[Editor's Note: The following guest post is by Marc Weidenbaum.]
In an age of digital downloads, virtual instruments, and social-media fandom, everybody, musicians especially, must learn how technology is controlled. People who fail to do that run the risk of leaving themselves open to manipulation—i.e., to being controlled.
That anxiety-stoking thesis is central to a new book by Douglas Rushkoff, who besides being a prolific author and longtime observer of digital life, has played keyboards in the experimental industrial band Psychic TV.
The book—Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age—describes in detail how the software that powers digital technology both shapes and informs human existence. And the book's lessons, taken one command at a time, provide useful advice (some functional, much philosophical) to working musicians.
To provide a clearer sense of what Rushkoff means, we've created a chapter-by-chapter cheat sheet to his book. This isn't a replacement for the book, just a test run of Rushkoff's thinking. Despite their pithy titles, the individual commands of Program or Be Programmed are a lot denser, and have a lot more to them. Each “translation" provided below is but one key lesson to be taken away from the given chapter.
Command I. Time: Do Not Be Always On
Translation: Don't mistake time spent dealing with computer chores as productivity.
The major thread of this book is to spend less time consuming and more time producing. With this chapter's title, Rushkoff isn't telling you to be late; he's telling you not to be tied to your computer. It's a somewhat counter-intuitive notion at the start of a book that is attempting to get people to be more active, not less, in regard to their computing lives. But this isn't about quantity of time; it's about what one does with that time. Spend time with your Twitter followers, and spruce up your Facebook page. But don't do that instead of composing and performing music
Command II. Place: Live in Person
Translation: Don't mistake your virtual Facebook friends (and MySpace friends, and Twitter friends, and Soundcloud friends) with the ones who actually show up regularly at your concerts.
As Ryan Sweeney has explained here before, programming isn't a replacement for “real" life; it's a tool. Rushkoff writes of the “misguided tendency to depend on long-distance technology to enhance up-close encounters." He singles out the digital-life equivalent of the couch potato: “the whole notion of place has been surrendered to the digital realm's non-local reality."
Command III. Choice: You May Always Choose None of the Above Translation: Consensus among members of a band can't necessarily be built by depending on radio buttons in a shared online project collaboration tool like Base Camp.
Though this chapter opens with some iffy metaphorical contrasts between the reproduction of sound on vinyl records versus the sound on CDs, its real lesson is that digital technology puts things into either/or, yes/no, on/off dualities that can, even when worded precisely, shave much of the nuance off of a given situation. It is crucial to remember that the world is not structured in this way, and that a third, or even fourth way, may be available. It just might not be available on your iPad.
Command IV. Complexity: You Are Never Completely Right
Translation: Even the most digitally innovative musicians would do best to not lose sight of the irregularities—starting with bent strings and blue notes—that make them and their music human.
Like the preceding chapter, Command IV focuses on our desire for easy answers. This is fed not so much by the easy availability of information as by digital technology's emphasis on the emphatic, what Rushkoff terms “a reduction of complexity." As in the prior chapter, he uses sound as a metaphor, moving from the vinyl/CD distinction to the MP3. Rushkoff describes it as “really just an algorithm," which is itself, with unacknowledged irony, an unfortunate act of reductionism, but that doesn't diminish the overall message of the chapter.
Command V. Scale: One Size Does Not Fit All
Translation: Musicians should play an active role in how their music is categorized and defined.
The chapter opens with another musical reference: an anecdote about a small record store that goes under after it undervalues its walk-in customers and instead favors its online customers. But don't confuse this chapter with the one about “place." Instead, it's concerned with how information is sorted in the digital economy: “In an abstracted universe where everything is floating up in the same cloud, it is the indexer who provides context and direction." Once upon a time, bands were categorized by a set number of predetermined genres in brick'n'mortar record stores (rock section here, jazz section there, classical in the rear). Today it's an ongoing curatorial concern, and is as much a matter of tags (a variety of terms associated with a given subject) as it is with social-media connectivity, where what you sound like is triangulated from who you are associated with.
Command VI. Identity: Be Yourself
Translation: Don't fake your identity on a message board. Don't hide behind pseudonyms online. And recognize that your online presence is a constituent part of your overall identity.
