The San Francisco Bay Guardian reports that the SFPD has begun routinely seizing DJs laptops at house parties. Like the ACTA treaty our federal government is currently pursuing, it's representative of a disturbing new trend in law enforcement -- one in which our digital civil liberties, or "e-speech," are not accorded the same protections that they would be in our physical lives or traditional communications media.
However, there's also something very familiar about this story. As I discuss in my forthcoming book, Mashed Up, musical practices and technologies have always been subjected to government regulation, often at gunpoint, from ancient times to the present. This is because music acts as a kind of social and psychological blueprint, and new musical ideas nearly always carry with them new social ideas, which threaten established institutions.
In the case of DJ- and laptop-based music, the new musical ideas are sufficiently threatening to destabilize all of today's modern institutions -- in the government, the marketplace, and even houses of worship. No small wonder, then, that the police would begin to confiscate and criminalize these devices.
Of course, the flip side of regulation is resistance. Even history's most dispossessed peoples (e.g. slaves in the antebellum South) have responded to musical subjugation with innovative and canny countermeasures. I'm kind of looking forward to seeing how the SF DJ scene starts to hide its contraband...
This is so staggeringly simple and such a deft piece of complex engineering, I am blown away. A new program called PhotoSketch turns simple line drawings into photocollages using image search, mapping, cutting, pasting and blending algorithms. In other words, you draw a doodle, and the program turns it into a photorealistic image.
I can easily imagine the day when this functionality is available for audio and video. Without advanced technical expertise, people will be able to create their own films, games, and songs simply by sketching their favorite actors, locales and musicians into the frame. Of course, the Andrew Keens of the world will decry it as yet another victory for mediocrity over greatness. I prefer to think of it as yet another victory for free expression over cultural exclusivity.
I'm almost done with the syllabus I blogged a few weeks back. But I still need some help from all you smart folks out there. Please take a look, and let me know what I'm missing. Feel free to borrow, as well. Remember, this is for Masters students in Media, Culture and Communication.
UPDATE: Here's the final revision going into the first class:
Topics in Digital Media:
Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace
Dr. Aram Sinnreich
Description
Today, for the first time in
history, computer-mediated culture has become mainstream for a majority of
individuals in technologically developed societies. From email to texting, from
online gaming to online banking, from YouTube to Hulu, from DoS attacks to
Second Life sit-ins, nearly every traditional aspect of our lives has found a
new expression in its digital proxy.
In order to understand the
cultural, social, political and economic consequences of this development, we
must look to the origins of today’s cyberculture, in the futuristic visions
(both dystopian and utopian) that shaped the development of today’s networked
technologies. We will trace the genealogy of these visions, as they developed
in tandem with the growing digital communications infrastructure over the past
three quarters of a century, and evolved into new forms that even the most
forward-thinking of visionaries could not have predicted. Ultimately, one can
argue that the Internet has both exceeded and fallen short of the hype that
surrounded its birth and development, and, by comparing the myth to the
reality, we may better understand what aspects of the human condition are
likely to persist regardless of technological development.
Class will be conducted as a
seminar. Students will be responsible for leading discussions on the readings,
and are encouraged to critically engage the readings and class conversations.
Bassist and composer Darren Solomon very cleverly married Terry Riley's "In C" with Kutiman's Through-You, and added interactivity, producing a hypnotic, finite-yet-infinite YouTube mash-up site called "In B Flat."
It's delectably simple, yet wonderfully compelling. Kind of like a sonic chocolate-chip cookie.
Michael Jackson is dead, and America the world is celebrating the man who more or less invented the music video by getting together for impromptu Thriller flashmobs, then uploading the video to YouTube. It's kind of cool that we can collectively preserve the his cultural memory from the ground up, rather than relying on the dainty official hagiographies we're bound to see on MTV and network news.
I was lucky enough to walk into one of those flashmobs tonight. Here's my video. Rest in peace, oh gloved one. You rocked a lot of worlds.
Whatever you think you're doing tonight, cancel those plans. Because Brett Gaylor's massively acclaimed documentary, RIP: A Remix Manifesto will be screening at UnionDocs in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And if that weren't incentive enough, you can hear me and Fred Benenson from Creative Commons talk about the social significance of remix at a panel immediately following. Serious fun. Begins at 7:30pm.
