MALE SPEAKER: I'm not going
to spend a lot of time
introducing Amanda Palmer.
She didn't ask me to do so,
so I'm not going to do it.
And so she's going
to play her self.
So everyone please
welcome to Google,
the Authors At
program-- "Authors" At,
but you could sing, too.
You're musical.
Please join me in welcoming
Amanda Palmer to Google.
[APPLAUSE]
AMANDA PALMER: Hi.
I'm not sure what to do.
You guys are all at work.
If you're not, what
are you doing here?
Why are you at Google?
She's your date?
Are most of you in the
middle of your work day?
Except for you.
OK, I know, I know,
I know, I know.
Shh.
What can I do for you?
What would you like?
Because I have-- read?
Read and sing?
Do a little bit of both?
OK.
I want to alleviate you of
whatever needs alleviation.
I don't actually
play the ukulele,
a fact of which I am proud.
And if you want,
I can give you--
I've been giving little flash
ukulele lessons to people.
I'm actually-- now that I
can maybe quit my day job,
which-- whatever.
If you knew me,
it would be funny.
I'm thinking of just
whoring myself out
to different corporations
as a ukulele healer.
It's just like going from
Google to Twitter to Microsoft
and bringing giant
truckloads of ukuleles
and teaching everyone on staff
the basic three chords that you
need to know to play all rock
songs ever at lunch hour.
(SINGING) In my mind, in a
future five years from now,
I'm 120 pounds, and
I never get hungover
because I will be the
picture of discipline,
never minding what state I'm
in, and I will be someone
I admire and it's
funny how I imagined
that I would be that
person now but it does not
seem to have happened.
Maybe I've just
forgotten how to see
that I'm not exactly the
person that I thought I'd be.
And in mind, in the
faraway here and now, I've
become in control,
somehow, and I never
lose my wallet because I will
be the picture of discipline,
never fucking up anything, and
I'll be a good defensive driver
and it's funny how I
imagined that I would
be that person now,
but it does not
seem to have happened
maybe I've just
forgotten how to see that
I'm not exactly the person
that I want to be.
And in my mind, when
I'm old, I am beautiful,
planting tulips and vegetables,
which I will mindfully
watch over.
Not like me now, I'm so
busy with everything,
that I don't look
at anything, but I'm
sure I'll look when I
am older, and it's funny
how I imagined that I would
be that person now, that's now
what I want-- that's I wanted
that I'd be giving up somehow
how strange to see
that I don't want
to be the person
that I want to be.
And in my mind, I
imagined so many things,
things that aren't
really happening,
and when they put
me in the ground,
I'll start pounding the lid,
saying, I haven't finished yet,
I still have a
tattoo to get, that
says I'm living in the moment,
and its funny how I imagined
that I would win
this, win this right,
but maybe it really
isn't funny that I've
been fighting all my life.
But maybe I have
to think it's funny
if I want to live before
I die, and maybe it's
funny as [INAUDIBLE] to think
I'll die before I actually
see that I am exactly the
person that I want to be.
Fuck, yes.
I am exactly the person
that I want to be.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
So what's better for you
guys-- if I read here
or at the reading thing?
This is good?
OK, then I'm not moving.
I just landed here
from Portland.
I did a reading and a show
in Portland last night
that was really wonderful.
And I'm doing one tonight
and tomorrow in this area.
And I've been doing nothing
for a week and change but just
this book and signing
it and talking about it.
And I've had all these fantastic
interview guests every night
of tour and all of these
incredible discussions
about the internet-- mostly
the topic with all these people
who are my friends
and other artists--
the topic keeps just snaking
back to internet trolling.
Especially the guests I have on
stage has any kind of following
or is even just a
small local artist,
it seems to be the bane
of everyone's existence.
And what do we do about it?
And how do we deal
with a culture that
seems to be addicted to outrage.
And can you guys fix that?
[LAUGHTER]
I'm asking for real.
Like is that a-- maybe that's
not actually a good idea.
Don't fix-- OK.
If you have ideas,
though, talk to me.
Because it's a pain in my
ass and my friends' asses.
What?
AUDIENCE: Try not controlling
people's speech here.
AMANDA PALMER: What
does that mean?
AUDIENCE: If people
want to say stuff,
by and large you're not going
to-- the internet's free
and all that.
