Commodification now means not the appearance of a world of things but the appearance of a world of information about things, including information about every possible future state of those things […] – @mckenziewark

Algorithms and data aggregation refined brand’s control over their supply and demand chains in spite of the real world human aspects of a labor and capital-based marketplace while also acting as an agent or representative for music and creatives. Media brands through platform capitalism have repurposed the use-value of music to fit the lifestyle and productivity of young millennial white collar or freelance workers in an increasingly tech industry influenced work/life environment. – @dfnbrown1

Meanwhile, deindustrialization of industry and the financialization of the economy has led to the massing of young people in urban centers as jobs dry up elsewhere. Dance music’s rise in popularity has mirrored that post-recession population inflow, becoming the soundtrack for a gentrified nightlife in the process. – @gabeastralplane

You are not a gadget. But you need a gadget. Somewhere, a gadget needs you. It is a nightmare from which we can only awaken, I believe, by holding on to one another more, and gadgets less, in real life.

Like the Australian bird mimicking the squawk of an air raid siren, or Colin Stetson playing acoustic music that sounds electronic, we now interact socially as if we were algorithms, emulating post-capitalist currency and circulation, gathering information about one another not out of genuine interest, but rather, in an effort to premediate — mediate every possible future state of — our professional and personal relationships. The outcomes, however, are not capital but cultural. We no longer make love or even desire love. We cannot stand to face one another. Instead, we process each other in the midst of an all-pervasive melancholic longing. (See High Maintenance, Season 4 ep 2.)

The devil cares not if you believe in him. Your limited credence or understanding is irrelevant. Your personal perception of late-capitalism — whether to view it as a wonderful, liberating force, or Marx’s worst nightmare mutated, or a compromise of the modern world that you and I are more or less willing to make — is itself regulated by the social, media, and technology bubbles that late-capitalism produces and propagates. Frictionless, we can see a person on Twitter recommend a book about political philosophy, a book that aligns with our own views on political philosophy, which in due course shapes our perception of that particular Twitter user, and of Twitter in general, and so forth. Others’ activities spur us to action, and our respective actions in the virtual-public sphere in turn stimulate others’ productive impulses — producing and reproducing capital and information, and if not, then arranging, rearranging, and parsing capital and information. And this post is part of the problem masked as part of the solution.

There is something worse than capitalism: Control.

Here, we must posit (remember) something else, a force beyond and more powerful, more pervasive, eviler, for lack of a more elegant term, than capital. (But fuck elegance!) We must acknowledge and confront Control as Burroughs and Deleuze and Galloway understood it. Control is Control. There is nothing in- nor outside of it. Remembering Control — i.e. noting it, recording it — is the perpetual project of reawakening. Relinquishing Control — i.e. sharing it, making it more equitable, smashing capital’s control over Control — is the communist project.

Yet, I might submit that there has never-not been capital. (Never-not as distinct from always-already in that it precedes the conception as well as perception of phenomena.) We have never-not placed value upon things. Those things include material thing-things like laptops and bicycles and lawn furniture, but also immaterial things like time, labour, ideas, and information. Necessarily, those values fluctuate, have proven uneven, artificial, contested. Exceptionally though, capitalism equates value with capital and capital alone.

Communism did not “lose” the 20^th century’s ideological battle, because communism has yet to exist. Communism is not a system of economic organisation or governance or evaluation or vector that stands in opposition to value itself. It is meant as an ethical system that redistributes value and capital along moral rather than capitalist vectors. We do not need to redefine communism to conform to hyper-capitalism. Nor must we invent new jobs for ourselves pinpointing and sub-partitioning capitalist energies — jobs that we’ll have inevitably lost anyway, to someone else in a fundamentally privileged position. We need only reiterate and oppose over and over the capitalist impetus to quantify and wring out and even invent all forms of value within any given economic system, rendered as surplus value for the elite few. A common misperception is that we ever even had communism — in the early part of the 20^th century, in the Soviet Union. Or national socialism in Nazi Germany, for that matter. Rather, what we still have, what we have always had, is global capitalism, full stop.

“The evil genius of the postbroadcast-era media is that it not only holds our attention, it also records it. A lot more information can be extracted as to who we are, what we like, and which punk rock goddess we want to be.” (Wark) Information technology and data collection is not a new category of commoditising. And cultural criticism is indeed just as much a part of the political economy — often just as subject to similar legitimising institutional forces. That value’s maximum extraction is automated and honed on information and data in the 21^st century is the logical if not natural progression of Control. We might prefer Patti Smith or Kim Gordon. Or Viv Albertine. But we all need to be some punk goddess now.

