The Covidian Vibe Shift / 1 / LOGGING OFF
Flee the algorithms before they destroy the last traces of wonder you have left.
PREAMBLE
A few weeks ago while riding the bus, I realized my goal for this season of life is to increase opportunities for magic to happen. I also realized that to bring my goal to fruition, I must log off.
So far, it’s working. Real well, in fact.
I implore you to do the same.
CHAPTER 1 // LOGGING OFF
I. SPOTIFY
II. VIBE SHIFT
I. SPOTIFY
I recently downloaded an app that lets me listen to KUTX, my local indie radio station run by the University of Texas. You see, I’ve become fed up with Spotify’s algorithm, as it has forced my listening habits to become increasingly stagnant and siloed, especially within the bounds of the once impressive Discover Weekly feature. My feed is a closed loop with no opportunity for meaningful exploration. I yearn for a lack of agency in my listening again. To be musically dommed by a disc jockey, if you will. I’m not the only one. In a piece for Dirt, Matthew Specktor writes about the joys of tuning into DJ Steve Tyrell on California State University’s KJazz 88.1. He states:
I am under no illusion that Tyrell’s choices are his choices, exactly: they belong to corporate sponsors, on-air promotions, lists that have been approved for airplay. And yet they are consoling because they are not mine or a machine’s either. Unlike a Mixcloud, they are prefaced and interrupted by a human’s enthusiasm, his moods and hesitations, and they feel like they are made in private, for pleasure. It’s surprising what a difference this makes.
I have fostered a similar fondness for KUTX in the past few weeks. Dopamine hits my brain when I hear a new beat or an old tune I completely forgot about. I also feel a telepathic connection to others in my city who are listening to the same song at the same time. It’s a small, mostly abstract, yet important way for me to feel in touch with those around me. My curiosity is once again nourished by this mode of musical discovery.
For those unfamiliar, Spotify’s algorithm for determining your Discover Weekly playlist largely relies on how songs are played and ordered within billions of user playlists. It scours these playlists to find similar songs to make predictions about what you like based on your listening habits. It also takes into account what the Internet at large enjoys at the time. The result? Thirty songs algorithmically picked each week just for little old you.
When Discover Weekly first debuted in 2015, it was a wellspring of, well… discovery. One playlist of mine entitled “melting into the bed because i’m both hungover and lovedrunk” features Discover Weekly-enlisted artists such as Silver Swans, Autolux, and Soko, artists for whom I have a great sentimental attachment to now. I took pride in crafting my angsty / sexy / sadboy playlists back then, as they were filled with equal amounts of coming of age indie nostalgia (my doing) and fresh artists hot off the press (Spotify’s doing). Discover Weekly felt like an adequate successor to Trntbl, Tumblr’s method of collecting your reblogged audio files from years ago.
Somewhere along the way, the magic of Discover Weekly disappeared. The algorithm was more repetitive than it was wondrous. For a couple months, Spotify kept serving me the same goddamn Small Black track “Sun Was High (So Was I)” for weeks on end. Yes, I like Small Black as much as the next indie rock piece of shit, but why this unrelenting suggestion? The stagnation continued on from there.
In the pursuit of optimization, curiosity is largely tossed to the wind. We are robbed of the magic of discovery while being spoon-fed our pre-determined preferences with fine-tuned efficiency. How do we truly expand our sense of self, create, and connect with one another if the algorithms have mapped out our thoughts, opinions, and tastes for us? When does predictive technology become a psychological cage for which you, the caged, do not hold the key?
The zeitgeist of our time is crafted undeniably by the rich cultural tapestry of the Internet, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. And yet, we are facing a turning point. Our ability to generate culture and art and meaning through experimentation and connection with one another is being encroached upon by the algorithms. How do we preserve the process of influencing, responding to, and growing from one another through organic interaction? As Specktor points out, it’s naive to think our sensibilities haven’t previously been contorted by forces outside ourselves, such as elite tastemakers and corporate interests. However, the algorithms are much more cunning and infiltrative than the class of monocultural celebrities and advertising machines of the 90s and early aughts. They are sophisticated in their ability to convince us that this really is the song we wanted to listen to next, the YouTube video we wanted queued up, the TV show we wanted to watch, the article we wanted to read, etc.
