the tentacles
The theme of 2022 for me was a sense of profound stuckness. It felt a bit like an omnipresent sensory malaise that covered everything in a dark shroud and seemed to spill into all aspects of my life. I spent a long time trying to intellectualize these feelings and rationalize them into some academically rigorous package, a tendency which I now think was misguided. Ironically I think this desire to rationalize an unruly social reality is reminiscent of the epistemological issues of data science I was seeking to critique (1), my engineering brain telling me my feelings are just another problem to be solved. So rather than allowing myself to continue being stuck in the myopic hole of “maybe if I just read one more esoteric essay theorizing network cultures then everything will click into place,” I have decided to simply start writing down some thoughts as they come. Maybe I should continue developing these ideas until I have a more coherent thesis, but I made a goal at the beginning of this year to publish writing every month, plus it seems like it would feel nice to free myself from any expectations of perfection and just put something out there. What follows is less an argumentative essay and more of a series of vignettes as I try to parse through the emotional experience of the past year of my life.
1. The emergence of internet native “post-regional” music subcultures is not a new phenomenon by any means. In the fascinating paper “From Microsound to Vaporwave: Internet-Mediated Musics, Online Methods, and Genre” (2), Georgina Born and Christopher Haworth trace back a lineage of digitally native internet music scenes all the way back from the .microsound email list established in 1999. While internet music scenes have existed for at least two decades, I would argue that they have only become of interest to the forces of the music industry concomitant with the ongoing digitization of society accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The emergent pattern of engagement between digital music scenes and the wider music industry seem to fit Daniel Joseph and Daniel Greene’s concept of the “digital spatial fix,” where
“Capital has long sought what David Harvey calls a ‘spatial fix’ to declining rates of profit and the possibility of over-accumulation: expansion into new or under-exploited geographies becomes a way to dispose of accumulated capital or to create fresh opportunities for new accumulation at faster rates than before. Digital spaces can act as outlets for the same sort of fixes we have seen in the past while providing new opportunities for exploitation and accumulation. Meanwhile, digital spaces potentially intensify and extend those same crises.” (3)
In many ways, streaming services have always been in crisis, unprofitable since their inception. But the more recent trend of the declining market share of new music and rise of catalog acquisitions seem to spell a more acute phase of this crisis for an industry structured around promoting new music releases (4). A recent report published by MIDiA research entitled “Scenes: A new lens for music marketing” proposes essentially a spatial fix in response to the crisis induced by cultural fragmentation, writing “music marketers and A&Rs can begin treating scenes as the new ‘territories’ in which to develop talent, nurture fandoms and unfold campaigns…” (5). It is almost uncanny how much this language resembles Greene and Joseph’s description of the digital spatial fix, even echoing the geographic terminology with the use of the term “territories.” Greene and Joseph write that “old strategies of accumulation are re-attempted in new spaces and new strategies are crafted through trial and error in the never-ending quest to surpass or displace the internal contradictions which lead to crisis,” and it seems like the institution of editorial playlisting is one example of these old strategies of accumulation being reattempted when they don’t really make sense (6), like a manifestation of a vestigial corporate apparatus which seems to yearn for an era where gatekeeper institutions were more powerful, now grasping for meaning in a fragmented world. This broadly mirrors the contradictions of the platform mediated streaming economy, where streaming services do not sell songs as much as produce a “branded musical experience,” of which music is but one input, and it would actually be in the interests of platforms for music itself to be devalued, such that the cost of licensing songs would be lower (7). But the music industry as a whole again remains structured to extract value from new cultural commodities, the resultant tension being one of the core contradictions which define the music industry today.
2. I just moved out of a strange illegally converted loft apartment in Brooklyn. My former roommate was an avid woodworker and had converted the loft space into a 4 bed 1 bath by constructing additional windowless rooms in the space herself. I knew it was a weird setup, but I was a bit desperate to find a place because I only had a temporary 6 month contract job when I was looking after my summer sublease ended, so I wasn’t willing to commit to a full lease and was instead trying to find a more flexible month to month living situation, which unfortunately made it much more difficult to find an apartment. Apartment hunting in New York during peak season was already hellish for my naive southern small town sensibilities, but the fact I was looking for a non-traditional lease only compounded my difficulties. The city felt like it was trying to kick me out and send me back to the life I was supposed to be living. I had to live in an Airbnb for a while when I couldn’t even find a place the first month I started looking. After a few more rejections and a particularly bitter moment when a roommate situation on the Roomi app didn’t work out, I eventually landed at my weird loft.
