Long one this week (definitely worth paying for), so I initially planned to accompany it with a dubstep track I made in like 20 minutes, since there’s not much to say about that. But last night, I realised I had a tune that kind of went with the post, so here we are, with a bunch of lyrics appended to a bunch of words appended to some music. Got my usual unreliable narrator and multiple perspectives going on in the song. It was a bit of a pain to mix it at the last minute, but I am prepared to suffer for my dear readers. I think of this one, written in July 2022, as my Lion King tune. You’ll hear why.
I’ve a series of interlinked ideas I’d like to explore over a few issues of Steve on Steve. The ideas could likely all be combined into a single essay. But I don’t know what I actually think about this stuff, or most stuff to be honest, so an essay, with its intimations of a thesis and argument, seems inappropriate. Instead, I’ll just offer some thoughts, reference some other thoughts, and another time tell you why I was wrong. But never as wrong as you. Never that.
Lately, I keep returning to the idea of frictionlessness. The cluster of presuppositions behind a lot of technological development that assumes we know who we are, know what we desire, and want to have those desires met as easily as possible. On the one hand, this is fine. It’s okay for technology to be instrumental: you know you want to hang out with your friends, arranging a time and place to meet them all is a bit tricky, and a text-based group chat reduces the friction of arranging a meetup. Lovely.
But friction has its uses, not least the opportunity for exploration, discovery, and creativity. A dating app assumes you are a single person looking for a relationship, and then guides you towards specifying what an appropriate partner for you looks like. The assumption is you want to meet people with traits X, Y, Z in order to exit the domain of singledom.1
But you’re not actually a set of data points, nor a neat set of self-understood desires. You contain infinite chaos within you goddamn it! And you don’t simply want to meet a person with traits X, Y, and Z. You want romance, a story, to have your horizons broadened. Or maybe theatre, drama, solidarity, affection, even someone to hate. Whatever you’re in it for, it’s not box-ticking. And, like creativity, those aren’t things that happen frictionlessly or on a set timeline.
I remember years ago reading an interview with a woman who ran a bespoke dating service, the kind where she shows up at her client’s house with a bunch of photos and descriptions of people she thinks will suit the client. She gets them to make a yes, no, and maybe pile. As much as she could, she’d try to convince her clients to go on dates with the maybes. She said over 80% of the successful relationships came from the maybe pile.
Often, the best parts of life are born from not knowing, from being given a perspective you hadn’t considered, or being taken out of your comfort zone. Or from simply being surprised. The cliche saying is “the journey is the destination” but just as indispensable is the phrase “getting to know yourself.” How can you instrumentalize what you don’t, and will never fully, even understand?
The danger of instrumentalization is ever-present in almost any endeavor. When we think of the ideal-type craftsperson, I’d wager most people don’t think of a carpenter churning out the most chairs possible, but someone who takes pride and care in the work for its own sake. To put it in Socratic terms, the question is: “Is it inappropriate for any craft to consider what is advantageous for anything besides that with which it deals”?
The answer depends on your frame of reference. Where are the boundaries? Perhaps there’s more to being a good shepherd than simply raising the most sheep or producing the most wool. Perhaps animal welfare and environmental concerns are part of the job. Money can’t easily count those things. But technology can change how we see the world, and can make the world seem more like something to be related to instrumentally.2
Here, an economist might say that money is simply a representation of how much other people value something, whether that be animal welfare or the work produced by an artist or craftsperson. A song that sells millions of copies touches millions of souls. It’s not money in the abstract that motivates the songwriter, it’s the possibility of a million souls thinking the work is good. That the song serves people just as a well-made chair helps people to sit. Humans are generally social creatures who want to feel helpful and useful.
One danger is that the writer’s logic slowly changes. Money has its affordances, chief among them the desire for more. (This has been observed for millennia.) Instead of the desire to produce an emotional effect in an audience, to tell a beautiful or true story, or to develop an idiosyncratic world, the songwriter gradually comes to see the worth of what is produced only in terms of money. After all, if it sells few copies, how valuable was the work? And yet we know that money isn’t the measure of art. You undoubtedly love some wildly unpopular songs.
Where does that leave the writer? Dedicated to the deep exploration of their inner psyche? Committed to telling the beautiful truth no matter what? Perhaps. But in his book Energy Flash, Simon Reynolds argues that the most invigorating, forward-thinking dance music made in the 1990s was created by producers specifically trying to generate big reactions from crowds. The goal didn’t seem to be the expression of individual, idiosyncratic worldviews: it was to produce a bigger energy rush than last week’s biggest track. In fact, Reynolds argues many of the more critically acclaimed electronic acts from that era, the Aphex Twins and assorted IDMers, were parasitic on artistic breakthroughs made by producers simply trying to one-up each other at the rave.
