Of Interest, 3/20/22
Every so often, I’ll make an effort to share some things I’ve been reading, listening to, or watching.1 I hope to be able to do this semi-regularly, although I admit I don’t have a great track record on the various promises I’ve made on here.
Damon Krukowski, Dada Drummer Almanach
I recently discovered that Damon Krukowski has a Substack called Dada Drummer Almanach. I know him best as the drummer from Galaxie 500, though he’s had many other projects since Galaxie 500 broke up in 1991. He writes primarily about music and often discusses the economic and cultural effects of streaming services.
A few days ago, Krukowski published a piece that dealt in part with Spotify’s algorithms, which I have written about before. He began by discussing a new report that found that most music (about 70%) streamed on Spotify is not a new release: “if streaming is replacing radio,” he wrote, “it’s oldies stations up and down the dial.” (This was the only part that I had a little trouble with; I wondered if it would be possible to break that 70% figure down into specific time periods. “Bohemian Rhapsody” is not a new release, but neither is “Sicko Mode.”)
Then he offered a personal story. Around 2018 he found that the Galaxie 500 song “Strange” had become disproportionately popular on Spotify. He was puzzled. For one, it hadn’t been featured in other media; for another, “[it] simply wasn’t the logical track to try first, if you wanted to check out what Galaxie 500 sounded like.”
Krukowski wrote a blog post about it, attracting the attention of Glenn McDonald, a top data scientist at Spotify who reached out to him and admitted he was just as puzzled. After doing some research, McDonald learned that “Strange” had begun to rise in popularity after Spotify made autoplay a default option. This means, in Krukowski’s words, that “[a]fter hearing whatever you have chosen to stream, Spotify doesn’t turn itself off but keeps playing music – letting its algorithm select what you hear next.” He continued:
[Glenn] explained that with autoplay switched on, the algorithm aims to select music that matches in some manner the music that just finished playing. […] But the simple goal is a resemblance – a familiarity - to whatever the user had initially chosen to hear.
The old adage was right: the algorithm really only aims to show you more of what you already like.
“Strange,” evidently, fit that role better than any other Galaxie 500 song. Or you might say: “Strange” resembles songs by other bands more than any other Galaxie 500 song. […] The algorithm would seem to have identified “Strange” as our least peculiar song – the one most likely to sound like whatever else you had played.
Now, zoom out to all possible musics streaming for all possible listeners. What music will most likely resemble what they just chose to hear? I suspect the answer is, way more often than not: something old.
[…]
This, I’m afraid, is the great algorithmic push toward the familiar. The echo chamber of resemblance. The online bias against difference.
I encourage you to read the piece in its entirety. I also really liked “There Is No CD Revival” and “Ed Sheeran’s Vinyls.”
Adam Kotsko, “What Happened to Giorgio Agamben?”
Giorgio Agamben is one of the world’s greatest living philosophers, but he’s become something of a celebrity in right-wing circles for his writings on COVID: in short, he dismissed it from the beginning as no worse than the flu and decried people’s willingness to accept public-health restrictions. Adam Kotsko, who knows Agamben and has translated some of his works, wrote about this turn in Slate last month. I’m glad they got an expert to write this piece; most non-academic publications have no idea how to write about philosophy, especially not philosophy from continental Europe.2
Agamben’s chief philosophical interest is situations in which the law enables crimes against humanity. (Compare Martin Luther King’s reminder that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.) The emblematic figure of the modern era, for him, is homo sacer, a Roman legal classification referring to a person who existed completely outside of the law, insofar as the law did not protect them, either. This person could be killed at any time by anyone. To put it somewhat crudely: if, for Michel Foucault, everything resembled a prison, for Agamben, everything resembles a concentration camp. But I will leave it to Kotsko to explicate Agamben’s overall project and whether or not it leads inevitably to COVID trutherism.
Patrick Medd, “The Leica for a Year Project”
I’ve been interested in photography since I was a sophomore in high school. (Here is an idea of what I like to shoot.) My interest has waxed and waned over the years, to say the least, but at least once or twice a year I get back into it.
I learned about Medd’s piece via Mike Johnston’s blog, The Online Photographer; Medd’s project, in turn, was inspired by a 2009 T.O.P. post titled “The Leica as Teacher.” The basic idea is to spend an entire year shooting black and white film in a Leica rangefinder, limiting yourself to one lens and one film and shooting anywhere between two and six rolls per week. No cheating. There’s also a printing element involved, but I don’t want to recapitulate everything here; read the articles I linked to.
The project has always seemed appealing, not least because film, compared to digital, requires you to jump through several more hoops in order to share your photos on social media. On the other hand, I don’t have the funds (or, frankly, the time) to spend a year shooting multiple rolls of film per week and scanning or printing them and using a Leica.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the bylined author. They do not represent the views or opinions of people, institutions, or organizations with which the author may or may not be associated in a personal, professional, or educational capacity.
Many thanks to John Ganz and Jamelle Bouie for the inspiration.
See Asad Haider, “Critical Confusion”; and Shuja Haider, “Postmodernism Did Not Take Place.” See also the New York Times’s absurdly disrespectful obituary for Jacques Derrida.