3. The sensible peak of societal digitization, the last moment where subjecting any additional social processes to digital mediation made economic sense or could be reasonably argued served some conception of the greater good, passed in 2020 with the COVID-19 lockdowns. What seems to be left are only progressively more sophisticated forms of rent extraction from the digital commons which already exist. The modern incarnation of platforms has only arisen in the capital flush ecosystem of the 2010s, a fleeting financialized mirage which seems to be ending as a new macro-economic paradigm emerges (8). Capital’s bets on perpetually increasing digitization in wake of the pandemic feel like they are just starting to correct to reality, the dissonance manifesting itself in the incoherent delusions of the web3/crypto ecosystem. Layoffs notwithstanding, the tech industry remains mostly intact at the top of 2023, but it still feels like an illusion obscuring a more profound shift, like it has only now reached the peak of a roller coaster and has just begun descending into the unknown. An overwhelming sense of fragility permeates all of it, and it is difficult for me to not also see the digital genres which emerged in the wake of the pandemic, whose social contexts and histories are inextricably bound in platforms, as another symptom of the wider digital mirage now proving itself to be a hollow fantasy as the 2020s advance—not a vision of the future, but a temporary blip.
4. Do you ever smoke weed, stare at your face in the mirror, listen to music on your AudioTechnica ath-m50xs and contemplate the essence of the age? What does it even mean to be alive right now? I ponder this question as I gaze into my own blue eyes and the Dazegxd pounds in my ears. I look at my eyebrow scar, remembering how I got it when me and my dad were playing catch in the park but I missed one time and just let the baseball hit my eye like a dumbass. For some reason I feel like this must be what defines the present time.
5. By far my most listened to song in 2022 was Dazegxd’s emotion engine feat. kaiyko (powerdoll redux). I like the original emotion engine too, but it’s the powerdoll redux in particular that has wedged itself so deeply into the folds of my brain. I’ve listened to this song so many times I’ve begun developing bizarre visual associations with it. It begins with a brooding build up, kaiyko’s dreamy vocals soaring over the chunky electric pounding synths, and a vision comes to me: I’m gazing at the city skyline at night from high above the river, an ocean of indistinct twinkling dots smeared like watercolors against the backdrop of the night. I think it might be the view from the pedestrian path of the Williamsburg bridge, but it’s blurry enough that I can’t really tell. Plus I’m not actually standing on a bridge; there is an ascending column of digitized sonic energy keeping me vertically suspended in the air like I’m standing in a wind tunnel. When the beat drops, the pulsating crackles blur my vision even further, degenerating almost into visual noise while the sonic wind accelerates and I begin soaring higher and higher. But ascending to a higher view does not feel particularly triumphant, if anything it evokes a sense of yearning—a reminder of the burning sensation that remains festering in the depths of my soul. The electric column of sound supporting me also seems to be quite brittle. It gives way slightly, suddenly jolting my body at an angle, making the buildings fly out of my vision like they’re slipping away and careening towards some nonexistent future.
The vision reminds me a bit of artist Alex Katz’s use of light. I recently saw Alex Katz: Gathering at the Guggenheim Museum, a retrospective exhibit showcasing work from Katz’s entire career, and many of Dazegxd’s electric sonic flourishes remind me of Katz’s depictions of light. Katz’s use of aggressively full blocks of color over some more dispersed shading effect seem similar to the full bodied brilliant splotches of digital miasma Dazegxd paints onto his songs. In particular the vision of blurred city lights while soaring over the sea feels reminiscent of the Katz painting “West 2,” shown above. The painting is a minimalist depiction of a city building, with simple white brushstrokes representing lit windows at night. Dazegxd’s music sounds like these electric slabs of light to me. But the visual rhythm of the windows is interrupted by the incomplete one on the center left, a half-finished brushstroke bleeding into the black ink of the night. The half-finished window feels like a reminder of the blurred line between digitality and reality, much like how Dazegxd’s chunky flecks of congealed light explode like some ion bomb in my ears whose shrapnel disperses like a gradient through the rest of my body.
