Conflicts of Interest

In ‘the real world’, a conflict of interest alludes to a form of corruption. Personal gain comes from a professional role (the director’s son got the job!); holding public office becomes financially advantageous (the councilor’s cousin won the tender!); funds that no one knows about end up in familiar pockets (the CEO’s mate won the community grant!). The professional managerial class is well versed in such conflicts, and manages them through a COI board, who ensures that specific personnel are kept at an appropriate legal distance; but this rarely prevents corruption in practice (aren’t councils, real estate and developers just operating as a collective?) When a ‘conflict’ of interest gets raised along the lines of a creative relationship, it’s often seen as the same thing. The charge of nepotism, or a lack of objectivity, is inevitable when responding to the work of friends, mostly because engagement is conflated with promotion, and thus profit, which I promise isn’t a concern for niche writers with small publishers.

So let me declare something of a conflict of interest here: Cher Tan is a friend (we catch up if time allows when crossing cities), a peer (we have written each other reference letters), and a collaborator (a band I’m in played our first show at one of this book’s launch events). Before I even read Peripathetic: Notes on (un)belonging, I knew it was going to scratch an itch I’d carried with me a long time, which means (and this is a critical red flag) I genuinely liked it before it existed. This is all to say that there was no way for me to write an objective review – a review of the book at an authorised distance – and when asked if I was interested in doing so, I felt that my proximity to it – a subjective license – would have to be the very point of the essay. I’m not just being cute here about the common (unspoken) practice of reviewing a friend’s work: Tan and I both have an interest in subcultures, and I’ve long been convinced that a subculture functions when it’s built upon shared subjectivities. Tan writes of this indirectly throughout her essay collection, filled with short and fragmentary pieces of wisdom about what it’s like to operate within and without subcultures (including, but not limited to, DIY punk, online piracy, niche sections of the early internet), and had me thinking about what it means for our work to converge rather than conflict.  

The ‘convergence of interest’ is a lesser-known notion, and means different things to different sectors. Foundational critical race theorist Derrick Bell coined the ‘Interest-Convergence Dilemma’ in 1980, describing the patterns by which civil rights were granted to black Americans only when those social changes benefited white elites, where this upward convergence from the minority populations to the establishment represented a form of co-option. Elsewhere, ‘convergence of interest’ in business studies sometimes refers to the organisational benefit of a manager-owner relationship (this the DIY community knows well), while in medicine it has become the banner under which commercial and profit-making incentives have become legitimised in the provision of care and education.

In a global order where powered interests converge and collude to support the growth of capital, the advancement of geopolitical strategy, or the maintenance of social hierarchies, it seems vital to me that subcultures fight fire with fire. Tan so often opens a window onto such ideas to the subcultural player that this might even be the core point of her work. In the context of subcultures that resemble movements (punk, DIY, activism), Tan is constantly examining ideas of belonging and unbelonging, and in doing so, has persuaded me that we can boil all our interests down to one form or another of conflict or convergence.  

Peripathetic questions the elements that make up a subculture, and the ways in which its boundaries are created and eroded. Reading it made me feel slightly less absurd about believing that the formation of a like-minded massive can be built into something more meaningful and effective. It publishes at a time when we’re exposed to all kinds of convergences of interests by powerful institutions. This is important, because when the State Library of Victoria abruptly cancelled writer’s workshops by three Australian writers due to their advocacy for Palestine, I felt closer to the writers, and further away from the State Library. When the ABC sacked a journalist for her tweets in support of Palestine? Closer to the journalist, much further from the national broadcaster. When an ALP senator was disciplined and intimidated for crossing the floor to recognise a Palestinian state? Closer to the senator, further from the ALP. I’m sure you see what I’m getting at here, but who is really in conflict with whom? If all these institutions are showing their true colours, and we have the capacity to show ours, then there must be something to be gained by drawing up these boundaries. As Tan herself declares: ‘to find a collective one has to show oneself’.

Cher Tan and I know each other through what might loosely be referred to as the DIY punk underground. Centred around punk music and its many subgenres, this subculture is formed around the ‘Do-It-Yourself’ ethic (an autonomist framework that encourages taking control of all elements of production to create and distribute your music), and declares itself ‘underground’ of a broader culture. At its best, this subculture really does offer an alternate world: it takes anti-capitalist forms, it welcomes newcomers into the fold, and it provides a third place outside of work and personal life. If I had never discovered Sydney’s DIY underground, I never would have picked up an instrument, started a band or a record label, toured another country as a ‘musician’, nor persisted with my interests in writing. Just as Tan writes: without it, ‘I might not have survived’, and with it, ‘I learned that I could do anything.’ 

