Advertising space being sold on our foreheads notwithstanding, we still live in a multimedia world where attention is the currency in trade. A couple of years ago, Doug Rushkoff sat down with John Brockman for a discussion about media, branding, choices, and what the “self” means among them. Seemingly mundane but paramount to our musing here, the question comes up as to what kind of shoes represent The Thing That Doug Calls “Doug.” Continue reading “The Thing That I Call “RoyC.””
Man Auctions Ad Space on His Forehead
I wish that were the first science fiction joke of 2005 (a lá Cory Doctorow’s Billy Bailey), but it’s not. It’s real.
My initial reaction to this type of thing (i.e., advertising showing up on personal vehicles, weather reports, football fields, etc.) is disgust, but once I think through it and recover, I’ve had hints of a different residual reaction lately. Let me see if I can be brief. This continued and exponentially increasing encroachment of corporations on personal space is just one of those things we can’t change. As Seattle’s The Stranger put it in an article a couple of years ago (in an issue called “Yes Logo” in response to Naomi Klein’s book, No Logo): corporate culture is American culture. There’s no escape. So, what do we do?
This is the part I’ve been working on: Aside from the extremes — constant frustration at one end and total resignation at the other — what can we do? There has to be a higher ground, a meta-level to this issue. If pushed far enough, you will realize that everything is fucked. So, then what? Well, then you look out for you and yours and don’t sweat the issue. Hedonism becomes the optimal path. But then one runs the risk of apathy and indifference to circumstances that ultimately do affect you and yours. As I said, I’m still working on it.
Friend and colleague Richard Metzger has a healthy attitude toward this kind of stuff and has helped lower my blood pressure quite a bit. It’s a qualified hedonism: We don’t want to be marginalized by Corporate America. We want to become Corporate America.
Other than Richard, two exemplars and their thoughts also come immediately to mind: artist Shepard Fairey and comedian Doug Stanhope.
Shepard does work for corporate clients to fund his Obey Giant projects. “The money that I make from doing corporate work allows me the freedom to do other things that I want to do, such as, travel around to different cities to put my stuff up and to make more posters, stickers and stencils, all the time…” Shepard explains. “The other thing is that I’d like to make corporate or mainstream companies not suck as hard, by doing some artwork for them that doesn’t insult the consumer. I look at it like ‘wouldn’t it be great if you could turn on the radio and hear great songs even on the top 40’s station?’ I know this philosophy won’t appeal to the elitist who thinks it’s cool to be marginalized and special and into the hip things that no one else knows about, but I’m a populist, and I think that attitude is very immature.”
Doug said something that sticks with me as well. He said, “Selling out includes not doing something you’d enjoy, on whatever level, just because of what someone else might think.” The issue of corporate involvement, branding, marketing, advertising, etc. is more complicated than I once thought of it. It’s a very complex, organic memespace in which we all exchange currency — whether we want to or not.
To wit, one might adapt Stewart Brand‘s dictum, “Technology marches on, over you or through you, take your pick.” to read, “Marketing marches on, over you or through you, take your pick” (Andrew Fisher certainly did). Manichean dichotomy or not, it depicts the unfortunate reality of the situation, and to quote it up a bit more, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice” (Rush, “Free Will”).
I am sanguine that there’s a way to philosophically feel okay about this shit without selling your forehead, “selling out,” and without pulling a Kaczynski.
Steven Johnson: No Bitmaps for These Territories
When a friend of mine loaned me Steven Johnson’s first book, I had no idea what he was getting me into. On the surface, Interface Culture (Harper San Francisco, 1997) looks like most other books on the subject of computer interfaces, but how many times must I be warned not to judged books by their looks before I start to believe.
Johnson’s books each tackle a different topic than the one before, but they all wander wide enough for you to see the color outside of the lines. Where Interface Culture seemed to be about interfaces, it was about, well, interfaces — but interfaces like I’d never thought of them before, in places I’d never seen them before. Emergence (Scribner, 2001) was about emergent phenomena and network culture, but again, in ways that I hadn’t seen discussed before. Johnson writes about the signs of the times, but no one else sees what they signify quite like he does.
