RSVPeeved

There has to be a better way to send an invitation

Don’t invite me to your events.

Correction: Don’t invite me to your events using the app Partiful.

Okay, double correction: Please invite me to your events but if you use Partiful know there is a solid chance I’ll completely forget or miss it on account of how unusable I find that particular app.

If you have a phone and you’re under 60, you’ve probably received a text via the app Partiful informing you that you’re invited to a birthday party or a trivia night or a memorial service or a 5K fun run or whatever it is people invite others to these days. Partiful is by no means the first app to try and be a hub for event invitations, many have come before and still exist, but I have to say of all of the players in that game, it is by far my least favorite.

We can get the obvious issue out of the way first: Partiful was founded by women (yay!) who were former employees of Palantir (boo!). If you’re unfamiliar with Palantir, well, too bad because Palantir is familiar with you. It’s the company doing some morally ambiguous at best data mining for the Trump regime and basically creating a surveillance state. Fun! JK it’s a literal dystopian nightmare. There are many bad companies out there with evil aims and nefarious practices, but Palantir is really high up there. It was co-founded by Peter Thiel and his obsession with the antichrist, if that nudges you over the line of “this company is terrible.”

So look, as with anything these days, you could pull on a thread and unravel horrific politics and practices and ownership of so many apps, companies, brands, and individuals. We don’t need to drill down too far into this side of Partiful’s problems because, well, I’m not a reporter and this newsletter is certainly not journalism. Read more about that from NYC Noise. Several other outlets have written about the reactions to the app and its founders’ former employer, like this great piece in The Cut.

Yuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

I would like to talk about my own personal issues with Partiful and also just how we communicate about events in general at this point in culture and technology. I don’t like it!!!!!

Maybe I’m at the exact wrong age for this moment in how most stuff works. I feel trapped between worlds. I’m still young enough that lots of my friends and colleagues eagerly embrace new technologies, but old enough to be like “uggghhh I don’t get this it’s too confusing” when some new technologies present themselves.

Here’s the thing: I like email. My email inbox is still the center of my world. Yes I text some people for show logistics and yes I get booked on things via Instagram DMs (though I almost always tell people in there to just email me!) and sure I see a lot of things I want to do via various social media platforms. But at the end of the day, my gmail and google calendar rule my world and the rest I’m always just trying to funnel in there.

Lots of people say Gen Z and Gen Alpha don’t use email. I mean, I get it, why would they. It was already phasing out of social culture by the time they were connecting with people. And from what I can tell a lot of them haven’t had many jobs, where most email usage is concentrated when you’re in your 20s. They also seem to use ChatGPT for everything and none of them know how to write, but that’s a different problem for a different newsletter.

What I like about email is it’s the hub. At this point in my life, my work, my social life, my business and administrative life, and basically any other communications I can have to do still all come to email. Instagram is for memes, comedy bookings, and friends I haven’t seen in many years and for whom I clearly do not have a phone number. Texting is great but happens at such a rate and without easy ability to organize and filter and search that you could never use it (or at least I couldn’t) to do real business. It’s all about email for me.

When I was a kid, invitations were pieces of paper that were either mailed through the USPS or hand delivered in class (though only if you blanket invited everyone, to do it there for anything else is cruel). My mom still has the invitations from my first or second birthday party she threw me. What a party is for a one or two year old I don’t understand, but we had something, and she invited people. They were pieces of paper in the shape of a wooly sheep and across the top it said “Ewe Are Invited.” I love it. No notes. I would kill for those now, honestly. And then that piece of paper had the date, time, place, and any other details someone might need to plan to attend that party. So simple.

Invitations like that existed through high school for me, save for some smaller gatherings that you could coordinate via phone calls (still a favorite method of mine, I LOVE THE PHONE). Email and the internet weren’t widely used every day until I was into college. Then I lived on my .edu email address and 24 hours a day on AIM. Texting was still a laborious ordeal with T9, so my college days, the way you got invited to something was a pastiche of fun pathways: telling you in person, late night instant messages, or a note on the white board on your dorm room door that said “Sigma Nu 10pm jell-o shots.” Those were the days. You could always track people down because there just weren’t that many places to go.

My twenties in New York were heavy on email for invitations. As everyone tried to take advantage of the city and assemble groups from disparate corners of our lives, the easiest way to do it was to send an email with all of the details and a bunch of inside jokes. It helped that I was working in communications and did a lot of press for my own stuff, so these emails from me at least read half like a press invitation and half like a college party.

A simpler time.

When Facebook became the monoculture, dominant social technology that everyone was on, life was the easiest. I rarely met someone who didn’t have a Facebook account in the early, mid, and even late aughts. Everyone was on it all day, and then they went and introduced “events” on Facebook. It was perfect. You could just click down the list of people you know, it didn’t matter if it was the first time you were inviting your new work friend to a birthday party and you didn’t text much. You could have a private event for your ten closest friends organizing a group dinner (you could, but I wouldn’t...). You could also post a public event, in my life this was often comedy shows. You could select all and invite everyone. Whatever you wanted, it was an option on Facebook and you rarely had to hunt down a personal email address or phone number or jump into someone’s DMs.

