Steve Dyer

It seems like just yesterday that I declared August 25th to be a national holiday where all observers took time to sneak out of their jobs and have a quick nip or two, but it turns out it was five years ago. Where did the time go? Fuck if I know. It’s 2015 now and nothing new makes sense to me, particularly this Internet we have going on these days. If I understood it any better I would set up some kind of hashtag like #nationalduckoutforadrinkday or however the hell you do it, that seems like a lot of characters, and like an Instagram thing where you could all post pictures of yourselves drinking during office hours with artfully blurred faces or whatever, but I don’t and I’m not willing to learn so instead what I will do is just remind you that tomorrow, August 25th, is National Duck Out For A Drink Day. You and your colleagues should make plans now for how you will be getting your holiday on tomorrow. A late lunch? An early exit? An “off-site meeting” around 2? The choice is yours! Have fun with it! Like and share, or whatever you kids do nowadays. But the important thing is that you celebrate. Again, the most important thing to keep in mind is this: If you go to the bar during work, it’s like they’re paying you to drink. Remember the holiday and keep it holy.

Earlier today, I got this message through WhatsApp. I don’t use WhatsApp very much. I’ve received spam there before, but not much, and nothing that looked quite like this. A few moments later I saw this in my Twitter feed:

HOT TIP pic.twitter.com/VCJtyeLV9c

— Marisa Kabas (@MarisaKabas) August 21, 2015

Oh. Oooh!!

I searched around and found lots of complaints:

First instance of @WhatsApp spam? pic.twitter.com/lBhG2eDt4I

— Michael Wang (@michaelwang20) August 21, 2015

I just got… Spam on WhatsApp. Looked like an attempt to phish or scam somehow. "This is Jack from Morgan Stanley" Adding no Jack, bihhh

— Broke Boi Bill (@TheBeatnikBill) August 21, 2015

@WhatsApp Great, my first WhatsApp spam came in today. How did this guy get my number??? #nothappy pic.twitter.com/Av6qWjYH3X

— Alexander Teusch (@alexanderteusch) August 21, 2015

A number of people on Twitter complained that this was their first-ever WhatsApp spam; others noted that the spam was fairly obviously an attempt to pump and dump a low-cap stock in a new and novel way. So let’s see:

Here’s an article about the spike on this penny stock site, which notes the stock spiked after “a massive whatsapp text message went out this morning.” Not bad at all! WHAT A MOVE!!! Etc. The company description is excellent as well:

AVRA Inc (OTCBB:AVRN) is focused on solutions in the digital currency markets, particularly in offering payment solutions to businesses worldwide. The Company’s business model is divided into four distinct categories: AvraPay: to develop a complete, turn-key and painless way for merchants to accept Bitcoin as Payment; AvraATM: to promote usage and acceptance of digital currencies through the Company’s proposed network of ATMs; AvraTourism: to provide cryptocurrency payment processing solutions for merchants such as hotels and casinos; AvraNews: to provide a news portal focusing on digital currency news.

Yes. Correct. Bitcoin penny stocks.

By the time I got my spam, the stock had already tanked. But others had received the post earlier. WhatsApp groups seem to be limited to 100 users, so maybe my group was just a little too far down the list.

@_TC_ received something similar pic.twitter.com/oyiOh5eoSn

— Michael T. Halligan (@mhalligan) August 21, 2015

Did WhatsApp inadvertently help move hundreds of thousands of shares in a penny stock scam? Unclear. But that certainly seems to have been the intent. Pump-and-dumpers practice all kinds of creative manipulations and come up with new ones all the time. A few years ago, a scammer’s best bet might have been to issue a fake press release, hoping for coverage that might produce the desired effect—to “hack” the media, more or less.

But a savvy scammer today might see a similar opportunity in the platforms that offer access to potentially much, much larger audiences. WhatsApp passed 800 million users in April. A spammer has discovered a way to access at least some of those users, reaching them with messages that are fairly obviously spam but which, unlike spam emails, are not common enough that people have completely tuned them out.

Small cracks (security or design) in platforms of unprecedented size can present major opportunities for those looking to exploit them. Just ask any publisher :)

1. A data dump, which allegedly contains over 35 million email addresses, 33 million accounts with more detailed information (names and addresses), and every credit card transaction from the last seven years, is reported to have been posted online. It could be doctored or entirely fake, however: a hack was previously confirmed by the company, and early signs point to legitimacy. (Update: Brian Krebs was unsure, but now seems convinced; Ashley Madison’s official statement is ambiguous.)

2. It is not easily accessible to most internet users—it’s still in fairly raw form, in massive downloadable archives.

3. However, 4chan users, and undoubtedly others, are already combing through data and posting their discoveries. They started by searching for people with government email addresses, university email addresses, and addresses associated with major corporations. This is unfolding very quickly, already revealing the email addresses of students, teachers, public servants and municipal employees.

4. Anonymous internet posters have already discovered the email address of at least one public figure. In subsequent posts, they identify this person’s partner. This person has been confronted on Twitter; I would not be surprised if the partner is currently getting alarming emails from strangers. This happened almost instantly after the leak.

5. On 4chan, and on Twitter, users are posting plain, searchable chunks of the data. There appear to be ongoing attempts to make the data much more easily available. It seems very likely that there will be a way for curious, non-technically-inclined people to search for the names of friends, spouses, partners, or anyone else very soon.

6. We associate the cost of hacks mostly with identity theft and financial loss, from which most victims are pretty well insulated. Target assessed the cost of that hack at $148 million; outside financial institutions added another $200 million to that figure. You may know someone affected by that hack, but the resulting damages were likely mostly absorbed by their bank or credit card company. It was unsettling, yes, but it wasn’t widely ruinous.

7. This, on the other hand, is basically unprecedented? Most leaks of this size don’t implicate people in anything aside from patronizing major companies. This is new territory in terms of personal cost. The Ashley Madison hack is in some ways the first large scale real hack, in the popular, your-secrets-are-now-public sense of the word. It is plausible—likely?—that you will know someone in or affected by this dump.

8. Most of the responses and acknowledgements I’m reading now are either straight news stories or… jokes? I’m not sure anyone is really reckoning with how big this could be, yet. If the data becomes as public and available as seems likely right now, we’re talking about tens of millions of people who will be publicly confronted with choices they thought they made in private (or, in some cases, didn’t: Ashley Madison does not validate all email addresses). The result won’t just be getting caught, it will be getting caught in an incredibly visible way that could conceivably follow victims around the internet for years.

9. Such a scenario would present a number of new questions for many more internet users— questions the nature of which they’ve never really had to deal with. If the names and email addresses are available in a simple Google-like search, for example, will they search for their partners? Friends? Coworkers? Representatives? Family members? If so, why? If not, why not? Will you seek out the raw leak data after reading this post? Will news organizations, presented with user profiles associated with public figures, ask for comment? Treat each as news? Which ones? How? The last time people dealt with similar questions on a large scale was when troves of internal Sony documents, including emails, were leaked. Before that, it was when hundreds of private celebrity photos were stolen and released last year. That act was widely denounced, as were the millions of subsequent acts by the people who viewed the photos. But enough people looked at these photos to set traffic records for sites like Reddit. In any case, an incredible number of ethical questions are posed by this situation!

10. Anyway, I may be overestimating how far things will unfold, but this feels like a momentous event. Barring some sort of heroic cleanup effort on the part of the entire internet—which I guess, between Twitter moderation and aggressive lawyering, isn’t totally impossible—millions of lives may be about to change profoundly. It’s easy to kid about the fact that these people were using a site intended to help them cheat. But if understood in more abstract terms, this hack has the potential to alter anyone’s relationship with the devices and apps and services they use every day. Here were millions of people expecting the highest level of privacy that the commercial web could offer as they conducted business they likely wanted to keep between two people (even if a great number of the emails are junk, or attached to casual gawkers, the leak claims to contain nine million transaction records). This hack could be ruinous—personally, professionally, financially—for them and their families. But for everyone else, it could haunt every email, private message, text and transaction across an internet where privacy has been taken for granted. Ashley Madison, in the strange hacker economy of 2015, may have had an especially big target on its back. But it’s a powerful reminder of the impossibility of perfect privacy.

11. Welcome to the future, I guess!

The first time we were anything is the last time that anything was possible. We start off life totipotent: one cell, absolute potential, ready to knit itself out towards infinity. Totipotency is a state that lasts about four days and feels as distant as some other, wilder precedents: the fish, the amphibians, the speechless hominids staring at the sun. Every Sunday night proves it: You’ll never get this back. Cells themselves can regain totipotency¹, but the means by which they do so remain occult. We—that one cell turned into a degrading thirty-seven trillion—sense our lost totipotency only in the rarest of flashes, and I think, only at the very first second we feel a new kind of love.