Control seeks to eradicate the rare. This is why the binary, on-off, either-or logic of the digital world is the best metaphor we have for it, and why Galloway chose to write about Control’s existence (persistence) into the virtual. At the time of Galloway’s writing, it still seemed as though the virtual-online world could prove to be a portal of liberation, a means of transcending the old, institutional disciplinary forms: family, school, church, prison. Other Control-affiliated institutions and infrastructures arose meantime: the shopping mall, the movie theatre, the food court; the trade conference, the festival, the rave; NASCAR, Oprah Winfrey, Late Night With David Letterman. Donald Trump. What we now see in hindsight (it is 2020, after all) is that, after broadcast media, the decentralised internet was precisely the “stack” that Control was looking for. Like any good needle. It could sink into the hay, recede into the interface, beneath the screen’s glossy veneer, behind the breezy urban lifestyles of mobile devices, the seamlessness of apps, the natural authenticity of streams, the weightlessness of clouds, the internet’s interconnectedness.

How do we fight a force that resists representation, defies definition, eludes identification, subsumes its own opposition? Dissent is among Control’s in-built design features. Even the most disruptive form of protest — i.e. terrorism — is part of the architecture, the 21^st century’s general ambience. Ideological death is the opposite of exceptional. Revolution at its most banal.

Our rarity is deleted in the performance of commoditised interconnection. In aspiring amongst ourselves, in public, toward unique cultural experiences, or nuanced political opinions, or marketplace tastes — performing those things that not long ago signified the modern, educated, cultured, western, enlightened, liberal, broadminded, individual, free (white) subject — we at once divide and subdivide our subjectivities and social relations and risk our diverse (racial, cultural, economic, linguistic, &c.) multiplicity by submitting ourselves to privatised repositories of information. The archive as weapon. Anyone who’s seen Schindler’s List knows that we test our ethical limits when human beings become raw data. We are susceptible to the awfullest abstraction and vulnerable to violence’s ultimate manifestations.

First as conspiracy theory, then as Black Mirror episode, then as bare-naked reality. First as tragedy, then as farce, then as documentary series.

Totalitarian states, law enforcement and paranoiac fantasies once fueled the fear of surveillance. We were worried that our phones were being tapped, our rooms bugged, our movements recorded, to catch us revealing something incriminating during a domestic moment of intimacy and honesty. Corporations have far more information than any government ever dreamed of collecting, and most of it we have given up willingly, gleefully — on Facebook, Twitter, Google. Left and Right-wing media have all widely reported Edward Snowden’s revelations, the Cambridge Analytica leak, the Panama Papers. It’s not like we didn’t know.

For a long time, we have known and done nothing. We have lived with ambient violence since 9/11 but have mounted no revolution. The momentum of the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and various uprisings around the world (including the Maple Spring-student protests of 2012 across Quebec) has all but entirely dissipated. It is not enough to indict and convict ourselves for this. It is not entirely our fault. Dissipating momentum is part of the contingency budget that Control accounts for in advance. It is possible that these movements were, in addition to legitimate and spontaneous insurrections, highly informative data collection exercises to monitor and map the spread and circulation of potentially radical action. (How many of us confirmed our coordinates via an app, or posted social media updates from inside the protest?)

Most of us are not going to do terrorism, or infrastructural sabotage, or symbolically self-immolate, or anything remotely close. Nor are those viable strategies. (See Control’s contingency plan for dissipating momentum.) Most of us are not going to join blockades along Indigenous lands to halt trainloads of oil. Most of us might not vote or even sign a petition.

We-must-this! and We-must-that! is to 2020s critical theory as Did-you-ever-notice-this? and Did-you-ever-notice-that? was to 1990s stand-up comedy. A book like Capital Is Dead fits neatly inside its own tautological narrative — a book for its times, the time for this book. It needs to be published via a press like Verso with a cover in that font, with that kind of au courant design, for it to fill the necessary number of orders. (How many of us routinely purchase our hauls of anti-capitalist books from Amazon dot com, let’s be honest?) These signifiers validate the story both for us and the status quo, whom are implicated. The damned enemy certainly does not want to be immortalised within the back pages of some obscure blog post. Bestsellers or bust!

