As I had said I was planning on doing in my previous post , I went to the 100% Electronicon music festival. I have a few thoughts I wanted to share about the experience.





The first is the incredible sense of camaraderie you (I) could feel. The emotional energy felt totally different from a lot of concerts and festivals I’ve been to. What was different about Electronicon was the sense of community. And I know sometimes it sounds like a cliché to say something like that, so let me elaborate. Within seconds, strangers could be in deep, excited conversations. Artists would linger, listen to each other’s sets, and talk to fans. It didn’t feel like they were above or better than the community. Artists (in particular the first artist I saw, Dan Mason) seemed to be grateful for their success and connected to the fans who were a part of it.









Dan Mason looks out over crowd









I felt like I was picking up on the emotional wavelengths in the room, and there was a collective emotional affect of euphoria. This was the moment we had been waiting for, it felt like. I felt blessed just to be present for it.





Some context might be appreciated, to understand the importance of Electronicon. A history, not of the vaporwave genre, but of my experiences of it.





I was first exposed to the music of vaporwave, I think, sometime in 2016. I was playing Smash Brothers with a friend, and she put on a Spotify vaporwave playlist . After that, I listened to everything vaporwave I could find on Spotify. I also used last.fm for music at the time and listened to everything vaporwave I could find there. It took a few months, but I eventually ran out of material. I slowly migrated to YouTube, where I found the Vapor Memory YouTube channel.





As I’ve discussed previously, my initial experiences of vaporwave were primarily with myself and with imagined others. However, I also spent lots of time talking to “real life” friends about what vaporwave meant to me and what it could tell us about the postmodern condition. Some of my friends had listened to vaporwave before, but it was an individualized experience for them too. At the time, it seemed like an unspoken understanding that vaporwave is meant to be enjoyed alone.





I started visiting the vaporwave subreddit on Reddit out of a desire to find more people who could relate to my experiences with the genre. I didn’t find much involvement in terms of a community there when I was visiting in 2018. The pivotal moment for my relationship with vaporwave and the community attached to it was connecting with doktorb’s research project on Reddit and becoming connected to some vaporwave folks through engaging with that project with others on Twitter. Over time, I’ve become more and more involved with the vaporwave community that exists on Twitter. It is a vibrant, active community of people regularly sharing their music, taking interest in each other’s lives, and collaborating.





What I learned through becoming connected to this community on Twitter is that, through increased connections with others in the community, some vaporwave artists and fans are shedding their monikers. Some others are sharing their non vaporwave identities with the vaporwave community. Still others might feel like their vaporwave identities are developing an increased importance in their day to day lives. There has been a merging between the identities that people put up online, the identities that people showcase in their daily lives, and the identities that people hold in private. And this became even clearer at Electronicon, where some people introduced themselves via their handles. I think Electronicon was the first time and place that I’ve introduced myself using an online persona, and that was surreal.









An art exhibition at Electronicon with computers showcasing vibrant images. Collaboration with Chewing Foil.









The other important thing I learned from being in the community on Twitter is that there is a tremendous market for vaporwave. I would see advertisements for tape sales by big artists, and they would sell out instantly. Repressings and resales of notable albums would sell out very quickly. The tickets for Electronicon also sold out almost instantly. I knew they would, and actually stepped out of the class I was in to buy my ticket the moment that tickets were available. They were sold out within an hour.





It seemed like this collective online experience had resulted in a yearning, a desire, for consumption. In neoliberal capitalism, the products that we consume constitute the identity that we portray to others . The more time that we collectively invested in vaporwave, the more there was a need to signify that we were a part of the vaporwave in-group.





All of these factors felt to me like the perfect leading up to the events of 100% Electronicon. People were connecting online, but there was a level of commitment to being able to connect in person that a lot of people recognized right away. Being at Electronicon was a way of saying, I am here, I am a part of this group, I belong. Plus, there was the music. All of it here, in one physical place, for the first time ever. There was the feeling that it could be the start of an explosion of live vaporwave, new artists, and a growth for the scene. To be here was equivalent to being at the original Woodstock for a lot of us, and I heard multiple people saying that more or less verbatim.





With such huge expectations, something about the experience didn’t quite feel right for me. Despite the euphoria, despite feeling accepted, I had this horrible FOMO. Yeah, despite being there, I had FOMO. What is FOMO, you might be asking? If you spend a lot of time on the internet you may not be asking this, but please humor me. FOMO stands for “fear of missing out,” and it’s a shorthand that came out of usage of social media. It refers to the experience of seeing someone else posting about their experience on social media, something you didn’t experience, and feeling some jealousy for their experience that you couldn’t experience for yourself.





How could I miss out on an event that I attended; you might ask? Well, I had implied expectations for the event, and my experience did not measure up to my own expectations. I didn’t look at the lineup of artists and make decision about who I would and wouldn’t see until the day of the event. I have some regret about the choices I made about who I did and didn’t get to see. This might sound silly, because I did get to see some artists whose sets I really enjoyed. But I didn’t come to terms with not seeing the alternatives. And it’s often too easy in life to focus on missed opportunities.









A blurry Negative Gemini dances as she performs for crowd at Electronicon.









The other element of my FOMO was the more classical edition: seeing other people’s social media posts about their experiences. And I think I experienced it in the exact same way as if I wasn’t actually at the event! If you weren’t at the festival and you saw images and posts about people having fun, your reaction might be, “I wasn’t there, they had so much fun, I wish I could have been there and had the fun that they had.” But you see, I was there, and I had the same reaction. I saw people’s posts and I thought, “I don’t see myself or my experiences represented in these images. These people look like they had so much fun, I wish I went to the same event that they went to. I wish I had the fun that they had.” FOMO is insidious. Despite being at the event and having an experience that I enjoyed, I was still afraid of missing out on something better.