As any reader of this blog, or anyone who is familiar with me and my work knows, I am a generally a big cheerleader for the whole D.I.Y. ethic. User-generated content, peer production, craftiness, what have you -- I'm all the way behind it. My wife and I subscribed to both Make and Craft magazines. D knits and crochets like a dynamo, and I am in the process of publishing a book on how mash-ups betoken a new social epoch. We dig hacks, mods, machinima, anything that smacks of good-old-fashioned people power.
However, an unnerving thought has been playing around the corners of my mind for a while: What if the whole D.I.Y. ethic isn't (just) a strategic boon to collective agency, but something more sinister: a wholesale shifting of productive labor onto the backs of consumers, and a sign of the end of the bourgeoisie as we know it?
We generally think of D.I.Y. as (light, encouraging voice) "C'mon, kid! You can do it! Do it yourself!" But what if it's actually something more like (gruff, discouraging voice) "Get out of here, pal, I'm too busy. Do it yourself!"
There are certainly many signs that D.I.Y. production is supplanting traditional economic structures across many industry sectors:
Fifty years ago, you'd go to a department store and purchase a bookshelf. Today, you go to IKEA, bring home a box of compressed wood chips, and spend hours at home with an allen wrench.
Marketers are increasingly relying upon consumers to share the cost of advocating products and identifying markets. MySpace and Facebook can certainly be seen as vehicles for this trend, although it also applies in the mass media, such as the recent peer-produced Superbowl Doritos commercial.
Fifty years ago, both local and national news events were reported and published by a corps of professional journalists. Today, an increasing percentage of the news and (especially) opinion we read comes from the peer-produced blogosphere.
The list could go on ad nauseum; these are simply the first examples I could think of. There are many competing potential explanations for this trend:
Peer-production is killing traditional industry, (e.g. the much-maligned influence of blogging on the newspaper business).
Big businesses are crassly appropriating the peer-production ethic to lower their costs and boost their margins, in the guise of consumer-friendliness.
Everybody benefits from increased efficiency, with lower overall production costs being passed down to the consumer.
Unfortunately, none of these explanations appears to be true:
In the case of newspapers, for instance, I would argue that Craigslist is far more devastating an influence than the blogosphere. Local and classified advertising have always subsidized print news journalism, and the Web is simply a much better platform for localized marketing and commece. If anything, the blogosphere provides much-needed credibility and readership for the newspapers' online editions.
Far from maximizing their margins, many industries are now in the red, and we are witnessing the fastest growth of unemployment in American history, and one of the fastest rates of atrophied production on record.
Consumers have hardly reaped economic rewards from taking on the burden of production. I did a little checking with the bureau of labor and statistics, and it turns out that the cost of furniture has escalated 300% (accounting for inflation) since the mid-1950s:
So if none of the explanations I cited above explain the D.I.Y. trend, what does? Is it just simply an accident of aesthetic and cultural history, a trend as shallow and temporary as pogo sticking or C.B. radio? Maybe. But I don't think so. My suspicion is that we, as a society, are primarily using the D.I.Y. ethic as a screen to hide our increasing poverty from ourselves -- both at the individual and the industrial levels.
One statistic that's stuck with me since i came across it a few years ago is that a double-wage-earner family in the 2000s has a lower standard of living, and less buying power, than a single-income family in the 1970s. Obviously, the continuation of this trend would be devastating: maybe we should expect to see polygamy legalized in coming years to functionally allow families to include three or more full-time wage earners. More likely, we'll see people staying with their parents longer, and the birth rate shrink, especially among higher-SES populations.
To put my premise simply: I think that the D.I.Y. ethic provides industries with a convenient way to hide the declining health and wealth of their sectors by cutting costs (both labor and capital) without cutting prices. And it provides individuals with a socially positive context in which to cut consumption costs, by buying raw or semi-raw materials, rather than finished products. Of course, neither of these trends can continue much longer; to combine metaphors, if D.I.Y. is an economic band-aid and craftiness is a cultural fig-leaf, the open sore of our festering economy and naked poverty of our middle classes cannot be hid much longer.
