In Response to You Are Not A Gadget

I recently finished reading You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier. The book is the latest in a series of prominent polemics decrying the effect of the internet on everything from pop culture to basic human cognition. Because I live most of my life surrounded by people totally taken with the promise of technology I try to keep up with these kinds of tracts (even though I find most of them to be abominably idiotic) in order to nurture a healthy sense of skepticism and to keep an open mind.

Approaching it in this reluctant spirit, I was surprised to find Lanier’s text not only far superior to the usual example of this genre, but deeply resonant with my own disappointments with web culture in the last decade or so.

Lanier draws a connection between the core design decisions of Web 2.0 and what he calls “cybernetic totalists” — Singularity-enthusiasts, semantic web-ists, and others who believe that the internet itself is becoming alive or sentient in some way. From Wikipedia to Digg to YouTube, many Web 2.0 designs de-emphasize the specific personalities of their individual contributors in order to create the impression that their content arose organically as an almost accidental side-effect of the artificial intelligence embodied in the site’s architecture.

Lanier sees this as an attempt to make the prophecy of the Singularity seem more accurate than it in fact is. If the writing or editing or videography of real people is reduced to ‘User Generated Content’, the mere raw material from which something of value is made via algorithm, then machine intelligence seems both more sophisticated and more valuable than may actually be the case.

His most vivid stating of this case comes in the form of a surprising interpretation of the famous Turing Test. Conventionally, the Turing Test is a landmark for AI: if a computer program can successfully pose as human in a text-only exchange then it has achieved some landmark on the road to intelligence. However, Lanier argues, when a person mistakes a program for a fellow human being that is not the sign of the success of the machine, but of the failure of the person. The computer hasn’t achieved humanity, we have lost, or intentionally forfeited or reduced, some part of ours. Machines don’t pass the Turing Test, people fail it.

For Lanier, this is what happens when we try to see human-calibre intelligence in the behavior of search engines, collaborative editing schemes, or user voting systems. We define intelligence down. We forget the genius involved in the real set of actions and decisions made by the people whose actions are aggregated in order to praise the mere mechanical aggregator. It’s a classic example of the pathetic fallacy

Another related thrust of Lanier’s argument that I find highly compelling has to do with the role of anonymity in “open culture”.

As a musician, Lanier tells us, he would be glad to apply a permissive license to his own work from a commercial point-of-view, but he wants to maintain a deeper form of personal connection than is made possible by anonymous reuse.

Why not have a flavor of Creative Commons license, he proposes, that would require a potential reuser to contact him in order to explain the proposed reuse? He wouldn’t have a veto right over the reuser, but simply a right of notification, a chance for interaction, for conversation.

As a musician (and programmer and animator and photographer) myself, I find this suggestion delightful. I have little interest in making a living from the media I create, but have found great joy in the relationships I have formed through its reception.

The only reason to abhor such a suggestion, to insist on the power of anonymous fluid reuse is to create the illusion of a gap between the products of open culture and its authors. It’s through this exact gap that the pathetic fallacy of machine intelligence grows. If we can’t see the authors of all this open culture, it must be a product of the system itself.

Despite the power of Lanier’s assault on Singularity Thinking, to my mind, he flounders terribly when he turns his argument towards aesthetic evidence.

Lanier proposes that over the last 20 years, with the rise of digital creation and networked distribution, musical creativity has faltered, falling into a retro phase of merely mashing up the past rather than generating the radically fresh sounds and ideas we might expect to have arisen from the introduction of such a powerful set of new tools.

Why isn’t pop music substantially different than it was at the start of the digital age? Where’s the new music that’s as different from hip-hop as hip-hop was from The Beatles?

I find this idea to be extremely wrong-headed for three primary reasons. First, there are strong examples of music that could not, on a purely technical basis, even have been made before the digital era. Second, much of the best new music stems from a depth and breadth of musical literacy that would be unattainable without the incredible variety of material available in the contemporary digital music catalog. Finally, and most importantly, digital culture has fragmented the formerly monolithic structure of musical taste, hollowing out what was formerly known as “pop music” and returning music to the status of a folk art, i.e. one primarily produced and consumed locally for and by people themselves. Therefore, pop music is completely the wrong place to look for inventive music being made and consumed with passion.

The conversation about whether or not digital tools have resulted in new forms of musical expression since hip-hop need be no longer than two words: Aphex Twin. Take as exhibit one, Girl/Boy Song. Released in 1996 on the Richard D. James Album, Girl/Boy Song is built on a fundamental structure that would be inconceivable without digital composition tools: the intricate a-metric drum line as solo instrument. The song is introduced and anchored by synthesizer parts that are highly reminiscent of traditional classical music: they sound like strings and reed instruments, they play in rigorous counterpoint, etc. On top of this, however, is a wild whooping programmed percussion track that weaves between the beats, sometimes accenting it rhythmically, often spastically ignoring it, always with a level of micro-detail and variation that would be impossible for any human (or even embodied) performer to achieve. The song’s aesthetic effect, the sense of stomach-dropping wonder, giddy acceleration, and sheer joy this music produces, comes directly from its digitally superhuman attributes.