I think that this reveals something about FOMO. It goes beyond the experience of not being at the event that your friends are talking about. FOMO is really about not experiencing the reality that is portrayed in the post. Which is a different reality than the reality that the poster literally experienced.





There is research that suggests that there is an ongoing mental health crisis, and that people who spend more time online are especially at risk of this. FOMO might help us understand why this link exists . People desire to experience that which they believe their peers experience. Yet, we all know that we are presenting an ideal version of ourselves, our realities, and our experiences when we post to our own social media pages. We do this because it makes us look cool, because we wish we actually had the experience we are posting about, and/or because in the act of posting about our experiences we justify our action by telling ourselves that the post does represent our experiences. But it still represents more of an ideal than a real experience. When we experience FOMO, we are yearning for our own and other people’s ideals.





Social media identities and posts come to signify a whole new reality, not the one that the poster experienced. Electronicon was a great opportunity for people in the community to make new connections. But I think that people’s experiences of those connections, their presentation of those connections, and my experiences hearing about them are three different things. I felt some FOMO and some guilt for not making connections as strongly as some other people or making connections with important figures in the community. But I was comparing my real experiences with the ideal representations of other people’s experiences.





It’s also important we don’t forget about that other group, the group of people who didn’t get to go at all. For them, there is no experience to compare the posts to. They might only see the proclamations of love and togetherness, and whether or not those proclamations are true, non-attendees know that that these proclamations exclude them. It’s important that the community, in its drive to increase connections in the wake of Electronicon, doesn’t forget or leave behind those who weren’t able to go. I imagine that the experience of FOMO can get amplified over time as Electronicon is canonized in the collective vaporwave memory.





What I can say for myself is that I am happy for the connections I did make at Electronicon.

And I’m happy for the excited conversations I had with people whose names I can’t remember or never asked for. Electronicon was not about experiencing other people’s experiences, it was about experiencing my own experiences! And I did enjoy it, I did.





I enjoyed it in spite of physically crashing really early. I think it was around 7 pm that I started having difficulties standing for more than a few minutes at a time. Electronicon began at 2. I was hoping to show up and be able to dance for 10 hours straight. I’m young, I take my body for granted sometimes. But I had taken a long train ride the day before, was recovering from a cold, and had not been sleeping consistently. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s not surprising that I crashed so early. I wish I didn’t crash but I still enjoyed the experience and don’t have any regrets for going home early.





A final pertinent observation. I noticed that Electronicon attendees were overwhelmingly white, male, and able bodied. Of the few women I talked to, most were there with a partner. These demographics might reflect who was willing and able to take time out of their life and travel to New York City for a festival. But I wonder if there is something about vaporwave that makes it more likely to attract some people over others. And I wonder if there is something we could be doing as a community to be more welcoming for all. Granted, it should be noted that vaporwave has active artists and fans who identify as being queer (including me, hi I'm queer). One of the biggest names in the scene, Saint Pepsi, has been vocal in his support of transgender rights.









A Skylar Spence (Saint Pepsi's alter ego) tweet saying "Trans rights."









I didn’t see any overt instances of racism or sexism at Electronicon. At least, I don’t think I did. But that doesn’t mean that those things weren’t present. Systems of oppression are always operating behind the scenes. Even when they’re not loudly proclaiming themselves, they’re still present in the people we choose to talk to, the jokes we make, and the ways music is sampled. So, I do just look around and wonder what we are doing to create a community with these demographics, and what we could be doing to be more welcoming of other people. Gatekeeping doesn’t have to be on purpose for people to be kept out.





Moving forward, where are we going as a community? I want to take a moment to really encourage some reflection about the whiteness and maleness that predominates the genre. I don’t necessarily have the answers to solve this issue, I do just want to bring it up and invite some reflections and conversation. I may write further on this issue in the future.





There’s also the commercial future of vaporwave. I think we’ve only seen the very beginnings of what that can mean, I think that the sun is only beginning to rise as a new day is born. More and more folks are recognizing the commercial viability of vaporwave thanks in part to some of the most innovative and hardworking faces, and also in part to the community that is making and consuming music at astonishing rates. Because we enjoy it.





It is certainly possible that in the next few years more and more vaporwave artists will be able to make a living as musicians full time, that they can tour and build fanbases. That old genre constraints will stretch, and that vaporwave will seamlessly become another pop neighborhood in the constantly changing pop megalopolis. I think this is very likely.





What is just as likely is that plenty of vaporwave artists will continue as they have done, passionately releasing music for their friends and a few others. And that’s okay too.





There are likely to be realities in between those extremes. Local scenes will develop, and their sizes will vary. People will make music called vaporwave, and they won’t know anything about the genre. That’s okay. Vaporwave has the potential to spread, to cross pollinate with other genres, and to occupy different realities at different scales.





As I hinted at a little bit above, I think that there is room for experimentation and new ways of doing vaporwave as the genre grows. I also think that new artists will copy successful artists in a bid to find success. The presence of a lack of originality meant that there had to be originality in the first place. So, I’m not too worried about that. The genre expanding stuff will keep coming, and I bet some of the copycats will improve on the originals too.









T E L E P A T H, wearing a mask, performs under lights for crowd. For me, this demonstrates an unmatched commitment to the anonymity of early vaporwave.









In the wake of Electronicon, one thing is for sure. We can’t take the community’s expanse into the physical realm back and only exist online. Once people were simultaneously connecting online and offline, our identities and connections no longer existed in one space or the other. They exist in both and in neither. Just like vaporwave itself.