In his piece, A Critical Look at Spotify’s Algorithims, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Algorhythm, Ben Wilson offers a seemingly measured critique of Spotify’s Discover Weekly algorithm, analyzing both the good and bad outcomes of this feature for artists and music fans alike. He ultimately concludes one of his arguments with:
The homogeny of the algorithm and our intensely growing comfort and need for it needs checking on occasion. Find other sources of recommendation, otherwise we will all collapse into a Spotify singularity.
I fear the collapse into Spotify singularity has already occurred. The algorithmically generated echo chambers have already deeply warped our politics, subcultures, and relationship to our own identities. Of course music (and any other vein of human creation and enjoyment, for that matter) is vulnerable to the forced homogeneity of the algorithms. This is not news.
As of 2019, Spotify granted brands the ability to sponsor Discover Weekly. In her piece for Vox entitled Spotify’s most personalized playlist is now for sale to brands, Kaitlyn Tiffany states:
It feels, pretty simply, like yet another example of a tech company creating a highly personalized product in seemingly warm partnership with its users, then realizing that it can trade on this goodwill to make money.
Again, we’ve had our content optimized for us to a tee, which makes it much more egregious and terrifying that corporations are creeping into our algorithms at this point in particular. This poses an existential threat to each and every one of us. Where does the machine that learned about you end and the fat cat who bought the machine begin? And where exactly are you in all of this? To what extent do you have a say in what enters and stays in your mind?
II. VIBE SHIFT
As you read these words, our collective synchronicity is in flux. A massive vibe shift is underway. The cultural failures of the (white, college-educated) Millennial generation are setting in (fucked over by the 2008 financial crisis and colossal student debt and responded by drilling the subpar and self-infantilizing joke of “adulting” deep into the ground, pioneering Girl Boss culture, etc.). Gen Z is now at the helm of the Internet and therefore in command of the spirit of this moment. The corporate bastardization of identity politics continues to cut away at revolutionary efforts towards liberation. Trump is out of office, leaving liberal pundits floundering from no longer having a cash cow to milk for clicks while refusing to scrutinize Biden with the same fervor of the last five years. Covid continues to ravage the globe, killing our loved ones and neighbors, forcing many of us online to fester in our own mental illnesses, isolation, and fear for the past 17 months.
Fuck, man. Of course there’s a vibe shift underway. How could there not?
In his piece Vibe Shift for 8Ball, Sean Monahan shares this meme and outlines the following vibe shifts in the past two decades:
Hipster/Indie Music (ca. 2003—2009)
Post-Internet/Techno Revival (ca. 2010—2016)
Hypebeast/Woke (ca. 2016—2020)
[ABOVE MEME] (ca. 2021—????)
The above meme is both an invitation to recognize insular Internet ephemera and to have the entire image wash over you, rendering your brain smooth as a baby’s bottom. It’s not so much about what the meme means or how legible it is. It’s the onslaught of information all at once. What does it feel like to be bombarded with obscurity? This, perhaps, is the tip of the iceberg of the new vibe.
I came of age in the Hipster/Indie era, and it is this age that a part of my spirit is trapped by the seduction of nostalgia, thus cementing my path as an aging person in our culture. And, to be frank, I’m one happy son of a gun with my lot. As the years go by, I get hotter, less self-serious, and increasingly more irrelevant. My role in our culture has shifted to one of spectatorship and reflection. Thank fucking God for that.
PREDICTIONS
The predictions I have about the Covidian Vibe Shift thus far are that…
Gen Z will:
a) continue to inject Millennial nihilistic dadaism with steroids and run with it, making it their own unruly beast
b) rupture para-social self-awareness into oblivion
Covid will:
a) cause irreparable damage to our ability to conduct reasonable risk-analysis for ourselves and our communities
b) continue to foster cohorts of distrusting, anti-government young people across the political spectrum
c) continue to create an urgency for people to go out IRL, thus leading to the desire to have ExperiencesTM rather than experiences (to be discussed in the next newsletter)
CONCLUSION
At some point, I believed the Internet was a transformative and unifying force. It saved my life as a young kid. It opened doors to knowledge and communities that nourished me emotionally, socially, and intellectually. Since then, it’s changed into something unrecognizable. Inhuman. In order to preserve our curiosity and capacity to connect with one another, to take ownership of the new vibe before the algorithms do so, we must log off. Not permanently, perhaps, but for a long time.
Until next time,
CB
• • •
Coming up…
The Covidian Vibe Shift / 2 / TOUCHING GRASS
I. Magic
II. Birds
III. The Post-2020 Experience Industrial Complex
IV. TBD
• • •
The only good tweets I’ve seen as of late:
