Okay
Emily Adel: The Hidden Cassettes
Dear reader,
The first speaking advice I ever got was from an uncle who line-quoted Donald Duck, played middle-aged instruments, and went to acupuncture regularly. He told me to never start with an apology. He made me promise that I’d never start a speech by saying that I’m not a great speaker.
Okay.
Now to the apology.
Sorry, I’ve been absent from your inboxes. The truth is so many things are happening, and I feel so excited by all of them, including evolving this newsletter into what feels like its intended shape. These things take time and attention, and then it is Saturday evening, and I’d rather go have a drink with friends, read a book, sleep, or talk with Ana.
I’ll aim to be more regular again in the next few weeks before taking a Summer break, and showing you what I’ve been working on.
With care,
Kristoffer
Emily Adel: The Hidden Cassettes
Emily Adel is my favourite internet-cheerleader. She made Naive Yearly happen again, and again (shh!). After years on the sideline, she is now adding her own gold to the web.
What are The Hidden Cassettes?
It is a secret my dad kept that I discovered when I was young (like 8 or 9).
I’d gotten home from school earlier than usual, and overheard my sister talking in my dad’s office, behind the shut door. I always got home before her, so I immediately clocked this as a surprising twist to my day and excitedly burst in the room to say HI! and ask why she was home early and what we should eat for a SNACK!!, as little sisters tend to do.
My dad –caught off guard– scrambled to shove some wires and equipment away from his messy engineering desk and yelped “Didn’t realize you were home already!!” and I immediately knew something was up. Like any desperate parent, he gaslit me away from my insistence that “I heard Lilly, what’s going on?!” and insisted she wasn’t home yet, which was obvious from my survey of the room. I was not satisfied with the information I had, so I ruminated for hours on what I had witnessed but not understood.
He famously napped every day around the same time (he was 56 when I was born, officially an OLDER DAD) – so I waited until nap time, snuck into his office to poke around and discovered a tinkered-together contraption including a huge red phone receiver wired to a cassette recorder, some more electronics and wires, and a bunch of cassette tapes in a red box. Knowing I’d better not touch anything to risk showing my detective work, I left the contraption alone but snuck a couple of the tapes back to my room to listen to, which revealed that every time the dial-tone would engage, the recording would start and capture entire conversations. Some quick, some drawn-out, all 100% unknown they were being recorded.
Since the receiver must have been tapped into the phone line itself, the audio was absolutely pristine – as though I was live on the call myself. I couldn’t believe it. That’s The Hidden Cassettes in a nutshell: an online artifact of my dad’s secret wiretaps.
Whoa! What happened after you discovered you were wiretapped by your dad?
I knew instantly that I could not tell ANYONE. There was NO WAY I was going to get caught, and there was zero chance I was willing to confess, or risk someone else’s hysteria blowing my cover because they couldn’t emotionally handle this information. I stayed silent.
And then, I used this power to my advantage.
There was NO WAY I’d continue having my conversations in the same manner, knowing Dad was tuning in. All of a sudden, everything I’d gotten in trouble for –and could never figure out how he’d found out details of!– made complete sense. One time, I’d written a friend’s number on my hand but the last digit had rubbed off. I decided to dial as many combinations of the number with a new last digit as needed to get to my friend, which I thought was pretty clever but knew would be considered unauthorized activity. I did it during nap-time, but a couple days later he chided at me during dinner that I shouldn’t ever dial numbers I don’t know – it could lead to safety issues and “bad guys”. I insisted I hadn’t done that (straight up LIED through my teeth) and he –again, all knowingly– gently said “don’t lie, I know you do that sometimes, and I’m asking for your safety to please don’t”. I was so confused as I hadn’t told a soul. Dozens of examples of my dad being “all knowing” suddenly made way too much sense.
