, spoke years ago about how they would game the algorithm, the techniques they used to reach the Pitchfork sheep etc.
all the marketing can do is bring the music to people. what it can’t do is make people like them. this story says less about Geese than it does about the herd mentality that flourishes in cultural consumption.
surely anything that stops a band being lost in a sea of algorithmic indifference is a good thing. Geese’s good luck is that their label can afford to buy this level of corporate marketing muscle—few acts can.