AMANDA PALMER: Yeah.
I know, I wasn't suggesting
that Google should just
become this giant fascist
censor that-- that would be bad.
It would be fun to
create a nice filter,
like if you decide
one day you could just
surf the "nice" internet.
That might be hard to do.
AUDIENCE: Well, we
could do a lot more sort
of justice-type stuff, like
try to encourage people
to do hash it out in a nice way.
AMANDA PALMER: I do that.
I do that a lot.
AUDIENCE: Somewhere else.
AMANDA PALMER: It
can be really hard
trying to direct angry
traffic, and that can sometimes
be a really losing battle.
But I kind of do-- I write
about it a lot in the book.
This is a section
of the book that
takes place towards the end
and I'm just going to read it.
"I loved being the center of
attention when I was a kid,
and I still do.
And sometimes it makes
wonderful things happen,
like when I convinced
the neighborhood girls
to enact an a capella production
of 'Fiddler on the Roof'
on my back porch.
I played Tevye, obviously.
And sometimes it made
terrible things happen,
like when I wore a bra
to school Madonna-style
on the outside of my dress and
got sent to the principal's
office, and the principal
delivered a lecture that I
would absolutely kill to
have a recording of just
to be able to use the line,
"You think you're so special,
Amanda, but you're not actually
special" in my techno remix
of 'Creep' by Radiohead.
As I moved through my life
as a street-performing statue
and later as a
musician, I started
to understand
something-- there's
a difference between
wanting to be looked at
and wanting to be seen.
When you're looked at, your
eyes can stay blissfully closed.
You suck energy.
You steal the spotlight.
But when you're seen,
your eyes must be open
as you are seeing and
recognizing your witness.
You accept energy, but
you generate energy.
You create light.
One is exhibitionism.
The other is connection.
Not everybody wants
to be looked at,
but everybody wants to be seen.
Following the success of my
TED Talk, Microsoft called."
I don't know why I was
expecting a reaction,
but-- just, like, crickets.
No, it's cool, it's
cool, it's cool.
"Microsoft called.
They were offering
to fly me to Seattle
to speak to a group of
women who worked there.
Apparently, a whopping 16%
of the employees at Microsoft
were female.
I asked the speaker coordinator
what I would be speaking about.
'Whatever you want,' she
said, and I started to panic.
I had no idea what
to talk about.
Crowd sourcing?
Music?
Surely I could wax poetic for
a half an hour about something,
but these women
were actually smart
and the fraud police
were paying me a call."
A fraud police is my own
personal version of what
y'all might call
"imposer syndrome."
"So for two months,
I avoided coming up
with an idea worth Microsofting.
And the night before
the talk, I was
pacing frantically around Jason
Webley's Seattle houseboat
where I was staying,
still having written
nothing, when it occurred
to me-- my mother.
She'd been retired
for a decade, but she
worked as a freelancer
for almost 40 years
applying her math whiz
brain to the emerging
field of computer programming.
And growing up, I'd had no
idea of what she actually
did all day after she
threw her heels in a bag
and drove her car into
the rush hour traffic.
And whenever she started
trying to explain to me what
her job entailed, the words
blurred into a wall of noise.
I hadn't called my
mother in a while,
but now I had
something to ask her.
And I needed her.
She talked for
two hours straight
while I furiously
scribbled notes
about what it was like for
her to be one of the only
female computer programmers
at various companies
around Boston in
the '60s and '70s.
I poured myself a glass of wine.
On the other end of the
phone, on the opposite side
of the country, so did my mom.
And for the first
time, in earnest,
it was like we were
drinking together.
I listened to her stories about
the sexism and the judgment
and the weird harassment.
She told me the story about
the guy she programmed
with who got fired for looking
at too much porn on his office
computer.
'In 1970?' 'No, no, no, no, no,
no, honey, this was way later,
when we were working on Y2K.
There was internet
porn by then.'
I couldn't believe my mother
had just said the words
'internet porn,' and I
asked for more stories.
'Well, you had to work harder
than the men just to keep
the job,' she said
matter of factly.
'And, you know, you had to be
perfect.' The way she said it
hit a nerve.
'What kind of perfect?' 'Well,
if a guy messed up a project,
there was always another
job waiting for him.
But a woman?
Forget it.
You'd never get a job
in that town again,
and Boston was a small town.
