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Neil Young’s name started popping up everywhere a few days ago after he gave Spotify an ultimatum, threatening to withdraw his music from the service unless the company deplatformed Joe Rogan and his “life threatening Covid misinformation.” I initially dismissed the news as more Twitter fodder, amplified for user engagement, failing to consider that this particular news could actually impact me directly: I listen to Neil Young on Spotify all the time, more than I listen to almost any other artist. Last night it suddenly occurred to me that this might be real. I checked Spotify and sure enough, all of Young’s albums were gone. All that’s left now are two songs from Live Aid (one being “The Needle and the Damage Done,” which the anti-vaxxers might still appreciate) and Young’s contribution to the soundtrack for Bright, the buddy cop movie where Will Smith is an LAPD officer whose partner is an orc. I don’t really care at all about the disagreement between Young, Rogan, and Spotify itself—I find it incredibly boring, in fact, which is why I’d tried to ignore it at first—but I care much more about the minor inconvenience their spat imposes on me. I like Neil Young’s music enough that I might now have to subscribe to Apple Music, or Qobuz, whatever that is. Despite my inescapable misgivings about Spotify, it has generally been good enough for me because its breadth of selection is so vast. But, in contrast to tech’s persistent unity myths—ranging from blockchain to whatever Mark Zuckerberg is pushing now (I won’t say the word!)—Neil Young’s disappearance from Spotify offers a glimpse of our balkanized digital future: a universe where content and data (and users themselves) constantly disappear and reappear on various platforms, flickering on and off, for reasons ranging from licensing to culture war beefs.
What I’m trying to say is that when decentralization arrives, it will probably feel stupid (and will be blamed on centralization). Certain enclaves of the internet occasionally luck into moments of high modernist alignment, like Facebook in the ‘00s, or Spotify more recently, where it feels like a single platform can accommodate everyone and everything. But that completeness is always an illusion and it always eventually falls apart. In 2016, I got rid of my large CD collection (sorry if I’ve talked about this before) but kept all of the Drag City albums because the label was famously not on Spotify. That domino would eventually fall as the platform continued to fill in the blanks, finally reaching a point at which I couldn’t make a rational argument for any listening alternative, but now we seem to have crested the peak and begun our slide down the other side of the hill, with the Neil Young void replacing the Drag City void and me wondering whether I should start buying CDs again (apparently other people are wondering that too), my confidence shaken ever so slightly by Shakey himself. The key to Spotify’s illusion of abundance—a pillar of the contemporary internet—is that it makes your skepticism feel ridiculous, even paranoid (I’m speaking as a listener, of course; artists are acutely aware of Spotify’s limitations). I may have forsaken ownership of any music media in exchange for access to infinitely more of it via streaming, but it’s still nearly impossible to imagine a scenario in which that faucet is turned off, even though the internet’s relatively short history offers little evidence that anything is even close to permanent.
I could easily insert a “blockchain solves this” argument here, but the problem exists at a higher level of abstraction—it’s an internet-inherent issue that probably can’t be solved with more internet. Philip K. Dick said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” As the pandemic wears on, there seems to be growing confusion about the degree to which digital existence is or isn’t an extension of reality. While it’s broadly true that the internet as a whole is a place where reality undeniably unfolds, we never experience the internet “as a whole,” and any individual part of the internet is, in fact, something we can stop believing in, or just ignore. That ease of exit is why the internet fragments so easily and why efforts to establish new systems of collective belief feel so urgent and cultish. Everyone online always already has one foot out the door and needs a really compelling reason to fully step in. Meanwhile, the physical world is the base layer we all ultimately crash back into, and thus share, even if less and less meaning is created there. It’s where we’ll reluctantly meet up when the next climate disaster knocks out our internet connection. One current buzzword for digital existence, “interoperability,” reflects a growing desire to impose a meatspace-like consistency upon digital experience, creating a universe that you and I and Neil Young can’t simply opt out of. From the high modernist perspective, digital balkanization is indeed a flaw—as in the physical world, it inhibits commerce, enables mischief, and reduces legibility—but for most of us it’s quite liberating, if only because it’s nice to be left alone. Meatspace is already interoperable enough.
Reads:
Joanne McNeil on the metaverse as depicted in ‘90s movies about virtual reality, such as Disclosure and The Thirteenth Floor.
Angela Nagle on the decline of street style as a consequence of the loss of public space and public life. “Today, bold fashion statements do live on but in designated zones and on the internet.” Pairs well with my Real Life essay about the tech industry’s uncomfortable relationship with fashion and public space.
Chris Arnade has a good newsletter in which he takes extremely long walks through American cities and then documents his journey. The most recent issue recounts his exploration of Washington DC’s periphery.
#176: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
When I tossed my CD collection, I ripped all the music first. Lately I’ve been buying more digital music despite having an Amazon Music subscription. Eventually this will all go on a NAS with a Plex server for streaming.
"I may have forsaken ownership of any music media in exchange for access to infinitely more of it via streaming, but it’s still nearly impossible to imagine a scenario in which that faucet is turned off, even though the internet’s relatively short history offers little evidence that anything is even close to permanent."
Every once in a while I have a moment of panic, wondering "what if?" It's certainly possible that Spotify (or Tidal, or whoever) could vanish, but I'm relatively certain I could rebuild most of my collection- it'd take forever, but it's not impossible. In the meantime, the value proposition you've laid out here is exactly what keeps me on platforms I might not otherwise engage with. I don't have the space--literally or physically-- for the amount of music I currently have on playlists, liked records, etc.
The downside is needing to reconcile that with the idea that they host artists, podcasters, etc. I might not agree with. But we make those same decisions all the time (Twitter, Substack, etc.).