Digital Glut

• 00. You were missed, Eric, but two out of three legs⁰¹ was at least enough to ambulate, and boy did we ambulate
• 01. I'm sure there's a 'third-leg' dick joke that I could make out of that, of which you would be the butt, but... ooohh, too late⁰²
• 02. Yes, I just called you a 'dick' and a 'butt' in one go
• 03. I initially used the term 'exchange', but the transfer was, in fact, omnidirectional on this particular occasion, which is entirely my fault, as there were things to be exchanged, but they will still be passed along through other means
• 04. A collective term used to refer to the ubiquitous accessibility of massive libraries of commercially curated media
• 05. Notably not 'everything', in fact; a limitation which factors heavily into this discourse

A recent assembly of myself and Triumvir Johnson⁰⁰ that, auspiciously, included enough time, both up and down, for intra-triad flow⁰³ of digital media, which, itself, is only remarkable in that it was a return from such a long hiatus, has caused a minor revelation in my music procurement and listening habits as of late: the Digital Glut⁰⁴ has dimmed my appreciation of music. Everything⁰⁵ is readily available. The dalliances with the new are still there, but rarely lead to the emotional entanglements that they used to; the sea is simply too teeming with fish. Goodbye, organic, self-motivated musical discovery. Hello, auto-generated approximation of taste.

Qwest made this just-around-the-corner future out to be unbelievable, possibly even disturbing:

Qwest Saloon from Toni Hess on Vimeo.

• 00. Choose-your-own Streaming Adventure, though Spotify is my deluge-of-choice, so I'm picking on them, in particular
• 01. What does that do, anyway? Are they fanning themselves?
• 02. A term I often use in reference to software in a similar sense to 'bullshit' as used by the monastic society of academics in Neal Stephenson's Anathem to describe meaningless or pointless innovations created for commercial purposes. i.e. Dynaglide lubri-strip, or Spotify's fragmented, seemingly incomplete social capabilities
• 03. Do you have any idea how much Haydn there is on Spotify? I just scrolled through it for several minutes, never hit bottom, and still have no idea how much there is...
• 04. Or worse, you did seek it out and it wasn't there; in the surprisingly limited alternate reality of hyper-libraries, exclusion too easily becomes nonexistence unless one is willing to straddle multiple realms. Tommy Lee Jones may only need to wait for the White Album's inevitable addition to this new alien format, but Tool is simply never going to be a part of your streaming universe
• 05. This is unfair, perhaps you did discover it; streaming services backed by unimaginably comprehensive collections aren't the death of discovery, your taste being cranked through an algorithm as you listen and seamlessly fed back to you as though you asked for it is the death of discovery

Enter Spotify⁰⁰: Qwest's quaintly anachronistic saloon becomes a certainty. It exists. You walk in, your taste intact, little saloon doors waving like a bridesmaid trying not to cry⁰¹ and it's great. You're getting buzzed on all of the 'neat tricks'⁰² that the software is capable of, which have little to do with the music, or even the service being provided, but, they are neat. By the time you've made it through the concertos, the cantatas, the symphonies, the Hungarian State Orchestra recordings, the Hungarian Chamber Orchestra recordings, the Heidelberg Chamber Orchestra recordings, etc⁰³, the bar is out of peanuts and you stumble home aglow with the listening possibilities. It's all there, you can listen to it whenever you want, and so, you don't. At least, not in the way that you used to; it's not special anymore. Maybe you searched for it, but you didn't seek it out⁰⁴, you didn't discover it⁰⁵, you didn't take the time to listen to it again and again because it felt so fucking good every time. You didn't even feel it.

• 00. Not actually all, but as near to all so as to not matter much⁰¹
• 01. You've probably noticed that I've been apeing the enthusiastic annotating from Peter's master's⁰² thesis⁰⁴
• 02. Not Peter's master's thesis, Peter's master's thesis, the thesis that Peter wrote to become a master, not the thesis that Peter's master wrote⁰³
• 03. Annotation is fun!
• 04. I'm not very far into it yet
• 05. Which was technically no longer an issue because of emulation state saving
• 06. This is a whole other diatribe that is actually more about me secretly hating most video games... so secretly that I haven't even told myself yet

I've experienced a similar phenomenon with video game emulation. The idea of having all⁰⁰ NES games was simply too appealing. I couldn't help myself. But, once I had them... just two clicks and poof, there they were... enjoying them became a chore. NES games were hard. They were mean and unforgiving and, in most cases, saving your progress was impossible⁰⁵. You continued playing because, at some point, you specifically wanted this game, and you only had one other game and you really fucking wanted to play Nintendo. Without that limitation, appreciation takes on the form of some wan, listless creature, chronically unimpressed⁰⁶. Three title screens in and you already don't give a fuck about the remaining thousand. You've successfully vaccinated yourself against this particular strain of Nintendo.

• 00. Thingness in this case referring to the reality of being without any sort of raison d'etre, somewhat in reference to Peter's references to Heidegger, Mitchell, and Ingold, which, in turn, all seem to be references to Plato's thoughts on thingness and being? I never actually read any Plato, but attempting to wrap my head around various ranges, junctions, and bifurcations of thinging like the toddler trying to carry all three stuffed animals at once is amusing; similar to the toddler analogy, probably most amusing from an outside perspective
• 01. As opposed to collections that progress, but never come to completion, a collection in which the impossibility of specific element inclusion is imposed outside of the collectors control is imbued with a vexing sense of futility
• 02. Spotify allows the user to 'save' songs and albums to a their personal library, but the library itself has no distinct advantage over the encompassing hyper-library that backs the service; both are searchable, neither have an explicit 'Play All' functionality⁰³, one is simply a subset of the other with a meaningless border drawn around it giving the user the illusion of collecting
• 03. This is based on my original attempt to find the equivalent of a random-play-all button and turns out to no longer be entirely true; the Android client includes shuffle-play buttons within the song, album, and artist contexts of the user's library, in each case shuffling by context

I've muddled my point, and reading back through, I find myself arguing against the slavering Ty of twenty minutes ago, but I think the thing that I'm getting at is this: curation is its own reward. A collection is just a pile of things exuding little more than their own dingy thingness⁰⁰, each inconspicuous amongst the plenitude until the collection is curated, the things and their thingness individually polished, cut, and set through deliberate, active appreciation, which is possible when applied to any pile of media. However, curating a collection that can never be complete⁰¹ is its own farce, made even more absurd by the pointlessness of the collection mechanism⁰².

Is this the fault of the misguided 'more-is-better' future vision seen above and the services that made it a reality? No, this is my own damn fault, which is easily remedied and not actually a real problem. Did my satirical attack on the paradigm of turn-key access to oceans of media vs accumulated ownership of individual works get more serious than intended? Yeah, fuck, Ty, chill out, man. Is the idea of version controlling our collective audio library so as to simplify change merging and make use of commit diffs to summarize the gulfs of time between triumvirate conclaves as auto-generated playlists just more of the same glut? I don't know, man, maybe we should find out.