His latest book, Mind Wide Open (Scribner, 2004), is an autoethnographic romp through the neurobiology of his brain. It’s not quite like reading a Charlie Kaufman script, but it’s close. He also co-founded FEED online magazine, and writes for Wired, Discover, Slate, Salon, and many others.
I’ve returned to Interface Culture many times since that first read, and in turn, I asked Johnson to return with me [Special thanks to Jonathan Field for additional input].
Roy Christopher: I want to go back in time a bit to your first book, Interface Culture. Its title betrays the broad scope of the book, but in the meantime, the interface has expanded in our culture: Everything from media, to branding, to communication is, in effect, an interface. Did you see this expansion when writing this book?
Steven Johnson: In a (slightly self-congratulatory) word: yes. There were a few things I think I ended up being wrong about, and more than a few that I failed to anticipate, but the general argument has held up very well over the eight years that have passed since I wrote it. The argument, simply put, was this: in a society where information is proliferating at an exponential rate, and where information is valued above all else, the tools we have to manage and filter that information — our interfaces — become the most important symbolic or “sense-making” form in the culture. It’s not exaggerating things to say that Google is the defining mode of self-representation for our society, and Google is, in the end, just an interface to the web.
RC: What are your thoughts on our political system as an interface? Everything in this country has evolved so much over the past century, except government. How well do you think it works in today’s world so far as serving the public interest and public good?
SJ: I tend to be an optimist about a lot of things, but the state of the government is not something that puts me in a half-full kind of mood. We’re clearly in a transition phase right now, one that might well last another ten years, if not longer: a small and vocal (and well-publicized) part of the electorate has realized the power of information revolution, and they’re demanding that politics be revolutionized accordingly. (Just today, one of the heads of Moveon.org announced that they had “bought” the Democratic Party in 2004 and it was time for the old guard to hand over the keys.) But a lot of us still think about politics the old-fashioned way: as a remote force over our lives that we can’t control in any real way. I said after Dean imploded that his campaign was a classic study in the clash of two overlapping paradigms: the internet had transformed the way people raise money and mobilize supporters and that had led to Dean’s spectacular rise in late 2003, but the decision that people made about who to vote for was still governed by the tradition of seeing someone on TV (or, if you were really lucky, seeing them in a town hall meeting in person.) And that created an imbalance — because all the early indicators revolved around money and activist passion, which created an artificial sense of Dean’s inevitability. But the “actual voters” didn’t really dig him.
RC: As long as we’re talking about interfaces, what about branding? What about the homogenization of the landscape where big-box retailers are concerned? This is a personal pet peeve, but I like to see different things in different places when I travel. I hate to see the same four stores, or the same coffee shop in every town. Is there any company you think is respecting regional culture even as they move in and set up shop?
SJ: I’m sympathetic to what you’re saying, but I think there’s a risk of sentimentality here as well. I mean, Starbucks is everywhere, which means by a certain standard the world has gotten more homogeneous. On the other hand, the world is now filled with far more places where I can order a triple-shot iced latté with good espresso. Ten years ago the number of places serving a wide range of coffees was pretty small, outside the ten biggest cities and maybe a dozen college towns. But thanks to Starbucks, even airports and shopping malls now have a huge palette of coffee options to choose from. Same goes for Barnes & Noble. Their outlets regularly carry Interface Culture in stores, despite the fact that it never came close to being a bestseller. But you would have been very hard pressed to find a book like that in a nonmetropolitan/academic bookstore ten years ago. (And then there’s the whole Amazon phenomenon, where everyone with a web connection now has access to the most obscure titles in print.)
So for the people outside the urban centers, I think the chains have largely been a force for more diversity, not less. The question is whether the chains are killing off the diversity in the cities themselves. I don’t think anyone has done a convincing study of this yet. My hunch would be it’s pretty much a draw: Soho is filled with J. Crew and The Gap now, but five blocks over in NoLiTa there are more small designers in one-room shops than there ever were in Soho. There are fewer indie bookstores now, but frankly, I don’t need indie bookstores with Amazon. And there are like a thousand Starbucks in NYC, but all the classic small coffee shops I know of are still thriving.
