“Wake me up before California
Darling boy I’ve never known ya”

— Annie Hardy

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1. Periscope (2018): Ambient Human Contact

In the fall of 2018, before TikTok Live and before Instagram learned how to professionalize everything, there was Periscope.

It was a live-video app owned by Twitter, but it never really felt like social media. It felt more like radio—with pictures. You could open it and see who was live anywhere in the world, zoom in on a city, drop into a stream, leave, move on. The scale was small enough that you could more or less take in the entire active population at any given moment. There was no sense of infinite scroll. The world was navigable.

It was also completely unpoliced. People streamed whole songs, movie clips, televisions playing in the background, themselves half-asleep or wandering around or doing nothing at all. No one cared. There were no warnings, no copyright bots, no friction. It was a free-for-all in the literal sense: free time, free speech, free form.

What Periscope allowed—what it uniquely allowed—was time. Long stretches of it. Silence. Repetition. Boredom. People would just sit there and talk, or not talk, or smoke on their porch and complain about their day. That kind of stream simply does not exist on Instagram Live. Instagram demands a reason. Periscope didn’t.

I loved it because it matched my temperament. I wasn’t looking to build anything. I wasn’t trying to grow an audience or perform a version of myself. I liked cursing around on the app, listening, occasionally speaking back. It was ambient human contact: voices moving through time, present but not demanding anything in return.

Most people didn’t want that. Periscope never offered a ladder—no clear path to recognition, no reliable virality, no payoff for effort. It didn’t protect users from themselves, and it didn’t compress experience into highlights. For most people, that felt pointless. For a few of us, it felt like oxygen.

I didn’t think of it as important while it was happening. It was just there, like a short-lived commons where people killed time together. Looking back, I’m amazed it existed at all.

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2. Time, Leave, and the Split Feed

From September 2018 through February 2019, I was on leave from my school. The reasons sit elsewhere and don’t need explaining here. What mattered was that, for once, I had time—real time, not time carved out between obligations. I was based in Kyoto, and in October and November I spent long stretches staying in a hotel in Akasaka, moving back and forth between the two cities.

At the same moment Periscope entered my life, I started a new blog, The Kyoto Kibbitzer. The original idea was simple: walk around, notice things, write about bars, art, neighborhoods. Periscope became a sister project—not an escape from writing, but a parallel way of paying attention. One was private and slow; the other was live and provisional. They fed each other.

I quickly settled into two distinct kinds of streams.

During the day, I walked. Downtown Kyoto, north Kyoto, sometimes Tokyo. I talked, observed, played music, responded to comments. I never put my face on camera—not once. The camera always faced outward, toward streets, storefronts, light, movement. I got a simple phone holder so I could film without fuss. The stream wasn’t about me; it was about what I was seeing.

At night, I streamed from my desk in the upstairs room of my house. I usually stood, like a DJ or a lecturer, sitting only when I was reading something. The night streams were almost entirely art: music, films, writing. I’d play songs and talk about them, read long passages from essays or movie reviews, sometimes even play sections of films on my laptop and film the screen. It was all technically a grey area, but Periscope didn’t care, and neither did anyone watching.

Once I read an entire Roger Ebert essay on air—an interview he’d done with Lee Marvin—and laughed out loud the whole way through. “If I want to be an icon I’ll do it my own way, baby,” Marvin said. Mostly, that was the night feed: attention without urgency, commentary without stakes. Occasionally I’d take it back outside to a bar, or, early on, stay up all night wandering and streaming, the phone dying fast enough that I had to carry two battery packs. But those were exceptions. The form settled quickly.

The split mattered. Day feeds faced the world. Night feeds faced ideas. Both were ways of being present without self-display. Together, they created a rhythm that made Periscope feel less like a platform and more like a place of its own.

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3. A Small World with Names

The audience was small, but it existed.

A few people watched consistently. My friend Andrew, who lives in Japan but not Kyoto, would sometimes tune in live or catch the replay later. John Innes watched as much as he could, and sometimes his wife, Kristi, would drop in too. When John commented, I’d usually stop whatever I was doing and talk with him at length. Conversation mattered because it was rare.

There were others who hovered at the edges. A French guitarist would sometimes watch silently for long stretches. Later, Mela would too, though I watched her far more than she watched me—mostly because she streamed for even longer than I did. And then there were the Periscope regulars: people who drifted in and out, stayed for a few minutes, disappeared, reappeared weeks later. That was the rhythm.