The brittle reality shattering sensation I feel listening to this song, sonic realities simultaneously being constructed and destroyed, also seems reminiscent of certain algorithms from network science. Any system of elements whose interactions can be modeled as discrete connections between them are studiable as a network, from protein interaction networks (9), transportation networks (10), local music scenes (11), or users on social media platforms (12). Many real life networks exhibit significant “community structure,” where nodes tend to be more predominantly connected to a certain subset of nodes, or community. A significant body of research is devoted to the problem of “community detection,” the algorithmic identification of communities in a network. A common example used in the study of community structure is the Zachary karate club network, a group consisting of 34 members of a karate club observed over a period of 3 years from 1970 to 1972 (13). In the network representation of the group, every node denotes an individual karate club member and the edges connecting them represent friendships. Over the course of an anthropological study of the club, a disagreement emerged between John A., the club’s president, denoted by node 34 in the network diagram below, and the club’s instructor Mr. Hi, denoted by node 1:
Mr. Hi wanted to raise prices for lessons, claiming authority to do so because he was the club’s president, while John A. pushed back on the price increase, claiming authority as the club’s chief administrator. This disagreement eventually led to John A. firing Mr. Hi, whose supporters decided to break away and form their own group. M. Girvan and M. E. J. Newman evaluated their novel community detection algorithm based on its ability to predict which group each member eventually joined, whether sticking with the original club’s administration headed by John A. or leaving with Mr. Hi’s splinter group, based solely on the friendship network that existed prior to the schism (14). As it turns out, processes of social fission such as these generally tend to cleave along existing friendship networks, and Girvan and Newman’s algorithm accurately predicts the split (with the exception of node 3). Furthermore, Girvan and Newman’s algorithm does not simply place each node into a bucket, but instead retrieves an entire community hierarchy, represented by the dendrogram below:
A community hierarchy can be useful in community detection, because oftentimes it may be more interpretable to see community structure not as some flat categorization scheme for which a node does or does not belong, but rather a nested hierarchy where communities are allowed to have subcommunities within them. For example, nodes 5, 6, 7, 11, and 17 are only friends with each other and Mr. Hi, therefore falling on Mr. Hi’s side of the karate club schism, but clearly representing a meaningful pocket within that group, which is a level of structural nuance not retrievable with a non-hierarchical community detection algorithm. Analogous to the similar split among clustering algorithms (15), there are actually two classes of hierarchical community detection algorithms: agglomerative algorithms, which function through a more “bottom-up approach” by taking individual nodes in a network and merging similar ones together and forming larger and larger communities until an entire community hierarchy is retrieved; and divisive algorithms, which operate through a more “top-down approach” starting with the entire network placed in one group and progressively dividing it into smaller and smaller chunks.
Viewing the city from high up atop my perch, it finally dawns on me that what I thought was a vertical column of digitized noise supporting me is actually a dendrogram. Somehow I have managed to ascend to this height atop the output of a hierarchical community detection algorithm—this must also explain the brittleness. But exactly which type, whether an agglomerative or divisive one, I can’t quite tell. The song sounds like both an act of agglomeration and division, particularly through the brooding build up in the beginning, rising through the sonic miasma forming networked communal structures of noise from the ground up, an illusion that is destroyed when the beat drops, the ebullient splotches of sound crackling through the air divisively breaking down my sense of reality. It is this musical interplay with network structure that makes this song so interesting to me, creating sonic hierarchies through the contradictory processes of agglomeration and division, reflections of a techno-scientific rationalization of the social world. Gazing out at the beautiful fuzzy mess of sparkling lights while being supported by a hierarchical community tree, a deep sense of unease overtakes me for some reason, and I decide to leave.