Such origin stories are common across this subculture, and though Tan doesn’t waste time hammering that point as I do here, the snippets of her biography that appear in fragments through the course of the book show a life primed for subcultural exploration. An early job running over seventy-hour working weeks in a Singaporean internet cafe, we later find, facilitated much of her organising as a member of the global punk community. Via the internet (almost a main character in the book), she starts a blog ‘to archive obscure nu-metal’, writes scene reports, and puts her ‘boss’s printer to good use’ in spreading the word. Tan’s discovery of one punk community (she describes, with visceral familiarity, meeting a LiveJournal friend for the first time at a punk show) leads her to a found family, discovering small collectives that in time become an escape from day-to-day unbelonging. After describing feelings of alienation in her work and social life: ‘then I’d hang out with a bunch of other 30-something misfits and we’d be the most normal thing in the world’. 

When Tan describes that ‘it is the normality of weirdness amongst others that allows my self to continue the work of living’, we see the ways in which subcultures come to mean so much to people, as trivial as they may seem to an outsider (come watch an adult slam-dance). And although Tan notes critically that the appeal of ‘weirdness’ is clearly filtered through hierarchies of race, sexuality, gender, class, and standards of beauty, she adds that despite their many flaws, smaller communities within the DIY underground at least continue ‘to serve as a rebellious sanctuary’.

In such sanctuaries, there is an internal tension, though, that is always responsive to external conditions (‘Belonging and unbelonging as multi-pronged masks, its spikes squaring off one another’). Each of the boundaries of the ‘DIY punk underground’ is disputed. One person’s punk band is another’s pop band (I prefer something on a garage-to-hardcore spectrum, others lean towards power violence or harsh noise, we cross paths more rarely than I’d like); DIY to me means no needless middle people (sponsors, managers, booking agents), while others deem these either appropriate or necessary; and ‘underground’ is a term that hints at an operation beneath (in my mind, firmly opposed to) the broader culture, while others are happy to overlap with commercially minded artists.  

These are maddeningly complex notions that Tan finds a way to interrogate in the defining section of the book, ‘The Lifestyle Church’. Here, subcultural philosophy is explored in fragmentary passages: a collection of quotes, excerpts from fanzine interviews Tan was a part of, interconnected mini-essays. It opens with the words, ‘There is always a “before” and “after” once you begin’, and is then written almost entirely in retrospect , all alluding to the lost promise of the ideal that opened up new possibilities to Tan as a young punk in Singapore. I noticed in myself a kind of instinctual affront while reading ‘The Lifestyle Church’, the kind of defensiveness that comes only when you’re holding on to something you believe in, all the while knowing that this belief might be misplaced. But this chapter reads as much as a sales pitch for the DIY underground as it does an obituary for its false promise, where it was ‘doomed from the start’. She describes a kind of subcultural erosion – ‘a little decontextualisation here, a little appropriation there’ – where ‘we were fuck-ups’ (yes!), ‘but we had something to sell’ (noooo!). She cites the ‘consumerism inherent to the sub-culture’, which reminds me that as much as I loathe corporate partnerships, forgoing those avenues means costs must of course be covered by sales! 

When Tan writes, still looking to the past, that ‘the underground has always been about what could be’, it made me wonder about the point of this subculture too. Whether it is really a place to arrive at (mission accomplished), or a system in flux. Tan pushes and pulls at different aspects of subcultural activity in what felt like a series of waves, where each succeeds and fails in predictable ways. A subculture of resistance that always seems to give in: ‘We were kidding ourselves when we thought we were doing anything to annihilate the status quo.’ But maybe there’s a gap to be filled here: rather than annihilate it (a joke my friend once made: ‘what if we raged with the machine’), the promise is that a world with no need for the co-opting force of the ‘aboveground’ can be discovered: maintaining and caretaking a tradition in a sense, for as long as we have the ability to do so.  

