In 2016, the comedians Sandy Honig, Mitra Jouhari, and Alyssa Stonoha were looking for a venue to stage a musical version of their act, Three Busy Debras. The show, which follows three suburban housewives all named Debra doing bad things with a big smile, had a sold-out run at the Annoyance theater in Brooklyn the year prior, and the comedians were ready for a bigger stage, but they couldn’t find anything. After yet another venue proved either too small or too expensive, Stonoha joked that it would be easier to book their show at Carnegie Hall. Turns out it was true; Carnegie Hall rents out its smaller recital rooms, and the Three Busy Debras launched a Kickstarter that raised $8,727, enough to rent a room but still short of the cost to get tech and lighting cues. They ended up performing their absurdist act that September for a “sold-out” audience (the tickets were free) with the house lights up.

It was around this time that Amy Poehler took notice and offered access to an even bigger stage: Adult Swim. Starting next spring, Three Busy Debras will premiere on the network—its first-ever female-led show—with Poehler as an executive producer. The quarter-hour live-action comedy show will feature the day-to-day activities of the Debras as they rapidly devolve into chaos. In anticipation of the premiere, we asked the photographer Logan Jackson to capture the Debras in their deranged element. —VICE staff

Styling by Sarah Toshiko West, hair and makeup by Lauren Young

Ecosia is the rarest of things—a search engine with a conscience: It refuses to steal data, evade taxes, or take any profits at all. Instead, it puts its revenue into tackling climate change by planting trees the world over. It’s the brainchild of Christian Kroll, a mild-mannered, 35-year-old German tech entrepreneur. He started the site with his sister in the storage room of a mosaics workshop in Berlin a decade ago. Today, it operates out of a hip warehouse in the Kreuzberg neighborhood, the entire operation running on its own purpose-built solar plants.

As Ecosia prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary this December, it seems their mantra of good not greed has struck a chord: Last year it saw an 82 percent year-on-year increase in searches globally. We asked Kroll to tell us about his plans for world transformation.

VICE: We keep hearing people say they have just switched to Ecosia. Can you tell us what it is and a little bit about the ethos behind it?
Christian Kroll: It’s really simple. It’s a search engine that uses the profit from the advertising revenue to plant trees all over the world. Search engines are the technology of the 21st century. Everybody uses them to get information and make decisions. They are slowly becoming our personal assistants—making choices for us without us really being aware of it. So while we already have Google, I think it’s important there should be an independent search engine that actually upholds certain ethical standards and isn’t designed purely for profit.

It sounds like a good idea—especially with monetization of data being such a big issue right now. So how does it actually work?
Microsoft[’s Bing] provides the algorithms for our search page, and so our results are different from Google. I would say that 95 percent of all my searches are answered by Ecosia. But one of the greatest advantages to using us is that we don’t track user information [permanently] and we certainly don’t sell any data. We anonymize all searches after four days and that means we basically don’t know anything about our users. It means we are making a little less money, but we decided we wanted to do what felt right.

That must be quite hard when you are up against one of the biggest and richest companies in the world. How do you hope to compete?
To a large extent I admire Google. It’s a very smart company and so not easy to win against. But I think that no company should be allowed to have as much power as Google has. In America and in many European countries it has around 90 percent share of the market. And that is a 90 percent share of probably the most important industry of the 21st century. I wouldn’t want Ecosia to have that. A search engine can never be neutral. It’s impossible for Google to be neutral: It has the power to decide what information people receive and so to influence their decisions. At Ecosia our aim is to encourage people to make decisions that are good for them but also good for the planet. It’s a lot of responsibility.

It’s a huge responsibility. What made you decide that planting trees was the best way to invest your profit?
I was in South America in 2006 and I found myself driving for hours and hours through these vast soy plantations, where the rainforest used to be, and which are now basically green deserts pumped full of chemicals. You never hear the sound of a single bird.

I started reading a lot about deforestation and became aware that climate change would probably become the most important topic of the 21st century, which currently it certainly seems to be. It’s a fact that if we planted one trillion trees we could pull enough carbon out of the air to massively reduce the risk of impending climate catastrophe. And trees don’t just help with climate change either, but also with poverty, hunger, flooding, and drought, as well as the biodiversity crisis.

Your homepage is telling me that I’ve now done enough Ecosia searches to plant nearly 1,000 trees, but how do I know that you are planting the right trees in the right places?
All Ecosia’s profits are given to partners around the world such as Progreso and the Green Belt Movement, which plant trees on our behalf. They are the experts and know what they’re doing. Recently we’ve planted acacia trees, which are good for drought, in Burkina Faso; fast-growing, protein-rich moringa trees in Peru; and mangrove trees in Madagascar.

We are a small company of just 45 people, and one of our most important teams is our tree-planting officers. Their role is to ensure the tree planting is actually happening and the trees are surviving.

It sounds like you are on your way to becoming our next tech millionaire. Is money important to you and can you tell us how much you earn?
We don’t share our salaries publicly, although I think that is going to change because I get asked that question a lot. We pay normal, market rate salaries and all staff have the option to reduce their earnings so more trees get planted. I voluntarily reduce mine, which means I earn around 30 percent less than the highest earner at Ecosia.

I have basically decided against becoming rich. I don’t think that money necessarily makes me happy. I have a small rented apartment, I have a bike, and while the Google founders have their super yachts, I have an inflatable dinghy that I share with friends and which we take out onto the lakes around Berlin. I live a simple life, very different from typical startup people.

It’s an admirable sentiment, but surely if, when the time is right, you decided to sell Ecosia you couldn’t help but become enormously rich?
To me, we are not a normal company, we are more like a movement. No one has the right to own a movement or, especially, sell a movement.

In the beginning I made a promise that I would never sell Ecosia, but I knew that was a bit meaningless because if I got hit by a bus, my family would inherit the company and would then have to sell it, possibly even to Google or Microsoft, to pay off the taxes. The bigger Ecosia grew the heavier this responsibility became.

We thought about turning ourselves into a foundation to prevent this happening, but that wasn’t quite right. Instead, recently we have become what’s known as a steward-owned company, and it’s now legally irreversible not just to sell Ecosia but also for anyone to take profits out of it.

I’ve also heard that Ecosia has been very vocal in its support for Extinction Rebellion, the global environmental movement.
In Germany we have this movement called FridaysforFuture, and we realized that we have a lot of people on our staff who are very active in organizing and participating in these demonstrations. We decided that the best way we could support them is by actually counting this protest time as work time. Also, if any of our staff happen to get into trouble for nonviolent disobedience and end up in jail for a few days, then we would count that as work time too, rather than taking it out of their holiday time or whatever. Plus we’d provide legal help.

When we hire people, of course they need to be very well qualified, but we obviously look for people who really care about what we’re doing. I would never hire somebody who is, say, an excellent developer, but flies to Dubai every weekend to go shopping.

So what does the future hold?
I do think we can grow big just by doing what we believe is right. Fifty percent of our users are under the age of 35, and a lot of these are smart, progressive people who really care about our planet.

I think companies have a responsibility to behave like role models, but unfortunately in many areas, they do not. There are a few things that Google does that aren’t very nice—being anti-competitive, for example, and finding ways to pay as little tax as possible. If I owned Google I’d make sure that I fulfilled all my social responsibilities. Unfortunately, I don’t own Google. Not yet.

Right now we are still minuscule compared with Google—I think in Germany we have something like maybe 1 percent or less of the market share—but out on the streets with Extinction Rebellion, everyone has heard of us. I think we have something that in the long term will be a huge advantage over Google, and that’s trust. And trust is something that money simply can’t buy.

Seven cows sunned themselves in a patch of grass in New Paltz, New York, relaxing in the early autumn breeze. When Nimai Pandit, the owner and chief farmer of Gopal Farm, stepped into their enclosure, a slim, tawny cow approached. Her name was Yogamaya, and she wanted a head rub. “They can’t massage this,” he explained as he scratched deeply behind the rough tuft of hair at the top of her head. When he stopped, Yogamaya nudged him with her nose. “Oh, they love petting. They like human touch.”

On 90 acres of land in the Hudson Valley, Pandit and his wife, Ashley Scott, started Gopal Farm in April 2016 with one guiding principle: love for the cow, something they found lacking at other farms. But selling milk requires permits, infrastructure, and money, so the couple started Gopal as a vegetable farm first, in order to establish themselves and raise funds to take on milk production. With the 2019 growing season over, Pandit is moving his efforts toward dairying.

By June 2020, Pandit expects to sell Gopal’s “ethical” milk. To him, that’s milk that circumvents even the concerns of vegans and which, he said, people already request from him more than anything else he produces. “We want to target people who would understand the time, effort, and the thought and consciousness [we’ll put] into bringing ethical milk to them,” Pandit said in a phone call in September. Gopal is a no-kill farm where, under Pandit’s guidance, the cows will graze freely into old age, newborns will drink from their mother’s teat, and male calves will grow into strong oxen.

This will be made possible by a “401(k)” for cows, as Pandit described it, with 10 percent of the dairy’s earnings going toward the cows’ future care. He’s betting that people will pay premiums for Gopal’s ethical milk—and they’d better, because the whole project relies on it.

Pandit arrived in Kentucky from India in 1994 with plans to work in IT, which he did until his roommate had a nervous breakdown. Confused about his own life, Pandit returned to India in 1996 to join an ashram. He hadn’t been religious, but in the ashram, he converted to Hinduism. As a new follower of a faith with reverence for cows at its foundations, he gave up meat and trained in Indian temple cuisine.

In 2000, he moved to New York City. After his time in India, Pandit became more critical of his food. “I started to think about food as something you have to worry about: the quality, sourcing, and ethical reasons. I wanted to have good food, not just the flavor but the quality of it,” he said. He met Scott in Union Square Park and they bonded over their interest in food. The two of them now sell vegetables at the park once a week.

Spurred by Scott’s suggestion to start a farm, they began visiting dairy farms in Pennsylvania in the summer of 2008. “Even if they were good, conscious farmers, unproductive cows are sent for slaughter and male babies are sent for slaughter. When we were face-to-face with it, we knew we could not farm,” Pandit said. To him, the cow was treated like a machine—used until broken and then fixed or tossed. Though cows can live up to 20 years naturally, the average life span of an American dairy cow today is four to six.

The financial realities were similarly alarming. With food, housing, veterinarian bills, milking, processing, and human labor, having dairy cows is expensive. Those costs are weighed by opportunities to make money: the milk the cows produce while they’re alive, the meat they become after slaughter. Keeping unproductive cows isn’t feasible in an industry in which sinking prices and low wages force the steady closure of farms nationwide. New York State alone lost more than 1,600 dairy farms between 2006 and 2016.

“I knew that in India, people do ethical farming,” Pandit said. Several states and territories in India prohibit the slaughter of cows, with punishment including fines and imprisonment. In 2009, Pandit and Scott went to India. But getting firsthand experience on farms was a nonstarter. Within India’s caste system, the couple were more educated and monied, so people from classes deemed lower wouldn’t hire them, Pandit said. The next year, the opportunity arose to take over a nonprofit dairy in Jaisalmer, a city in the northwestern state of Rajasthan where Pandit was raised.

Many dairy farms sell male calves into the meat market, but at Gopal Farm, Nimai Pandit plans to keep them, like the now one-and- a-half-year-old Karan.

In his new role, Pandit could ask farmers to teach him. Though he had followed Ayurvedic practices since childhood thanks to his mother, it wasn’t until then that he learned the methods of Ayurvedic farming, such as using cow urine to enhance soil, cow dung to preserve seeds, and neem oil to prevent pests. But, he said, “The most important thing I learned by staying with these cow herders was the personal love for the cows—that the cows are like family members. She is also considered a mother and in the same status as one’s mother.”

Pandit isn’t alone in rethinking the dominant system of milk production. As people become increasingly aware of the environmental, animal, and human toll of animal products, milk is being reconsidered in every way. Sales of nondairy milk rose by 61 percent between 2012 and 2017, which has led even longtime dairy farmers to opt for cashews instead of cows. One Bay Area startup is even hoping to make cow’s milk without the cow by using fermentation to create milk proteins in a lab.

In the United States, yearly per capita milk consumption dropped from 197 pounds in 2000 to 178 pounds in 2010. Last year, that number went down to 146 pounds. There are many reasons why people are giving up milk or consuming less of it, and there are just as many suggestions on how to change that.

“The most important thing I learned by staying with these cow herders was the personal love for the cows—that the cows are like family members.”

For people who already think critically about milk, Pandit wants to offer a better option. “A big part of why we are doing it is that I would very much like to see this kind of ethical dairying become a kind of dairying adopted by other dairy farmers,” Pandit said over the phone. “This is a reality that farmers are facing. Many, many are going out of business. If the vegan people do not want to drink milk and so many are doing it for ethical reasons, why not provide them with ethical milk?”

But the ethics of eating are a complicated tangle of individual values. When I contacted the Northeast Dairy Producers Association to understand how Gopal’s model fits into New York state’s dairy farming industry, the executive director, Tonya Van Slyke, wrote, “Dairy farmers are ethical.” Unlike the organic or fair-trade designations, there are no set criteria for “ethical” and no official certification. That frustrates Pandit, who takes issue with the use of “ethical” and “humane” when those terms are used by farms that still engage in slaughter.

Since Pandit and Scott returned to the States in 2012, everything they’ve done has been in preparation for this milk. Even the Ayurveda distribution company Pandit started in 2008 was intended to raise funds for the farm. In 2016, they bought the land in New Paltz. There’s a house, a barn, a greenhouse, and a small building for the Ayurveda business.

Next spring, Pandit and Scott will build a milking parlor and a space to pasteurize and bottle in the final steps toward bringing their milk to market. Because of state permit laws, all the raw milk they’ve produced so far has been for personal use only.

During my October visit, the herd was lounging on the grass while it was still plentiful. America’s dairy industry has relied almost exclusively on Holstein cows, and to a smaller extent Jerseys, but Pandit wants to work with breeds on the Livestock Conservancy’s watch list instead, like his Dutch Belted and Guernseys, to avoid the genetic problems of more popular breeds. Soon, he’ll pick up three Milking Devons from a farm in Vermont.

Pandit has received offers of animals as donations, but because of the environmental stressors and health problems of industrial dairies, he only accepts cows that have lived their whole lives outside factory farms. “For us, it’s a big issue, because in a normal factory farm, if there is any problem with a cow, they just send her for slaughter, and we would never do that,” he said.

Working with heritage breeds has downsides. Holsteins have taken over the industry for a reason: They produce about 2,674 gallons of milk per year, compared with a Guernsey’s 1,600. Plus, according to Pandit, with mostly Jersey farms nearby, not only is the local knowledge base smaller, but ready bulls aren’t available. His cows must be artificially inseminated using semen from registered flocks.

Impregnating cows is integral to dairy farming because cows produce milk only after birthing a calf. Mating can happen naturally, but more commonly, cows are artificially inseminated, a practice that some animal rights activists find unacceptable. While sorted semen allows some farmers to play God, natural breeding results in female calves and male calves. With no use for males on dairy farms, farmers usually sell them as meat.

The two males at Gopal were unintended additions, but keeping them is a testament to Pandit’s mission. Bhima, a three-and-a-half-year-old ox, was born to Kunti, the leader of the herd, shortly before she arrived at the farm. “[Her previous owner] asked me, ‘You’re buying the cow. Do you really need this?’” Pandit recalled. Now, he said, “He’s my favorite. He’s my first son, I feel like.”

Bhima gained a brother in March 2018 when Scott decided to rescue a calf now known as Karan. When Bhima and Karan are fully grown, Pandit sees them pulling rides around the farm or powering a ghani, the traditional Indian system for extracting oil from seeds. As nature goes, there will surely, eventually, be more males.

Pandit takes issue with what he sees as a lack of compassion. Instead of separating calves from their mothers immediately, which is done in part to reserve the cow’s marketable milk, he keeps them together for 15 days, after which the baby nurses twice a day for around six months. One argument he said he’s heard from vegans is that a cow’s milk is meant only for its babies.

To that, he pointed to the time when Bhima drank as much as he wanted, until he had diarrhea from the glut of milk. To Pandit, that’s proof that the mother makes more milk than needed. After he gives the calf its fill, he said, there’s plenty of milk left over from the three other teats.

Once the dairy is set up, Pandit will have 10 cows producing an estimated 40 gallons of milk a day. That’s small-scale—one Holstein yields close to 9 gallons per day and one farm may have thousands of them—but Pandit thinks sales will even out the operation. A single gallon of his milk, which he’ll sell in the city, will be around $17, with 10 percent put aside for the cows’ future. That’s not something that just anyone is going to pick up at the store.

As good as Pandit’s intentions are, there’s skepticism from experts on both sides.

The goal might be to make milk that appeals to the ethics of vegans, but on that point, the vegan-feminist theorist Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat, was wary. “The presumption that vegans are looking for ways to drink the nursing material of a cow, it’s a false assumption,” Adams said. “The idea that we vegans are looking for an ethical out… we are perfectly happy.”

In championing the idea that using animals as business is fundamentally unethical, Adams is certainly more radical than most. “Let’s acknowledge that everything he is attempting to ameliorate identifies some of the problems with the dairy industry,” she said. “The assumption is that dairy can be mitigated. Why mitigate it? Why aren’t we just walking away from it?”

On the other side of the equation, dairy insiders shared their own concerns. Thomas Overton, a professor of animal science at Cornell University, noted some potential management challenges. One reason calves are separated from their mothers, for example, is so the mother can be milked for her immunity-giving colostrum, which a calf should drink four quarts of in its first four hours. That can be guaranteed if the calf is fed by a farmer, Overton suggested, but it doesn’t always happen if the calf is left to feed on its own.

Whether a model like Gopal’s can work financially will be for the market to decide. “We live in a country and a place where if someone can create a niche market, and they have a product that consumers are willing to pay more for than regular milk, then more power to them,” Overton said.

Though some consumers may be willing to pay extra for “attribute-rich” milk, the market is limited, wrote Marin Bozic, an assistant professor of dairy foods marketing economics at the University of Minnesota, in an email. Organic still accounts for only approximately 5 percent of total milk sales. He wrote, “There might be a sliver of the populace that would be willing to pay a much higher price for milk advertised as ‘ethical,’ but that market is very small.”

In the meantime, Pandit takes pleasure in caring for his cows. To him, they’re like children—all with their own preferences and personalities, and smart, but in need of a little guidance. Sitting in the garage at his home, he explained that it’s a rare occasion that he’ll drink conventional dairy or eat anything made with it. “I don’t like to. I can see in my mind the whole process of what’s going on,” he said. “I don’t like to support that industry.”

More than 2.7 million people call Chicago, Illinois, home. But in one of the most segregated cities in America, what home means to the inhabitants of Chicago’s North and South sides is intensely different.

Tonika Johnson, a photographer, activist, and mother, is known for her visual explorations of Englewood, the South Side neighborhood where she grew up. In 2017, she was named a Chicagoan of the Year by Chicago magazine for her photography depicting daily life in Englewood, offering a counterimage to the media’s version of the neighborhood as a place of poverty, tragedy, and crime.

That same year, Johnson began photographing a project that has her grappling with what home looks like for the rest of the city: The Folded Map Project, an ongoing exploration of modern segregation, depicts corresponding addresses on the North and South Sides of Chicago. Johnson told me she began by finding what she calls “map twins” in an effort to “identify and compare what present-day inequity and segregation looks like while also bringing together people on same blocks but in different segregated neighborhoods to have a conversation.”

Johnson grew up in the Englewood home that her grandmother purchased after moving to the city from East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1965, having worked hard for seven years to save for it. “My childhood was wonderful,” Johnson recalled when we met at her home in Englewood in October. “I thought my neighborhood was the most ideal place to be until I started to go outside and encountered people who asked me questions like, ‘Oh is there a lot of shootings on your block?’ So, it just really kind of ruptured the childhood reality that I had.” Throughout high school, she began to notice the sum of differences between her neighborhood and those located on the North Side, observations that sparked the Folded Map Project, in part an attempt at understanding why her neighborhood became that way.

“Chicago is not the only city that’s impacted by structural, systemic discrimination and racism,” Johnson said. “Even though we have put laws and policies in place to dismantle segregation, it is something that has seeped into our daily lives, our social networks, that allows hatred and stereotypes to get perpetuated.”

The Folded Map Project has been exhibited widely since she began work on it, and Johnson was awarded the Field Foundation’s Leaders for a New Chicago designation this year. Johnson plans to identify more “map twins” in 2020 and is developing two projects expanding on that work, in which she’ll document African American teenagers’ journey to feel like they belong in the city and collect Chicagoans stories about being told to avoid the South Side.

“I wanted the Folded Map to serve as an opportunity for people to see the result of segregation,” she said. “[Chicago] is also the place that has the greatest opportunity to get it right, to be an example of how you can dismantle this deeply embedded historic segregation.”

A gallery piece from a recent exhibition of Johnson’s Folded Map Project shows 6900 North Ashland Avenue.

Johnson poses in the living room with her children, Nyjah and Khayyel.

Johnson rests on the porch of her Englewood home.

Johnson has a deep archive of unpublished work. BoysInWater—2015, one of Johnson’s lesser-known photographs, depicts a group of boys playing in the water at Foster Park, on Chicago’s South Side.

Hotchips—2011, another image from the photographer’s archive, shows Johnson’s daughter and a friend eating hot chips while attending summer camp at Foster Park.

Johnson holds a copy of Story of Englewood. The book tells the early history of Englewood, when white settlers were prominent. Few texts have been published after it to update the history of Englewood to today, but Johnson’s work continues to fill in this missing and overlooked history.

A gallery piece from a recent exhibition of Johnson’s Folded Map Project shows 6900 South Ashland Avenue—6900 North Ashland Avenue’s South Side counterpart.