There were only a few of us and
the men all stuck together.'
And she told me the story
of the accountant, Jerry,
who paid all the male
freelancers on time but kept
withholding her paycheck,
claiming off-handedly that
because she 'had a husband,' she
probably didn't need the money
as badly as the men did.
She ask nicely for
months, persistently,
and a check she was owed
still didn't arrive.
So one day, she called him
up 'At 6:02,' she said.
'when I knew the switchboard
operator had gone home
for the day, and I would get
him directly.' And she said,
'Hi, Jerry.
It's Cathy.
Just wondering when
we're going to be
able to process that check.
It's eight weeks late.' And
when Jerry made some grumblings
about how they would send
it out as soon as possible,
my mother said, 'What are you
having for dinner tonight,
Jerry?'"
I love my mom so much.
"And Jerry said, 'Excuse
me?' And my mother said,
'I need that money to buy
groceries to feed my family
and if you don't cut my check,
I'm coming to your house
for dinner tonight.
And I don't like salmon
and I don't like peas.'
The check was on her
desk the next day.
I'd never known
any of this stuff.
But then again, I'd never asked.
And as we were wrapping up our
two-hour conversation and well
into our second or possibly
third glasses of wine,
she said, 'You know, Amanda,
one thing always bothered me--
something you said when you were
a teenager.' Whatever this was
going to be, it was not good.
I was a terrible
teenager-- an explosion
of hormones and nihilism.
'What, Mom?' She can do this
imitation of me as a teenager
that makes me want to
crawl under a table,
and she did it now.
'You said, "Mom, I'm a real
artist and you're not."' Oh,
god.
And then she added more
kindly, 'You know, Amanda,
you were just being a typical
teenager.' I winced and I felt
my neck tighten and my teeth
grit down into Mother fight
or flight mode.
And she continued, 'But you
know, Amanda, you would say,
"I'm an artist.
Fuck you, Mom.
What do you know?
You're just a
computer programmer."'
I had to admit, I
could totally imagine
myself saying that
as a teenager.
Maybe not the 'fuck you,
Mom' part, but still.
And then my mother
said something
that absolutely demolished
my defensiveness.
And I don't think
it all the years
I've known her that
I've ever heard
her sound more vulnerable.
'You know, Amanda,
it always bothered me
because you can't
see my art, but I'm
one of the best artists I know.
And it's just that no one can
see the beautiful things I made
because you couldn't
hang them in a gallery.'
And then there was a pause
and I took a deep breath.
'God, Mom, I'm sorry.' And she
laughed and her voice turned
cheerful again.
'Oh, don't worry, sweetie.
You were 13.' As I related
the story the next morning
to a small theater filled
with 200 women of Microsoft,
I added a confession, which was
that in all my years of rock
'n' roll, touring around
and supporting people
and advocating for women and
giving all these strangers
and fans permission to embrace
their inner fucking artists
and to express themselves fully
and look at their own work
and lives as beautiful,
unique, creative acts--
I'd somehow excluded
my own mother.
And maybe, by extension, a
whole lot of other people.
And I looked out at
the women of Microsoft
seeing present-day versions
of my 1970s programmer mom.
Maybe they all felt
thoroughly misunderstood
by their own bitchy teenage
wannabe-poet daughters.
Who knew?
So I thought about
all the things
she told me over the
phone, I said to the room,
and I thought about her work
that I couldn't possibly
comprehend-- about the actual
creative work she had done.
All of that delicate,
handmade programming she
did into the dead of night
to switch one platform
to another on some critical
company deadline, how
outside the box she said that
she would think and venture
to fix a problem, and
how insanely proud
she felt when it worked, and
the true beauty of those things.
And the sadness,
too, because nobody
ever clapped for her at
the end of the night.
And as I looked out
into the audience,
I saw that three or four
of the women of Microsoft
were sniffling and
dabbing their eyes,
and my own throat tightened up.
And she couldn't hang
her work on a wall.
I can.
I do my art in public and
people applaud all the time.
And my mom never
really got that.
And she's retired now.
After the talk, I
hugged a handful
of the women of Microsoft,
got back in my rental car,
turned the radio up to 11, and
peeled out of the office park.
Take that, Fraud Police."
[APPLAUSE]
Do you guys want one more?
Or do you want to ask questions?