Maybe the most radical of the ten commands in Rushkoff's book, VI is an extended rant against anonymity (actually, it's fairly convincing, so upgrade “rant" to “considered argument"). As he sees it, technology's very structure encourages “depersonalized behavior" in its users. Anyone who's been on stage (or an online message board) more than once has encountered this kind of thing before, so musicians are used to dealing with it. One way to dissuade it online: use your real name.
Command VII. Social: Do Not Sell Your Friends
Translation: Your fans, by definition, are already sold on you. Don't try to sell them something else.
All active bands, all active musicians, live and die by their audience. Once upon a time, so-called “selling out" was a bugaboo among recording artists. Nowadays, concerns about selling out are passé, as pop songs regularly appear in advertisements with negligible backlash from fans. The new selling out is selling out your friends—from the overt (sending unsolicited ads to your mailing list) to the covert (selling that user data directly to an advertiser). Monetizing one's fan base is a risky proposition.
Command VIII. Fact: Tell the Truth
Translation: Don't lie, whether with PhotoShop or full-on plagiarism. Such ill-advised shortcuts are eventually noticed online, and once noted they leave a fairly indelible stain.
You can try to hide your identity as a musician. But it can come back to bite you; just ask Will Bevan, a.k.a. Burial.
Today's technology sits at a complicated juncture for all musicians. Mystique has been an essential part of music of all kinds (think reclusive classical pianist Glenn Gould, interplanetary bandleader Sun Ra, and every band that's ever used a self-mythologizing moniker). In a close parallel to Command VI ("Be Yourself"), Rushkoff focuses on how “technology is biased against fiction and toward facts."
Command IX. Openness: Share, Don't Steal
Translation: DRM (digital rights management) is itself a form of theft. Despite what the RIAA might suggest, you should trust your fans not to rip you off. Because trust goes both ways.
It's worth noting at this juncture that 10 percent of Rushkoff's earnings from this book's sales are donated to the WikiMedia Foundation and to Archive.org, the latter of which is a major storehouse of freely available audio, video, and texts. He's not giving all his profits away, but he is funneling a chunk back into services that provide an infrastructure for the methodology he supports. (There's a valuable lesson in that cycle alone.) He writes, “By learning the difference between sharing and stealing, we can promote openness without succumbing to selfishness." In the process, he champions both the practical and experimental aspects of this notion: the value inherent in free culture and the sampling techniques that he tracks back to Dada via William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin.
Command X. Purpose: Program or Be Programmed
Translation: Put fear-of-programming behind you. Give it a try. Get a feel for the very process of programming, and consider taking an active role in working with at least some of the technology that is part of your life. Your website may be a good place to start.
Programming needs to be demystified. It is, in reality, no more or less complicated than writing a good song lyric. The task you wish to accomplish with your programming, like the thought and feelings you wish to express with your song, determines the complexity of the undertaking—not the other way around.
* * *
Here's a little more information about Rushkoff, for readers new to him. He brings plenty of experience to this Program or Be Programmed enterprise—and not just from that side gig with Psychic TV.
A longstanding public intellectual focused on digital life, he's written on the origins of real-world cyberpunks (Cyberia, 1994), about how distributed software development can provide lessons for political change (Open Source Democracy, 2003), and related subjects. His Digital Nation documentary for Frontline, co-developed with Rachel Dretzin, looked into the future of man-machine interaction by observing the current habits of American soldiers, MIT students, and South Korean gamers, among others on the front lines of digitally mediated life.
As the book's subtitle suggests, the “commands" are a play on the 10 Commandments. There's no hubris on Rushkoff's part. He's not comparing himself to Moses. An interest in the liturgical, however, isn't new to his work. His venture into long-form comics ("attempt" may be the better word, as it was pretty darn clunky, as far as graphic novels are concerned), titled Testament, mashed up the Bible with modern conspiracy theories. And his non-fiction book Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism proposed applying those same open-source lessons mentioned above to the religion synonymous with diaspora.
Marc Weidenbaum founded Disquiet.com, which focuses on the intersection of ambient music, sound art, and emerging technology in 1996. He has written for Nature, Boing Boing, Down Beat, NewMusicBox.org, the Ukulele Occasional, and elsewhere. He lives in San Francisco and at @disquiet.