In his quest for newness, Lanier describes playing contemporary music for young people and asking them to guess the decade in which it was written. Their inability to do this accurately, he argues, implies that the music of the last 20 years is all a rehash of earlier styles, retro stuff. I would like to see him try that experiment with Girl/Boy Song and other songs from the best work of Aphex Twin and a handful of other similar artists.

Lanier would certainly acknowledge, I’m sure, that digital culture has transformed music listening, dramatically increasing the variety of musical styles available to the average listener as well as the sheer number of recordings. A number of prominent artists today make work that is not specifically the product of digital creation tools, but would be inconceivable without the simultaneously broad-ranging and obsessively deep musical education made possible by these new digital archives.

For example take the Dirty Projectors. The Dirty Projectors combine guitar ideas derived from West African music with rhythms and vocal approaches extrapolated from hip-hop and soul and a compositional approach grown out of progressive 60s rock. For a canonical recent example, listen to Stillness Is The Move.

They are not, as a group similarly described in the 70s or 80s might have been, a “fusion” act. Fusion involved hanging world music tropes such as exotic instruments or pop sounds such as electric bass on the framework of modal jazz. It was noodley music for hippies and music geeks. The Dirty Projectors, on the other hand, are aggressively pop. Their beats are meant to move your body in an explicitly sexual way and their melodies are meant to get stuck in your head. They are doing the same thing The Beatles or Rolling Stones did, transmuting African-ate blues and Tin Pan Alley craft into liberatory music for young people, only with a much wider set of source material.

Another trend that bespeaks this expanded field of influence in contemporary music is the rise of what you might call post- or neo-classical artists. Here, I’m specifically thinking of harpist Joanna Newsom and violinist Owen Pallet. Both of these artists come from rigorous classical backgrounds and make music that addresses the aesthetic interests of classical music: orchestration, structure, development, virtuosity, subtlety, etc.

In an earlier era, Newsom and Pallet would almost definitely both have ended up as classical composers or performers. But since classical orchestras became museums dedicated to preserving the music of 19th Century Germany rather than performing today’s composers, they found their outlet in the indie rock/youth music culture.

In the 80s, if you had told people that teens and twenty-somethings would line-up to see a wispy elfin woman play an hour-long song cycle on the harp filled with references to Samuel Barber and named after a mythical city in French Brittany they would have thought you were insane.

Finally, the fatal flaw to Lanier’s analysis of contemporary pop music is the dissolution of “pop” itself. As centralized media was replaced with the decentralized net, a funny thing happened: pop music became less popular. Sure, many young people are still aware of its existence, but fewer and fewer use it to forge their identity. Young people still have powerful, emotionally formative experiences with music, but more and more of those are in relation to artists, and even genres, you’ve probably never heard of: Norwegian black metal, southern “crunk” hip-hop, Manchester trip-hop, etc. Music ties small social groups together, but is no longer a generation-uniting universal. Amongst people my age (30) and younger, I have little to no expectation that I’ll ever have heard of a peer’s favorite bands, let alone share them.

Pop music simply no longer posses the central generation-defining role that once made its vicissitudes seem like cultural sea changes. It doesn’t matter in the way it once did. Beyond the net-enabled explosion of musical options described above, there are two additional reasons for this change.

First, as the music industry has shriveled economically, it has grown ever more entrenched in the tastes of the Baby Boomers. The Boomers outnumber real young people demographically, exceed their per capita music spending, and can be served by existing artists and catalogue. This trend is most obviously visible by the never-ending careers of artists like the Rolling Stones and Madonna, artists whose commercial presence lives on zombie-like long after their contribution to contemporary culture has ceased to be fresh. There’s more and safer money to be made catering to Baby Boomer nostalgia than developing new acts that might excite the diverse tastes of the net generation.

Secondly, since digital tools have made it ridiculously cheap and easy to perform, record, and distribute music, a greater percentage of youth music appetite can be sated locally by small bands of their peers. Most of my favorite musicians are people I know. This isn’t because of bias or because I’m especially well connected, but because music made in a community in which you participate ends up meaning more.

Another word for music like this — music made by local musicians to entertain their immediate peers — is “folk music”. Most of the music I deeply love is folk music, not by style, but by mode of creation and distribution.

I hope that my defense of contemporary music is enough to convince Lanier (and anyone who thinks like him) of his error without letting the rest of you forget about the valuable ideas in the rest of You Are Not A Gadget.

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0 Responses to In Response to You Are Not A Gadget

  1. Mike Merrill says:

    I enjoyed this Greg, nice counter argument.

  2. Dustyn says:

    Excellent response to Lanier. I haven’t read the book yet, but just recently heard of it when I was presenting the case for licensing my book Creative Commons to my agent and editor.

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