The difference between ordering your pile of radical literature on Amazon or directly from the Verso webstore is insignificant. It serves the same productive model. Your order will still pass through the “stacks”, that connective web — through your ISP, the cable plugged into the wall, the fibre optic line that runs to the end of your street, maybe underground, maybe over radio waves from then on. The order still gets filled in some warehouse, packed into a box and taped shut with a purchase order inside. It still ships and gets delivered to your doorstep by a driver earning a low wage for some delivery company or another. In all likelihood, taking this stand against The Man will cost you more capital than dealing with Amazon. The upshot is that Amazon’s finely oiled machine is never-not the ideal to which the independent bookseller must but never will measure up. UberEats and Skip The Dishes are rapidly replacing traditional urban food delivery models for similar reasons. (How can each restaurant be expected to have their own city-wide fleet of delivery drivers?) The choice between an independent bookseller and Amazon, or the local restaurant delivery versus UberEats, or Airbnb versus a hotel, or the buffet rather than the daily special, is made inherently political. But capitalism under Control shapes the fields of play and makes (and breaks) the rules of the politics game. Whichever choice you make, the game remains the same. It’s the old Coca-Cola-or-Pepsi routine for the 21^st century.

It is not a case of identifying what iteration of the game we are forced to play at any given moment, but rather of remembering and re-remembering that it is a game, and the game is fundamentally the same rigged capitalist shell game it has always been. That is what Control does. Control controls. It seems so stupid to write down, to say aloud, and yet it could not be more profound! Whether we say, “this is not capitalism, this is something worse!” or “this is still capitalism and it’s gotten worse”, it is still much fucking worse, and there are few things Control would rather have us do than argue amongst ourselves whilst things worsen further.

Narratives like Capital is Dead or High Maintenance instruct us on how to navigate the playing field. They update us to the new rules of the same old game — the new terms and conditions, the new license — as would Apple with a new operating system or Microsoft with a piece of software. (This is the latest 2020 version.) Our attention is trained on deciphering the meaning, reading, critiquing, interpreting, getting to the heart of this inviting and familiar narrative. Familiar enough yet never-not strange, this seductive, instructive narrative. But deciphering Control’s terms is a misdirection of our potent critical energies. Assume terms! And assume that the terms are against you at all times, because they either are now or will soon be.

There are no alternatives to making things better. Dropping out is not an option. Escape is impossible. But trying is. The only thing within our control is what might be described as temperament, or timbre: our distinctive resonant vibrational colour — however harmonious or discordant — with Control. This is the opposite of a binary with-us-or-against-us relation. Upon this spectrum, there are infinite frequencies, infinite rhythms. And so, we always must dance.

2020 has so far been the bearer of bad tidings for experimental music coverage: Tiny Mix Tapes and FACT have both announced that they will no longer publish editorial content.

Ten thoughts on that, below:

1: algorithmic engines and AI have replaced humans in media search and recommendation

Industry, not the state, is the engine of capitalist production. And industry, not the state, is the seat of power. So, corporations, not the state, are the sites of capital and power. As such, they lead the pursuit for data collection, not necessarily (or primarily) for social control, but for the ignorant pursuit and growth of wealth. The largest media and technology corporations have been watching and listening to us, the watchers, the listeners. And they have noticed certain patterns in our behaviours. Patterns that can be repeated and turned into capital — “if you like this”; “listeners also bought”. For better or worse, we have built and trained algorithmic recommendation through our consumption habits. Apple and Spotify, Amazon and Google silently survey us. Social networks encourage us to “share” everything. We have allowed and even participated in a serious erosion of privacy, and the potential privatisation of everything we make public.

2: streaming has replaced MP3s in the second great digital switcheroo

Remember when iTunes first opened, and artists complained that they only received nine cents for every 99-cent download? Those numbers, which significantly undercut CD royalties at the time, now seem lavish. On average, one would have to stream a song on Spotify between 20 and 30 times in order to equal the value of one iTunes-circa-2010 download. Where did the money go? The value of music has seemingly evaporated, but it is the tech companies and platforms that are rapidly reconstituting all that melts into air back into solid capital. Just as CDs artificially inflated the recorded music marketplace in the 1980s and ‘90s, streaming is artificially solving the problem of digital reproduction in the 2010s and ‘20s. Tech companies are like the mafia: they create a problem (“it would be a shame if someone ruined your nice business”), and then they offer up their own proprietary solutions, for a price (“You’re with us now, but we may call upon you for a favour…”)

3: streaming is still artificially buoyed by the major labels and their back-catalogues

The most-streamed artists and genres are not the obscure artists or genres. They are still label creations like Drake and Adele, Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift. After that, it is the Fleetwood Macs and Pink Floyds, the Madonnas and Princes, the legacy artists that we listen to. The legacy is the leverage. The more we mythologise, the greater the legacy’s value to capital and power. It is possible for independent artists to upload their music directly to streaming services, and also to trade their wares through platforms like Bandcamp. But hyper-specific currents and trends are more easily ignored on the major streaming platforms, and just as often absorbed — scaled up incrementally — by the corporate colossi.