RC: In Emergence, you uproot the free-content-with-advertising model of mass media and propose an opt-in, information-exchange model. You envision a world of media with less ads, but rather a more open exchange of information between companies and consumers. As someone who cringes at ads filling every available space, I like the idea. Do you think there’s a way to get past the privacy issues, or protect privacy, and still implement such a model?
SJ: Amazon sends me email announcements when there’s a new release that it thinks I might be interested in, given my past purchasing history. I’d estimate off the top of my head that they’re on target about thirty percent of the time (often it’s notifying me of something I’ve already purchased, though not from them.) That means that two-thirds of the time they’re completely off base in anticipating my interests, but still I welcome those emails. I mean, what’s the batting average of all the other advertising in my life — all the billboards and radio plugs and subway banners and random TV spots, not to mention the spam? It’s a fraction of a fraction of a percent, if you add it all up. So when someone shows up and says, “thirty percent of the time, I’m going to point out something you really might want to buy,” I say: “Great, keep it coming.”
As for the privacy issues, I don’t know. I worry about health and financial records — and personal information about my family — getting into the wrong hands. But I don’t care about someone tracking the DVDs that I buy, as long they give me a one-click method of shutting down their recommendations if they’re not working for me.
RC: What’s the new book-in-progress all about?
SJ: It’s a pure work of persuasion, arguing that popular culture, on average, has been growing more cognitively challenging over the past thirty years, not less. Despite everything you hear about declining standards and dumbing-down, you have to do more intellectual work to make sense of today’s television or games — much less the internet — than you did a few decades ago. It will definitely be the most controversial of my books, but I think it’s also going to be a fun read. It’s called Everything Bad Is Good For You, and it’ll be out in the U.S. in early May.
The Laws of Cool by Alan Liu
Even with as many texts as have come out exploring and explicating our so-called information age, there has yet to be a more exhaustive account of just what the hell has happened than Alan Liu’s The Laws of Cool (University of Chicago Press). Nevermind the misleading title. This isn’t another exposé on “cool hunting” and finding out what the kids are into. This lengthy tome is about how most of us came to be knowledge workers in the factories of information.
To call this book “exhaustive” is an understatement. I can’t stress the reaches of Liu’s research or the sprawling implications of his book enough – and reading it is quite the lengthy process. Every time one thinks that Liu has found his bounds, the next chapter opens another door on which one wouldn’t have even thought of knocking. Yet, it’s a cohesive work, written with unwavering wit and erudition.
Exploring the Foucauldian climate of the corporate control culture, set off by IT and the mainframe, Liu shows how managers came to be “seduced by the system” (as Ellen Ullman put it in her book Close to the Machine). They used the abilities of their information systems to keep tabs on their workers – even where there had previously been no problems. His use of temperature-related tropes (e.g., “hot,” “cold,” “warm,” and especially “cool”) is confusing at first, due to the previous uses of such terms (i.e., as slang or as in McLuhan’s ubiquitous probes). These temperatures eventually come together to illuminate the weather of the twenty first century workaday, from the stifling of hot emotions by the cold machine to the warmth of friends and family and the cool of today’s assimilated, yet über-hip “knowledge workers” (“We work here, but we’re cool,” quoth Liu).
Taken whole, The Laws of Cool is a high relief, topographical map of the workscape of the early twenty first century. Couple this with Ken Wark‘s A Hacker Manifesto and you have a crash course in post-Marxist labor studies.
