You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto (20 page)

Twenty-five years later, it seems clear that my concerns were justified. Open wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven’t promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything, they’ve been hindrances. Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old software designs as if they were facts of nature. Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique—shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.

I’m not anti-open source. I frequently argue for it in various specific projects. But the politically correct dogma that holds that open source is automatically the best path to creativity and innovation is not borne out by the facts.

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. This is a tough enough problem when the topic is computer code, but it’s even harder when the subject is music.

The whole idea of music criticism is not pleasant to me, since I am, after all, a working musician. There is something confining and demeaning about having expectations of something as numinous as music in the first place. It isn’t as if anyone really knows what music is, exactly. Isn’t music pure gift? If the magic appears, great, but if it doesn’t, what purpose is served by complaining?

But sometimes you have to at least approach critical thinking. Stare
into the mystery of music directly, and you might turn into a pillar of salt, but you must at least survey the vicinity to know where not to look.

So it is with the awkward project of assessing musical culture in the age of the internet. 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.

Such extravagant expectations might seem unreasonable in retrospect, but that is not how they seemed twenty-five years ago. There was every reason to have high expectations about the art—particularly the music—that would arise from the internet.

Consider the power of music from just a few figures from the last century. Dissonance and strange rhythms produced a riot at the premiere of Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring
. Jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong, James P. Johnson, Charlie Parker, and Thelonius Monk raised the bar for musical intelligence while promoting social justice. A global cultural shift coevolved with the Beatles’ recordings. Twentieth-century pop music transformed sexual attitudes on a global basis. Trying to summarize the power of music leaves you breathless.

It’s easy to forget the role technology has played in producing the most powerful waves of musical culture. Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring
, composed in 1912, would have been a lot harder to play, at least at tempo and in tune, on the instruments that had existed some decades earlier. Rock and roll—the electric blues—was to a significant degree a successful experiment in seeing what a small number of musicians could do for a dance hall with the aid of amplification. The Beatles’ recordings were in part a rapid reconnaissance mission into the possibilities of multitrack recording, stereo mixes, synthesizers, and audio special effects such as compression and varying playback speed.

Changing economic environments have also stimulated new music in the past. With capitalism came a new kind of musician. No longer tied
to the king, the whorehouse, the military parade, the Church, the sidewalk busker’s cup, or the other ancient and traditional sources of musical patronage, musicians had a chance to diversify, innovate, and be entrepreneurial. For example, George Gershwin made some money from sheet music sales, movie sound tracks, and player piano rolls, as well as from traditional gigs.

So it seemed entirely reasonable to have the highest expectations for music on the internet. We thought there would be an explosion of wealth and of ways to become wealthy, leading to super-Gershwins. A new species of musician would be inspired to suddenly create radically new kinds of music to be performed in virtual worlds, or in the margins of e-books, or to accompany the oiling of fabricating robots. 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.

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 Barnett 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 a 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.

Here is a claim I wish I weren’t making, and that I would prefer to be wrong about: popular music created in the industrialized world in the
decade from the late 1990s to the late 2000s doesn’t have a distinct style—that is, one that would provide an identity for the young people who grew up with it. The process of the reinvention of life through music appears to have stopped.

What once seemed novel—the development and acceptance of unoriginal pop culture from young people in the mid-1990s (the Gen Xers)—has become so commonplace that we do not even notice it anymore. We’ve forgotten how fresh pop culture can be.

Where is the new music? Everything is retro, retro, retro.

Music is everywhere, but hidden, as indicated by tiny white prairie dog-like protuberances popping out of everyone’s ears. I am used to seeing people making embarrassingly sexual faces and moaning noises when listening to music on headphones, so it’s taken me a while to get used to the stone faces of the earbud listeners in the coffeehouse.

Beating within the retro indie band that wouldn’t have sounded out of place even when I was a teenager there might be some exotic heart, some layer of energy I’m not hearing. Of course, I can’t know my own limits. I can’t know what I am not able to hear.

But I have been trying an experiment. Whenever I’m around “Face-book generation” people and there’s music playing—probably selected by an artificial intelligence or crowd-based algorithm, as per the current fashion—I ask them a simple question: Can you tell in what decade the music that is playing right now was made? Even listeners who are not particularly music oriented can do pretty well with this question—but only for certain decades.

Everyone knows that gangster rap didn’t exist yet in the 1960s, for instance. And that heavy metal didn’t exist in the 1940s. Sure, there’s an occasional track that sounds as if it’s from an earlier era. Maybe a big-band track recorded in the 1990s might be mistaken for an older recording, for instance.