The Chicago skyline. Johnson has said she wants the "Folded Map Project to serve as an opportunity for people to see the result of segregation. [Chicago] is also the place that has the greatest opportunity to get it right, to be an example of how you can dismantle this deeply embedded historic segregation."

Seven feet tall, furry, orange, and rotund, he’s the belle of the ball, his googly eyes darting around in every direction. As he zipped around the Wells Fargo Center on a hoverboard, he shook his big ass, flanked on each side by stoic men in crisp black suits and dark glasses; behind them were the dancers for the Flyers, Philadelphia’s hockey team. It was a parade of sorts. The girls gyrated to pop hits from 10 years ago, while the guys waved orange-and-black flags. His face is permanently contorted into an enthusiastic grin, with a menacing pink tongue; his beard, like the rest of his fur, is a bright orange, but much longer and almost filthy. As he approached clusters of fans, they screamed, “Gritty! Gritty!” and begged for pictures, settling for high-fives. One fan got on his knees and bowed down to him, the god that he is. In moments like these, Gritty is the biggest celebrity in the world, and not only does he know it, he can’t get enough of it.

My arms flailed and I panted as I raced to keep up with all the excitement. This beloved orange monster is somehow the epitome of both grace and chaos, and I was smiling and laughing so much that the experience began to feel spiritual—I was one with this strange, beautiful community of worshippers. Face-to-face with the most popular sports mascot of the 21st century, I felt comically starstruck. Gritty offered me his four-fingered hand, which squeaked clownishly; unsure of what to do, I gave it a little kiss. He shot me one last leer, then abruptly turned away and continued his dance.

A human being walking around in a giant suit that resembles an anthropomorphized animal or other creature should be terrifying, but mascots remain universally cherished. Gritty offers a perfect example of the power these strange creatures wield in our modern society. He was introduced to the world on September 24, 2018, and slipped on the ice during his debut performance; despite (or perhaps because of) this, he became a sensation immediately. Sarah Schwab, the Flyers’ senior director of communications, told me that the team braced for a negative reaction initially, since “mascot adoptions typically take from three weeks to three months.” A writer from the Guardian described him as “a horrifying bearded man-Muppet hybrid whose eyes are permanently rolling in their sockets, presumably from years of drug use… toxic masculinity incarnate.” Responding to his debut tweet—“It me. #Gritty”—the rival Pennsylvania hockey team, the Pittsburgh Penguins, wrote, “lol ok.” But Gritty was able to expertly charm his way into the hearts of Flyers’ fans and beyond, quipping back, “Sleep with one eye open tonight, bird.”

Within days, he had made an appearance on The Tonight Show, chartering a helicopter from New York to Philadelphia to make it back in time for the game. Less than a month after his introduction, The New Yorker observed that “the mark of a knowing user on Twitter was to declare Gritty not just a good sports mascot but the latest version of the best thing ever.” According to his marketing team, he’s been swarmed by TMZ paparazzi on multiple occasions. His ascension from frightening NHL mascot to cultural icon—anti-fascists have co-opted him as one of their own; he appears on posters around Philadelphia telling citizens, “Only you can prevent street harassment”—was so swift that it’s now impossible to fathom that for the majority of my lifetime, I have lived in a world without Gritty.

By all means, Gritty should have been a passing fad, a five-minute sensation that quickly faded into the abyss of the internet, but more than a year after his introduction, he’s more popular than ever; the mascot, generally, seems to be growing in power. Why?

Mascots as we know them, fixtures of culture that they may seem, are a relatively new invention. In 1974, a San Diego radio station hired a college student to wear a chicken suit and do promotion at Padres games. It was a terrible season for the California baseball team, but the man in the chicken suit received great fanfare regardless. Taking note of the chicken’s popularity, the Philadelphia Phillies decided to reimagine their mascots, a pair of 15-foot animatronic twins from the colonial era named Phil and Phillis, into the Phanatic, an obese and happy green monster from the Galápagos Islands. The Phanatic, designed by the same person who dreamed up Miss Piggy, was introduced in 1978. Soon, having a mascot became commonplace in both college-level and professional sports.

Gritty exemplifies many of the mascot trends of the past 40 years, and may represent their logical conclusion, but it takes more than timing and a clever design to truly capture a nation’s imagination. For evidence, we can look to Phang, the mascot of the Philadelphia Union, a Major League Soccer team. Two weeks before the world fell in love with this new giant fuzzy Philadelphia sports icon, Phang hatched out of an egg at the Philadelphia Zoo. (He was not the first mascot to hatch out of an egg, and I imagine he will not be the last.)

Gritty offers a perfect example of the power these strange creatures wield in our modern society.

I met Phang at a Union game on a warm October afternoon, and observed as he enjoyed fanfare similar to Gritty’s, but with a smaller and more constrained operation, and generally less impressive stardom. An anthropomorphized snake, buff and mohawked, Phang is not snake-like at all, not least because he has arms and legs; almost as tall as Gritty, he is respected but not revered and, in many ways, is Gritty’s polar opposite. Gritty is a universally beloved icon of resistance to authoritarian control; Phang is not. Gritty has escaped the narrow uses to which sports marketers might put him, while Phang has not. The most striking difference between the two, though, may be that Phang is ripped, while Gritty has a body type that is more relatable to the average American. (Spokespeople from both teams said that the two are friends.)

Gritty’s largeness is very intentional, and certainly central to why he is so beloved. “If you give a mascot some area around the waist, you give them more ways to convey emotion,” Schwab told me. Phang, despite the arms and legs, is clearly a snake, a familiar creature. (At the Union game, I overheard two children arguing about Phang. “Literally, the Union symbol is a snake,” a girl of maybe 9 or 10 told her friend. “But I think it’s a dragon,” her friend protested. I couldn’t help but interject that yes, he is, in fact, a snake.) Gritty is an abstraction. Noseless, he does not resemble any known creature. This makes him anonymous, something of a blank slate onto which we can project our hopes and desires.

This anonymity seems central not just to the appeal of Gritty—a left-wing icon who can get Flyers fans to the stands for more hot dogs—but that of all mascots. Mascots’ identities are a carefully guarded secret, as part of what I like to call “mascot law.” The Union and the Flyers would not reveal the identity of the people who perform as their mascots—a common practice in professional sports—so as not to spoil the mystique of their team representative or remind the world that there is a very sweaty man inside whatever large stuffed animal we all agree to worship. Silent heroes, mascots are not allowed to speak when they are in the suit.

The Flyers are so secretive about some aspects of Gritty that when I asked what was up with his belly button—something that resembles a neon scrunchie and often changes colors—Schwab tersely said, “We can’t comment on the belly button.” She was effective in keeping all information about the man inside Gritty hidden from me, and when I attempted to peek inside the mask, Gritty ran away from me, disgusted by my transgression. The one small detail I learned: He is tall. In fact, Gritty was originally adapted from a design drawn by Brian Allen of Flyland Designs known internally as “Monster D.” (The “D” does not stand for anything naughty, but rather differentiates it from Monsters A–C.) Monster D rocked a Donald Duck look, but when the performer initially tried on the costume, his height made him look strangely naked, so they gave him pants. “That was a good call,” I told Schwab. “Otherwise, we’d all be wondering about his penis.” Unsurprisingly, Schwab did not have further comment on Gritty’s reproductive organs, but when I mentioned it to Allen, he insisted, “I never designed Gritty’s genitals.”

(There is no easy or obvious place to bring this up, but it’s difficult to talk about the popularity of mascots without talking about furries, a community of people who have a sexual fetish for anthropomorphized animals. Their cultural impact has grown in recent years, particularly online, and brands are paying attention. After sending a glut of sexualized tweets to the cereal mascot Tony the Tiger, furries seemingly drove him off the social media platform. Meanwhile, Chester the Cheetah, the mascot for Cheetos, capitalized on the enthusiasm of these fetishists. Inevitably, the sexualization of these characters, while it remains niche, has become increasingly mainstream.)

Phang, unlike Gritty, was an easy nut to crack. He had one handler, who was, unlike Gritty’s secret service agents, not in character. When he pulled me in for a picture, I whispered to him, “Will I be able to get you to talk?” and he whispered back, “Maybe.” I gasped with delight. When his handler wasn’t paying attention, he told me that he also plays the sidekick to the Phillie Phanatic, and was also a college mascot. Down the throat of the snake costume, he flashed me his piercing green eyes, which sent a chill down my spine. Later on, while he was taking a break from his mascot duties in an office conference room, I sneaked a peek of him out of his suit and saw a young man, soaking in sweat, totally silent, holding his head in his hands, as if he was in deep pain. A couple minutes later, he was back in the suit, continuing his charm offensive around the stadium.

Since mascot law barred me from speaking with the men who embody Gritty and Phang, I turned to my friend Josh Lay, a former New Jersey Devil who went to the University of Tennessee on a full mascot scholarship with books included. Lay has an infectiously upbeat quality to him, and his reviews of mascot life were decidedly mixed. He described his experience as “super hot,” involving wearing a 25-pound suit with no ventilation, constantly dehydrated. Lay became a mascot because he liked sports and was an aspiring actor. When he moved to New York after college to pursue acting, he recalled performing as the Devil to a screaming audience of thousands, only to return to the city later that evening and perform improv for eight drunk people at a small bar. “You’re this instant celebrity,” he told me. “Smokey [the mascot for the University of Tennessee] has been around for 50 years. You’re a celebrity who has never lost celebrity status.”

The growing appeal of mascots almost seems inevitable in our increasingly broken world: They don’t have any of the flaws that make humans so difficult to love. They are what anyone wants them to be, and what everyone wants them to be. The Flyers might lose a hockey game, but Gritty always wins. The New Yorker writer Naomi Fry named Gritty one of the best men of 2018, explaining, “Gritty is magic because he is pure male id, but without any of the menace.” He threatens without doing anything; he is as kind or unkind as you desire.

In a punitive era where anyone can be canceled for a stray word, the mascot is a safe figure to love. Gritty, an otherworldly apparition who doesn’t even have the baggage of looking like a real animal, is the perfect idol. He is ugly and chaotic, and thus relatable, but only exists for the purpose of having fun, of celebrating the strange joy that comes along with existing in a society. He is beautiful and beloved, and has already secured his place in history. His time, this era of anything that can be everything to everyone, is just beginning.

It was around two in the morning when Jessa Jones began to feel like the blood-soaked iPhone in her possession was a lost cause. The microsolderer had spent hours holed up in her repair shop, painstakingly cleaning and replacing rice-size chips on the phone’s logic board and fixing a tiny electrical problem affecting its power button. But when she pressed that button, the device still wouldn’t turn on.

“I was exhausted, and I was feeling kinda hopeless about this phone,” Jones said. “I was pretty close to saying this is beyond what I can recover.”

Jones is a world-renowned phone fixer, but this was far from an ordinary repair job. The device she was working on that night in May of 2017 belonged to Srinivas Kuchibhotla, a 32-year-old Indian man who was fatally shot earlier that year in a bar in Olathe, Kansas, a horrific hate crime that drew national attention. The phone was likely in Kuchibhotla’s pocket when Adam Purinton, a white man, began hurling racial slurs at him and another Indian national named Alok Madasani, shouting “Get out of my country!” before opening fire. (Madasani was injured but survived.) By the time the police recovered the device from Kuchibhotla’s body, it was drenched in his blood.