4: increasingly more individualised self-identification and taste has destroyed consensus, and further subdivided communal affinities

Postmodernism and the omnilegent critical regard have levelled all cultural manifestations. There is no high nor low art now, neither hot nor cool medium. Everything is of equal importance: film, TV, music, fashion, visual art, text, talk, even politics and commerce. (Especially politics and commerce have come to replace art.) It is in the corporate interest to make us believe that if we don’t attend to everything, we haven’t heard anything. Through curation of cultural production, we cultivate the idea of ourselves. Yet the Left is divided further against itself by the very technologies and platforms (Twitter) that seem to unite and solidify the Right. The cost of our plurality is a lack of unity. The hope is that this is only temporary.

5: increasingly fragmentary temporality online has de-historicised the narrative(s)

In his 2010 book Retromania, Simon Reynolds was already documenting the effects of YouTube and the long historical tail on cultural production, arguing that the ability to plumb media’s historical depths made it easier to ignore the present, much less to orient toward an unwritten future. His was a voice in a growing chorus including Nicholas Carr (The Shallows), Sherry Turkle (Alone Together), Jaron Lanier (You Are Not A Gadget) and others attempting to conceive of the future and warn us of it at once. The sheer volume of simultaneous historical media disorients a sense of context and causality. In Reynolds’ end-of-the-2010s round-up for The Guardian, he writes: “While the clock and the calendar continue to plod forward in their steadfast and remorseless way, what you could call ‘culture-time’ feels like it’s become unmoored and meandering.” Writing for The Wire in 2012, Terre Thamlitz observed: “today’s widely embraced model of the ‘internet as context’ is a sign of new heights of refinement in selling the Western humanist model of a ‘shared human experience’ to a diversely destitute world — albeit only at the expense of denying every material circumstance facilitating one’s entry into cyberspace, ranging from the realities of our crap little rooms in which we sit with our personal computers to the massive social and ecological destruction caused by server facilities and power plants…” To date, I’ve never heard it said better.

6: the internet’s pliability and ephemerality distort history

The ability to write, rewrite, amend, redact, and delete things on the internet weakens its textual authenticity and authority. Note the rise in prominence of Twitter “watchdogs”, like the accounts that track and document edits made to Wikipedia and The New York Times. The restless revision of history — reissues, reboots, lists, commemorations — has become the most reliably profitable productive form. (See #1) An artist no one had ever heard of becomes the forgotten pioneer. The contested terrain of history becomes the archeological site for ever-new discoveries. And these exist beyond criticism’s reach. The lack of consensus means that evaluative critical distinctions like “good” or “bad” are rendered meaningless. Truth no longer requires permission.

7: affect rather than (or in addition to) the subconscious-subliminal is how capital-power constructs and enforces the Real

In Adam Curtis’s BBC documentary series Century of the Self, he argued that Freud and the subconscious characterised the 20^th century’s cultural zeitgeist. Advertising appealed subliminally to our hopes and fears. And we felt mediated interactions as if they were real. Power and capital deploy arcane, resonant symbolism to communicate with us and amongst themselves through a sprawling and increasingly dreamlike media constellation. Jung more than Freud gives meaning and shape to media in the early 21^st century. The sensorial immediacy and illusion of media’s endless availability guide — and misguide — us online. Every stimulus is effectively an interrupt request.

8: the internet is about appearance and experience — about media and its mediation, not about objects

As vast as it is, and as obvious as this sounds, the internet only houses an extremely limited number of things — obviously, it cannot transmit “things”. Thus, it masks its own materiality. The “thing”, the object of capital and power online, is attention. The ability to command and scatter it at will is currency. Michael Tausig, in a recent Critical Inquiry essay entitled “Unpacking My Library: An Experiment in the Technique of Awakening”, describes what he terms “Erlebnis”, a new “genre” of understanding: “a rapid-fire mode of experiencing in which an experience, so long as it is not extreme, burns out as soon as it is born. And it is scattered — [a] perfect reflection of our neoliberal age of tweet consciousness …” It is therefore understood and expected to regard and disregard in near simultaneity.

