You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto (21 page)

It’s easy to forget that the very idea of a digital expression involves a trade-off with metaphysical overtones. A physical oil painting cannot convey an image created in another medium; it is impossible to make an oil painting look just like an ink drawing, for instance, or vice versa. But a digital image of sufficient resolution can capture any kind of perceivable image—or at least that’s how you’ll think of it if you believe in bits too much.

Of course, it isn’t really so. A digital image of an oil painting is forever a representation, not a real thing. A real painting is a bottomless mystery, like any other real thing. An oil painting changes with time; cracks appear on its face. It has texture, odor, and a sense of presence and history.

Another way to think about it is to recognize that there is no such thing as a digital object that isn’t specialized. Digital representations can be very good, but you can never foresee all the ways a representation might need to be used. For instance, you could define a new MIDIlike standard for representing oil paintings that includes odors, cracks, and
so on, but it will always turn out that you forgot something, like the weight or the tautness of the canvas.

The definition of a digital object is based on assumptions of what aspects of it will turn out to be important. It will be a flat, mute nothing if you ask something of it that exceeds those expectations. If you didn’t specify the weight of a digital painting in the original definition, it isn’t just weightless, it is less than weightless.

A physical object, on the other hand, will be fully rich and fully real whatever you do to it. It will respond to any experiment a scientist can conceive. What makes something fully real is that it is impossible to represent it to completion.

A digital image, or any other kind of digital fragment, is a useful compromise. It captures a certain limited measurement of reality within a standardized system that removes any of the original source’s unique qualities. No digital image is really distinct from any other; they can be morphed and mashed up.

That doesn’t mean that digital culture is doomed to be anemic. It just means that digital media have to be used with special caution.

Computers can take your ideas and throw them back at you in a more rigid form, forcing you to live within that rigidity unless you resist with significant force.

A good example to consider is the humble musical note, which I discussed in the first chapter. People have played musical notes for a very long time. One of the oldest human-hewn extant artifacts is a flute that appears to have been made by Neanderthals about 75,000 years ago. The flute plays approximately in tune. Therefore it is likely that whoever played that old flute had a notion of discrete toots. So the idea of the note goes back very far indeed.

But as I pointed out earlier, no single, precise idea of a note was ever a mandatory part of the process of making music until the early 1980s, when MIDI appeared. Certainly, various ideas about notes were used to notate music before then, as well as to teach and to analyze, but the phenomenon of music was bigger than the concept of a note.

A similar transformation is present in neoclassical architecture. The original classical buildings were tarted up with garish colors and decorations, and their statues were painted to appear more lifelike. But when architects and sculptors attempted to re-create this style long after the paint and ornamentation had faded away, they invented a new cliché: courthouses and statuary made of dull stone.

A neoclassical effect was formalized for music with the invention of MIDI. For the first time, it took effort not to succumb to neoclassical reinvention, even of one’s own freshly invented music. This is one of the dangers presented by software tools.

The best music of the web era seems to me to be “antisoftware.” The last genuinely new major style was probably hip-hop. That’s a rather sad thing to say, since hip-hop has already seen at least three generations of artists. Hip-hop’s origins predate the web, as do the origins of every other current style.

But hip-hop has been alive during the web era, or at least not as stuck as the endless repetitions of the pop, rock, and folk genres. The usual narrative one hears within hip-hop culture is that it “appropriated” digital technology—but I hear things differently. Hip-hop is imprisoned within digital tools like the rest of us. But at least it bangs fiercely against the walls of its confinement.

Outside of hip-hop, digital music usually comes off as sterile and bland. Listen to a lot of what comes out of the university computer music world, the world of laptop-generated chill-out music, or new-age ambient music, and you’ll hear what I mean. Digital production usually has an overly regular beat because it comes out of a looper or a sequencer. And because it uses samples, you hear identical microstructure in sound again and again, making it seem as if the world is not fully alive while the music is playing.

But hip-hop pierced through this problem in a shocking way. It turns out these same deficits can be turned around and used to express anger with incredible intensity. A sample played again and again expresses stuckness and frustration, as does the regular beat. The inherent rigidity of software becomes a metaphor for an alienated modern life mired in urban poverty. A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn’t correspond to the graffiti but to the wall.

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. This is one of the more serious disconnects between what I love about making music and the way it is being transformed by the hive-minded movement. I’ve gone back and forth endlessly with ideological new-music entrepreneurs who have asked me to place my music into Creative Commons or some other hive scheme.

I have always wanted a simple thing, and the hive refuses to give it to me. I want both to encourage reuse of my music and to interact with the person who hopes to use some of my music in an aggregate work. I might not even demand an ability to veto that other person’s plans, but I want at least a chance at a connection.