Carly Rae Jepsen is a pop artist zeroed in on love’s totipotency: the glance, the kaleidoscope-confetti-spinning instant, the first bit of nothing that contains it all. This is audible and immediate in her voice, whose definitive quality is a childlike ardency inflected with coyness; she sings like her smile is bursting, like there are stars imploding in her eyes. Her music, strictly and deliberately generic, transcends its structure through this sonic technicolor hurry, this ecstatic sense of the possible, untethered from the way anything works.

And so Carly Rae’s music is tied up with an adolescent but ageless question: What’s more compelling—the falling or the love? Infatuation is an unrealized glimpse of future possible, and how you are as a person depends greatly on whether this vision supersedes, creates, or gets eclipsed by the actual possible. Carly Rae, anyway, is not interested in actual possible. She sidesteps the conundrum, and in a very particular way. The nameless, sparkling tension in her music comes from two parallel but opposite forces: Her substance regresses back to an impossible purity of emotional intention, while her form progresses towards an emotional climax that, necessarily imaginary, can never come. Carly Rae wants love; she wants nothing more than to want it—as in, she literally will not move past that point.

And so Carly Rae becomes somewhat of an unlikely mystic. In Decreation, the poet Anne Carson wrote about art without a personal center—a hole in the middle, left open for God. Carly Rae has resuscitated this idea, shot it through with molten sugar and planted it in genre. She’s displaced herself from the center of the pop album, a self-centered form, designating love—or E  • MO • TION, the album’s title—as her god.

Decreation’s title comes from religious philosopher Simone Weil’s idea of self-erasure. Carson quotes her: “If only I could see a landscape as it is when I am not there.” That’s the project that occupies much of E • MO • TION, its diffuse and unbearable babyish exaltation the sound of a highly pop martyrdom. The love of Carly Rae’s sonic imagination is distinctly spiritual: directed with unimaginable force at some distant object, further distinguished by having no subjectivity at all. Piece by piece, she insulates her subject matter against self-pollution, building a cathedral out of crystal and neon and smoke.

She stays, for the most part, absent, and in doing so becomes wildly present. The productive paradox of the mystic is in here: You can’t have erasure without a self to erase. When you raze your own presence, you are empowered by what goes up in place of it; the mystic becomes stronger in a degree that corresponds to self-extinguishment. The thirteenth-century mystic Marguerite Porete, eventually killed as a heretic for claiming to be able to access the divine directly, cried out in her writing to be an “annihilated soul.” Six centuries later, Weil wrote, “But when I am in any place I disturb the silence of heaven with the beating of my heart.”

Decreation draws heavily on both Porete and Weil, and for the writer, the paradox gets sharper. “Withness” was the problem, wrote Carson: “I cannot go towards God in love without bringing myself along.” The teller can’t disappear from what she is telling, and what’s more, a writer’s vocation renders this project disingenuous from the start.

For the pop star, disappearance is even less fundamentally possible, and Carly Rae—productively—is not always content to stay on the outside. It’s in the friction between her self-effacing vacancy and desperate presence that she achieves something like genius. The synth-blistered, drug-distilled, hyper-real sax howl that opens the album into “Run Away With Me” opens up into a tripleted club beat that, by the chorus, has Carly Rae pounding her fists on the walls of her cathedral she built to protect what she’s looking for. Baby, she sobs, take me to the feeling. It’s the best pop song of the year.

Carly Rae has always been in pursuit of interpersonal totipotency, the bubblegum/impossible/first kind of love. She is, really, the queen of it: Her breakout track, “Call Me Maybe,” situated pure heart-eyes potential in a single transaction that’s almost sure to go nowhere but is, at that moment—and here’s what those skipped-beat synth riffs will convince you—capable of leading to an eternity of bliss. Hey, I just met you/ and this is crazy. The text-message lyrics are fitting; infatuation is the dumbest, most colloquial thing in the world.

Because of this focus, Carly Rae is often criticized as being juvenile—isn’t she actually almost thirty, people will say, accurately—or lowest common denominator, for doing things like placing an entire hit chorus on the stairway-to-nowhere of I really, really, really, really, really, really like you. She’s also criticized for being, I guess, unsophisticated, but a few times through E • MO • TION and it’s obvious she is in control of the genre, rather than the opposite. Her music is often read as unintentionally blank when it seems to me to be obviously deliberately so, and much of the basis for all this confusion, I think, is the fact that she appears somewhat narrative-less: At a time when music criticism is both overworked (hello) and heavily reliant on intentional fallacy, pop stars are expected to provide either biographical or signatory hooks on which to hang a reading (or ideally, like Taylor Swift and Beyonce, both at the same time). Carly Rae was on Canadian Idol, released a debut album, released “Call Me Maybe,” another album, and now she’s here. Her hooks are only, and abundantly, musical. Outside that, she has her thicket of bangs, and fin.