Several months later, Kuchibhotla’s wife, Sunayana Dumala, took the phone to a local repair shop, desperate to boot it up so she could access some final snapshots of her husband’s life. A technician, Dumala says, took one look at the device and knew he wouldn’t be able to help. But he told her that Jones, who runs a gadget repair shop in the tiny upstate New York town of Honeoye Falls, just might.

Dumala shipped the phone off to New York almost immediately.

Our smartphones are practically extensions of our bodies these days, but we treat them as if they’re disposable. We trade them in when the screen gets cracked; we discard last year’s model for that shiny new one with slightly better specs or a new selfie camera. We do this, in part, because the companies that make our phones frequently tell us they cannot be fixed: The cost is too high, the internal circuitry too complex for our simple minds to fathom. Instead of being encouraged to try, we’re told to replace.

Jones will tell you that’s bullshit.

A mother of four with a PhD in molecular genetics, Jones has become an unlikely leader in a growing community of microsolderers. These are fixers who aren’t just swapping cracked screens and dead batteries, but who are more like physicians, diagnosing and repairing tiny electrical problems on the motherboard (or logic board, as Apple calls it). This is the beating heart of your device, containing chips and circuitry responsible for many essential functions. In a matter of minutes, a skilled microsolderer can fix a short circuit on an iPhone that fell in the bathtub, and by doing so she can bring the device back from the dead—something Apple frequently tells customers is impossible.

But Jones doesn’t limit herself to simple short circuits. She’ll revive phones that have been through hell: phones that were run over by a car; recovered from the wreckage of a crashed airplane; bathed in the blood of a dead owner. She goes to great lengths to do so not because these devices will necessarily be used again, but because someone’s last memories are locked away inside. In the case of iPhones, which have had their data encrypted since the release of iOS 8, the only way to recover those memories is to boot up the phone and enter the passcode.

For those who’ve lost precious photos, videos, or messages, getting those digital mementos can be a profound experience.

“People cry about it, all the time,” said Joe Ham, a microsolderer whose Washington State repair shop, Gadget Genie, is one of the few shops that can do complex data recovery jobs from Apple devices. “They say, I really need this, I’ve taken it to three other shops, you’re my only chance.” Ham, who’s been fixing gadgets his whole life, credited Jones with giving him the confidence to launch a microsoldering business after he flew across the country to learn from her.

Jones didn’t set out to fix tiny computer circuits for a living. But after she left her job teaching college biology to become a stay-at-home mom, she had some time on her hands. When her sons started cracking iPad screens, Jones watched online repair videos and learned how to replace them. When her then-toddler-age twin girls dropped her iPhone 4S in the toilet, Jones took the toilet outside, sledgehammered it open, retrieved the phone, and decided to fix it.

That decision would change her life.

After she swapped the phone’s battery and charge port, the phone still wouldn’t hold a charge. Eventually “it became clear that it was a motherboard problem,” Jones said. “And it just seemed like it had to be a solvable problem.”

Jones purchased soldering equipment and a microscope and began tinkering with other dead devices. It took over two years and countless hours on repair forums, but eventually, she got the toilet phone working again. By the time she did, Jones was pretty good at repairing lots of common phone problems and had launched MommyFixit, a mail-in repair service she operated out of her dining room. Soon, Jones was drafting other stay-at-home moms to help her run the business.

“Moms are super capable,” Jones said. “And they’re really good at fixing phones.”

In 2015, Jones, along with fellow mom-fixers Sunday Thomson and Christy Dryden and another microsolderer named Mark Shaffer, moved into a derelict shop at the corner of downtown Honeoye Falls’ lone stoplight intersection and rebranded themselves as iPad Rehab. They’ve been there ever since, using their specialized skills to fix smartphones and tablets from all over the world. Once a month, Jones teaches a practical board repair class out of the shop, and in doing so has spread her knowledge to hundreds of other fixers. She teaches far more on her repair-focused YouTube channel, which has amassed 130,000 subscribers since its launch around the start of 2015.

“She doesn’t just fix stuff, she teaches others how to fix stuff,” said Gay Gordon-Burne, the executive director of the grassroots trade organization the Repair Association. “Which means there’s more skill out there than there ever was before.”

Jones isn’t just a teacher, but a voice for the community she’s helped build. She’s a vocal proponent of right-to-repair, the simple idea that if you own a device, you should be allowed to fix it. It’s a stance that frequently puts Jones at odds with Apple, a company that has become notorious for its anti-repair stances. For years, it refused to sell parts and share information with unauthorized repair shops (and authorized shops are prohibited from doing any of the logic board repairs Jones offers), forcing independent and DIY fixers to rely on aftermarket parts that can vary in quality and, in the case of microsolderers, on board schematics that were leaked to the internet. As Apple lobbies against right-to-repair legislation and repeatedly introduces updates aimed at spooking its customers out of attempting repairs at home, Jones fights back, advocating at state houses, testifying as an expert witness in iPhone repair cases, and repeatedly calling the company out on her YouTube channel when she feels Apple is spreading misinformation about what can be fixed.

Data recovery is a common example. Jones said she frequently gets customers who’ve been told by an Apple employee that the data on their water-damaged phone or tablet is unrecoverable. Or the customer may have been directed to DriveSavers, a company that originally specialized in hard-drive data recovery, where customers sometimes are quoted upwards of $1,000 to get photos off iPhones. (When I called DriveSavers’ customer service line and asked how much it would cost to recover photos and videos from a water-damaged iPhone, a representative told me it would be in the $700 to $1,900 range and “probably in the upper third.”) Jones charges $300 for a basic data recovery job.

“How many people were told ‘Kiss those pictures goodbye, there’s nothing you can do’?” Jones said. “I don’t know, but it’s a huge number, and that’s really sad.”

“This is exactly why right-to-repair exists,” said Nathan Proctor, who heads up the U.S. Public Interest Research Group’s Right to Repair campaign. “So that there can exist a market for repair outside of what manufacturers want to offer people.”

When I reached out to Apple to ask what sort of help it could offer a customer who wanted to recover data from a dead device, a spokesperson sent me a list of links to Apple support pages detailing how to back up your working iPhone and to Apple repair services (none of which mentioned data recovery). Apple declined to comment on record about independent repair shops that offer data recovery services.

Jones has a quick smile and a matter-of-fact demeanor that puts you at ease right away. Her shop is equally inviting; the front is styled like a parlor room with a dining table, a thrift store couch, and an array of beverage options available for clients. A painting of Mona Lisa holding an iPad, done by Jones’ husband, hangs near the entrance. When I visited on a cold, rain-soaked October morning, I was offered a cup of hot tea and escorted to the back. There, the homemaker’s façade gave way to a maverick’s laboratory of microscopes, soldering stations, multimeters, and DC power supplies. At every workbench, phones and tablets sat in various stages of dissection.

Jones had pulled together some case studies for my visit: phones that were sent to the shop for data recovery after they died. There was an iPhone that a woman in California accidentally ran through the washing machine for five minutes. The phone was dead, and she had lost all her kids’ baby pictures. An iPhone from Nebraska had also taken a bath and died, taking out a year’s worth of family photos with it.

As we opened up the phones to look at their logic boards, Jones talked me through the process of diagnosis and repair. She did so with the clarity of a doctor telling a patient about their latest lab results and the enthusiasm of a high school science teacher. “This is very much like science,” Jones said. “It’s troubleshooting, pattern recognition, and experiments. It’s also fast and doesn’t take months. So that’s why I love it.”

Some of the phones we dissected had neat and tidy solutions, like an iPhone 6S that had a single short circuit preventing it from powering on. Having seen this problem many times before, Jones immediately zeroed in on the sand-grain-size capacitor that was causing trouble, tweezed it out, and booted up the phone. Other cases weren’t so straightforward. We examined a water-damaged iPhone that had important chips stripped from its logic board, meaning somebody had been working on it before it was sent in. Jones spent about an hour attempting to wind the clock backward from that prior repair attempt, but eventually concluded the phone likely wouldn’t be recoverable.

There are so many data recovery jobs with similar stories—water damage or a bad drop; lost pictures of a newborn baby or grandma’s birthday—that they blur together in Jones’ mind. But iPad Rehab also receives devices from parents whose child committed suicide; from families who lost a loved one in a tragic accident. Working to restore these phones can be painful, but they’re also some of the most rewarding jobs Jones gets.

A few years back, a Rochester native named Peter Lovenheim brought in a phone that belonged to his sister, Jane Glazer. The device had been recovered by divers at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea, where Glazer and her husband’s private plane crashed in September 2014, killing them both. Lovenheim had sent the phone to a different repair shop first, which told him it was impossible to recover. Another company he called said to not even bother sending it in. When he discovered Jones’ shop, based locally for him, he drove over and dropped off the phone.

Within a couple of days, he said, her team had recovered the data.

“It was astounding,” Lovenheim said. “She was able to give us scores of photos.” One of the final photos ever taken of his sister is now sitting framed on a dresser in his house.

Last year Jones’ shop received another plane crash case. In late February of 2018, Bill Kaupp, a 64-year-old private pilot from Alberta, took a small aircraft out for a spin along with his 28-year-old son, his best friend, and his son’s best friend. It was supposed to be a quick test flight, but something went horribly wrong, and the plane crashed just west of the Colorado border in Utah. Nobody on board survived.

Several days later, two iPads that Kaupp used for navigation were discovered cracked, smeared with dirt, and buried in snow amid the wreckage. It seemed “pointless” to try to fix them, said Lindsay Magill, Kaupp’s 38-year-old daughter. But she tried anyway. One of the tablets turned out to be a lost cause—the memory chip was damaged. But Jones’ team was able to recover the other, which contained photos and videos of Kaupp with his grandchildren in Montana just days before the accident.

“I can’t express my gratitude enough to Jessa,” Magill said. “There’s no replacing the videos and pictures she recovered for us. And it’s something his grandchildren will have for the rest of their lives.”

Every phone that Jones brings back from the dead shines a little more light into a life someone wants to remember. For Jones herself, Kuchibhotla’s story may be the most unforgettable.

Born in Hyderabad, India, Srinivas Kuchibhotla came to America for a master’s in electrical engineering at the University of Texas, El Paso. There, he started a long-distance relationship with Sunayana Dumala, who was from the same hometown.

“For me he was the perfect guy,” Dumala said. “He would add humor to a discussion when it was required. He would be the most mature guy in the group when it comes to giving opinions. He was caring, humble, always respectful of others.”

In 2012, the two got married in India and moved in together in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where Kuchibhotla worked as an engineer at an avionics company. About a year later, Kuchibhotla was offered a job at Garmin, and so the couple packed up and moved to Olathe, a suburb of Kansas City where the company is headquartered. Kuchibhotla quickly became part of the community, joining a cricket league and playing pool with his co-workers at happy hours.The couple bought a lot and built a house, where they eventually planned to raise their kids.