Although Tan writes that ‘our capacities for refusal are shrinking simply because there isn’t a groundswell of collective energy’, I still sense a need to return to subcultural alternatives. The protest movement for a free Palestine has shown that the promise of that collective energy does exist, and can be transmuted consistently across all our practices, subcultural or not. To generalise, the options are then to pander to institutional requirements (keep your politics quiet, understand that your work must produce something by way of financial or social capital for an organisation), or to reject those requirements entirely (produce and organise your own work without external permission). This type of rejection takes a sacrifice: pay, ‘opportunity’, a pat on the back from someone you’ve never heard of but are told is ‘really important in the sector’. If we accept that we can generate all we need from below, to turn away from what’s institutionally recognised and find what we want and need within (our versions of) the underground, then maybe we can be freed from compromised positions. For all the disputes that surround the community (‘rightly’ or ‘wrongly, bitch about selling out’), Tan says it best when she declares, ‘you’re either in it or you’re not’.

Tan is particularly skilled at identifying and analysing the demarcations between us as they pertain to matters of culture and subculture, work and technology, authenticity, punk communities and the internet. There is reference to our split realities, where ‘meatspace’ and ‘cyberspace’ host our divided selves on one level, and where we adopt as many disparate selves as languages depending on the worlds we inhabit. She discusses the intertwining of her many sociolects, whether formally recognised ones (such as ‘Singlish’, the creole she grew up alongside), informal ones like ‘Netspeak’ (developed alongside the rise of the internet), and ‘ocker’ (adopted following her move to Australia in her twenties.) She alludes to the self that is found at work (‘are you able to block out these dates?’), among friends (‘lol r u srs’), and further, among communities: punk, diasporic and otherwise. Tan describes the feeling of ‘pride and disgust’ when one vernacular enters the realm of another, and explores whether or not it’s possible to ascertain your true self: ‘you’re not the same to your drinking friend to your lover to your colleague to your internet friend to your casual acquaintance to your dog’. 

But how to delineate these many selves? Moreover, which one is ‘real’? To Tan, this search has as much in common with a role-playing game as anything else, her writing constantly making reference to the eerie experiences that come with the blurred boundaries of contemporary living. Terms like ‘uncanny valley’, ‘cognitive dissonances’, and ‘suspension of (dis)belief’ are littered throughout the book, and are all apt descriptors of today’s intertwined (meat/cyber-)lives, identifying in our surrounds an intangible and unattainable mission to locate something we want or need among ‘the unrealness of our current reality’. Of course, Tan had pre-empted this, positing the search for the true self as a ‘psychological war’. Having learned during her upbringing in the ‘illiberal democracy’ of Singapore to ‘disentangle the many layers of propaganda’ fed through state-controlled media, she is attuned to untruths and inauthenticities in all their forms. Tan makes immediate comparison to the Israeli government’s ‘hasbara’ program, an ‘information warfare’ strategy that seeks to re-interpret every horror the state enacts in Palestine as somehow defensive, benign, or in defence of democracy and freedom. The feeling of being constantly lied to creates a sensation where ‘everything appears uncannier and uncannier’, a paranoia deepening ‘as the real becomes swallowed up’. This gives more weight to the notion of authenticity, truth, and the real than just the loss of social capital, insofar as each co-optive step increasingly aligns one’s interests with the powerful.

Tan writes that ‘we are living in a time where these boundaries [between our various selves] are becoming superfluous, which can ironically prompt a chase for that one single self’, and it’s true that buried among our (sub)cultural performances, embedded in our various vernaculars, it often feels as though there might be one hidden true self screaming to get out, if we could only find it. The problem is not only that it’s harder to see what is or isn’t real, but also that it’s not so clear exactly who is responsible for expressing our borders and boundaries either. Tan again: ‘If authenticity is a social relation, then we can say that we are more authentic to others the closer we reach its ideal, one that is mostly attained through others’ perceptions.’

It might well be a contemporary pathology: that few of us are truly willing to give up on the many wants and needs of these disparate parts of ourselves, convergent or conflictual as they may be. Tan expands on this in terms of the postmodern turn in nineties’ mainstream culture, where we are ‘all in on the gag’ and ‘self-aware enough to reckon with multiple cognitive dissonances’. In doing so, a form of co-option takes place where, to discourage the sacrifice that comes with going underground, you’re offered the chance to have your cake and eat it too. An extension of this nineties postmodernism (Tan cites David Foster Wallace’s essay, ‘E Unibus Pluram’, which, among other examples, describes an Alf advertisement where the puppet instructs the viewer to: ‘Eat a whole lot of food and stare at the TV!’) is the contemporary all-knowing text which panders to a market that desires critique, but does not want to go digging in the subcultures to find an alternative to the mainstream. Major TV shows like Succession, White Lotus or Squid Game (a once scathing critique of capitalism that now boasts marketing tie-ins with multinationals from Samsung to McDonalds), films like Triangle of Sadness, or any other number of putatively satirical texts about the rich act to satiate our sense of injustice (the elites look stupid behind closed doors!), while pandering to a brain-washed need to always desire more (that champagne-laden-yacht holiday sure looks lovely!). You can retain your ‘underground’ anti-capitalist progressive sensibilities, all while indulging in the sin of watching a big-budget production based on the Intellectual Property of a children’s toy (among other examples of independent filmmakers co-opted into Hollywood, see Barbie or The Joker). When Tan writes, ‘Each performance assembles a specific character in the tunnels of your mind, driven by unconscious desires and repulsions’, I think about how often those internal characters are at war with each other’s interests too. 

