But I Was There First!

The Loneliness of the Early Adopter

What if I told you I was stricken with a disease that's painful and incurable?  You'd be sympathetic, right?  But wait -- one of the most grievous symptoms of this sickening syndrome is that telling people you're stricken with it actually pisses them off.  And all you hear, as you're abandoned in your misery, is the sound of the cosmos going Mwah-ha-ha-ha!!!

Here's how it attacks.  You stumble upon something, usually in some haphazard, seemingly random fashion -- a small item in the paper, an accidental radio dial landing, a half-conscious following from link to link to link during an internet troll -- but suddenly you're riveted.  It's a voice you've never heard before that nonetheless touches you to the core.  And all the fibers in your soul and consciousnesss scream discovery!  Because your hurried, excited research quickly certifies the fact that whoever made this beautiful thing -- a singer-songwriter, an author, a filmmaker -- is somebody nobody else seems to have heard of, either.  They have a following, sure, but it's an obscure one; said artist is currently a well-kept secret.

Meanwhile, the Thing They Made (an import album, a small-press edition of a novel, an indie feature that hasn't gotten national release yet, etc.) has changed your life.  You're addicted to it.  It's become one of your favorite things, and you're given to proselytizing about it to friends who are initially indifferent (note the primary, insidious nature of the disease already at work: isolation of  victim/apathy of peers).  Those friends who become intrigued (or exasperated) enough to experience The Thing -- and invariably, your contagion does claim fellow victims -- are regaled by the precious bits of information you've gathered about the Unknown Artist; he or she is perhaps Canadian, and/or formerly played with/worked for/slept with so-and-so Somewhat Famous Person.

In this nascent phase of the disease you are happy, and it's a happiness peculiar to the human ego: part of the joy you derive from enjoying your Favorite Obscure Thing by an Unknown Artist is the knowledge that you are in the know.  You are ahead of the cultural curve, camped out on your own desert island of art-adoration, and thus tacitly privileged; this artist is going to be big -- so you've been telling everyone you know -- but as of now, they're... yours.  You have them to yourself, and it's a strangely self-satisfying form of intimacy.  Once in a blue moon, if you encounter someone else who knows of Them, the two of you share a rare complicity; you exchange details of the Wonder of Them like Masons doing the secret handshake.

Then one day, inevitably, the hammer falls.  You overhear a total stranger swooning over Them.  Them's photo is suddenly on the front cover of a national magazine.  You hear Them's latest work playing over the speakers in a clothing store like so much Muzak.  And the most debilitating blow of all -- someone you detest, someone whose taste you deplore, someone who belongs to clubs you would never want to have you as a member, this vile being accosts you to ask (their excitement laced with a horrifying scent of lordly I-know-something-you-don't-know-ness): have you heard of... Them?

We've all been victims of what I'll call the I Was First syndrome (IWF), and we've all encountered victims of the sickness.  It's that guy who insists on belligerently recounting how he saw Springsteen in a small club in Jersey when nobody was in the place; it's the woman who read Isabelle Allende's House of Spirits in Spanish, before it was published here; it's anyone who claims to have seen Reservoir Dogs on the festival circuit.  Ironically, whether they're telling the truth or not is entirely moot, because their "But I got there first!" story is almost always greeted with the same condescending, indulgent tolerance one might give a child who insists she had breakfast with Bigfoot.

The only natural response to an IWF victim's claim is: Good for you!  And hence the pain.  Because you know you were the smart one, the hip one, the one who got it when no else had it.  But now -- now that your Them is everybody else's Them -- who gives a rat's ass?  In fact, the more you insist on the primacy of your personal "ownership" of the art under discussion, the more you sound like exactly what you are: a sniveling, whiny elistist.  Mwah-ha-ha-ha!!!