In an age of digital downloads, virtual instruments, and social-media fandom, everybody, musicians especially, must learn how technology is controlled. People who fail to do that run the risk of leaving themselves open to manipulation—i.e., to being controlled.
That anxiety-stoking thesis is central to a new book by Douglas Rushkoff, who besides being a prolific author and longtime observer of digital life, has played keyboards in the experimental industrial band Psychic TV.
The book—Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age—describes in detail how the software that powers digital technology both shapes and informs human existence. And the book's lessons, taken one command at a time, provide useful advice (some functional, much philosophical) to working musicians.
To provide a clearer sense of what Rushkoff means, we've created a chapter-by-chapter cheat sheet to his book. This isn't a replacement for the book, just a test run of Rushkoff's thinking. Despite their pithy titles, the individual commands of Program or Be Programmed are a lot denser, and have a lot more to them. Each “translation" provided below is but one key lesson to be taken away from the given chapter.
Command I. Time: Do Not Be Always On
Translation: Don't mistake time spent dealing with computer chores as productivity.
The major thread of this book is to spend less time consuming and more time producing. With this chapter's title, Rushkoff isn't telling you to be late; he's telling you not to be tied to your computer. It's a somewhat counter-intuitive notion at the start of a book that is attempting to get people to be more active, not less, in regard to their computing lives. But this isn't about quantity of time; it's about what one does with that time. Spend time with your Twitter followers, and spruce up your Facebook page. But don't do that instead of composing and performing music
Command II. Place: Live in Person
Translation: Don't mistake your virtual Facebook friends (and MySpace friends, and Twitter friends, and Soundcloud friends) with the ones who actually show up regularly at your concerts.
As Ryan Sweeney has explained here before, programming isn't a replacement for “real" life; it's a tool. Rushkoff writes of the “misguided tendency to depend on long-distance technology to enhance up-close encounters." He singles out the digital-life equivalent of the couch potato: “the whole notion of place has been surrendered to the digital realm's non-local reality."
Command III. Choice: You May Always Choose None of the Above Translation: Consensus among members of a band can't necessarily be built by depending on radio buttons in a shared online project collaboration tool like Base Camp.
Rushkoff stresses that technology often frames choices in misleading ways.
Though this chapter opens with some iffy metaphorical contrasts between the reproduction of sound on vinyl records versus the sound on CDs, its real lesson is that digital technology puts things into either/or, yes/no, on/off dualities that can, even when worded precisely, shave much of the nuance off of a given situation. It is crucial to remember that the world is not structured in this way, and that a third, or even fourth way, may be available. It just might not be available on your iPad.
Command IV. Complexity: You Are Never Completely Right
Translation: Even the most digitally innovative musicians would do best to not lose sight of the irregularities—starting with bent strings and blue notes—that make them and their music human.
Like the preceding chapter, Command IV focuses on our desire for easy answers. This is fed not so much by the easy availability of information as by digital technology's emphasis on the emphatic, what Rushkoff terms “a reduction of complexity." As in the prior chapter, he uses sound as a metaphor, moving from the vinyl/CD distinction to the MP3. Rushkoff describes it as “really just an algorithm," which is itself, with unacknowledged irony, an unfortunate act of reductionism, but that doesn't diminish the overall message of the chapter.
Command V. Scale: One Size Does Not Fit All
Translation: Musicians should play an active role in how their music is categorized and defined.
The chapter opens with another musical reference: an anecdote about a small record store that goes under after it undervalues its walk-in customers and instead favors its online customers. But don't confuse this chapter with the one about “place." Instead, it's concerned with how information is sorted in the digital economy: “In an abstracted universe where everything is floating up in the same cloud, it is the indexer who provides context and direction." Once upon a time, bands were categorized by a set number of predetermined genres in brick'n'mortar record stores (rock section here, jazz section there, classical in the rear). Today it's an ongoing curatorial concern, and is as much a matter of tags (a variety of terms associated with a given subject) as it is with social-media connectivity, where what you sound like is triangulated from who you are associated with.
Command VI. Identity: Be Yourself
Translation: Don't fake your identity on a message board. Don't hide behind pseudonyms online. And recognize that your online presence is a constituent part of your overall identity.