Periscope allowed replays, which changed the feel of everything. Not all attention was synchronous. A stream could be watched hours later, like a letter someone opened when they had time. It softened the sense of performance. You weren’t always talking to people; sometimes you were just sending something out into the day.

What mattered wasn’t numbers. Most streams—mine included—had only a handful of viewers at any given time. Even the people who seemed central to the platform often streamed to three or four names. The world was small enough that you could recognize it. You learned who was usually awake when you were. You noticed when someone stopped streaming altogether.

Because of that scale, recognition carried weight. When someone you knew appeared in the comments, it felt like a real arrival. The back-and-forth could stretch without interruption. There was no pressure to keep things moving, no sense that you were losing an audience if you paused to respond.

It didn’t feel lonely in the usual way. It felt communal in miniature. A village square that never got crowded enough to become anonymous.

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4. Killing Time Together

I was somewhat lonely during that period, and looking for human companionship. Not intensity, not rescue—just being awake with other people. Periscope worked because it was like radio, only you could talk back. You could toggle around the world and find whatever level of interaction you wanted, then move on without consequence.

Some streams were playful and I would play along. There was a beautiful Russian woman who spoke mostly in Russian and replied to my comments in halting English. She’d do things like eat honey off a spoon, theatrically, and I’d type something juvenile and she’d play along too. It sounds silly, and it was, but it was also light. Once we talked longer and she told me she wanted to go to medical school but couldn’t afford it. I’d guess she was in her mid-to-late twenties. After that, I drifted away. The language barrier was real; the connection couldn’t sustain itself. That was normal.

There was a French guitarist I watched early on. He was very good—technically accomplished, friendly—and he seemed to have infinite time. He’d sit in my stream silently for long stretches, just there. Periscope people had time; that was one of the defining traits. After a few weeks I stopped watching him. Not because anything was wrong, but because it was all one thing. Skill without movement. No arc. Attention drifted, and that was allowed.

Other streams were even more minimal. I remember a woman in Oklahoma who would sit on her porch, rip bongs, and talk about her day. That was it. No premise, no performance. Just presence. That kind of stream doesn’t exist on Instagram Live. Periscope tolerated people doing nothing in public.

There was also Max, a trans woman from eastern Canada. She complained about her mother, about being broke. She usually had no viewers. Every time I came into her stream she lit up. Once I sent her fifty dollars for an art commission, and she reacted like she’d won the lottery. It wasn’t about the money. It was about being seen. On Periscope, small gestures carried disproportionate weight because the economy of attention was so thin.

People weren’t looking for transformation. They were killing time. Talking. Waiting. Passing hours together across time zones. The platform allowed that without apology. It was so free-form that it’s hard to explain now without it sounding unreal.

But that was the baseline. That was what “normal” looked like.

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5. Mela: Process Recognizes Process

I didn’t find Mela right away. It wasn’t until mid-October that her stream appeared on my map. By then I already knew how Periscope worked—what it rewarded, what it ignored, what kinds of attention lasted.

The first stream I remember, she was just walking around New York City. Not driving. Walking. Taking stairs. Cutting through neighborhoods. Letting the city decide the route. Almost immediately I felt a shock of recognition: she’s me. Not biographically, not emotionally—procedurally. We were using the same method.

She would ask, “left or right?” I’d type “left,” and she’d take a left. That was it. No drama. No explanation. A shared orientation, moment to moment. I’d stay with her for hours, wandering the city together at walking speed.

People who showed up looking for something else—someone conventionally attractive to perform, flirt, deliver a payoff—would drift off. The stream filtered itself. What remained was patient, non-demanding attention. Process over outcome.

She was in her mid-to-late thirties and had worked in film props on sets around New York. At the time she was on sick leave after a back injury, which explained the free time. She streamed from her apartment, sometimes from a friend’s place she was house-sitting, and often from the streets and trains. The life context was legible. Nothing felt invented for the stream.

Eventually we connected on Instagram, but that’s not the story here. What mattered was simpler: real, undemanding, non-sexual attention feels good. In a micro-attention economy, it feels enormous.

Mela mattered because she showed that Periscope could sustain healthy, lateral connection—companionship without escalation, presence without claim. That mattered later, because it proved the platform itself wasn’t the problem. It was capable of holding something gentle and durable.

That made what came next easier to recognize as different.

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6. Giant Drag (Came Late, Stayed Forever)

I came to Giant Drag late.

I first heard them sometime around 2015, years after their debut. The song was “Kevin Is Gay,” and I heard it on All Things Considered on NPR. I remember stopping short. It sounded like shoegaze, but with attitude—guitars that rang and crunched at the same time, a voice that was sharp, funny, unsentimental. I thought: who on earth is this woman?

