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Permanent Present

The Automation of Listening

Spotify, Pandora and YouTube are all powerful tools that give us instant access to a giant archive of recorded music. But how do its algorithms make its choices for us, and on whose terms? When a robot governs your listening selections, to what extent are you discovering or encountering music, and to what extent is music being supplied to you in formulaic terms, become nothing more than an automated setting on a culture machine?

Technology allows a smorgasbord of niche forms of music to exist happily in their own channels alongside the mainstream, without ever having to clash with it. As Mark Fisher says “the capacity to make an infinity of meaningless choices has replaced the capacity to actually change things”.

The algorithm is now the arbiter of choice.

There is a utopian idea in the concept of this great library in the sky, where all music and video can be accessed instantly and for free. But what other library chooses your reading for you, spies on what you read, and then sells that information on for profit? Technology has built a living archive of content that can prove enormously profitable to companies like Google and its sponsors, and yet anything but profitable to those who actually create its content.

As far as the listener’s tastes are concerned, what streaming services rely on more than anything else is data, by endlessly tracking what you watch and listen to in order to give you more of the same. Data can therefore only supply a picture of what’s already popular, instead of what might come next.

In becoming so ubiquitous, while at the same time, in the case of Spotify and Youtube, paying so little to the artists, these platforms are increasingly having an impact on what music sounds like: not only the way artists compose music but in the way we think about and listen to it.

Franklin Foer has talked about the ‘automation of thinking’ that the algorithms we interact with make commonplace. The impact of algorithmic processes on social media and political debate is already a matter of concern, but we’re only starting to see how they could impact creativity. We in the creative industries like music like to think that what we do is so uniquely human that it can never be replicated by a computer. But “no human endeavour has resisted automation,” says Foer. “Why should creative endeavours be any different?”

The automation of listening goes beyond the age-old debates of disco versus rock, or guitar versus synthesizer. More and more what we listen to is not chosen for us in just of terms of the social or genre relations but through their compositional similarities. On Spotify, content is increasingly channelled through made-up mood-based playlists — “deep focus” and “indie chill-out” and so on. For a song to have value within that listening dynamic it’s important that not only does it not stand out, but that it literally sounds like something else. So music starts to become more and more a function of the background, something to fill a sonic gap irrespective of its cultural intent. Add to this the expectation we have not to pay for music and what we’re left with is exactly the thing we didn’t think could happen: the automation of listening.

Gordon Moakes, 2018.

In our wonderful technological now, our permanent present, the rich ever-moment which outruns the past and the future in both directions, the dream of possibility lives and lives again without dying. We live in omni-directional, anti-directional times. No up, down, left, right, back or forward. Time as negation of time. Why die when you can live forever?

Our efforts have lain in expressing the heart, but with a clear head. In the battle between head and heart (as between science and art), the head reasoned that with the correct mathematical application, a state of being could be brought about to allow the heart to live forever. Once the heart lived forever, it was reasoned, human nature could triumph above all things, and so art could live forever. But art must live in a place of dying. Eternal life negates art, by precluding it. There is no longer a need to dream or soliloquise because the lament is only for the fading, the diminishing, the sadness of life’s end. When life stops ending, so does sadness, but culture goes with it. We make it go away.

This is our crossroads. Science has built places where culture can live forever, permanently preserved and accessible, free to all. But those places make culture more and more meaningless. There is no need to add any more cultural content to that archive. Infinite culture is culture at a complete stop.

Must the archive be destroyed? An impossible question, but one that must be asked. We need to ask who the permanent archive serves. It was built by technicians, engineers, capitalists, technocrats. The only thing they asked in return was a complete picture of your daily habits, choices, tastes, social circle, belief system and ideology: to know you intimately and utterly, the better to serve your lifestyle and consumer needs. A small price to pay, you reasoned, without being given the opportunity to think it over in any way. By the time you had a chance to consider, it was too late - access to the culture seemed of vital importance to your every moment, and you weren’t particularly concerned what they knew about you. In fact, the more the knew about you, it seemed, the more they could provide you exactly what you wanted. It was a thoroughly symbiotic set-up.

Omni-culture is mono-culture. The strains of automated ambience wash the background into the foreground and it is there that we live. No longer is there any discord. The great acts of rebellion live on in tinted aspic, permanently neutered. There’s an internet connection, there’s a Spotify account, now form a band. Your own personal rebellion is apparently incarnate. It confers the illusion of change upon you. Toss that guitar strap across your shoulder, wrap your uncertain fingers around its neck: you can reach for the same change that exists simultaneously along every fretboard in the world. You are being permanently listened to, but remain utterly unheard. The great victory of technocracy was not in the repression of change, in ruthlessly putting it down with violent counter-revolution. The need for such counter-revolution was annulled. Its victory was to make your revolution the same cause as theirs: the revolution of the self, the privatised dream to be heard, to put down the rebellion in your own heart and conform. The privatised heart walks in step with the corporation: its revolution flows constantly, endlessly, uselessly, into the archive, where it will will never die, and never live.

Read the full text of 'Permanent Present'.

Unwind to the soothing sounds of our wonderful technological now, where the dream of possibility lives and lives again without dying.