It's really up to you.
I'm here for you guys.
You want another one?
OK.
This is a shorter one, but
I think you'll like it.
"While I was working on the
first draft of this book, which
I did over a few
thousand coffees
in various cafes in Melbourne
over about seven weeks,
I shared a coffee with Samantha
Buckingham, an Australian indie
guitarist.
And during the coffee,
I picked her brain
about her process
and her relationship
with her own fan base.
Sam is typical of a lot of indie
musicians eking out a living.
She's not on a
label, she crowdfunds
and she releases music
directly to the internet,
and she plays house parties
in her fans' living rooms.
We were comparing notes
about the pros and cons
of patrion.com, which is a new
subscription service Sam was
using which allows fans to
automatically deposit money
into a musician's account
every single time the musician
releases a piece of
content, kind of like
a book-of-the-month
club for weirdos.
And the artist can then rely on
a somewhat predictable income
instead of praying that their
Kickstarter will get funded
every single time they have
something to release or make.
And at the time of this
writing, she's got 44 patrons,
including 19 $1 backers
and one backer at $50,
and is paid about $200 every
time she releases a song.
Patrons can choose how
much they pay per song
and they can cap
their monthly bill,
so she doesn't all of a sudden
dump 1,000 songs on them
and run off to Mexico.
Although running
off to Mexico when
your Australian seems weird."
Because-- far.
So I'm thinking she
would more run off
to Papa New Guinea or
something like that.
"Sam was, in fact,
about to travel
to Asia with her
boyfriend and she
was fretting about what
her backers would think
if she continued releasing her
songs on a schedule on the page
fan website while
she was on vacation.
She was worried that posting
pictures of herself sipping
a Mai Tai while simultaneously
releasing content for money
was going to make her
look like an asshole.
'What does it matter where
you or whether you're drinking
a coffee, a Mai Tai, or a
bottle of water,' I asked,
'aren't they paying for your
songs so you can also live?
And doesn't living include
wandering and collecting
emotions and possibly drinking
a Mai Tai so that you got stuff
to write about-- not just
sitting in a blank white room
and writing songs without
ever leaving the house?'
I told Sam about another
songwriter friend
of mine, Kim Boekbinder, who
runs her own direct support
website through which he fans
pay her monthly at levels
from $5 to $1,000.
She also has a running
online wish list
of musical gear and costumes,
like a wedding registry
to which are fans can
contribute any time.
Kim had told me a few days
before that she doesn't
mind charging her
backers during what
she calls her
'staring at the wall'
time, which she thinks is
essential to have before she
could write a new
batch of songs.
And her fans don't complain.
They trust her.
These are new forms of
patronage and it's messy.
The artists and the patrons
are making up the rules
as they go along.
But whether these
artists are using
crowdfunding or subscriptions or
pay-per-piece of content pledge
services, it doesn't matter.
The fundamental building
blocks of these relationships
boil down to the
same thing-- trust.
If you're going to ask
your fans to support you--
you as the artist--
it doesn't really
matter what your choices
are as long as you're
delivering your
side of the bargain.
And you might be spending
their money on guitar picks
or on Mai Tais or baby formula
or college loans or coffee,
as long as the art is
coming out the other side
and making the people who
have paid for it happy.
The money that you need
to live and 'need to live'
is hard to define.
It's almost indistinguishable
from the money
you need to make art.
Like me, Sam, and thousands
of new-school artists,
Kim is in daily communication
with her fan base,
and her ongoing arrangement with
her 200 supporters functions
because she shares her
songwriting process
and her bad days and her
heartaches and her travels.
And so they trust her decisions.
And what she posts
a photo of herself
in a vintage dress
she just bought,
nobody scolds her
for spending money
on something other
than effects petals.
It's not like her fans'
money is an allowance
with nosy and critical
strings attached.
It's a gift in the form
of money in exchange
for her gift in
the form of music.
The relative values are messy,
but if we accept the messiness,
we're fine.
If Beck needs to moisturize
his cuticles with truffle oil
in order to play guitar tracks
on his new crowdfunded album,
I technically shouldn't care if
the money that I've fronted him
isn't going towards two
turntables or a microphone.
Just as long as the art
gets made, I get the album,
and Beck doesn't die.
But that doesn't
mean observers are
going to stop criticizing
artists in their processes
any time soon.