There are areas of life in which I am ready to ignore the desire for connection in exchange for cash, but if art is the focus, then interaction is what I crave. The whole point of making music for me is connecting with other people. Why should I have to give that up?

But no, that option is not currently supported, and the very notion is frowned upon. Creative Commons, for one, asks you to choose from a rich variety of licensing options. You can demand attribution—or not—when your music is mashed into a compound product, for instance.

I realize the whole point is to get a lot of free content out there, especially content that can be mashed up, but why won’t Creative Commons provide an option along the lines of this: Write to me and tell me what you want to do with my music. If I like it, you can do so immediately. If I don’t like what you want to do, you can still do it, but you will have to wait six months. Or, perhaps, you will have to go through six rounds of arguing back and forth
with me about it, but then you can do whatever you want. Or you might have to always include a notice in the mashup stating that I didn’t like the idea, with my reasons.

Why must all the new schemes that compete with traditional music licensing revere remoteness? There’s no significant technological barrier to getting musicians involved in the contextual side of expression, only an ideological one.

The response I usually get is that there’s nothing preventing me from collaborating with someone I find by some other means, so what difference does it make if third parties I never know are using the same digital fragments of my music in unrelated ways?

Every artist tries to foresee or even nudge the context in which expression is to be perceived so that the art will make sense. It’s not necessarily a matter of overarching ego, or manipulative promotion, but a simple desire for meaning.

A writer like me might choose to publish a book on paper, not only because it is the only way to get decently paid at the moment, but also because the reader then gets the whole book at once, and just might read it as a whole.

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 the 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.

Even if a video of a song is seen a million times, it becomes just one dot in a vast pointillist spew of similar songs when it is robbed of its motivating context. Numerical popularity doesn’t correlate with intensity of connection in the cloud.

If a fuzzy crowd of anonymous people is making uninformed mash-ups 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.

There are some deep principles here that apply far beyond culture and the arts. If you grind any information structure up too finely, you can lose the connections of the parts to their local contexts as experienced by the humans who originated them, rendering the structure itself meaningless. The same mistakes that have stultified some recent digital culture would be disastrous if applied to the sciences, for instance. And yet there is some momentum toward doing just that.

In fact, there is even a tendency to want to think of nature as if she were a hive mind, which she is not. For instance, nature could not maximize the meaning of genes without species.

There’s a local system for each species within which creativity is tested. If all life existed in a undifferentiated global gloop, there would be little evolution, because the process of evolution would not be able to ask coherent, differentiated questions.

The illusions of the hive mind haven’t thus far had as much influence in science as in music, but there’s a natural zone of blending of the Silicon Valley and scientific communities, so science hasn’t been entirely unaffected.

There are two primary strands of cybernetic totalism. In one strand, the computing cloud is supposed to get smart to a superhuman degree on its own, and in the other, a crowd of people connected to the cloud through anonymous, fragmentary contact is supposed to be the superhuman entity that gets smart. In practice the two ideas become similar.

The second, wiki approach has gotten more traction in the scientific community so far. Sci Foo, for instance, is an experimental, invitation-only wikilike annual conference that takes place at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. There is almost no preplanned agenda. Instead, there’s a moment early on when the crowd of scientists rushes up to blank poster-size calendars and scrawls on them to reserve rooms and times for talks on whatever topic comes to mind.

It wasn’t official, of course, but the big idea kept popping up at a recent Sci Foo I attended: science as a whole should consider adopting the ideals of web 2.0, becoming more like the community process behind Wikipedia or the open-source operating system Linux. And that goes double for synthetic biology, the current buzzword for a super-ambitious conception of biotechnology that draws on the techniques of computer science. There were more sessions devoted to ideas along these lines than to any other topic, and the presenters of those sessions tended to be the younger people, indicating that the notion is ascendant.

There were plenty of calls at Sci Foo for developing synthetic biology along open-source lines. Under such a scheme, DNA sequences might float around from garage experimenter to garage experimenter via the internet, following the trajectories of pirated music downloads and being recombined in endless ways.

The quintessential example of the open ideal showed up in Freeman Dyson’s otherwise wonderful piece about the future of synthetic biology in the
New York Review of Books
. MIT bioengineer Drew Endy, one of the enfants terribles of synthetic biology, opened his spectacular talk at Sci Foo with a slide of Dyson’s article. I can’t express the degree to which I admire Freeman, but in this case, we see things differently.

Dyson equates the beginnings of life on Earth with the Eden of Linux. Back when life first took hold, genes flowed around freely; genetic
sequences skipped from organism to organism in much the way they may soon be able to on the internet. In his article, Freeman derides the first organism that hoarded its genes behind a protective membrane as “evil,” just like the nemesis of the open-software movement, Bill Gates.