So, though E • MO • TION should by all rights be enormous, Carly Rae seems paired with this basic confusion: Why isn’t she clearer about how we’re supposed to read her, why isn’t she bigger, why don’t we have more to work with here, people will say. Even people who love the music could wonder: How are the songs so direct and the artist so absent, the licks so obvious and the image so dissipated in smoke? The listener, I think—like the critic—wants to be the intermediary: to be pulled into the equation between the artist and what the artist seeks. But Carly Rae, like Marguerite Porete (who, again, was burned at the stake for it) seems to be after direct communion. Her willingness to be directly possessed by emotion—to regress, away from narrative, away from audience, back to that original point—reminds me of Porete’s idea of the soul stripped naked by divine presence. A soul:

to whom one can teach nothing

from whom one can take nothing away

to whom one can give nothing

and who has no will at all.

To be an original in this respect does not necessitate that Carly Rae be original in any other whatsoever. Melodically, she’s right on top of other people’s territory for much of the album. “Making the Most of the Night,” co-written by Sia, sounds like her; “Warm Blood” sounds like Lykke Li on moon rocks; “All That” perhaps should have been Jessie Ware; “LA Hallucinations” (whose first line is incredible: I remember being naked/ We were/ Two freaks just fresh to LA) has a tack-to-delectability ratio and hilariously declamatory chorus that conjures Britney Spears in “Born To Make You Happy”; the great bonus track “I Didn’t Just Come Here to Dance” sounds like what Taylor Swift’s next album will sound like if she keeps dating Calvin Harris. Vocally, Carly Rae gestures towards Ariana Grande on “Boy Problems”—whose first hook is so far up and forward in the nose that I sneezed in sympathy—and, with her roughed-up alto pulled up into little-girl coquetry, she sounds like Selena Gomez on every other song.

But “Run Away With Me” is the song that only Carly Rae could do, the song that epitomizes and matches and clarifies her artistic center. Listen to it again, right now. Robyn could get the closest—Robyn can do pure longing—but it would be more complicated: Robyn is as sad as she is buoyant, always knowing, always wrecked. Katy Perry could do it, too, but then it would be slick, anthemic, the finish line of the race rather than the gun that begins it. Taylor Swift could inhabit and electrify the sheer direct pull of the song, the big Swedish chorus. But it’s the defining feature of Taylor Swift: She is never, ever, ever going to be de-centered.

So, Carly Rae is almost everyone, and in the process she becomes no one—just not in the way that people might think. She’s not derivative but absorptive. E • MO • TION burns three decades of pop down to a few heartstrings and plays them from a home base of pure need. And in the playing, Carly Rae becomes invisible, the Casper of pop music, this album her Lazarus machine. There’s her resolution to that paradox. If only I could see a landscape as it is when I am not there. One way to do it is to be a ghost.

I feel sort of a reverse recognition when I listen to Carly Rae. I have never been good at valuing infatuation or falling helplessly to my needs, but I would like to be. Love is steady even when it’s enveloping; it’s an endpoint that’s always felt un-mysterious and immediate to me. The great, stupid, fascinating mystery is that vectored positioning—that ambient hunger, that sense of possibility, the deliberately thoughtless worship of love before it complicates or decays. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to stay there, hovering at the unreal beginning, under a spell of violent self-enchantment? Tearing your eyes out and replacing them with stars?

Gimme love, goes one of her choruses. Gimme love, gimme love, gimme love, gimme love, gimme touch/ Cause I want what I want/ Do you think I want too much? That’s Carly Rae for you. The world, as they say, is a vampire; by sheer force of wanting, Carly Rae outpaces the world. On the chorus of “LA Hallucinations,” there’s a line: There’s a little black hole in my golden cup/ So you pour and I’ll say stop. It’s a neat and perfect recompression of her genre, whose broadly painted cravings are just accessories to infatuation; it’s a sixteen-word explanation of her endlessly desiring ethos, and of endlessly desiring, you and me.

1. Well, pluripotency, but close enough.

Cherish the daylight. Sunset Tonight is at 8pm for the last time until May http://t.co/PB3oYLlEOo pic.twitter.com/5aqOZ6Y8j1

— NY1 Weather (@NY1weather) August 11, 2015

I told you people this would happen so long as the Earth continued to revolve around the sun. But did you believe me? You did not. And now winter is coming. Winter is almost here. Enjoy what light you have left, it won’t last. The days will become shorter. Your days will become shorter. All things become shorter. What’s next for you is winter. Forever.