No less than Henry David
Thoreau has been called a poser.
Thoreau wrote in
painstaking detail
about how he chose to remove
himself from society to live
by his own means in a little
10 by 15 foot hand-hewn
cabin on the side of a pond.
But what he left out
of 'Walden,' however,
is the fact that the land he
built on was borrowed from his
wealthy neighbor, that his pal
Ralph had him over for dinner
all the time, and
that every Sunday,
Thoreau's mother and
sister brought him a basket
of freshly-baked goods,
including donuts.
The idea of Thoreau gazing
thoughtfully over the expansive
transcendental Walden Pond,
a bluebird alighting on his
threadbare shoe, all the while
eating donuts that his mom
brought him just doesn't jive
with most people's picture
of him as a self-reliant,
noble, marrow-sucking,
back-to-the-woods folk hipster.
In the book 'An Underground
Education,' Richard Zacks
declares, 'Let it be known
that Nature Boy went home
on weekends to raid
the family cookie jar.'
Thoreau also lived at Walden for
a total of two or three years,
but he condensed the book
down to a single year--
to the four seasons-- to
make the book flow better,
to work as a piece of
art, and to best reflect
his emotional experience--
a poetic license that I also
took with this book.
And I told this story
to Sam over our coffees.
'Poor Thoreau,' said Sam.
'The donuts are totally the Mai
Tai.' Taking the doughnuts is
hard for a lot of people.
And it's not the act of taking
that's so difficult-- it's more
the fear of what other people
are going to think when they
see us slaving away
at our manuscript
about the pure
transcendence of nature
while munching on
somebody else's doughnut.
Maybe it comes back
to that same old issue
we just can't see what
we do is important enough
to merit to help, the love.
Try picture getting
angry at Einstein
devouring a doughnut brought
to him by his assistant
while he sat slaving on
the theory of relativity.
Try picture getting angry
at Florence Nightingale
for snacking on a donut while
taking a break from tirelessly
helping the sick.
These are difficult
things to do.
So a plea to the artists and
the creators, the scientists,
nonprofit runners, librarians,
strange thinkers, start-uppers,
programmers, inventors, to
all the people everywhere
afraid to accept the help in
whatever form it's appearing--
please take the doughnuts.
To the guy in my
opening band too
ashamed to go out into the crowd
and accept money in his hat,
even though people wanted to
give it-- take the doughnuts.
And to the girl
who spent her '20s
as a street performer
and a stripper living
on $700 a month who
went on to marry
a best-selling author whom
she loves unquestioningly--
but even that massive love
can't break her unwillingness
to accept his help--
please, everybody,
please just take
the fucking donuts."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
How much time have we got?
MALE SPEAKER: 20 minutes.
AMANDA PALMER: Great.
Let's just talk for 20 minutes.
And if any of you guys want to
grab a book and get it signed,
I'll take a couple minutes
at the end to do that.
I'm happy to do that.
Yes, if you have a
question, use the mic.
Hi.
AUDIENCE: Hey, Amanda.
I'm curious how this has been
for you to go from a street
performer to an ever-growing
circle of influence,
and how that's
changed the way you
interact with the world
and the responsibility that
maybe comes with that.
AMANDA PALMER:
The responsibility
that comes with what?
AUDIENCE: With having
influence and people following
what you do, what you say.
AMANDA PALMER:
Well those are kind
of two different
questions, I think,
but I guess they're related.
I think to distill it
down, one of the things
that happened gradually as I
street-performed for five, six
years is I just became
really comfortable.
And I tell musicians
this a lot--
it really breaks you in a
certain way, in a good way,
I think, to be a
street performer.
Because there's just
no stage and there's
nobody taking care of you.
And you just can't have
any sense of entitlement
because you're in
the fucking street
and there's billions
of people passing by.
And if you spend
an ounce of energy
getting angry at the thousands
of people who aren't stopping,
you can't do your job and
attract the one person who
does want to stop and
give you a dollar.
So really, you're shaped into
this different kind of vessel
that just doesn't happen.
Even starting off
in a band-- it's
a way safer space being
in a bar on a stage,
even if people are talking and
not paying attention to you.
It's not like the
street, where it's you
versus all of humanity.
And I think it's really
good for a musician's ego
and general stage
presence which is--
this is so much easier
than the street.