A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark
A Hacker Manifesto is the Big Picture of not only where we are in the “information age,” but where we’re going as well. Adopting the epigrammic style of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, as well as updating its ideas, Ken Wark establishes so-called “knowledge workers” as an unrecognized social class: “the hacker class.” Wark also updates Marx and Engels, Deleuze and Guattari, Nietzsche, and a host of others: Continue reading “A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark”
war@33.3: The Postmodern Turn in the Commodification of Music
We live in a realm where once clear boundaries have been reformed, pushed back, reconfigured, and often blurred beyond recognition. The age-old stable image of photography — once considered by most as a reliable visual representation of some brief slice of reality — is now suspect due to digital editing techniques. The same fate has fallen on film, the word, and music of all kinds.Whereas modernism adheres to the idea that there exists but one real “truth,” postmodernism sees all things shifting according to perspective. It finds no central truth, only changing points of view. As we will see through the course of this essay, the commodification of music has gone through a similar change — from a stable central authority to myriad shifting forms.
Where all of the aforementioned forms used to come down to the public from one source, like the divine word of God, or the idea of one central “truth,” the digital now allows most anyone to create, recreate and distort coded information of all kinds. In the music of the marketplace, the center of power was the record company. The decree was the packaged product — the record album, the cassette tape, and the compact disc.
Band of the Hand
Twenty or so years ago, the Hip-hop DJ emerged as a vigilante on this landscape of music as commodity. While remixing and recontextualizing the product, he decentralized the power of the record company. DJs break the code. They reorganize the power structure in the world of sound. The product is no longer the be-all, end-all, but just another piece of the new story. The center does not hold:
The DJ cultivates and manages singularities: the bifurcation points on the edge of chaos, where dynamical systems manifest their emergent properties and transcend the sum of their elements. The speakers emit alchemical sounds, cut and pasted by needles in deep grooves, manipulated by human hands on black wax. It is a pastiche of ever-shifting, hand-engineered, sonic references. The dialectic of the two turntables unfolds in time. Beats juggled for the meat jungle. Scratches snatched for the daily catch. Crowd control, cruise control, remote control, the discotheque as Panopticon: A command-control system with the DJ at the helm. Several systems work at odds and in conjunction to make waves in the scene. This is a language sans nouns; a lingua franca consisting only of verbs: motion, phase transition, aural morphology, all moving at the speed of left and right.
As the Universe of sound finds ears, vibrating shards meld into sonic calling cards: An ever-shifting musical identity that gives way to unrelenting multiplicity. Thanks to technology often perceived as obsolete, the entire history of sound is available for data-mining. The DJ is an archeologist of vinyl plates. Digging in the crates, (s)he returns with pieces to the amorphous puzzle. A cartographer of soundscapes unknown and yet unformed, the DJ makes the maps and the terrain simultaneously on the fly.
Sound manipulation is the foundation of all musical forms. The individual control of audible vibrations is what allows musicians to create aurally aesthetic sounds. As Paul D. Miller writes, “When Thomas Edison first recorded the human voice onto a tin foil roll singing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb,’ on December 6, 1877, history changed. It became malleable in a form never before seen on this planet. Experiences of events, and the moment-events themselves could be captured, edited, sequenced, and distributed. What Edison did was take the voice and reduce it to its basic component: sound.”[1] This is what the DJ in Hip-hop does when he combines and reanimates bits and pieces of old recorded history to create entirely new compositions. The music represents a future without a past.[2]
Surf, Sample, and Manipulate
Where turntablism was the most exciting thing happening in music at the turn of the millennium, the art of the remix has moved online. The power of the record company has suffered another blow as the power of the DJ has been networked. Call it “uploadphonics,” “bootlegging,” or just plain “remixing,” but whatever you call it, it is a war of intellectual property, a war of copyrights, a war of the freedom of speech and most of all a war of sound. Online, underground remixers like 2 Many DJs, The Evolution Control Committee (whose slogan reads, “We’re so next year.”), Rick Silva a.k.a. CueChamp, Cassetteboy, Bit Meddler, and many others “surf, sample and manipulate” (in the words of Mark Amerika).[3]
Rick Silva calls uploadphonics “a tight spiral outwards of creativity that makes a music in tune with the ideals of the internet, a soudscape to fit the netscape.”[4] Record companies, in an effort to retain control, are fighting a moving target. Indeed, a moving target made up of moving targets: peer-to-peer networks are completely decentralized. The file trade is made from node to node, without central control. The center does not hold.