I bought the CD immediately. The record was Hearts and Unicorns. There was “This Isn’t It,” “Slayer,” and a sense that this wasn’t a novelty discovery. It didn’t feel like a phase. It felt like something I’d been missing and had finally caught up to. Ten years later, the music is still with me.

Learning afterward that the album came out in 2005 only clarified things. I hadn’t encountered Giant Drag as part of a moment or a scene. There was no social reinforcement, no sense of being early or late. The music arrived on its own terms and stayed because it deserved to. It became part of my listening life in a quiet, durable way.

That matters here, because when Annie Hardy later appeared on Periscope, she didn’t arrive as a stranger or as “a streamer.” Her voice was already familiar to me. Not biographically, not personally—but aesthetically. I knew the intelligence. I knew the precision. I knew the attitude. What I didn’t expect was where or how I’d encounter it again.

At the time, none of this felt connected. It only looks that way in retrospect. Back then, Giant Drag was just music I loved, and Periscope was just a place people killed time together. I had no reason to think those two tracks would ever overlap.

Then they did.

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7. Band Car → Band House

Because the number of active streams was limited, as I have said, I spent a lot of time just cruising around the map. One night in September 2018, I landed on Annie Hardy without looking for her. The stream was called Band Car, which turned out to be exactly what it sounded like.

She was driving. Talking. Rapping. Singing into some kind of vocoder or effects chain. Swearing at other drivers. There was no Giant Drag material, no backstory, no explanation. She’d say, “Give me three words,” and then build a rap off whatever came in. I gave her words. Over and over. It never went stale. The language was filthy—relentlessly so—but also precise. The filth wasn’t sloppy; it landed because it was aimed.

I watched every day. She streamed every day. She had no job and very little money, and she drove for hours, talking, rapping, improvising, stopping occasionally to run into Home Depot or some other errand. I’d wait. Dead air didn’t bother me. This was how Periscope worked.

Sometimes she used gay slurs, and I balked internally. That wasn’t my thing at all. But the space itself was unfiltered by design, and she used every word under the sun. I didn’t intervene or moralize. I noted it and stayed. Admiration and discomfort existed side by side.

I talked about her on my own stream. I told people she was the best thing on Periscope. I couldn’t believe I had such unfettered, generous access to a high-level artist just living inside her process. There were others watching too, but not many. I was probably her biggest fan, or one of a few. In a micro-attention economy, that mattered.

One night, very late in Los Angeles, I’d been with her for hours. The audience thinned until it was just me. She parked the car, got out, and said, almost casually, “Do you want to do band house?” It was a first. I said of course.

She went into her garage, then into a music room. There was a piano. She asked, “What do you want to hear?” I said how about After the Gold Rush. She sat down without ceremony and played the entire song. No sheet music. No warm-up. She hit the high parts cleanly. Musicians have an astonishing memory for songs, and she had it in full.

It was the greatest musical moment of my life, bar none. The only thing that comes close is hearing Spencer Krug play “Julia with Blue Jeans On” at Urbanguild in Kyoto. This was different. This was private, unadvertised, unrepeatable. When she finished, she said, “Okay, that’s band house,” and wrapped it up.

No encore. No processing. Just the sound, then silence.

That was the miracle. And it was already complete.

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8. Running Its Course

In December, I used Periscope again in New York and Boston, mostly with Mela. The rhythm was familiar by then—long stretches of time, nothing urgent, companionship without demands. One night in a Boston hotel room, where I was staying to see Phosphorescent and Jay Som, I streamed the entire film Michael Clayton from my laptop. It was a grey area, as everything on Periscope was. She watched the whole thing with me, commenting occasionally—“bad guy, ooh”—the way someone does when they’re present but not trying to perform being present. It was fun. That was enough.

After that, things ended. Not abruptly. Not painfully. Periscope had simply ran its course.

Mela moved to Oklahoma and stopped streaming. I stopped too. The app thinned out. People disappeared. The small world became smaller and then, effectively, gone. There was no sense of loss that needed narrating, no aftermath to dramatize. The conditions that made Periscope feel possible—time, openness, a tolerance for doing nothing in public—shifted. Life resumed its usual density.

Looking back, what remains isn’t a lesson or a warning. It’s a memory of a brief commons where attention wasn’t monetized and presence didn’t have to justify itself. A place where someone could play a song once, perfectly, for one person, and then stop. And that could be enough.

That was Periscope. And then it wasn’t.

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Dedication

For the micro-attention economy.
I had a total blast.