Nine People, One Album, One Night

I have written before about the group of nine that faded from twenty-two thousand messages a year to sixteen hundred, most of them links and congratulations.

On Thursday night into Friday morning it produced three hundred and ten messages in two hours, and I have read all of them twice, and I need to report something that complicates my own thesis.

They were not about the album. Perhaps forty of them were about the album. The rest were about 2019, when four of us drove to a show in a car with a broken air conditioner, and about a specific service station, and about a thing Dev said that night which two people remember differently and which was relitigated for about twenty minutes with enormous energy at half past one in the morning.

Dev, who left the chat in March without comment and whom I wrote about, replied. He is not in the chat. Someone screenshotted a message and sent it to him privately and he replied to that, and it was pasted back in, and for about fifteen minutes we had a nine-person conversation conducted through a human relay.

Here is the complication. In my earlier piece I argued the capacity had not gone anywhere and only the occasions had — that a group needs a reason to be in the same place on a Thursday and nobody has invented a replacement. I still think that is right. What I had wrong is the assumption that the occasion has to be an event in the world. This was not a wedding or a funeral or a crisis. It was a record coming out at midnight, which is the flimsiest possible pretext, and it worked exactly as well as the March week when someone's father died.

The pretext does not need to be important. It needs to be simultaneous. That is the whole mechanism and I have been overcomplicating it for two years.

The relay was Priya. She did it without being asked and without commenting on it, pasting his replies in with no framing, as though he were simply present.

Nobody said “tell Dev we miss him.” Nobody said “why doesn't he just come back.” Eight people conducted a conversation with a ninth through an intermediary and treated it as completely unremarkable, which it was not, and which everybody understood was not.

The obvious move is to add him back. It has been the obvious move for five months. The reason nobody does it is that adding him back would require someone to have decided he should be added back, and a decision has an author, and an author can be wrong in front of eight people.

So instead there is a relay. It is absurd and it is also, I want to be fair to us, a form of care. Priya spent fifteen minutes typing twice so that a man who left could be at a thing without having to come back to it.

It happened at 12:51, 1:04, 1:19 and 1:40. Each poster added their own preamble. Two of them said “ok but.”

Nobody pointed it out. In a healthy group chat you do not tell somebody that their line was already posted, because the posting was never about being first, and everyone knows this and nobody has ever said it out loud.