Inside the world of technology, this is is already a well-established syndrome with its own set of terms and principles.  An Early Adopter is a person who embraces new technology before most other people do.  The term comes from a "diffusion" theory formalized by Everett Rogers in a 1962 book called Diffusion of Innovations.  The adopters of any new innovation are characterized as innovators, early adopters (i.e. the IWF-stricken), early majority, late majority, and laggards. 

Computer geeks of course thrive on elitism and are thus shamelessly arrogant about being early adopters.  Only one of them could have coined the acronym RTFM -- Read The Fucking Manual -- as the preferred uber-term to torment newbies.  But out here in the rest of the culture, there's really no gain in being rabidly IWF.  You're more likely to gain enemies and alienate people by insisting you're hipper than thou... and thus the typical victim of I Was First syndrome can't do much more than suffer in silence.

Or blog about it.  This whole screed was triggered by an extreme attack of IWF yours truly suffered when I opened up this morning's NY Sunday Times, and if you're not a laggard (to give you the benefit of the doubt, I'll assume you're an early majority member) you'll have recognized the photos accompanying this post and know just who I'm kvetching about.  Front page of the Book Review?  A review (by James Wood, no less) of a book by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño.  And front page of the Arts & Leisure section?  An article citing Canadian singer-songwriter Feist as the next big thing.

But I was reading Roberto Bolaño a year and a half ago!  And I was listening to Feist when she was still in Broken Social Scene!!  I was reading Bolaño's first book of short stories translated into English while listening to Feist's Mushaboom -- the imported UK version -- and making pancakes for Bigfoot, in 2005!!!

Yeah-yeah-yeah.  Good for me, right?  In the lonely world of the IWF-diseased, no one wants to hear you scream.

 

Comments

[Giles Bowkett]

The key is to blog about it in 2005. Then other people who were there first can commiserate. The downside is that people who pretend to have been there first too will be using your blog as their "inside scoop."

Anyway, once you recover from the pain, and you decide you want your next hit of the sweet early stage of IWF, have I got a screenplay for you.

[binnie]

Ah yes. The burden of being The Hippest One In The Room. But then again, Billy, you've always been too cool for school! I once saw a pin that said, "I'm eruditer than you"...
Hey, blog about "Music From The Inside Out". Not too many people have caught on to that one. Yet. Or is it not cool/hip enough anymore?

[E.C. Henry]

IWF rocks, Billy! It's one the coolest things about the Entertainment Industry.

Your "Clouds in My Coffee" series waxes a strange shade of IWF, like blue to the color purple. Based on what I've read in your posts (since I've come aboard this love train) IWF is very prevalent in your own career in the industry, Billy.

Every pre-pro sceenwriter wants to be the object of affection in a IWF relationship to someone inside the "biz." IWF IS THE DREAM, if you stop to think about it, for all those going the contest route to get exposure for their scripts.

Point: IWF IS NOT PMS. IWF is a good thing!

- E.C. Henry from Bonney Lake, WA

[Frank Conniff]

I'll be the first to admit that I didn't see Reservior Dogs on the festival circuit. And by the way, last weekend, I was the first to not see Grindhouse, way before everyone else was not seeing it. And not to brag, but I was the first to lie about seeing Springsteen before he was big, way before everyone else was lying about how they saw Springsteen before he was big. And this morning, when I read the Arts and Leisure section, I was the first to say, "Who the hell is Feist?' But now that the Times has written her up, I guess she's in the Feistgeist. (And I was the first to realize how godawful that last line is, and I was also the first to know that this whole post is just one joke, repeated over and over again.)

[jen]

1. hilarious.
2. oh, how you suffer.
3. if you REALLY knew bigfoot, you'd know he prefers waffles.

[Ann Wesley Hardin]

IWF to use sunblock back in 1970! Uval--washed off in the ocean and tasted like ear wax.

Oh and I did Nerd Heroes waaaay before Vicki Lewis Thompson. But Kelly Rippa catapulted HER to the bestseller lists and left ME eating dirt. Of course, would've helped if I'd been published then.