Maybe the most radical of the ten commands in Rushkoff's book, VI is an extended rant against anonymity (actually, it's fairly convincing, so upgrade “rant" to “considered argument"). As he sees it, technology's very structure encourages “depersonalized behavior" in its users. Anyone who's been on stage (or an online message board) more than once has encountered this kind of thing before, so musicians are used to dealing with it. One way to dissuade it online: use your real name.
Command VII. Social: Do Not Sell Your Friends
Translation: Your fans, by definition, are already sold on you. Don't try to sell them something else.
All active bands, all active musicians, live and die by their audience. Once upon a time, so-called “selling out" was a bugaboo among recording artists. Nowadays, concerns about selling out are passé, as pop songs regularly appear in advertisements with negligible backlash from fans. The new selling out is selling out your friends—from the overt (sending unsolicited ads to your mailing list) to the covert (selling that user data directly to an advertiser). Monetizing one's fan base is a risky proposition.
Command VIII. Fact: Tell the Truth
Translation: Don't lie, whether with PhotoShop or full-on plagiarism. Such ill-advised shortcuts are eventually noticed online, and once noted they leave a fairly indelible stain.
You can try to hide your identity as a musician. But it can come back to bite you; just ask Will Bevan, a.k.a. Burial.
Today's technology sits at a complicated juncture for all musicians. Mystique has been an essential part of music of all kinds (think reclusive classical pianist Glenn Gould, interplanetary bandleader Sun Ra, and every band that's ever used a self-mythologizing moniker). In a close parallel to Command VI ("Be Yourself"), Rushkoff focuses on how “technology is biased against fiction and toward facts."
Command IX. Openness: Share, Don't Steal
Translation: DRM (digital rights management) is itself a form of theft. Despite what the RIAA might suggest, you should trust your fans not to rip you off. Because trust goes both ways.
It's worth noting at this juncture that 10 percent of Rushkoff's earnings from this book's sales are donated to the WikiMedia Foundation and to Archive.org, the latter of which is a major storehouse of freely available audio, video, and texts. He's not giving all his profits away, but he is funneling a chunk back into services that provide an infrastructure for the methodology he supports. (There's a valuable lesson in that cycle alone.) He writes, “By learning the difference between sharing and stealing, we can promote openness without succumbing to selfishness." In the process, he champions both the practical and experimental aspects of this notion: the value inherent in free culture and the sampling techniques that he tracks back to Dada via William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin.
Command X. Purpose: Program or Be Programmed
Translation: Put fear-of-programming behind you. Give it a try. Get a feel for the very process of programming, and consider taking an active role in working with at least some of the technology that is part of your life. Your website may be a good place to start.
Programming needs to be demystified. It is, in reality, no more or less complicated than writing a good song lyric. The task you wish to accomplish with your programming, like the thought and feelings you wish to express with your song, determines the complexity of the undertaking—not the other way around.
* * *
Here's a little more information about Rushkoff, for readers new to him. He brings plenty of experience to this Program or Be Programmed enterprise—and not just from that side gig with Psychic TV.
A longstanding public intellectual focused on digital life, he's written on the origins of real-world cyberpunks (Cyberia, 1994), about how distributed software development can provide lessons for political change (Open Source Democracy, 2003), and related subjects. His Digital Nation documentary for Frontline, co-developed with Rachel Dretzin, looked into the future of man-machine interaction by observing the current habits of American soldiers, MIT students, and South Korean gamers, among others on the front lines of digitally mediated life.
As the book's subtitle suggests, the “commands" are a play on the 10 Commandments. There's no hubris on Rushkoff's part. He's not comparing himself to Moses. An interest in the liturgical, however, isn't new to his work. His venture into long-form comics ("attempt" may be the better word, as it was pretty darn clunky, as far as graphic novels are concerned), titled Testament, mashed up the Bible with modern conspiracy theories. And his non-fiction book Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism proposed applying those same open-source lessons mentioned above to the religion synonymous with diaspora.
Marc Weidenbaum founded Disquiet.com, which focuses on the intersection of ambient music, sound art, and emerging technology in 1996. He has written for Nature, Boing Boing, Down Beat, NewMusicBox.org, the Ukulele Occasional, and elsewhere. He lives in San Francisco and at @disquiet.