Okay, so maybe the answer is to go big or go home, in some sense? Thrill people, make them happy, meet them where they are, try and rack up the play counts if not the dollar amounts? But creativity, like friendship and romantic chemistry, tends to disappear when consistently exploited instrumentally. I’m sure everyone who’s ever tried to make something has encountered that. Good ideas appear of their own accord, and rarely when is most convenient. Often, the best parts of life are born from not knowing.
Perhaps ideas are given to us by benevolent muses. Probably, our subconscious is simply more creative than our conscious mind. Either way, if creativity is treated in purely instrumental terms for too long, it withers. You may produce work, perhaps even a lot of it, but it will lack that spark of life, and deep down you’ll know it.3
French leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, among others, has argued that capitalism encourages a dictatorship of short-termism in which the long-term needs of humanity and the planet always take a backseat to the need for profit right now. The immediate, instrumental use of technology to meet the immediate needs of people alive right now. The truth is that this kind of exploitation is a feature of many different human social and economic systems; deforestation is not unique to capitalism. But he proposes a Green Rule: “Don’t take from nature more than it can replenish.” That seems reasonable, and good advice for most endeavors. The dance music scene of the 90s eventually burned itself out; artists and fans turned to more subdued, slower, headier sounds. You can drink as many cups of coffee as you like — at some point, your body will fall asleep. Perhaps a Green Rule for artists would be: don’t take more from your creativity than it can replenish. How can you replenish it? By getting to know yourself.
He came out of the womb and said, "If there's nothing I can do to serve, I'm on my way." He came out of his room and said, "If there's nothing here left to clean, I'm on my way." He walked out of his school and said, "I'm not sure what that was for, I'm on my way." He walked out of his work and said, "This educated man will lead, I'm on my way." And while he climbed a ladder Being slowly shorn of beams, He thought only of the path, and little of his seams. Until one day he met her, And told her, "Breast feed me your dreams. Forget who you have been and think what I could be/mean." He walked out of the church and said, "Was that my future or her love? I'm on my way." He shrugged his friends goodbye, Thinks they'll take him back with pride, "I'm on my way." He works hard, piecemeal, that's the way, Slowly adding footnotes to the problems of the day. And so in unison, all his seniors say, "You're on your way." So he climbs, feeling blessed, Taking more and giving less. What does he do with all that gold? What kind of heaven needs such a scaffold? "I'm on my way." It's the dose that makes the poison And then pen that signs the pain. He doesn't deal in absolutes, and certainly not in blame. Because heaven shone upon him, With its caskets and its words, But remember who's forgiven, And who'll be paying for the hearse. The mistake is to think that life can be cured, That you can love and work while living insured. So while he took more than most people ever need, So he was touched by less than either you or I feel. There are things that think in you, Just remember how to listen. Pay more attention to your dreams, Than you do the competition. Remember how to dream. Remember how to dream.
More than that, the app actually goes some way towards producing the traits you look for through the set of questions it asks you. The app needs you to fit into its boxes so it can compare you to other people. Academics call these affordances: “the quality or property of an object that defines its possible uses or makes clear how it can or should be used.” Even the group chat has its own affordances. The snappy, text-based nature of it encourages meme-sharing, link-embedding, etc. This has implications for instrument use and design that I’ll return to some other time.
The cruder side of this instrumental approach is seen in the oft-repeated phrase, “The universe doesn’t care about you.” Yet we’re a part of the universe, not apart from it. And we care about a great deal. Someone might even care about you. Shocking, I know. As the author of one of my favourite blogs is fond of repeating, “If your job is to describe the entire universe – and particularly the development of the universe – then when you look through a telescope you have to take into account what is happening at both ends of the telescope; at both sides of the mirror; in front of, and behind, the radar dish.” Dig into his work for fun discussions of supermassive black holes and evolving universes.
There's a cliche that musicians do their best work when they’re young. I don't think it's true — Leonard Cohen, Gillian Welch, Guy Clark, the list goes on. If you practice something, you usually get better. But if you have an audience who expect something from you, and who you need to pay your bills. Well then maybe things become too…instrumental (perhaps singers don’t have this problem 😉).