In an attempt to defy Overlord Dad, I would sneak into the office during nap-time and study how the contraption worked while my sister or mom was on the line. I did this a few times and tested hitting the “pause” button – seemingly simple, but effective. It worked!! I felt like a God myself upon this discovery. I’d pause it before conversations I knew wouldn’t please the Ears Listening In ™️, take my call, and diligently un-pause after I finished my business.
I tweaked my usage upon curiosities from my dad that would almost ruin the operation I was running… “hey Emily, you’re not using the phone as much lately?” he’d attempt to ask innocently, so in turn I learned to temper my anti-usage and let my more benign calls through on recordings.
We were both playing a game that neither one of us knew all the rules of. To this day, if someone mis-dials me, I will never hang up. I stay on and listen. I imagine most normal people immediately hang up, but not me. Somehow, I romanticized my dad’s surveillance and overbearance in justifying these recordings as love… as in, he must really care about us so much to want to know what we were doing. And the logical way, of course, to do that is to listen in, without consent. My childhood logic was clearly flawed, but would last for decades.
I really wish we could have a conversation about it all – alas, he’s been dead for 21 years now, and I still have never shared this with anyone in my family until a couple of weeks ago. Probably because I think that’s one unlock your 40’s brings: making questionable art.
How many tapes are there?
I know my dad had many tapes (at least 20 from my mind’s eye) and over the last year I scoured my mom’s home for any unmarked tapes and played them all, only to be disappointed that none of them housed any recorded phone calls from the late 90’s. I gave up, although committed to always staying diligent if any popped up, and made my ask clear to my mom (ANY unmarked cassette tapes need to come to ME).
In my recent journey of digitizing everything, I booted up my DVD player and went to a huge container of old CD’s and DVD’s I had to enjoy some high school film projects I’d authored to DVD. In it, I’d found a simple ziploc bag with two unmarked cassette tapes in it, at the bottom. My heart pounded. I ditched my original plan and shoved the two of these in my cassette player. AND IT WAS THE PHONE CALLS. My heart exploded with excitement and nerves at such a find!!!
I hope you’ll find more of the tapes. They must be somewhere. Until then, why did you decide to put the tapes online?
I’m obsessed with nostalgia, archiving, documentation, and retrieval systems so I’ve been playing with my online home in marrying these things. I’d like it to be a “Museum of Emily”, so I explored these tapes as an exhibit of myself. I’ve also recently created a digitization of my planner from 2003-2004 (my last year of high school), and I’m really committed to sharing Annual Reviews of the events of my life to keep this practice up.
Housing it in the form of a website is very much a throwback to early Geocities sites and hand-spun coding of the earlier internet days. I can’t find my old websites, but they housed my favorite poems and lyrics, one-liner thoughts of the time, all with black background and glittery red rose graphics along the borders. I see this theme of documentation and retrieval continue on my tumblr I’d maintained in early adulthood, and when I visit them it is always a tidal wave of nostalgia – a mix of cringe, joy, sadness, longing, and amusement. A powerful elixir of emotion borne unto myself entirely by myself. I’m addicted to that.
Listening to my completely unfiltered 8 year old self feels like the truest version of me before learning in adulthood to hide various parts of it. Then one day you wake up, turn 40, and all of a sudden are up for shedding all of that in an attempt to be seen. So I shipped it. I love witnessing reactions to it – I get to know my friends + family better when I see how they respond. It teases out big feelings and not predictable ones, either. There is no way to feel neutral about these cassettes, and I quite like the complicated feelings it brings up.
When I’ve shared with friends, most become visibly uncomfortable – a mix of shock of having access to such a unique time capsule (“can’t believe you found that”), and the immediate application to self (“what if this happened to me”). I love the complications of privacy as it relates to parenting (how much should you really know / control?), and the different facets of personalities we choose to show to the world and then decide to live privately, separately, un-integrated from our public personas. Even astrology has accounted for this (“rising” vs. “moon” signs… iykyk) and that push and pull between inner and outer worlds is something I am always trying to figure out with people I love and care about.
