Feature Work: Field as Witness, Rosanna Li, 2026.
The other day I heard Let It Go by Peter Broderick, and it stopped me in my tracks.
On the surface, it sounds like a ghost of 70s folk — prairie grass, open skies, moral seriousness, the kind of wistful purity that once travelled on vinyl and lived in small rooms. But it’s not nostalgic. It’s contemporary in a way that only becomes audible now.
It’s a song about technology. About being torn. About entanglement.
And somehow, that tension makes it more honest, not less.
From Stadiums to Solitude
For most of the 20th century, cultural reach required mass aggregation. If you wanted to be heard, you had to enter the stadium — literally or metaphorically.
Stadiums are a technology:
they manufacture intensity through scale
they rely on synchronisation and emotional contagion
they confuse volume with meaning
They’re also increasingly unsafe — for performers and audiences alike — and depend on a kind of mass hysteria that now comes with a premium ticket price.
But something has shifted.
We no longer need to collapse into crowds to feel something together.
Micro-Intimacy at Scale
Platforms like TikTok didn’t invent intimacy. They unbundled it from rarity.
What used to require:
proximity
subcultural access
a small room, a house show, a shared physical moment
is now:
ambient
distributed
repeatable
accessible
Not shallow — diffuse.
This is micro-intimacy made available en masse: a voice cracking into a phone camera, a thought forming in real time, someone alone but not isolated.
No pyrotechnics. No spectacle. No performance of transcendence.
Just presence.
Post-Digital Audiences Don’t Need to Blink
There’s another quiet shift happening too.
Progressive audiences no longer need exaggerated signalling to recognise meaning. They don’t need to be told when to feel, how much to feel, or what to applaud.
They’re comfortable with:
unfinished thoughts
contradiction
vulnerability without confession
solitude without withdrawal
This is what post-digital looks like:
we know how the machine works — now show us something human inside it.
Folk Music, Updated
That’s why this new wave of indie / folk — especially from places like Oregon — doesn’t feel hypocritical when it sings about wires, platforms, and doubt.
Folk was never just a sound. It was a philosophy about how one should live.
So of course it has to grapple with technology now. Refusing to do so would be the real betrayal.
Broderick doesn’t resolve the contradiction. He doesn’t pretend to be outside the system, and he doesn’t celebrate it either. He just stands in the middle of it.
That honesty is what makes the song devastating.
Reach Without Mass Hysteria
The genuinely new configuration is this:
You can now have:
IRL solitude
authorship without intermediaries
global reach without aggregation
an audience that never becomes a mob
That’s not just a cultural shift. It’s an ethical one.
It changes who gets to speak, who gets to be seen, and who doesn’t have to sacrifice their nervous system for scale.
After the Stadium
This isn’t nostalgia for the past, and it isn’t techno-optimism either.
It’s something quieter:
A recognition that we can remain singular and still be heard.
That we can mix solitude with reach.
That we don’t need to manufacture hysteria to matter.
Sometimes a song does this work better than any theory paper.
And sometimes noticing it is enough. Noticing, however, is the new art form in a landscape of diffusion.