That dream ended when Kuchibhotla’s life was taken at a bar on the night of February 22, 2017.

When Jones received the phone that had been with Kuchibhotla in his final moments, she was hit with a torrent of emotion. There was no escaping the fact that this device was only in her hands because of an act of brutal violence.

“I can remember a thick, heavy feeling from the history of that phone, that just filled the room,” Jones said. “This was filled with a human being’s blood from the night that he died. And it was really hard not to just burst into tears.”

The phone was so drenched with blood that Jones had to spend several hours cleaning the logic board in an ultrasonic bath before she could work on it. Once she’d gotten it as clean as she could, she sat down at her workbench, turned on a livestream, and began examining the phone under the microscope.

Jones removed chip after chip from the logic board and discovered that every one was still caked with blood on the other side. After she cleaned and replaced a number of critical chips and spent a while troubleshooting a power issue on a critical line, the phone still wouldn’t turn on. It was well past midnight, and Jones was nearing the end of her rope.

Every phone that Jones brings back from the dead shines a little more light into a life someone wants to remember.

About to give up, she decided to try one last thing. Jones had been attempting to boot up the phone using the power button, but an iPhone can also be prompted to boot by connecting it to a USB device. So she did that. Somewhat miraculously, the phone started to boot. When Jones connected a screen, it was responsive to touch, meaning a passcode could be entered. She had a path to its data.

“It was just really amazing,” Jones said. “I really had been very close to actually saying it’s not responsive, and I’ve replaced this whole board.”

The next day, Jones and Thomson together called Dumala to tell her they’d restored the phone and extracted all the photos. “We were in tears, she was in tears,” Jones said. “You couldn’t help it. And she was just, at the time, super grateful [to have] this little win in this horrible situation.”

“The way they handled it just spoke volumes about them,” Dumala said. “How they take it personally. I think, no wonder iPad Rehab is run by women, because we know the value of relationships and memories. It’s not just data. It’s the human value.”

Dumala still lives in the house she and Kuchibhotla built. Because she was a dependent on her husband’s visa, she had to apply for a new one after he was killed, and in doing so was bumped to the back of India’s astronomically long immigration line. All the years she spent waiting to become a citizen with her husband were lost; she now has to start over.

But Kansas has become Dumala’s home, and she’s not leaving. When she’s not working, she advocates for immigration reform. She started a Facebook page, Forever Welcome, to honor her husband’s memory, share immigrant stories with her community, and spread a message of unity and acceptance. She’s planning to turn it into a foundation.

The phone that Jones repaired sits on Kuchibhotla’s nightstand.

Diamonté Harper, better known as Saweetie, had been working since 5 a.m. when I spoke to her on a Friday afternoon in October. She said she was tired—the young rapper had been traveling nonstop for weeks—but for Saweetie, hard work is nothing new.

She was born and raised in the Bay Area and then moved to LA, where she first garnered social media fame in 2017 for her car raps: short, candid clips of her casually rapping over a hip-hop instrumental in the driver’s seat. If you go back far enough on her Instagram, you can still find them. She posted these videos often, showing off her smooth style and lyricism with intricately written verses and a playful flow.

The single “ICY GRL,” Saweetie’s introduction to the mainstream, was born from one of these clips. Now, two years later, that music video boasts more than 86 million views on YouTube. In that time, the half-Black, half-Filipina rapper released two EPs, performed another hit single, “My Type,” at the 2019 BET awards, and started a romantic relationship with Migos’ rapper Quavo. Saweetie chalks up a lot of this success to her work ethic, and her dedication to keep growing regardless of what obstacles stand in her way.

Despite her rapid rise to fame in the past year, the 26-year-old remains humble and is more focused than ever. And as 2019 comes to an end, Saweetie’s on the precipice of becoming a household name. For her, that’s only the beginning.

VICE: Could you tell me a bit about how you got started rapping?
Saweetie: As a little girl, I originally wanted to be a singer, but I couldn’t sing like that [ laughs], so those dreams died very fast. But I always loved expressing myself: I’ve been writing poetry since I was 14 years old. I was kind of introverted with my feelings—I’m cool to socialize; that’s another thing—but I express myself best on paper.

What inspired you to start incorporating music into your poetry?
For me, it’s like, writing poetry [with] no beat is cool. You’re able to create the beat in your head. But once I realized that hip-hop is basically poetry over a beat, that’s what got my attention. I feel like rap is just poetry in life form. And there’s different flows, different songs, different ways you can compliment a beat, so that’s what kind of drew me to hip-hop.

So it felt like a natural progression, like taking an existing rhythm and bringing it to life.
Exactly.

I lived in the Bay Area for a while, but I think it’s really rare to see such a big rapper of any kind—especially a woman—come out of the Bay. Has being from there influenced your work? I get that question a lot, and I don’t think I have the proper way to answer it. Bay Area people are really into being unique. We’re into being creative and coming up with our own ideas. We’re hella fly and down-to-earth. So I feel like that’s [the energy] I bring from just being from there. I reference Mac Dre in “My Type,” just taking dope lines and dope ways from the greats of the Bay. I think that’s where I grab my influence from.

I felt that too when I was out there, like no one in the Bay really cares about what’s trendy, or cool in the mainstream.
Bay natives are so artistic because we express ourselves through being creative—whether it’s dancing, painting, styling, rap, or music in general. The Bay is just such a melting pot for different creatives, period.

What inspired you to go to the University of Southern California for school then?
Well, I didn’t want to go to college [ laughs]. I went to high school in Sacramento, and there’s not much out there for entertainment. I went to San Diego State and transferred to USC ’cause I wanted to be in LA. I wanted to be by the music, to be discovered—that’s why I transferred schools.

I had so much anxiety, and I was so stressed out ’cause I really wanted to be in LA. One of my homegirls was an English major, so she’d proofread all my transfer letters and applications for me.

It’s super stressful because it’s competitive, too.
I was literally calling the admissions office maybe like three to four times a week, just asking them hella questions to make sure everything was perfect.

I feel like it really shows off your work ethic, which I know you’ve talked a lot about before.
I’m very passionate and I’m very driven when I’m interested in something. I don’t stop until I get it.

When did you decide that you wanted to do music for real?
When I was in high school, which is why I didn’t want to go to college, because rappers are always talking about dropping out and not going to school and making it with that. That’s why I thought J. Cole was so dope, because he went to school and was still dropping mixtapes. That was very inspiring.

As an Asian American, I think it’s awesome that you advocate for being half-Asian. Has that impacted your music in any way?
Sometimes at my shows my fans will bring a Filipino flag because my mom is Filipino. But I think it’s impacted my fans because I feel like there’s never really been a super poppin’ Asian female rapper. A lot of Asian girls identify with me. And I feel like it’s my job to just make them feel fly, to make them feel included, which is why I drop references here and there to let them know where I come from.

Do any facets of Filipino culture show up in your work or process?
Mostly it’s my mom—she Asian, she a tiger mom, so growing up she would always make me do stuff until it was perfect. I think that’s [where I] get [my drive], making sure everything is perfect and going over every little detail because my mom was really hard on me as a kid with homework and projects.

I want to shift a bit and talk about the “Icy” movement. “Icy Girl” came out in 2017, and it really started putting you on the map. What does being an “Icy Girl” mean?
A lot of people think that being “icy” is having all this jewelry and clothes. But if you really pay attention, my fans—my real “Icy Girls”—notice: I didn’t have any of that shit. So for me, “icy” is more so a mentality, a philosophy. I feel like an “Icy Girl” is a hustler. She’s independent and unapologetic. I say hustle because I was working three, sometimes four jobs in college. I was paying my own bills, taking care of myself.

And on top of that, she’s unapologetic. I know sometimes I get criticism for doing things that are “off brand,” but I think the dope thing about my brand is that I don’t box myself in. So I might do stuff that might shock people, but you can’t block me. I’m gonna do whatever I want. So I feel like that’s what an “Icy Girl” is—a boss-ass, independent-ass woman.

I love that part about being unapologetic, because I think that women can be so reactive to criticism because we get it so often.
Definitely. I like to show people that although I might receive a lot of criticism, when you poppin’, that’s what comes with the territory. So if you can’t handle the heat, get out the kitchen. But if you’re going to be poppin’, then you’re going to be in the kitchen.

Does the criticism ever get to you?
I’m a human. So sometimes I do take things personal and want to fight [ laughs], but I can’t argue with everybody. I feel like it’s important for me to work on my mental toughness, because at the end of the day, I choose where I send my energy.

Do you feel like you’re more heavily scrutinized because you’re a woman?
I think women in hip-hop have a history of just being scrutinized, period. If you’re doing something wrong, you’re never gonna have the benefit of the doubt. But if you’re doing something right, then it’s like, Oh how is she getting this? or How is she getting that? It’s unfortunate that women are put in that position, but I feel like hard work pays off. And longevity. And being constant—the memory of great work. When you do that, people fucking shut up. So that’s what I want to do, keep putting out great, bomb-ass content.

You’ve been collaborating with some other dope female artists, like City Girls and Jhené Aiko. Are you planning on doing more of that?
For my next project, I am. I’m very stingy with my records—I love writing to the whole beat and finishing the whole song. But I think for this EP, I’m going to collaborate more. There are some artists I have in mind.

Can you tell us anything about the new record?
We were actually planning to release an album but I feel there’s a little bit more… artist soul searching that I need to do before I release a body of work like an album.

Are you still working on finding your sound?
Finding a sound is constant. You know, as an artist, I feel like there’s two ways: There’s finding your sound when people hear something that reminds them of you, and then once you find that sound, there are other sounds you can add. I feel like I’m still in that first stage, but I’m getting close to finding what my sound is, what my purpose is, what my mission is—what I want to represent as a woman, as an artist, and just as a person.

So it’s more about coming into who you are as a person and presenting that back out as Saweetie.
Definitely. These last two EPs have taught me what I like, what I didn’t like, and one thing that I really want to focus on is purpose. Because you know, I’m known as a bomb-ass, independent woman—that’s what comes across in my music. But there’s much more to my brand than that. So I’m just figuring out what these things are, but empowering men and women through my music is what I aim to do. That’s one of the main things people take away from listening to my songs.

What do you have planned for 2020?
I feel like the foundation has been made in music. People know me as an artist, OK, great. But there’s more to me than just music. I’ve been acting; I’m on full episodes of this recurring series. I’m super excited about that, looking at a couple movies. We have my business ventures. I just did a collaboration with PrettyLittleThing for fashion. I have another coming out soon for my own beauty line.

My brand is more than music. It umbrellas so many different avenues that I’m interested in—and I think that’s what’s so cool about music and why it’s such a blessing. I’ve always been interested in these things, but music has opened the doors to allow me to do [them].

You’re right— it’s so much bigger than the music. It’s giving you the access to be able to come into your full potential.
And I think what’s so cool about my brand is that like, college girls, Asian girls, girls from the Bay, girls from Sacramento, girls who can identify with me—I just make them feel like they can do it, too. So if I’m making myself happy and inspiring other women to make them feel like they can do it too, I’m proud.