At some point during the
day, you chose to be here.
And so I've already won.
I don't have to sit here and
win you over and convince
you to sit down.
And I think that kind
of comfortableness
just came with me.
I took that kind of
comfortableness onto my blog
and onto the internet
and then out on the road
with The Dresden Dolls.
And I was so thrilled to just
have any human entities coming
to me by choice.
That was thrilling.
And it's why it's always
been pretty easy for me
not to focus on the people
who don't like my music
or don't like me or don't
like the way I do things.
I'm like, that's fine.
You guys are in
it the typical 99%
of the population passing by.
And the people who
criticize and troll me just
remind me of the people
who would take time out
of their day to
be like, you suck!
And you're just like, OK.
There's a little circle of
people around me watching what
I'm doing and enjoying
it, and I know
that my job is to just
pay attention to them.
And I think this can be
intellectually something
that artists know,
but emotionally it
can be really hard to
get to that place--
that you just are
dealing in a relationship
with those who want to be there
who appreciating your work, who
appreciate you, and not
spending your time shaking
your fists at the
rest of humanity.
Because that can be so tempting.
And I think the street
really prepared me for that.
And as far as the
responsibility goes,
I actually write about
that in the book.
I talk about how unwieldy
that was in the beginning
and how I fucked up
plenty in the early days.
And actually when I was in
New York about a week ago,
my guest was Brandon Stanton.
Do you guys know him?
He runs a blog called
"Humans of New York"
that's just wonderful.
And we shared our stories
of clumsily wielding
the hammer of justice when
we first had blog power
and thinking that we
could use our blogs
and our new found
platform of fans
to go out and sort of be like
justice-seeking superheroes
any time we saw-- and
how stupid that was.
Because it doesn't really work.
And so I have an anecdote--
he told a great anecdote
about in the early days
of "Humans of New York."
he asked this woman if he
could take a picture of her
and she was really
excited to do it.
But her boyfriend sidled in
and was like, no, no, no no,
don't do this thing
with this guy.
And she was like,
but I want to do it.
I said yes.
I want to do it.
Leave me alone.
Let me do it.
And the guy wouldn't
allow her to do it
and photo-bombed the
picture with his arm
around her making a
really stupid face.
And Brandon was so irritated
by this entire exchange
that he just told the entire
story of everything that
had happened and then
posted the picture of them.
And it got millions and
millions of hits and the guy
became a villain.
Like, he was now the most
hated man in New York.
And he now had his own sub-sites
of hatred directed against him.
And I had my own moments
like that on my blog.
I tell a story in the
book-- my first real taste
of mishandling crowd power.
I was very, very small.
I had just started
my blog, but I
knew I had a few hundred
really dedicated readers.
And we had just gotten our first
label check-- our advance--
and we were on top of the
world and feeling legitimate
all a sudden because we'd
finally gotten signed.
And Brian went off and bought
a really fancy drum kit
for the first time in his life.
And I had a budget
to go get a piano.
And I was thrilled.
It was the first time
in my life I had money.
And I was like, I have
money, I have power.
I'm going to go buy
a piano and I'm real.
And I shopped all over Boston.
And then one day I went
to a store in Brookline
and it was a little mom and
pop piano shop and I went in.
And I had been sort
of comparison shopping
all over town, and I
sat down at this piano
and I started playing some
really loud Dresden Dolls
songs.
And there was two other
people in the shop.
And this guy came up to me-- the
meek piano shop owner came up
to me-- and said,
ma'am, I'm going
to have to ask you to leave.
I'm sorry.
And I was like, but-- (CRYING).
I'm real.
(STAMMERING) I-- I-- and I
went home and I blogged about
it and I gave the guy's address.
And it was like, if you want
to stand up for what's right,
write them a letter
about who I really am.
And I was 25 or something
and I was so hurt.
And it's such a
perfect example of-- I
was just this wounded,
weeping mass of pus.
And I had a choice in that
moment-- I could deal with it,
or I could lash out to
the only possible object
that I could aim at,
and it was this guy.
And the next day, I
checked-- and this was back
when I just emailed directly
back and forth with all
my fans-- like five people
had written me proud
emails being like, I wrote him
a three-page letter about how
amazing you are and how
wonderful your music is
and what a dick he is.