… and how do you think about this as a mother to a five (soon six) year-old child? Are you talking with her about what and when you record/document and when you publish?
I try to record as many snippets of her as possible that it’s becoming a nuisance to her – these days, she’ll moan and say “stop recording meeeee” and I offer to stop but explain why I’d love to capture her genius in these moments and she usually gives permission and smiles at the flattery.. It’s very much a “oh mom” moment, but we haven’t talked about publishing socially or things like Instagram, mainly because she’s very shielded from social media as of now and I’m not ready to explain what it even is. I don’t think I overshare online, but I have exposed her face enough for a stranger to probably recognize her which might be invasive enough already. This always results in mixed feelings for me. She’s a great part of my life and sharing is fun and important to me, but I’m cognizant that privacy will soon be a luxury afforded by the rich. I try to use the filter of “if she was 20 and knew I shared this, would she feel embarrassed / invaded / upset”? Like all aspects of parenting, I’m sure I’m doing it both right and wrong, and I’m open to learning and unlearning more.
Field notes
1.
My Girlfriend is an Artist. It was Ana’s birthday, so I added more of her photographs to the site I made for her. Btw. most of you only see her analog photographs. I think you should also treat yourself to a look at her commercial work.
2.
How to Spend It with Kristoffer. I was asked by Charlotte from Quiet Media how to pay attention. I answered the questions back in February before I got my driver’s license and my mom died. How time flies.
3.
Narrow is the way. Lovely profile of Andrew Trousdale, a researcher who stays with positive psychology and technology. I’ve been working with Andrew through Apossible, and he is such a bright mind.
4.
Call for Participation. Public Access Memories (May 17), Softer (June 1), The Wrong Eclipse (June 12), Sense to Sense (June 15), Lullaby Machine (July 1), Small Media Festival (July 4), and Internet Phone Book (Summer).
5.
Poetic Web Calendar. Wordhack (May 21, NYC), Open Hardware Summit (May 23-24, Berlin), Cyberdeck workshop (May 23, SF), Ghost in the Loop (May 29, London), Parameter (May 29-30, Ljubljana), DEMO2026 (June 3-5, NYC), From Earth to Sky (June 10, NYC), Low Tech Server (June 11, Eindhoven), Olia Lialina online since 1996 (June 28, Sindelfingen), Dweb camp (July 8-12, Berlin), Reclaiming Data (June 12-13, Berlin), H&D Summer Camp (July 13-23, Amsterdam), Extending Poetry Through Computation (July 24-25, NYC), Luddite Camp (Aug 14-16, Pärnumaa), Poetic Promenade (June 20-21, NYC) and INC Exit Fest (June 24-26, Amsterdam).
Reader’s corner
I’ve been building a web series called Since You Arrived. Four single-page experiences, each one using a different browser capability. No framework, no backend, nothing stored. Each page is a single HTML file. When you close the tab it forgets you.
Vol. I counts what the world did while you read. Vol. II reconstructs yesterday’s sky from atmospheric data. Vol. III uses your GPS to tell you what was already at your exact coordinates — geological formations, fossil sites, species. Vol. IV reveals everything your browser gave away the moment you opened it, narrated as prose.
— Matt
I run a podcast called LÄS HÅRT (Swedish for “Read Hard”). We’ve been going since 2016, talking about books - mostly genre fiction, but really anything unexpected. Now the podcast has become a fanzine. Printed on paper, created by the community, friends and me. It’s called LÄS HÅRT #1 and it’s available to order now. Inside: interviews and essays about books, tao, reading, cricket films, Jackie Chan, male loneliness and tabletop roleplaying. The idea is that it should feel like an podcast episode: a loose theme, but plenty of room for long digressions.
It is in Swedish, as is the podcast.
— Magnus
Wayside flowers
Send questions, comments, products, sites, links, and more to kristoffer@naiveweekly.com.