9: premediation (not remediation [the transubstantiation of old into new media] nor premeditation [the accurate prediction of future events]) is the cultural logic that governs our relationships between what could be and what is, the virtual and the actual

In his 2010 book of the same name, Richard Grusin defines premediation as “proliferating multiple remediations of the future both to maintain a low level of fear in the present and to prevent a recurrence of the kind of tremendous media shock that the United States and much of the networked world experienced on 9/11.” I would extend the logic of premediation to the cultural sphere: we are constantly braced for the next publication to cease operations, for the next cynical branding exercise, for the untimely deaths of artists and thinkers, for the planet’s general devastation. Cultural premediation is born of the critic’s impossible desire to stay one step ahead of the imminent future, while existing in the present, of observing without altering. (See #5)

10: shock is the ambient texture of experience

Control, as Burroughs or Deleuze or Galloway knew it, exists after decentralisation precisely because of the premediated shock-doctrine; rather than imagine ways out, we are too busy reacting, like cornered soldiers, firing off in all directions. For evidence, see the rise in prominence of the phrase “the new normal”. The New Normal implicitly means the shock, the lack of an anchor on bumpy seas, that we are now expected to simply live with. Is it possible to shock ourselves out of this? Through Acid Communism? Communist Surrealism? The thinkers I keep returning to — Water Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Mark Fisher — all took their own lives. Self-sacrifice certainly suits power and capital just fine. Another job they don’t have to do. But it’s clearly not the answer. Is there somewhere a shock that is not yet death, the useful shock of a new kind of consciousness?

1: This was not investment. It was an advertising budget. These are similar but not the same. An investment requires a direct return. An advertising budget also requires a return, but less direct, more diffuse. Just as any company would, after finding that their advertising campaign wasn’t reaching its market, or that that market had already been tapped out, they reallocate it elsewhere. It’s very 20^th century thinking, actually. If a company figured out that their radio ads weren’t reaching enough of an audience, they’d put more money into print ads. An easy way to think about RBMA is to replace the word “Academy” — or “event” or “lecture” or “radio broadcast” or “historical essay” — with “ad”: Red Bull Music Ad.

2: Although it employed and advanced the livelihoods of many people who were passionate about music, and excellent at their craft, Red Bull was not a benevolent patron of the arts. (See #1.)

3: It was not about building local communities. Otherwise, they would have used local venues with local employees, hired local PR companies, grips, riggers, sound engineers, and ultimately respected grassroots local scenes. They did none of these.

4: The vast archive of RMBA materials is historically significant for at least two reasons: A: superficially, it is a repository of often interesting, often important, and often informative talks, essays, and the like. B: subcutaneously, it is a repository of what a corporate brand regarded as interesting, important, and informative, as well as how those narratives were subtly curated and sculpted to reflect and represent Red Bull’s brand identity. Examples of this include their history of Montreal’s Post-rock scene, Montreal’s Torn Curtain history, &c. Here, they de- and re-historicise to suit their own narrative, aligning their product with things that had nothing to do with Red Bull — scenes that were in direct ideological opposition to everything Red Bull stands for. In this respect, an archive is all the more necessary, as a cautionary tale, if nothing else, against anything like it in the future.

5: There is a question about whether or not the loss of RBMA will be a loss for culture at large. Some of the music RBMA rubbed up against existed already (Iggy Pop, Bjork). Some of it was concurrently emergent (Flying Lotus). Some of it was produced from the ground up, and/or immediately co-opted into the Red Bull brand ecosystem. This goes for their journalistic arm, too. Some people who wrote RBMA materials (Will Straw) had other careers, and didn’t really need the gig. Others (talented freelancers like Chal Ravens or Harley Brown) are likely more dependent upon an RBMA pay cheque. So there is a continuum — from co-opting and infiltrating already-existing cultures, to producing an artificial bubble — upon which everything they touched can be placed. Of course, Iggy Pop and Bjork won’t really suffer from RBMA’s demise. What Red Bull “made from scratch” is most at risk of disappearing, and most in need of immediate attention.

6: Here is a sinister thought: what if RBMA was really an assassination attempt of an entire scene on the part of a corporate conglomerate? I would argue that electronic/experimental/dance music communities are among the most progressive, most radical, and ultimately most dangerous cultural waves to come along since the illegal rave culture of the early 1990s. Did the corporate brands figure out how to nip these movements in the bud by sponsoring them from the get-go, and then pulling the plug just as they were gaining momentum? How calculated this nefariousness was, or if it even existed at all, is up for debate. But it’s possible. And if you consider the scale of wealth and power at play, it almost seems plausible.

7: This is a time for sympathy. If you’re in an abusive relationship and your partner dumps you, it’s you who has won, even though it might not seem that way for a long time. Unfortunately, in many instances of abuse, the victim continues long afterward to make excuses and apologies for their abuser. Hostages eventually feel pity for and even solidarity with their captors. A drowning victim will often fight and sometimes take down with them a would-be rescuer. Love, empathy, and healing are what we need now. We’re on dry land. We’re safe. Where we go from here is entirely up to us.