In 2019, having tested the patience of Centrelink, I was told to apply for the New Enterprise Incentive Scheme: a training program that is something of a scam for privatised ‘job providers’ that grants you thirty-nine weeks of the going welfare rate, no questions asked, on the condition that you start a small business. I’d started a DIY record label that couldn’t possibly turn a profit (I later almost declared bankruptcy), and, expecting to be laughed out of the building, I found that this venture was really no different to my classmates’. These included: a prospective artisanal baker obsessed with blending charcoal into her products; an importer/exporter of laser-cut trinkets; a cold-call telemarketing scammer (not kidding); and an eighteen-year-old web designer whose target market, he insisted, was ‘pensioners’. What I learned as a NEIS student was that, outside of some detail around the tax system, I’d learned it all already while flubbing around in the punk scene as a ‘sole trader’ (DIY or die, right?). Tan is onto this too. When eulogising the underground, she states that in allowing you to ‘teach yourself how to be savvy with business’, it can end up being ‘an incubator for the outside world’. It was true that if I just hid all the ostensibly radical elements of the DIY world (antagonism, subversion, aversion to profit, funny band names) then the entire skill set developed in those communities was transferable to the world of business. When (only half-joking) I detailed my cassette mixtape mail-order service in the business plan we were required to complete, I was complimented for being ‘entrepreneurial’. Feeling my selves merge in a sickening way, I then had a minor meltdown at the Bankstown Hotel.

This kind of adaptation and code-switching can be interpreted in many ways: some of it is a necessity (best not wear a Butthole Surfers t-shirt to a conference), some of this is survival (best not discuss your sexuality at your rugby league job), and some of it is just boundary setting (best not tell your colleagues about the generator show your band is playing in an alleyway.) But letting those boundaries fall can tend instead towards another form of co-option. Even in the supposedly anti-capitalist subculture of punk, ‘we all had something to sell’. Tan also does well to expand her critiques to more important targets than just the ‘sell out’ (a term she deems ‘anachronistic’, but one that I think needs a reboot), exploring the ways by which every step forward, when it looks good, gets subsumed by the aboveground. At first, notable underground figures become ‘funneled upstream towards a kind of underground-adjacent mainstream’, and looking larger still, observes that even ‘the word “community” became co-opted by tech corporations’. Tan describes how the skills of subversion (now a synonym for ‘innovation’ and ‘disruption’) end up being a competitive advantage in a corporate world that increasingly adopts the language and source material of sub/counter-culture. Even Silicon Valley tech workers have now graduated from prescription amphetamines to hallucinogens as a work drug, seeking to gain an edge over the populace they hope to innovate themselves away from (acid was supposed to be our trick!).

Tan demonstrates these many disconnects through the practice of shanzhai (knock off tech brands like Nokir, Samsing or Anycat phones that rebel against large corporates), global punk networks, the class relations between writers and readers within the book industry, literary pseudo-hoaxers like W.G. Sebald (who adopted friends’ stories as his own), small details shared with co-workers among dozens of shit jobs, and most thrillingly, the promise of the early internet in the ‘Speed Tests’ chapter. Using the example of torrenting hub The Pirate Bay, she contrasts ‘the sharing of information’ with ‘anti-piracy propaganda’. The chapter is broken up by the ‘copyleft’ symbol, a related movement for open access to information that I remember vividly through torrenting networks and open-source software (the source code for the initial entry in the now AAA video game franchise Doom, for example, was made public five years after release to encourage the efforts of a thriving online community; much has changed since 1997!).  