One final thought, generated by a masters student of mine as I was discussing the above in class last week: The whole green/sustainability movement may have powerful economic and altruistic roots, and may be socially beneficial in problematizing and solving the rampant excess of consumer culture, but it can also be understood as a fig leaf of sorts. When I was growing up, old people who saved string, tin foil, and paper bags seemed like damaged goods, crazy holdovers from the anomalous scarcity of the great depression. Today, it's becoming increasing hip and cool to do exactly these things -- in other words, we've developed a cultural mechanism couching the degradations of poverty in both the attractiveness of hipster culture and the admirability of altruism. Today's string-savers aren't a bunch of crazy old kooks; they're cutting-edge, avant-garde paragons of youth culture, and staunch defenders of our planet's future.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute an the University of Salzburg just published new research in BMC Neuroscience demonstrating something that music makers have known for time immemorial: playing music together makes your brainwaves synch up. And the longer you play together, the more synchronized your brainwaves become.
As I argue in my doctoral dissertation and forthcoming book, Configurable Culture, this facet of the musical experience is precisely what makes it such an effective tool for communicating -- and monitoring -- social organizational ideas. Put in other words, the act of making music together is not only analogous to, but constituent of, the act of producing society.
There's a pretty nifty video here showing the EEGs side-by-side with performance footage. Unfortunately, there's no embed link.
This isn't particularly clever, or even new, but when my family and I needed a laugh this weekend, this video came through like gangbusters.
Amazing what a little creative censorship can add... your brain fills in the naughty parts, making it far funnier than either the pre-censored version, or any actual dirty version could be. Kind of like the way revealing underwear can make someone look sexier than they do in the nude. Thanks, brain! And thanks, cousin Mark!
For the last week or so, there's been a little tizzy in a teapot among the music nerd informatosphere about Microsoft's brilliantly/awfully-marketed Songsmith software (see trailer below), which essentially "composes" on-the-fly, karaoke-style accompaniment to any song you sing into your computer mic.
Most of the commentary has followed Valleywag's excoriation, proclaiming Songsmith the final death knell for human culture, etc. etc.
I respectfully disagree.
First of all, you can't kill something that's dead already. What universe do you have to live in to believe that Songsmith poses a credible threat to "legitimate" music production? The radio, television, internet, and every public space are currently awash in a cacophony of computer-generated, market-researched, auto-tuned, HSS-approved, virtually identical songs, produced by the same handful of engineers, for an ostensibly diverse group of artists, genres and programming formats. Everything is already compressed to hell, as well, adding dynamic flatness to the aesthetic sameness. So I fail to see how this meager intervention by Microsoft could really make things any worse, sonically.
Second of all, despite all of the factors I mentioned above, music isn't dead -- in fact, it's thriving. Never in the history of industrialized society has there been such a broad range of sonic material available at our beck and call, and never in the history of the modern music industry have musicians had so many opportunities to share their work with potential listeners. In fact, some of the most interesting work being made and shared today begins with the insipid songs and tools I have mentioned, and uses them in unintended, unofficial, critical, and resistant ways. This includes lo-fi goofing around, such as creative karaoke, as well as an efflorescence of mash-ups, remixes, glitch and the like. Valleywag untintentionally cops to this in its post, by sharing a bunch of videos in which people have run a capella versions of much-loved pop songs through Songsmith, and paired the result with the original video for the song (The Police's Roxanne, brilliantly songsmithed, is embedded below). In other words, Songsmith may be evil, but its evil may be used for good.
Finally, I am always wary of people who react to any democratizing technology by bemoaning loss of standards and quality; they sound a bit too much like Habermas bitching about the public sphere. Far too many erstwhile defenders of goodness and beauty are slaveowners in liberators' garb, too busy saving us from ourselves to give us the room to save ourselves. The truth is that most people these days don't know how to make music with instruments. It's a damnable shame, but that's how it is, and we can blame everyone -- the government, the schools, the recording industry -- except the people themselves. Clearly, a great many people remain very interested in producing their own life soundtracks rather than buying them ready-made, and I say more power to them. Any tool that helps them move towards this goal is a good tool. And if Songsmith isn't up to the challenge, someone else will come along and offer a better tool (unless Microsoft owns so many patents they effectively chill innovation).
Anwyay, that's my rant. Take a look at the videos below. Buy the software or download a hack, and play with it. Decide for yourself before you start writing society's epitaph.
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