As I write this I am (re)mixing music. Through my KaZaa Lite P2P client, I’ve downloaded a cracked version of Sonic Foundry’s Acid 3.0 mixing software, as well as a plethora of songs in MP3 format. In the past few weeks, I have been able to literally re-work many of my favorite songs. Lifting a beat from one, a guitar lick from another and vocals from a cappella versions, I’ve made entirely new compositions that none of these artists ever intended, and then uploaded them for distribution to others. Anyone with a connection to the Internet wields the same power. Think of it as a massive, collective phase transition: the record companies put out solids (records), the Hip-hop DJ melts them down into liquids (remixes, etc.) and the home-computer remix kids boil the mass into gaseous vapor (molecules of sound, splitting and recombining without end). While there is still product coming down from on high, the “central truth” no longer holds ultimate power. There is no divine sonic word. There is only sound and infinite ways to put it together.
“In a recent post to boomselection.com an assignment was given out,” writes Rick Silva in an article from 2002 on online remixing, “a call to remix Eminem’s latest track was followed by a link to the MP3 of the a capella version. A week later boomselection released a subsite dedicated only to the Eminem remixes because the response had been so positive. The tracks were rated and posted. The number one track was number one mainly because of its amazing turnaround time. Within ten minutes of the assignment, someone had turned in a bootleg. The remixer took ten minutes to download the a capella, find a track roughly the same BPM, sync it, record it, encode it to MP3, FTP (upload) it, and mail out the link.”[5] All of this is good fun for fans and remixers, but a virtual nightmare for the recording industry.
Two weeks prior to the release of Eminem’s 2002 record, The Eminem Show, an advanced copy found its way onto a popular peer-to-peer network. As widespread downloading ensued, Eminem’s record company was forced to release his record a week before it had originally planned. “The source of this conundrum is as simple as its solution is complex,” writes John Perry Barlow on the digitizing of intellectual property. “Digital technology is detaching information from the physical plane, where property law of all sorts has always found definition.”[6] Since the replication of a file in digital format doesn’t decrease its quality, nor does it have limits, this is where the ideas of copyright, intellectual property, and digital bootlegging collide head-on.
No one has brought this collision to the attention of the mass mind like DJ Danger Mouse. His Grey Album, which meshed the a cappella vocals of Jay-Z’s Black Album with music lifted from The Beatles’ White Album, was an internet sensation that set off a shitstorm in boardrooms and bedrooms everywhere. Record company suits were scrambling to kill it, and bedroom remixers were scrambling to outdo it. The record (in its modern form: the physical compact disc) was squashed by a cease and desist order from EMI (who own the rights to The Beatles record), but its children replicated: The Brown Album, The Rainbow Album, The Slack Album, etc. (the latter of which is an amusing blend of Jay-Z’s vocals and music from Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted record by DJ n-wee). The remixing continues — and so does the battle to stop it.
The United States Copyright Act states that “the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means… for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.”[7] The art collage band Negativland tested this clause long before Eminem was asking the real version of his oft-remixed song “Without Me” to “please stand up.”
In 1991 Negativland released a single titled “U2” which sampled the Irish supergroup’s hit single “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” The song and the release of the single were both part parody, part critique, and part media prank (some off-mike comments by Casey Kasem were also a part of the composition). It was quickly sued out of existence by U2’s label, Island Records.[8] Not to be beaten so soon, Negativland released a magazine in 1993 chronicling the court case. “The Letter U and the Numeral 2” was sued out of existence by Negativland’s own label, SST Records (also for alleged copyright infringement: Negativland used SST bumper stickers and press releases in the publication).[9]
“We live in a world where nothing is what we were taught it was,” Negativland write in the introduction to their 1995 book on the ordeal. “Art is business, business is war, war is advertising, and advertising is art. We are bombarded with information and entertainment. Negativland responds to this environment by making music that uses fragments and samples from existing media of all kinds.”[10] For Negativland, if it’s on the airwaves (or the internet), it’s fair game for fair use.