Tan writes about the outcasts who created these worlds, and the canny practices of the subversive pirate, like the efforts to circumvent YouTube’s content monitoring software by filming a cat watching new release movies on a TV set. In doing so, she re-litigates the (essentially closed) conversation about Intellectual Property, demonstrating the ways that torrenting networks paved the way for the victory of the anti-piracy lobby over online subcultures, which were eroded whenever they allowed themselves to be co-opted by capital. Tan recalls that Kazaa’s attempt to bring in paying customers depleted the number of seeders and eventually killed its networks. The same thing happened to LimeWire (which, hilariously, recently attempted to re-launch itself as a NFT platform for the music industry), and is happening now, too, to Discogs (who are attempting to introduce paid features that no one really wants). In each case, the pressure to conform to ‘legal’ practice meant that when institutions conspired to ‘see ownership as morally defensible’ then ‘anything else [became] theft’. Now, we have dozens of streaming services acting, in a sense, as paid-for torrenting networks to source multimedia content for what feels like ‘free’ consumption. In practice, the co-option has been so effective that we are now patterned to be against piracy in practice, regardless of our ethical position on open information (there’s a particular irony here that, in many cases, paid-for streaming services really are modelled on early torrenting platforms). To resign yourself to a litany of paid subscription services, then, is a form of giving in, even though it feels increasingly futile to resist them. The funny thing is that online subcultures based around, say, open-source information are no harder to find than they ever were. Tan even cites studies that state opposing truths, that piracy rates have never been lower, and never been higher. So what is true and real here?  

Peripathetic is refreshing on many levels, not just because it engages with a niche subculture so close to my own heart, but because it accurately portrays a world that’s continuously churning. Diving into its waters and taking notes on both ends of the stream, Tan never suggests that there’s a neat ending. In her fragmentary style, origin stories are only important in service of the theme: elements of her biography, her research interests, and her observations are all part of a sample set, and she doesn’t seek to build artificial dams for the sake of narrative convenience. Through notes, vignettes, dispatches, stories of experience, reflections on what those meant in the scheme of things, she exercises a freedom of form and subject matter to portray the increasingly complicated worlds we’re locked into online. In its unique rhythms, Peripathetic mirrors what it is like to read in our contemporary reality: a few pages here, an online essay there, a meme or a text message in the other hand, all while a TV show runs in the background. 

It’s welcome, too, that Peripathetic pushes against a contemporary non-fiction market that consistently fails readers by marketing the author first, and focusing on a singular hot topic that, in some marginal way, overlaps with the author’s biography. Such books are sold as ‘urgent calls to action’, yet collapse their subject matter into the story of an individual, suggesting that, if the author could only be cured, then the ‘issue’ could be resolved too (flick ahead to the final chapter to find any number of rushed solutions as demanded by the editor in the final edit). Tan’s work isn’t so limited, and it reaches out to connect multi-faceted issues to describe the world as it is. This creates an ecosystem of ideas, where everything is interrelated through some small detail, rendering legible the complexities of (cyber)life and its infinite possibilities.

Tan is also unique in that the presentation of her work is consistent with her own analyses; she does not pander to the market. The books surrounding Peripathetic on the shelves will have back covers filled with blurbs from well-known media commentators (sometimes hacks), former politicians (sometimes disgraced), and other writers of renown (sometimes the author’s university tutors). It’s common to find out more about what the author and publisher’s professional network thinks of the book than what the book itself is actually about. Yet Tan refused to seek or publish testimonials, worked towards an unconventional cover that speaks to the work over the accepted wisdom of marketing departments (A-format books that take up more space on the shelves, brightly-coloured enormous fonts that are readable as Amazon thumbnails), and launched it on her own terms via a series of events featuring like-minded authors and DIY punk bands. For the publisher (NewSouth Books) to encourage these steps shows that there is room for authors who understand their niche.

In ‘Lingua Franca’, Tan writes that the ‘essay started out as a plea for understanding’ before immediately qualifying that with: ‘Whose understanding?’ I feel the same way about this review! It sometimes seems silly to put so much time and energy into the minor squabbles of the global punk scene (does it really matter if a US hardcore band is earning well enough to pay for a billboard?), but I think a broader analysis of Tan’s work shows that all these apparently innocuous things can matter at least by way of analogy. The place of each and every minor cultural drama can be located by asking whether the band, film, performance, or event brings the creators closer to you, or if it seeks to build a distance between the two. If this book is an urgent call for anything, it’s for all of us to identify our subcultures and to strengthen them – to clarify their boundaries, and support the works that speak to us as a collective. Because we can only make our conflicts mean something if we converge first.