That’s gone now, Facebook is (thankfully) no longer the town square where everyone gathered to share news and jokes and work. Now, from what I can tell, it’s a place for boomers to fall for bad AI pictures of a cat making a birthday cake or argue in the comments of a bullshit article about how immigrants are voting too many times in America’s Got Talent.

[Okay full disclosure, I canceled my Facebook account in spring of 2020 when the world shut down and it looked like live comedy was gone, at least for a while. It had become less and less a part of my life over the years. Even at my most bored I didn’t open the app. I used it to get messages for show bookings, and those were done for a while so I finally left after joining as one of the probably original 20,000 users. Last year, when a pair of H. T. Huang toucan lamps showed up in a Facebook Marketplace listing that a friend sent, I panicked and tried to rejoin Facebook so I could get them, minutes before I was supposed to go on stage for a panel science show in Mobile, Alabama. I quickly set up a profile and messaged the seller that I wanted them and I wasn’t spam. They immediately reported me and I have been in Facebook jail ever since, not a member, but not able to delete the account either.]

As Facebook waned, Paperless Post and a few other imitators sprung up. It was mostly for hallowed events like weddings, major birthdays, or serious work accomplishment celebrations. I never minded it because they came to your email, so I could easily RSVP and it usually even connected to my google calendar so I’d see it as I planned each week and month.

Paperless Post seemed to stay in the world of weddings and related events. People, especially those under 40, send fewer email invitations than ever. I have great friends I text all the time and new friends who live and die by Instagram DMs until we make the jump to phones. No social media is anyone’s dominant space, and even if it were, none of them run a chronological feed where you could post or share things in a timely manner. News stories always complain “Why don’t people do anything anymore?” and it’s like bro, blame the algorithm.

Then Partiful hit the scene and it got very quickly adopted despite (outside of its politics) being super flawed. The first and most glaring issue is you have to RSVP TO FIND OUT THE LOCATION. We all know this, we all hate this, but like, it fucking sucks! I don’t care where you live, that’s annoying. I work a lot at night and I live a busy city life, so often I’m cramming a few things into one evening. Where something is makes a big difference in if I can attend! I’m also frustrated that they all pop into the same text thread, demanding you go to a second location where you STILL don’t get all of the information until you actually RSVP. And then all of the updates, both invitations for things you’ll never even click open as well as hourly updates for your best friend’s birthday party all live in the same text thread, voiced by former Palantir employees who are certainly keeping tabs on where you go and what you do. Cool!!!!

My birthday party invitation from last year. Everything you need to know.

I don’t know what the solution is. The way we communicate now is so rich, and you can use specific modes for specific things. But invitations continue to be an issue when everything is so spread out. I, for one, do not check my mail, but I live on my email and I 80% of the time will be able to shift from Instagram to my real calendar and not miss something. But that’s just me and weirdly now, everyone is different.

My solution the last few years has been kind of a return to the birthday party invitations of my youth. Natasha and a few other friends do something similar. I like to make an image where I type all of the details you need to know (date, time, place, general expectations) and have it all in one handy photo. Then I can post that to “close friends” on Instagram or easily text it to dozens of people or group texts. If I don’t have someone’s number or aren’t sure they’ll see a post, I can also send it via DM. It’s not super elegant, and impossible to work off a guest list, but at least Peter Thiel isn’t involved.

MORE STUFF! MORE STUFF!

This Saturday is Natasha Pickowicz’s Great Community Bake Sale! If you haven’t bought tickets yet, get those now! Literally every chef, baker, restaurant owner, recipe developer you have ever loved will be there selling treats. All proceeds go to charities that help people access food. Get a few tickets, pick up some goodies, and support a great cause. I’ll be there volunteering!

Wow, I was hoping The Chair Company, Tim Robinson’s new HBO show, would be good and it delivered. It’s the silliness of I Think You Should Leave mixed with the slight mystery of his film Friendship but paced as an exciting week to week thrilling drama. I laughed a LOT.

RIP D’Angelo. This week is a great chance to listen to him, namely one of my favorite albums of the last 20 years, Black Messiah. (Ideally not on Spotify because they run ads for ICE now so fuck them forever.)

This week on Ruined we did the new Evil Dead. And get your tickets for the next Ruined live show on Sunday 10/26 where we’ll ruin Good Boy.

This week Welcome to Talk Town welcomes our resident fashion expert Courtney Maginnis, and Greg had some ideas for her.

This Sunday I’m performing at Noise for Now at 6pm. Monday I’ll be hanging at Union Hall for another great Frankenstein’s Baby. Tuesday I’m on Uptown Showdown at Symphony Space on team “Street Smarts.”