To live a modern life is to have one's daily activities logged, recorded, analysed and added together like never before. Buy something at a shop with a debit card and your purchase is logged. Listen to Spotify and your musical choices and preferences are carefully recorded. Watch Netflix and your viewing history is noted to the second. Send money on PayPal and every penny is traced. Your every social media interaction, website visit, Amazon purchase and streaming view is picked up and used for analysis and ultimately the creation of profit.
In these circumstances, acting in the real of the purely physical - buying things with cash, reading secondhand books, getting your news from the newspaper, listening to analogue radio - is almost subversive.
I felt this quite keenly the other day when I finally set up the 1970s hi-fi I inherited from my late father and started playing some of his old records. Like anybody else, these days I mostly get my music through Spotify or YouTube. Listening to an Aretha Franklin album on vinyl I was struck not just by the feeling of once again hearing music unmediated by a digital device, as was normal not so long ago, but also by the feeling of freedom it engendered in me. I was listening to this music alone in the house and nobody else knew it. Nowhere was my experience being logged. It was therefore purely my own.
Gaming online has been a great boon for me over the past two years. I have a weekly gaming group who would never be able to assemble physically in the same place, and it's been a lot of fun. But I am always conscious that even at this level our activity is being recorded by impersonal forces and hence, albeit indirectly, being sucked into the vortex of late-period digital capitalism. We play for ourselves, of course, but we don't play for ourselves entirely. We also serve the profit-making imperative.
Sitting round a table with friends, a D&D rulebook, some dice and a bottle or two of wine can, in this sense, take on the aspect of a rebellious act. It is a petty form of rebellion for sure, in that it affects almost nothing in the 'real world'. I believe that it does affect one's soul, though, and that might ultimately be the most important effect that there can be.
I love it. Our Dune future approaches!
ReplyDeleteAs I read this post, I noted that this is a Blogspot site, and kept an eye on my privacy extension. 97% of the requests this page has made were privacy-disrespecting, and were blocked. About 2,000. Took a few minutes to consider what else to type. Now it's over 2,100.
ReplyDeleteI just keep thinking of that phrase. "You will own nothing and you will be happy."
In the end, you were logged. By Google.
2306 blocked requests. I pause to consider what to say next. 2400 blocked requests. It's like if irony were a number, and you could quantify it.
In the end, there was no subversion. The attention economy chugs forward, stronger, healthier, and bigger. But you can't deny that this post was convenient to make.
I nowhere made any claim that writing this blogpost was going to be subversive.
DeleteI recently dug out an audio cassette player. It still functions, and I have a shoebox full of tapes, some with faded handwritten labels by my parents. The sound quality certainly seems better than my laptop speakers and there is a delightful lack of adverts.
ReplyDeleteOf course, it's not terribly useful for discovering new music. But that's what Radio 3 is for.
I have a box full of tapes in the attic. I knew that I wanted to bring it with me when I move, not because I want to listen to them as tapes, but because one day I hope to digitised them and so, one must assume, be tracked listening to them.
DeleteMy wife made her feelings know about this by labelling the box not in a purely utilitarian way, as with my boxes of CDs and DVDs, but with the words "FFS Tapes, dead form of music technology".
It is a tongue-in-cheek conspiracy theory of mine that many of the horror movies of the last few years (Sinister, Annabelle, etc.) are part of a deliberate effort to make people fear older technology and antiques so they spend more money on the next new thing: "Throw out that record player you inherited - the Devil lives in it".
DeleteBut even if it's possessed, nobody's going to ditch their old Hi-Fi. After all, the Devil has all the best tunes.
DeleteThere's something to be said about the intimacy of a campaign. You play a weekly game for 2.5 years, your decision and actions carve a story out of the foundation laid down by the GM, and something magical and meaningful is created. And when it's over, it's just over. You don't document what happened but you carry it in your memory. The campaign is shared by the people who lived through it and they know it was important but don't feel the need to keep records for posterity.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely. The kind of experience that is just for the participants and not for external consumption/processing is now becoming less common than it was. Even sex.
DeleteNo "almost" about it. %))
ReplyDeleteMike
PS Though, of course, to say something serious you don't use blog posts. ;)
Just make sure the smart speakers and smart phones are turned off in your game room too :) they're always listening!
ReplyDeleteAnd they care!
DeleteIf no one else knew, you weren't playing it loud enough.
ReplyDelete