6. The declining market share of new music (4), the rise of catalog acquisitions (16), and the accelerated emergence of internet-based microgenres are all complementary sides of the same platform-induced “decentralization of culture” trend. Industry analysts who comment on cultural fragmentation typically attribute it to the rise of algorithmic recommendations, or some version of the Eli Pariser’s filter bubble theory (17), but I think this explanation is guilty of a similar overemphasis on personal data collection to explain the workings of the tech industry as Shoshana Zuboff’s analysis in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (18). Evgeny Morozov makes this point in “A Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason,” locating the original sin of Google’s business model not as surreptitious extraction of user data, but through the no-fee indexing of the world’s information. He makes a comparison between Spotify and Google: Both Google and Spotify index and collect information, Google being all of the internet and Spotify all of music. However, Spotify must pay to license content from major labels, unlike Google which does not pay to index websites in search results. Morozov writes:
“...to focus on users and their data here is like focusing on Spotify’s personalized playlists at the expense of royalty payments: the former are not entirely irrelevant—they keep users coming back—but, in the grand scheme of things, their explanatory power pales in significance compared to the latter.” (19)
Similarly, I feel like writing off the present decentralized state of culture as simply the byproduct of algorithms misses something essential here. Streaming services do a sort of funny thing where they separate their business lines fairly rigidly between “creators'' and “fans,” which makes sense on the level that the services required to support each are considerably different, yet I feel like this dichotomy reduces music to something which only exists to be consumed, generated by atomized artists working in a box entirely removed from the people who listen to it. Under this conception of music existing solely as a commodity to be sold, ignoring all social and material factors which surround the production of music and culture itself, then maybe algorithmic recommendation systems could be seen as the primary cause of cultural decentralization, just some passive consequence of users being served the music they enjoy. But I think this picture obscures the material deprivation which plays a role in the decentralization of culture, a more general starvation of creative communities eliminating the possibility for anything new to flourish, leading to this sense of directionlessness. This again gets back to the core contradictions at play in the music industry, where for genuinely transformative subcultures to take root, the type of which would be valuable for exploitation, it requires the physical space and infrastructure which have been hollowed out by platforms themselves. It is difficult not to see the emergence of online music scenes as the continuation of a sort of zero sum spatial game, a shunting of emergent cultural forms from physical spaces into fragile metrified online spaces, which are themselves a contradiction because:
7. Internet communities do not exist. The contradictory notion of online community is not unique to the platform era, humdog wrote about it back in 1994, but the critiques have only grown exponentially more salient since, particularly as the music industry has shifted towards explicitly commodifying the idea of community itself (20). I think of it similarly to Nathan Jurgenson’s critique of what he calls “digital dualism” (21), the tendency to hold “real life” and “the online” as entirely separate spheres which don’t interact. Jurgenson rejects this dualism and instead advocates for a view he calls “augmented reality,” seeing online and physical spaces as part of one enmeshed inextricably intertwined continuum. I don’t mean to argue against the existence of any form of online sociality, but the dualist conception of online communities as some entity floating out there in cyberspace, with innate properties separate from lived physical reality and able to be used as some sort of currency—this is a fiction. But even if the idea online community is an incoherent myth, it is nevertheless a useful one, and to understand how I think it is helpful to turn to Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre (22). In The Production of Space, Lefebvre argued that capitalism was not only about the production of things in space, but the production of spaces themselves. He claimed that space is constructed trialectically through the contradictory nexus of perceived space; space as perceived through the senses; conceived space, space as designed by architects, programmers, data scientists, etc.; and lived space, how people actually engage with that space, with Lefebvre particularly critical of the domination of conceived space over lived space (23). Considering internet communities to be real tangible entities is not necessarily a mistake, but a form of conceived space, the exact type of abstraction fundamental to the advancement of capitalism.
8. There is persistently a fiery pulsating blob floating maybe 50 feet above me. It is a quivering electric mass of snakes, tendrils intertwined and tangled endlessly. A trembling morass of humanity shaking so violently it threatens to tear itself apart under the weight of its own contradictions. It is terrifying but feels insignificant, and I can’t tell if it actually matters. So trivial yet somehow I can’t look away as I obsessively pry for the invisible threads which I feel like connect it to some fundamental truths, the beating heart of whatever machine is animating it. I can’t stop thinking about it. I am helplessly enthralled by the mighty tendrils. There is nothing to be done, you must watch the tentacles. I am the tentacle. The tentacle is fighting back, trying to escape the oppressive weight of its conditions but failing, resigning itself to its place as a cog in the broader octopal network of which it is only a mere node, but perhaps it underestimates the agency it has over the course of its own existence.
A writhing frothing oozing electric mass in my mind, tendrils cracking through the air like echoes of dystopic visions of the future that won’t come to pass. An air of death permeates existence like dark clouds rushing across the bleak sky, menacing but ineffectual. Wind rushing through my hair flying over one of Earth’s dying oceans. Plunging deep underwater, rushing through the sea, glimmers of hope barely visible in the inky haze obscured by the gurgling blue bubbles. Streaming through a massive expanse, turbulent swarmachines aggregating and fractalizing continually in a groundless feedback loop leading to nothing but the endless void. But sometimes there are shapes in the abyss! Flickers of meaning and glimmers of joy continually reflecting in a hall of mirrors, communal joy abstracted into shapes continually until it is twisted into something unknowable, the act of their very creation negating themselves, annihilation begetting annihilation.
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