Bits and Pieces
While the legalities of remixing are still squirming under the weight of innovation, the format of music has shape-shifted as well — from atoms to bits.[11] The advent of the Compact Disc changed recording in many ways, but the fact that a band could now do over an hour of music (without having to release a double LP) was one of them. Where the CD killed the LP, shrunk cover art, and caused the public to buy all of their albums on a new digital format, the MP3 ends the tyranny of any multi-song format of the past. We’re now back to the single (without a B-side). A single made of bits, not atoms. A single awaiting a home on the mass storage device of your choice. A single awaiting a new beat, a new vocal track, or a new time signature.
“Just as a Powerbook is a processing-machine,” writes online remixer Tim Jaeger, “and Max/MSP is audio software with which users can program, code, and construct their own virtual instruments, combined they become meta-samplers and schiz-machines. Max/MSP consumes other instruments only to turn them into new, different instruments for others to use and produce new instruments with. The same with turntables, or small CASIO keyboards spitting out sampled rhythms from old New Order records.”[12] It’s music as shareware, open source sound, armed audio warfare… Embrace the postmodern: Reduce, reuse, recycle. The future of music is in our hands: Let’s remix it.
1. Cumulus from America; Cartridge Music: Of Palimpsets and Parataxis, or How to Make a Mix by Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid).
2. Band of the Hand by Roy Christopher, Born Magazine, 1997.
3. “Uploadfonix” by Rick Silva, 21C Magazine.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. “The Economy of Ideas” by John Perry Barlow, 1993.
7. United States Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 107, 1988 ed. and Supp. IV).
8. Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 by Negativland, Seeland MediaMedia, 1995.
9. Spin Magazine, May 1993.
10. Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 by Negativland, Seeland MediaMedia, 1995.
11. Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte, Vintage, 1995.
12. “Scatter(ed) Dynamics” by Tim Jaeger, posted on the macrosound discussion list, January 3, 2003.
[Media Reader, #8, 2005]
Year-End Top Ten List, 2003
My friends and I always used to do year-end top ten lists of our favorite records of the year. Thinking back through 2003, I decided to archive my favorite ideas of the year. Not that I was let down by music this year, on the contrary, I heard plenty of good records in the ’03 (e.g., Aesop Rock, Kinski, Cex, Prefuse 73, Radiohead, Ilya, Interpol, Mogwai, Tomahawk, Deadsy, Why?, The Blood Brothers, The Mars Volta, Atmosphere, The Roots, etc.), but I thought this would be more interesting. We shall see. Continue reading “Year-End Top Ten List, 2003”
N. Katherine Hayles: Material Girl
Digging deep in the texts of both literature and science, N. Katherine Hayles exemplifies the reconciliation of C.P. Snow’s “two cultures” better than anyone I know. Her refusal to concentrate on either side of the fence, instead insisting on plowing new ground on both sides, has lead her to some of the most intriguing research currently being done. Looking at texts from all sources and angles, Hayles is always seeing new things that others overlook. Continue reading “N. Katherine Hayles: Material Girl”
Guest Post: Ashley Crawford on Prefiguring Cyberculture
Ricocheting from such subjects as The Matrix to James Joyce, Prefiguring Cyberculture (MIT Press) is a dazzlingly ambitious compendium. As in any collection of essays, it is a mixed affair, however, given its scope, and despite the occasional lapse into impenetrable jargon, it is an important addition to the burgeoning world of cyber-theory. Continue reading “Guest Post: Ashley Crawford on Prefiguring Cyberculture”
Guest Post: Ashley Crawford on Uncanny Networks by Geert Lovink
Have you ever been to a party where every conversation was of interest? Didn’t think so, but as host, Geert Lovink, the founder of Nettime, might just pull it off.
Lovink’s latest book, Uncanny Networks (MIT Press), is a roller-coaster ride of discussion that ranges from art to politics, techno-tribes to dot.com IPOs, radical politics to futuristic fantasy. Continue reading “Guest Post: Ashley Crawford on Uncanny Networks by Geert Lovink”