And I was like, oh my
god, I'm actually--
I'm now going to
ruin this guy's life.
I have to put a stop to this.
So I took the
address of the blog
and wrote like a cease
and desist to my fans
and was like, that was
a really weak moment,
please don't bother the guy.
He doesn't deserve your vitriol
any more than I deserved his.
And I had a few of
those early days.
And I still-- I feel
like I see so much
negativity and nastiness
on social media
and on blogs and in
online journalism.
It's so shitty.
And it just cycles and gets
worse and worse by the day.
I almost feel like I
can't go on the internet
without losing my mind nowadays.
And I think people
don't realize even just
by making a snarky,
off-handed comment,
they're contributing to the
cesspool of the internet.
And so I feel like if I have
a responsibility at all,
it's just to remind
people you have a choice.
You can live a life of
outrage constantly look around
the internet looking at who
you can be pissed off at,
or you can not.
And you can just back away and
have those angry conversations
in bars with your angry friends.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
Thank you for being here.
So you've talked
about connecting
with people and your experiences
with the diverse people you've
met.
And I feel very sheltered in the
tech world and generally having
been to a top university
and then coming to Google.
And I'm wondering if you have
any tips or thoughts on how
to reach out to different people
or connect with more people
than just those who are just
like me and already around me.
AMANDA PALMER:
Wait, do you really
feel like the people of
Google are just like you?
AUDIENCE: In certain ways, yes.
They come from
different backgrounds,
but they're here
because they reason
about things in similar
ways as me and they think
in similar ways to me.
And I think we try really
hard to get diversity,
but we get diversity that
all contributes to tech.
And so it's diverse in
the domain it needs to be,
but I think it's
still narrowing.
AMANDA PALMER: Well the
obvious answer-- and it may
seem like a stupid
answer, but how much time
do you spend outside of work?
Period.
Because it may just be that
the change of environment
is more about what you need.
I mean, I feel the same
thing in my life sometimes.
Especially on tour where I met
like a bubble of Amanda Palmer
fans, which is not
a very-- they're
diverse in their own way, but
when they interact with me,
they're not fucking diverse.
When they interact with me,
all they want to talk about
is Amanda Palmer.
And that can get
really irritating.
Not that I don't want
to give them what
they want, but they don't
generally come up to me
and just chat about other
totally unrelated, interesting
things.
And so I go out of my
way to stay connected
with those outside of my bubble.
Also just so I don't
start living my life
with celebrity blinders on.
And I feel like that
has happened to me,
and I have to
constantly self-police
so that I don't just turn
into a machine of my own ego.
And I look around at my
life and who feeds me
and what friends I have
from other areas who
don't give a shit
about the capital
Amanda Palmer, who just
know me as a person.
And I reach out to them and
I email them and I text them
and I try to stay in touch with
people outside of my bubble,
just to make sure.
I remind myself on a daily
basis that I am actually not
very special.
I'm special to these
people in this building who
bought a ticket to
see me, but that's
a very small sliver
of the population.
And even though my ego
is wonderfully fed by it
and I think it's
fantastic, it's not
a representation of
the world at large.
And so whoever your
friends were pre-Google
or whoever is around you in
your environment outside work,
making actual friends
with those people
is probably a step in
the right direction.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
AMANDA PALMER: You're welcome.
And if you got the book-- it
just hit the best seller list
yesterday, which is against--
[CHEERING]
Thank you.
And that was against all odds, I
wasn't expecting it necessarily
to because it wasn't
sold on Amazon,
because the book's
on fucking Hachette.
And so if you are following
the Amazon-Hachette wars,
I was one of the prime
victims of that war
and my fans went crazy
helping me promote the book.
And it was one of the best-sold
books in indie bookstores
last week.
Because my fans just
grassrooted the shit out of it.
So it's still not easily
available on Amazon,
but it's getting there.
But you guys can really do me
a solid and if you like it,
spread it around or
pass the copy on.
And it's also an
audio book, it's
an e-book, it's all the various
book, book, books that exist.
And if he doesn't
make it here and you
happen to run into Michael
Gaiman, my stepson who
works here, give
him a hug for me.
You'll embarrass him.
It'll be great.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much
for speaking with us today.
AMANDA PALMER: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
AMANDA PALMER: It's
been a pleasure.
Thank you guys.
[APPLAUSE]