Like so many Memphis stories, this one starts with a legendary Black musician. Don Bryant is one of the city’s quintessential homegrown geniuses, a savant who sold his first song while still a teenager in 1960. He would go on to become one of Hi Records’ house talents in the label’s heyday, releasing one solo album in 1969 and composing hits for O.V. Wright, Otis Clay, and Ann Peebles, with whom he wrote “I Can’t Stand the Rain” in 1973. The two were married the following year, because what else can you do after making something so perfect together?

By the time Fat Possum Records approached Bryant, in 2016, Hi hadn’t been an active label since the late 1970s, and Bryant hadn’t written or released any secular music under his own name for nearly half a century. The Oxford, Mississippi, label has cultivated and reissued Southern blues and soul artists since 1991, and Don’t Give Up On Love, the album released in 2017, featured Bryant in a typical Fat Possum retro setting: close-miked, unadorned, surrounded by tasteful session musicians playing live in the room.

Producer Bruce Watson, a Fat Possum executive since 1994, was struck by two of those musicians in particular. Courtney and Chris Barnes were both less than half Bryant’s age, but they sang behind him with effortless poise.

“I got goose bumps listening to them,” Watson recalls. “We started using them on everything.”

The Barnes boys are native Memphians and full-time musicians with experience across all the city’s defining styles. Older brother Chris has sung behind rappers 8Ball & MJG and with Larry Dodson of Stax legends the Bar-Kays, and the pair also leads their own rock band, Black Cream. But like Bryant—and like most of Black Memphis—their deepest roots are in the church, in gospel. Watson heard their harmonies, honed since childhood by their parents and their equally musical brother and sister, and he thought of the Staple Singers. That kind of country gospel-soul isn’t the genre’s typical contemporary format, which hews toward a slicker, more heavily produced sound indebted to Kirk Franklin, among others. But it was a natural fit for a label that made worldwide draws out of raw Mississippi bluesmen like Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside.

In September 2019, Watson’s vision finally came to fruition. Nobody’s Fault but My Own is the debut album by the newly christened Sensational Barnes Brothers, and the first original release on Bible & Tire, Watson’s new gospel imprint. On the one hand, Watson is simply attempting to do for gospel what Fat Possum did for Mississippi blues—to introduce it to the eager Americana audience that values rough-hewn authenticity and overlooked folkways. But his task is perhaps even more fraught this time around: That audience is largely white, like Watson himself, and not necessarily receptive to the explicit proselytizing of Black church music.

That balance of commercial optimism and preacherly purpose—one might say sacred and profane—is evident in the Barneses themselves. Asked if their primary goal is to sell records or save souls, the brothers hedge. “Whether you believe or not, everyone has a connection to God,” says Courtney. “God is everywhere, and I do want people to come close to belief in God and Jesus.”

Chris is still adjusting to the idea that this music might be commercial at all. After a lifetime of singing it with family and on Sunday mornings, he said, “it’s surreal. It’s new for us to have a white guy come in and take an interest. Bruce is a businessman. I had no idea there were hipsters, as he calls them, who love this music. But maybe it’s time for a new thing.”

On September 20, the release day for Nobody’s Fault but My Own, Watson and his team put on a concert east of downtown Memphis. The Sensational Barnes Brothers headlined, but the bill also included a handful of the city’s older gospel groups as well as Elizabeth King, whose own religious recordings from the early 1970s were being reissued by Bible & Tire the same day. The event epitomized the Fat Possum old-meets-new ethos, with the added intimacy of a genuine community who had known each other for decades.

Watson paced in a leisurely fashion through the back hallways and green room of the Crosstown Theater all day, never raising his voice or attracting attention. He’s in his mid-50s, gently grayed, and manages the rootsy label Big Legal Mess in addition to Fat Possum and Bible & Tire. But even as he corralled multiple generations of musicians and prepared for an expected crowd of hundreds, Watson never seemed stressed. While Elizabeth King sound checked with the house band, Watson stood at the side stage near the soundboard, arms crossed in a short-sleeved western shirt and black-framed rectangular glasses.

Bruce Watson made stars out of forgotten Delta blues musicians as an executive for Fat Possum Records. With Bible&Tire, he’s trying the same for the South’s many unsung gospel talents.

His crucial collaborator for the Bible & Tire project, Pastor Juan Shipp, arrived early to the venue as well. Pastor Shipp is Watson’s opposite in many ways, a vibrantly youthful 80-year-old Black preacher and Memphis lifer with a hype man’s unflagging energy. His button-down shirt and crisp pants were both made of purple silk, and he wore a black baseball cap emblazoned with the message jesus is my boss as he passed out gig flyers and roamed every corridor of the theater, leaving a trail of cologne scent wherever he went.

“It fell in our lap,” he said of the growth of Bible & Tire, resting momentarily on a couch backstage. “But it’s also divine.”

In the 1960s, when he wasn’t preaching or working his regular job at the post office, Pastor Shipp was a part-time DJ for the Memphis gospel station KWAM. There was a huge number of 45s from local groups to play on the air at the time, many of them recorded and released by gospel-only independent labels like Designer Records. While Shipp never doubted the talent and sincerity of artists such as the Jubilee Hummingbirds, the Mighty Blytheville Aires, and the Holy City Travelers, Designer’s recording quality didn’t serve them, especially in an era when Stax was setting new production standards on McLemore Avenue downtown.

So Pastor Shipp decided it was time to take up a fourth job. As the 70s dawned, he met a former Sun Records artist named Clyde Leopard, whose pristine but underused studio, the Tempo Recording Service, was located around the corner from the famous Beale Street corridor. With Tempo as his headquarters, Shipp founded D-Vine Spirituals, a record label for the many artists he’d gotten to know through his ministry and his radio show.

That list included an all-male octet called the Gospel Souls. Around this time, they first heard Elizabeth King sing in church, and were so taken with her alto that they asked her to join the group as their leader. Most gospel groups at the time were either single-gendered or a mixed group of multiple men and multiple women. It was rare to have a single female voice leading a chorus of men, but Elizabeth King and the Gospel Souls soon entered the D-Vine studios to cut their first 7-inch single.

King was raised in Charleston, Mississippi, and came to Memphis in 1965 a few years after marrying at 15. This was a propitious time for a young person to arrive in the city: Booker T. and the M.G.s’ “Green Onions” was soon to turn Stax into the most successful independent label in the United States, B.B. King was ascendant, and Beale Street was the literal and figurative home of legends like Furry Lewis. But the young Mrs. King stayed far away from all of it. She loved the blues but never sang it, and certainly never drank. A loyal wife and eventual mother of 15, her voice lifted only to praise God.

For her first recording session with Juan Shipp and the Gospel Souls, King fleshed out a scrap of melody that she’d heard her mother sing back in Charleston. Her arrangement, which she named “I Heard the Voice,” was effective, but Pastor Shipp felt her singing was too aggressive, “too hard,” in his telling. He approached her in the vocal booth and spoke to the pious Mrs. King as a record producer, not a minister: “Sing it like you’re making love to Jesus.”

Elizabeth King recorded a string of singles for D-Vine Spirituals in the early 70s. Now those recordings are back in print thanks to Bible&Tire, and she’s preparing her first LP for release in 2020.

“I Heard the Voice” became D-Vine’s first A-side single and a significant regional gospel hit. It inaugurated a decade-long run for the label, which yielded hundreds of songs by dozens of artists, many of whom came from Memphis churches. It wasn’t necessarily lucrative, however, and eventually Shipp felt that his production and personnel-management duties were keeping him from his daily ministry. D-Vine Spirituals closed in 1982, right as synthesizers and digital recording became the norm in gospel, as in secular music.

Shipp’s archives sat in storage for decades while, 70-odd miles away in Oxford, Bruce Watson and Fat Possum built a minor empire out of analog-recording fetishism. In 2014, Watson helped open a vinyl pressing plant in Memphis to serve the growing LP market, and began spending more time in the city, record-hunting as always. Fat Possum had already acquired the Hi Records catalog by that point, and soon Watson discovered Designer, which was his gateway into the voluminous history of midcentury Memphis gospel.

In 2014, Big Legal Mess released The Soul of Designer Records, a box set collecting those raw 45s that Pastor Shipp found wanting at the time. For Watson, they represented the kind of unvarnished, unheralded regional sound that he has built his career on resurrecting. When he heard Chris and Courtney Barnes, he knew he’d found the way to bring these songs into the present day. Nobody’s Fault but My Own is built entirely from the Designer catalog; the brothers hand-picked the songs that best suited their voices, their emotions, and their spirituality.

Inevitably, Watson’s obsession led him to Pastor Shipp. Watson moved to Memphis full-time in late 2014 and learned that the D-Vine catalog was sitting in a local studio, unharmed but unheard. After a few meetings, the octogenarian preacher found himself back in the record business.

“I thought I was through with this,” he said in the Sears Crosstown green room with a smile and a sigh. Shipp is now the unofficial A&R man for Bible & Tire, bringing many of his surviving artists to Watson, some of whom were performing that night. The label will release a box set of D-Vine Spirituals recordings in 2020. But the new label’s first archival release, no surprise, is Elizabeth King and the Gospel Souls: The D-Vine Spirituals Recordings, a collection of their 7-inch singles and unreleased songs that kicks off with “I Heard the Voice.” With its easy swing and doo-wop harmonies, the song is more tender than was typical in early-70s Memphis. But you can hear Shipp’s unpastorly advice in King’s breathy, pleading inflections. Her words have a clear message, but her deep feeling—her devotion—could move anyone.

With its bright lobby and plain black-box décor, the Sears Crosstown Theater is a far cry from rowdy midcentury Beale Street. The near-capacity crowd that filled its stadium seats included many of Elizabeth King’s friends and fellow congregants, but the Bible & Tire showcase was a new type of venue for King. She still sings regularly in her Baptist church, and she performed on behalf of the Coalition for Burned Churches, a nonprofit that helps congregations rebuild, until 2003. Under bright spotlights, on a wide, tall theater stage, flanked by white roots musicians? This was new territory, even if, in her words, it was “a long time coming.”

She is quiet, reserved, not given to grand statements. When Pastor Shipp called her in early 2019, asking if she wanted to go back in the studio for the first time in decades, she said only, “Yeah.” How about tomorrow? he asked, and she agreed to that as well. It was reminiscent of their old dynamic, when she would come by Tempo Studio after a full shift as a florist’s deliverywoman and uncomplainingly work late into the night to meet Shipp’s exacting musical standards.

Elizabeth King is quiet, reserved, not given to grand statements. When Pastor Shipp called her in early 2019, asking if she wanted to go back in the studio for the first time in decades, she said only, “Yeah.”

As with Shipp and the Barneses, King’s Bible & Tire opportunity is both a surprise and an inevitability. She knew Chris and Courtney’s parents because of their musical connections: Their father, Calvin “Duke” Barnes, was a self-taught pianist well-known in Memphis for recording with the gospel legend Jessy Dixon, while their mother, Deborah, is a University of Memphis–trained opera singer who spent three years backing Ray Charles as a Raelette in the late 70s. King knew the couple from church, and regularly babysat Courtney and his sister.

King’s husband died years ago, and many of her children are dispersed around the country now. Bible & Tire is an exciting development, but her eye is on the sparrow, as it were.

A few hours before showtime, she was calm backstage, thinking of her mother, who only allowed religious music in the house. “The songs that she sang were personal,” she said. “If you sing gospel from your heart, you can make people think better. There’s a higher power, and we need it. If you focus on Christ, you can change things.”

For King, her religious message is inextricable from her singing style. “A lot of times, I go to church and only hear the praise themes,” she said. “I want to bring songs like ‘Precious Lord, Take My Hand’ back. If you express yourself with the classic songs, sing about your problems, you can solve them. There aren’t many people singing this way anymore.”

The concert began at 7 p.m., when a gentle, elderly man in a fine tan suit walked onstage to greet us. This was James Chambers, a 43-year veteran of local gospel station WLOK, where he currently hosts the 6 to 9 a.m. slot every weekday. It was a familiar crowd to him, and he pointed to audience members and cracked in-jokes while two toddlers played near their parents just off stage right.

The early acts included Reverend John Wilkins, who took the stage in a black Stetson, patterned cowboy boots, and a massive watch to play solo acoustic guitar. He performed two bluesy, fingerpicked songs, including “Prodigal Son,” his father’s composition that the Rolling Stones covered on Beggar’s Banquet. Elder Ward led his mixed-gender quartet through three haunting a cappella devotionals, while the D-Vine Spiritualettes, Pastor Shipp’s onetime go-to female trio, sang without instrumentation as well. These groups’ solemn, blended sound was contrasted by Fat Possum artist Liz Brasher, who accompanied herself on electric guitar and brought the crowd to its feet with her impassioned belting.

Pastor Juan Shipp, a staple of Memphis’ gospel community for a half-century, is back in the record business as an adviser and partner for Bible&Tire.

Elizabeth King took the stage in a blinding, wide-sleeved neon pink dress and elicited a similarly raucous response. In front of drums, guitar, bass, a Hammond B3, and a trio of female backup singers, she sang for more than half an hour, largely with her eyes closed. Most of her songs started in a gentle groove and gradually built to a praiseful, chanting repetition. When fully moved, King pulled her microphone from its stand and bent over to her left, pleading and straining her powerful alto to its highest register. Under blue lights, her short, light-colored hair seemed to glow, just as the message and urgency of the material transformed this prim, churchgoing grandmother into a bright, supernatural vision.

The Sensational Barnes Brothers couldn’t match the unique spectacle of King’s revived diva-hood—no one could. But they assembled an impressive physical presence of their own, in complementary vests and gleaming shoes, alongside three male singers and the house band. The sight of five young Black men bringing this family- and community-born music into contemporary form was inspiring. Chris is the taller, broader Barnes brother, with hair and a beard that both shoot out straight. Courtney is slimmer, quieter, and more reserved, like his former babysitter, “Miss Elizabeth.” Onstage they didn’t interact so much as effortlessly coexist. Their banter was endearingly awkward when it wasn’t touchingly heartfelt, a mixture of “Who downloaded the album today, y’all?” with brief, earnest explanations of their song selections. Before the song “Let It Be Good,” which on the record features their father on vocals, they revealed that Duke Barnes died suddenly this past spring. They chose the song specifically because it echoed their father’s constant refrain that anything worth doing is worth doing well—what started as a hat-tip to an elder had become an encomium.

Gospel is so deeply entwined in Black American music that there’s no reason why this sound and these singers’ recordings couldn’t appeal to the same audience that celebrates the same emotions in country, soul, rock, and hip-hop.

This is how gospel lives, after all. The power of this music, as Elizabeth King made clear, is its simplicity, its timelessness. The messages of faith, loyalty, triumph, and tragedy are the same as those of the blues, R&B, and for that matter, most pop. Gospel is so deeply entwined in Black American music—which is to say, so entwined with 20th-century pop music altogether—that there’s no reason why this sound and these singers’ recordings couldn’t appeal to the same audience that celebrates the same emotions in country, soul, rock, and hip-hop. The only difference is that these artists are supposedly singing for a purpose beyond commerce.

That’s a distinction without a difference in the world of Americana that Fat Possum has helped build. The kind of authenticity that Bruce Watson has fostered in his various labels is based in plainspoken communication and unfiltered artistic testimony; theoretically, gospel will fit right in.

Watching all night from the side of the stage, his foot occasionally stomping when the band hit a deep pocket, Watson was simultaneously the shepherd and the odd man out: a white nonbeliever, a relative newcomer to this small city’s tight-knit gospel community, and a businessman among soul-stirrers. He knows this music only as music, and loves it as such. Maybe that’s enough to help it reach the unconverted.

Reverend John Wilkins is one of many gospel entertainers in Memphis, Tennessee, and elsewhere that the new record label Bible & Tire is attempting to bring to a popular audience.

It takes a lot to make Tyler, the Creator laugh, but Left at London (aka Nat Puff) is a natural. Back in April, the 23-year-old Seattle-based musician put out her savagely funny but affectionate impression of the Odd Future rapper: “This is how you make a Tyler, the Creator song. First, start with a shitty piano and pick a fucking chord. Next up: Record the audio of you playing the piano, pitch-shift it up a little bit so the audio quality kind of is ruined, and then just add the drums!” Two minutes and 20 seconds later she had 8.2 million views and an especially admiring fan. “This lowkey spot on OMG,” Tyler tweeted. “You forgot the ‘ayo’ though.”

Maybe you first encountered Left at London when the Tyler video was retweeted (64,200 RTs and counting) into your feed, or maybe you recognize her from the many internet platforms she’s improved through her presence. She’s the kid from the “hahaha I do that” Vine (28.7 million loops). She made the viral Smash Mouth–approved mashup of “All Star” and “The Black Parade” by My Chemical Romance. Most recently, she’s been impersonating some of your favorite musicians—including Frank Ocean and Mitski—on Twitter. She’s part of a generation of kids who grew up on the internet, flitting effortlessly between mediums and managing to be excellent on all of them. We talked to her about being one of the few good things left on the internet, her upcoming album You Are Not Alone Enough, and whether she could see herself becoming the next Lil Nas X.

VICE: Do you feel like you’re a product of the internet?
Left at London: This debut album is very much a product of the internet. It’s basically about being on Tinder and the weirdness that comes with being a mentally ill person that tries to navigate the complicated world of dating in, at the time, 2017. As far as my other content goes, tomorrow is actually the five-year anniversary of my first Vine.

What was your first memory of the internet?
I was so tiny. I was somewhere between 7 and 10. I was obsessed with making Miis [Nintendo Wii avatars] that looked like celebrities. I tried to make a Mii out of Adam Savage from Mythbusters and I clicked on a picture of Adam Savage [in Google Images]... What I got was a picture of somebody with their ass cheeks spread wide open, revealing a tattoo of a clown with the anus as the mouth. I told my mom immediately, because I was like, “The internet is a scary place.”

That is way too young to look at people’s assholes with clown tattoos.
I think there’s no proper age where you can do that.

What about when it comes to music? What are your first memories?
When you’re trans, your childhood just jumbles into one mess. I can remember when I got these [ear] piercings to the day, but I cannot remember for the life of me what age I was when I first started going to dance classes. But that’s what my first memory of music was—dance classes, because my sister took them... It was my first experience with hip-hop.

When you make a video, do you script it or do you just grab the phone and shoot?
I come up with the concept, and usually I’ll just improvise until I get a good take and then keep on going.

How do you prepare for one of your how-to impression videos? Do you listen obsessively to the artist?
They honest-to-god just happen. With the Tyler, the Creator one, I made the beat and then I relistened to his entire discography in the span of three days. It’s just happenstance, it’s never me planning to make a video like that.

Were you ever tempted to do comedy full-time?
For me, doing comedy is always just an accident. I’ve never done it on purpose and I think keeping that dynamic—just having humor happen when it happens—ends up being a good thing for me. It makes me less boxed in. But that being said, I do have a YouTube series in the works currently being crowdfunded through Patreon. It’s going to be like those how-to type of videos but more professional, more long-form, and more vague because it’s going to be about songwriting as a whole, not songwriting as a specific artist. It will have punch lines, but it will also be an actual learning experience.

How do you walk the line between being respectful because you like the music and also angling for the punch line?
I think, If I were this artist, could I take this critique? The how-to videos are just done out of respect. The two artists that did notice their videos, Mitski and Tyler, both saw that and appreciated it.

Was it crazy realizing that they had watched it?
Mitski was less of a surprise because she already followed me, but I am thankful that she saw it like, two days before she deleted her Twitter. But the Tyler, the Creator one was definitely the most surreal. I have a friend who knows somebody who works at Blonded Radio [Frank Ocean’s Apple Music radio station] and they sent it to them. So there’s a chance that Frank Ocean saw it and did not respond. I kind of like the open-endedness of not knowing whether or not he actually saw it and liked it.

He’s a shy person. You never know.
I read an interview where he said he wouldn’t think of himself as reclusive as other people think of him. I think that’s an interesting notion, about how because he’s not constantly projecting his life out there into the void, we consider him reclusive. As far as we know, he could be going to karaoke bars every day.

You, on the other hand, are quite open about yourself.
Almost to a fault.

You’ve been on the internet for most of your life now. Do you ever regret being that open and very online?
I don’t, really. I feel like I’m open but I’m safe about it. People can find shit out about me but nothing that I don’t necessarily want them to find out.

How much does online success translate to real-life success? Do people recognize you in the street?
I have been recognized in the street, actually. Quite a bit. I went to Dick’s recently, which is like a burger joint that we have in Seattle, and the person working the counter asked me to sign a takeout bag. It’s now framed. [laughs] My life is weird.

Do you ever want to turn the page on being the shitposter on Twitter and be like, “I’m just a musician now, forget about everything else”?
I don’t think that I have the strength to stop shitposting. I have tried to go on breaks just to focus on music, but I will still find a way to get an idea for a tweet that I just have to pop off.

What do you think of Lil Nas X?
I actually have a cover of “Panini” in the vaults.

The parallels seem really obvious to me. He used the internet to make his song huge.
I think [this is] the only place where Lil Nas X and I differ. My songs are unfortunately very un-meme-able. The thing with “Old Town Road” was that it was just a fun song to listen to. You can’t meme “Waiting on a Ghost.” I can definitely imagine people doing sad TikToks to them, but I don’t think that would be a great look for that song.

You’re obviously very versatile when it comes to writing songs, because you can pick up the tropes of different songwriters so quickly. Have you ever been tempted to just make a meme-able song?
There is one thing that I want to release—a Christmas song I wrote called “Santa’s Homophobic.” The concept of the song is literally just like, [ deadpans] “If Santa doesn’t give me the gifts that I asked for, then automatically, I have to assume that he’s homophobic.”

On September 13 more than a hundred activists participated in a bicoastal protest at Palantir’s two headquarters, in New York City and in Palo Alto, California. The intent of the protest was to bring awareness to the tech company’s involvement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which Palantir provides with data-mining software that’s been used to screen undocumented immigrants and plan raids.

While the events put pressure on such Palantir higher-ups as the CEO, Alex Karp, and its co-founder Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor and Donald Trump ally, the messaging was geared to Palantir workers themselves. At the Palo Alto action, concentration camp–style barbed wire fencing was placed outside the company’s offices, and then an afternoon rally was held in front of one of Karp’s houses. “Palantir, you know it’s true / The crimes of ICE depend on you,” chanted marchers. The Manhattan action, led by the group Jews for Economic and Racial Justice, called on Karp, who is Jewish, to honor the approaching high holidays by not repeating mistakes of the past.

“During the Holocaust, IBM used the latest technology to aggregate census information, which was used to identify Jews around Europe,” said Abby Stein, one of the organizers, to the crowd. “What if the workers at IBM had said no? How many lives would have been saved? What if the workers at Palantir say no now? How many families would be kept whole?”

You could say these actions were at the end of a timeline that began a week prior, when Karp wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post explaining his decision to continue working with ICE. Or you could wind the clock back a few weeks farther, to when Palantir officially renewed its contract with ICE. Or before that, when the photo of the bodies of Óscar Alberto Martínez and his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria, who’d both washed up on the banks of the Rio Grande after a failed border crossing attempt, went viral.

But you could also look farther back, or even beyond Palantir’s partnership with ICE, at a slowly layering movement, in which each siloed group of workers watches every new protest action and wonders, “If them, why not us?”

There was the great Uber and Lyft strike of 2019, when drivers around the world turned off their apps for 24 hours. And the Google walkout of late 2018, when more than 20,000 Google employees left work to protest sexual harassment within the company. And, earlier that year, the series of actions at Twitter and Stripe HQs after their CEOs funded a campaign countering Prop C, a San Francisco measure levying a small tax on huge corporations in order to pay for homeless services within the city. (The measure passed, albeit without the two-thirds supermajority needed to keep it from delays via legal challenges.)

As with the public school wildcat strikes that rolled through the United States in 2018, each action has seemed to lead to the next as workers at all levels watch tech’s tendrils wind through nearly every sector of work and wreak consequences: Disruption often leads to dysfunction, the profits of innovation don’t trickle down, and technology brings the world together while it tears families apart.

As these truths become more blatant, a diverse group of workers—programmers and coders, drivers and cafeteria staff—are beginning to bond as a sort of cohesive class. If they get there, it’ll finally force tech to do what it’s been claiming it does all along: make the world a better place.

While there have been efforts to organize and mobilize tech workers for years, the broadest radicalizing force is the most obvious one: the presidency of Donald Trump.

“A lot of things happened before, but Trump catalyzed a lot of activity within the industry,” said Jeffrey Buchanan, a spokesperson for Silicon Valley Rising, a coalition of labor leaders and community organizers.

The key moment wasn’t necessarily Election Night, when everyone was still in a state of shock and confusion, but rather a few weeks after that, in late 2016, when the future president met with tech’s biggest CEOs. That moment, workers have told me, was when they realized their bosses would compromise with, rather than fight against, the incoming administration. The years since have proved this analysis correct—in 2017, Google began building out the Pentagon’s artificial intelligence program under Project Maven, while more recently, Microsoft won the contract to handle their cloud computing.

“I’m not the savviest tech person—people make fun of me because I can’t even figure out Facebook,” said Jacinta Gonzalez, the field director for Mijente, a grassroots hub for Latinx and Chicanx organizing—they helped organize the Palantir actions. “But we’re interested in it now because it’s affecting our communities.”

Gonzalez explained that as ICE raids have increased, Mijente has begun fielding questions about technology’s expanding role with things like data mining, GPS location, and facial recognition software. “All of that is going to be used in the next stage of racial incarceration in the U.S.,” Gonzalez said. “There was a lot of hype and excitement about how technology was going to bring us closer together, but we’re starting to see the negative consequences. It brings up a bunch of ethical questions for people who are affected by it, and also for tech workers themselves.”

This self-examination seems new to the tech industry. Tech ideology has always trended in the direction of achieving broadly socially liberal aims through crypto-libertarian means—working toward an “open” society through “disruption.” In practice, this has largely translated into replicating previous experiences, but more quickly and without worker protections, exploiting gaps in a regulatory state that moves too slowly. The tech-optimist view that has dominated has been based on a sort of vulgar reading of the efficient-markets hypothesis, the idea that efficiency is not just desirable in itself but will definitionally lead to good ends, so that creating more tools to that end is a worthy aim. But what that has missed is how efficiency’s inherent result is more wealth and power trickling up to ownership, and how making more productive tools means further draining the disenfranchised.

As time reveals these truths, workers project the trend lines and see a bleak future. Unless they stop it in time.

Edan Alva is a 49-year-old tech worker. Originally from Israel, he’s been in the United States for the past 19 years, working as a contract freelancer for financial institutions, schools, and other tech companies. A few years back, he downloaded Lyft as a little side gig to get some extra money picking up passengers as he drove to and from work. But when he got terminated from his steady gigs, he turned to driving full-time, and it changed his perspective.

“Pay went down significantly, and meanwhile, you’re paying more to service the car,” he explained. “Most drivers don’t notice they’re losing money instead of earning it because those costs are spread over time.” Further shifting him into action was seeing firsthand how wide the gap was between the lifestyles of the rich and how the drivers themselves lived. “You find very quickly that you can barely make a living in the Bay Area, and it causes resentment, especially when the CEOs are making $45 million a year,” he said.

Alva heard about the organizing coalition Gig Workers Rising (GWR)—a group largely composed of Uber and Lyft drivers fighting for a living wage and benefits, transparency, and a voice at the workplace—and decided to join. Part of it is fighting for a better life now. “I enjoy talking with people and having unique situations that occur,” he said, when I asked him why he still drives. “But that has nothing to do with the company of Lyft.”

While some of his involvement with GWR is to fight for better conditions in his current job, he’s also thinking about his next gig, whatever that may be. It’s impossible to look at the trajectory of technological advancements and see much in the way of future work that will remain. Algorithms will be doing copywriting, self-driving technology will be handling cabs and trucks, and robot servers and bartenders are coming soon enough. “Any industry can be put in an app,” he said. “Companies like Lyft and Uber deeply reflect the fact that people who happen to be in particular positions get extremely wealthy at the expense of workers, and sometimes even the expense of their investors. It almost sounds like a pyramid scheme.”

A coalition of protesters rally in front of one of Alex Karp’s houses.

One fight that’s been won—albeit with legal battles still left to wage, the result of trying to regulate a well-armed industry that hates following laws—is the passage of AB-5 in the California state legislature, which would ensure that gig economy workers for companies like Uber and Lyft are categorized as employees, rather than 1099 contractors. (GWR was one of the main forces behind moving this legislation forward.) This would mean drivers would get minimum wage, workers’ compensation, and other benefits. It would completely upend this industry, forcing companies to finally support their workers in a way they haven’t before.

“No one wants to think about it when you’re out on the road. It’s a reality you put in the back of your mind as much as you can,” said Carlos Ramos, who’s been driving for Lyft for the past three years and is also a member of GWR. “But if something were to happen out there, you’re all on your own.”

While Ramos is excited about the changes AB-5 could bring, he’s skeptical about the ability of tech workers of all ilks to form a mass counterforce to the way tech is currently run. “There’s a huge difference between who we are and who they are,” he said, recalling the many times he’s driven rich programmers through hilly San Francisco. “They’re wealthy, we aren’t. They have Michelin-star chefs in their offices and like to brag about it; we’re lucky if we can catch a Jack in the Box. They’re worried about the cost of living in multimillion dollar houses, and we’re sleeping in our cars.” If there is to be a seismic shift in how the tech industry works, this difference in pay and privilege between workers at, say, Palantir and drivers at Uber needs to be flattened.

But there is also an often-overlooked spectrum of tech worker that exists between high-wage programmers at massive companies and gig workers used as chum. It’s a segment that may become more common as tech continues to infiltrate every crevice of society, and perhaps where the next wave of organizing will take place.

“There’s a huge difference between who we are and who they are,” Carlos Ramos said. “They’re wealthy, we aren’t... They’re worried about the cost of living in multimillion dollar houses, and we’re sleeping in our cars.”

One tech worker named Eric—whose name has been changed to protect his identity and prevent professional ramifications—has been working in the field for almost 15 years. He’s now at what he considers a “pretty standard start-up,” and while things have been going well, their tech side was just split off by the parent company, a move that has employees asking questions. “How much has this technology made the world a better place?” Eric asked. “I can see it as the way I’m making money, but it’s not actually improving anything.”

After years of hope in what tech can do, Eric now sees the industry in “this ridiculous cycle” of investment bankers and venture capitalists building unnecessary “disruptions” on the off chance they’ll make investors more money, but paying no real attention to worker stability, let alone worrying about actually helping the world. Now, with a new management structure coming in, the future of his job seems murkier—who knows what change will bring, or if he’ll want to stick around for it. To combat this, Eric is turning back to really the only way to counter the power imbalance between owners and workers: “We don’t have input in how the organization relates to us, so the only recourse we have is to quit, unless we work to collectively bargain,” he explained. “So I’m now starting efforts to unionize.”

Look around and you sense that this shift from tech optimism to tech skepticism (or maybe tech realism) is trickling down to the next generation of workers. As further reports showing the impact these massive companies have had on society come to light, the signing bonuses and Ping-Pong tables in the open-plan offices may not be enough to justify taking these jobs. But with the Trump administration being such a galvanizing force, and an approaching election perhaps scooting him from office, will this trend continue no matter what?

“As a millennial myself, aside people who’ve been fucked by the economy and by the previous generation, I’d be surprised if we went back to where we were in 2016,” said Catherine Bracy, the director of the advocacy organization TechEquity Collaborative. “If you’re a 25-year-old tech worker who has $60,000 in student loan debt at 8 percent interest, who never has a chance in hell of buying a house close to your job, and you’re living with three roommates until you’re 35, you’re asking questions about what this economy has gotten you.”

A new student movement called SLAP, Students for the Liberation of All People, has been urging computer science students from Stanford to forgo jobs at massive tech firms like Google and Facebook. “We are an anti-racist, anti-capitalist organization fighting to mobilize students to recognize and act on our responsibility to support liberation movements,” reads SLAP’s mission statement. “Through direct action, education, and community-building, we aim to disrupt the culture of apathy that upholds an oppressive status quo, envision alternatives, and sustainably campaign for tangible wins in partnership with marginalized people. We struggle against worker exploitation, the prison industrial complex, and the systemic violence that Stanford perpetuates and profits from.” In September, more than 1,200 students from 17 colleges pledged not to work for Palantir.

This is new in how graduates view what defines a “good” tech job, and it suggests that while Trump may have been an accelerant to the movement, the fire won’t be extinguished by something as neat and clean as the result of a single election in 2020.