Jaron Lanier, one of the founders of virtual reality (he coined the term) and a fairly influential voice out in Silicon Valley, recently published "You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto". The book is primarily about his concerns over the direction in which the web and digital culture in general are headed. There's an interesting section about music informed by both his technical knowledge and his insights as a musician.
Lanier starts with a question that vexes, us, too. "How can you know what is lame and derivative in someone else's experience? How can you know if you get it? Maybe there's something amazing happening and you just don't know how to perceive it". He doesn't like music criticism, he goes on, but he wants to try and think objectively and analyze the situation.
Twenty-five years ago, he was a true believer:
I entered the internet era with extremely high expectations. I eagerly anticipated a chance to experience shock and intensity and new sensations, to be thrust into lush aesthetic wildernesses, and to wake up every morning to a world that was richer in every detail because my mind had been energized by unforeseeable art.
Lanier was excited because he understood the radical cultural changes that had come along in the last century, leading up to the digital revolution. He writes affectionately about Stravinsky's dissonance, jazz music, the Beatles, and the global transformation of sexual attitudes wrought by pop. In each case, he talks about how technology played a role in the new music. Stravinsky needed instruments that weren't in use a decade or two earlier. Rock and roll, "the electric blues", was "a successful experiment in seeing what a small number of musicians could do for a dance hall with the aid of amplification". The Beatles benefited from "multitrack recording, stereo mixes, synthesizers, and audio special effects such as compression and varying playback speed".
Capitalism helped, too. Artists formerly dependent on patrons or other groups suddenly became free agents, innovators. For example, Gershwin made money from sheet music, movies, and player piano rolls in addition to his conventional gigs. The combination of technology and the opportunities on the web made Lanier eagerly anticipate "super-Gershwins": "Even if it was not yet clear what business models would take hold, the outcome would surely be more flexible, more open, more hopeful than what had come before in the hobbled economy of physicality".
Lanier writes all this to establish his enthusiasm for technology and the Internet in particular. These are the reflections of a tech junky, a cutting-edge developer, and a musician who brought a strong love of the humanities to his work on computers. He had higher hopes than anyone, and more than that, he understood in detail how the new technology could help music flourish.
Such were his feelings in the early to mid-Eighties. Events disappointed him.
At the time that the web was born, in the early 1990s, a popular trope was that a new generation of teenagers, reared in the conservative Reagan years, had turned out exceptionally bland. The members of "Generation X" were characterized as blank and inert. The anthropologist Steve Barnet compared them to pattern exhaustion, a phenomena in which a culture runs out of variations of traditional designs in their pottery and becomes less creative.
A common rationalization in the fledgling world of digital culture back then was that we were entering a transitional lull before a creative storm-- or were already in the eye of one. But the sad truth is that we were not passing through a momentary lull before the storm. We had instead entered a persistent somnolence, and I have come to believe that we will only escape it when we kill the hive.
Lanier writes about many of the same observations I, Qvist, and others have already talked about here. He admits again and again that he may not hear what others are hearing. But ultimately, in his judgment, something's wrong. (Incidentally, Lanier's analysis would fit in perfectly with Joshua Clover's timeline.)
He transitions back into the primary study of the book, web 2.0. Thinking about his concern for pop music, he comes up with a hypothesis that links "the anomaly in popular music to the characteristics of flat information networks that suppress local contexts in favor of global ones". The hypothesis is in boldface type: "What makes something real is that it is impossible to represent it to completion". As when MIDI appeared, the web flattens out music and images such that everything passes through a baseline standard of representation. Lanier continues:
The hive ideology robs musicians and other creative people of the ability to influence the context within which their expressions are perceived, if they are to transition out of the old world of labels and music licensing.
...
When you come upon a video clip or picture or stretch of writing that has been made available in the web 2.0 manner, you almost never have access to the history or the locality in which it was perceived to have meaning by an anonymous person who left it there. A song might have been tender, or brave, or redemptive in context, but those qualities will usually be lost.
...
Numerical popularity doesn't correlate with intensity of connection in the cloud.
If a fuzzy crowd of anonymous people is making uninformed mashups with my recorded music, then when I present my music myself the context becomes one in which my presentation fits into a statistical distribution of other presentations. It is no longer an expression of my life. Under those circumstances, it is absurd to think that there is any connection between me and mashers, or those who perceive the mashups. Empathy--connection--is then replaced by hive statistics.
"Statistical distribution of other presentations": see Amazon, iTunes, Google.
Lanier has lots of other great insights, even going into biology to show how evolution favors "hierarchical encapsulation" as opposed to cloud-like development. He savors the rich irony in the fact that Apple, for example, has been a leader in developing products that encourage the "cloud"/"hive" networks despite the fact that their production model is exactly the opposite: a relatively small group of inspired creators working in a closed environment. Like artists, in other words.