[mernitman]

Giles: Why didn't I think of that? Oh right -- you were there first...

Binnie, no one could be as hip and cool as YOU!

Readers, Binnie was an early adopter of "Music from the Inside Out," a wonderful documentary about musicians (finally available to the general public; you can get info on it at http://www.musicfromtheinsideout.com/), and yes, it's certainly blog post-worthy, so the next time I re-view it...

EC, Let's get those IWF IS NOT PMS bumper stickers printed up
soon (and confuse everybody!).

Frank, let me be the first to recognize your comedic genius (Feistgeist is just fine by me).
I'm already telling people I knew you when.

Jen: Busted!!! Ouch.

Ann: I think after all the sunblock and dirt, we ought to treat you to a nice piece of chicken (or sauteed tofu, if preferred).

[Guillermo]

I've been reading Bolano (and in fact tried to secure the rights to The Savage Detectives before it was translated, to no avail--though I'm sure somebody with more juice than me will buy the rights and produce a blockbuster) untranslated for a very long time...

I think now that the Spanish Language has been discovered by Hollywood you'll going to see a lot more names from south-of-the-border make their way onto the silverscreen.

You heard it here first (or read it, as the case may be).

[tc]

Not Feist! Lonely Lonely has to be the best song-EVER- a moment in a script that captures the feeling of that song? That's what I struggle to write.

It's almost as shocking as hearing Imogen Heap playing in the Smith pilot (abandoned heist tv show).

If the music that captures you is suddenly being played in moments on shows you watch (or in movie soundtracks) does that mean you're "getting it"? Is there hope that our scripts will one day be that thing people talk about, that we as writers might be the next big find? Or does the gift of recognition only apply to work other than our own? (Did that even make sense?)

Great post, Billy, way to put it all in words, that feeling of connection...

[jess]

man, i discover EVERYTHING first.

...it's always so annoying when the rest of humanity catches up and steals my thunder.

[MaryAn]

(insert clever one liner here)

[mernitman]

Guillermo: Seems to me that a couple of stories in "Last Evenings on Earth" are ripe for film adaptation...

tc, that certainly makes sense, but you're posing the kind of question that prob'ly only an I Ching reading (or something like it) might answer. I believe in hope, myself.

jess: and it's TOTALLY irksome when they snatch your lightning.

maryan: [insert clever response]

[Janet]

You are the only one I know who could write a post about IWF without sounding whiny and egotistical. I must say that I feel your pain. Numerous occassions (the sudden success of The Decemberists for example) have removed me from my elitist standing as one of the few and the proud.

But for the record, Ashley Mounts and Die Romantik are still mine!

But please, consider their music and make them famous because they deserve it.

[binnie]

You know, I actually take great pride in knowing I was an Early Adopter of Billy Mernit...

[sal]

LOL! You could always do what my uber-cool 18 year old does (because she hears about every cool band first - seriously, she photographed the Arctic Monkeys before anyone else had heard of them) - sneer "oh, they're so mainstream" as soon as anyone else mentions them, because she's already moved on to the next "next big thing". Only an 18yo can be quite so perfectly culturally superior!

[mernitman]

Thanks, Janet: I'll look out for Ashley and Die (and I'll keep quiet about it, and/or say you sent me).

Binnie: Pure genius, clearly.

Sal: Or a tweener...

[Patty]

Read this post three times--the laughs hold up! Keep seeing it in my mind's eye as a snarky exchange in yes a comedic romance.
He being the IWF, of course. She being the skeptic with "Whatever." of course. Oh, but then she one-ups him, of course. Blunders into a friendship with the next best thing.

Er, sorry. Got carried away.

[writergurl]

Just call me a laggard... I'm not ashamed! Hell, I'm proud of it! (Yeah, right.) After all, you can verify my laggard status by looking at the date of this reply to your post!

Late... yep, that's me.