But a decade was always a long time in the development of musical style during the first century of audio recording. A decade gets you from Robert Johnson’s primordial blues recordings to Charlie Parker’s intensely modernist jazz recordings. A decade gets you from the reign of big bands to the reign of rock and roll. Approximately a decade separated the last Beatles record from the first big-time hip-hop records. In all these examples, it is inconceivable that the later offering could have
appeared at the time of the earlier one. I can’t find a decade span in the first century of recorded music that didn’t involve extreme stylistic evolution, obvious to listeners of all kinds.

We’re not just talking about surface features of the music, but the very idea of what music was all about, how it fit into life. Does it convey classiness and confidence, like Frank Sinatra, or help you drop out, like stoner rock? Is it for a dance floor or a dorm room?

There are new styles of music, of course, but they are new only on the basis of technicalities. For instance, there’s an elaborate nomenclature for species of similar electronic beat styles (involving all the possible concatenations of terms like dub, house, trance, and so on), and if you learn the details of the nomenclature, you can more or less date and place a track. This is more of a nerd exercise than a musical one—and I realize that in saying that I’m making a judgment that perhaps I don’t have a right to make. But does anyone really disagree?

I have frequently gone through a conversational sequence along the following lines: Someone in his early twenties will tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about, and then I’ll challenge that person to play me some music that is characteristic of the late 2000s as opposed to the late 1990s. I’ll ask him to play the tracks for his friends. So far, my theory has held: even true fans don’t seem to be able to tell if an indie rock track or a dance mix is from 1998 or 2008, for instance.

I’m obviously not claiming that there has been no new music in the world. And I’m not claiming that all the retro music is disappointing. There are some wonderful musicians in the retro mold, treating old pop music styles as a new kind of classical music and doing so marvelously well.

But I
am
saying that this kind of work is more nostalgic than reaching. Since genuine human experiences are forever unique, pop music of a new era that lacks novelty raises my suspicions that it also lacks authenticity.

There are creative, original musicians at work today, of course. (I hope that on my best days I am one of them.) There are undoubtedly musical marvels hidden around the world. But this is the first time since electrification that mainstream youth culture in the industrialized world has cloaked itself primarily in nostalgic styles.

I am hesitant to share my observations for fear of hexing someone’s potentially good online experience. If you are having a great time with music in the online world as it is, don’t listen to me. But in terms of the big picture, I fear I am onto something. What of it? Some of my colleagues in the digital revolution argue that we should be more patient; certainly with enough time, culture will reinvent itself. But how patient should we be? I find that I am not willing to ignore a dark age.

Even the most seemingly radical online enthusiasts seem to always flock to retro references. The sort of “fresh, radical culture” you expect to see celebrated in the online world these days is a petty mashup of preweb culture.

Take a look at one of the big cultural blogs like Boing Boing, or the endless stream of mashups that appear on YouTube. It’s as if culture froze just before it became digitally open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over a garbage dump.

This is embarrassing. The whole point of connected media technologies was that we were supposed to come up with new, amazing cultural expression. No, more than that—we were supposed to invent better fundamental types of expression: not just movies, but interactive virtual worlds; not just games, but simulations with moral and aesthetic profundity. That’s why I was criticizing the old way of doing things.

Fortunately, there are people out there engaging in the new kinds of expression that my friends and I longed for at the birth of the web. Will Wright, creator of The Sims and Spore, is certainly creating new-media forms. Spore is an example of the new kind of expression that I had hoped for, the kind of triumph that makes all the hassles of the digital age worthwhile.

The Spore player guides the evolution of simulated alien life-forms. Wright has articulated—not
in words, but through the creation of a gaming experience—what it would be like to be a god who, while not rethinking every detail of his creation at every moment, occasionally tweaks a self-perpetuating universe.

Spore addresses an ancient conundrum about causality and deities that was far less expressible before the advent of computers. It shows that digital simulation can explore ideas in the form of direct experiences, which was impossible with previous art forms.

Wright offers the hive a way to play with what he has done, but he doesn’t create using a hive model. He relies on a large staff of full-time paid people to get his creations shipped. The business model that allows this to happen is the only one that has been proven to work so far: a closed model. You actually pay real money for Wright’s stuff.

Wright’s work is something new, but his life is of the previous century. The new century is not yet set up to support its own culture. When Spore was introduced, the open culture movement was offended because of the inclusion of digital rights management software, which meant that it wasn’t possible for users to make copies without restriction. As punishment for this sin, Spore was hammered by mobs of trolls on Amazon reviews and the like, ruining its public image. The critics also defused what should have been a spectacular debut, since Wright’s previous offerings, such as The Sims, had achieved the very pinnacle of success in the gaming world.

Some other examples are the iPhone, the Pixar movies, and all the other beloved successes of digital culture that involve innovation in the result as opposed to the ideology of creation. In each case, these are personal expressions. True, they often involve large groups of collaborators, but there is always a central personal vision—a Will Wright, a Steve Jobs, or a Brad Bird conceiving the vision and directing a team of people earning salaries.