The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly exploration of music, culture and the new Internet.

On the culture-tech byway, things move at breakneck speeds. From web3 to AI, copyright to collective ownership, art to psychedelics, The Beat is an exercise in association. We all contain multitudes, and within them, vast differences. But there is some connective, fundamental essence to be found.

The Beat is dedicated to that essence, and to the people who seek it; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

Disposability

Last week, Justin Strauss was my guest on For the Record, Grey Matter’s conversation series with music heads. 

Strauss has some iconic music cred. His band Milk 'N' Cookies was signed to Island Records when he was only 17. As a DJ in the 70s and 80s, he held residencies at legendary New York venues like Mudd Club and The Ritz. And in the decades since, he’s collaborated with everyone from Hot Chip to Tina Turner, Depeche Mode to Jimmy Cliff.

When we chatted, he recounted the halcyon days of Manhattan’s early club scenes, where you could walk into a club and the set’s only throughline was the DJ – genre guardrails be damned. He recalled the enigma of new music – sans Shazam immediacy – and the ensuing pursuit of unidentified tracks: asking friends, bothering the DJ, tuning in to the right radio station at the right time.

Today that mystery has largely dissolved, of course (although the pursuit can still last years). Strauss recognized the merit of today’s Shazams and such – when anything can be retrieved at any time. But he also lamented the sense of “disposability” new music technologists have wrought. 

These days, there are loud voices relegating music to the “content” bin. “Today, with the cost of creating content being close to zero,” tweeted Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek, “people can share an incredible amount of content.” 

For musicians, body, mind, pockets and soul all bear the burden of cost. Words like Ek’s represent a worrying misalignment that gives music that feeling of “disposability,” which in turn engenders a sense of “too much music.” And some conflation of corporate interest, unprecedented access, information overload and the emergence of generative AI compound that sense. 

I hate that feeling, but I do feel it. So when I sit down and face the “celestial jukebox” on my screen, I force a recurring daydream where I’m dropped off at the moon with my Walkman, five CDs and a couple AA batteries. No mood machines here. Out here in the quiet vacuum of space, I can let my taste guide me. For a moment, I’m far away, and things like Ek and AI dissipate into the fidelity of a song.

The Stargate Project

In a recent Beat, I quoted Stephen Hawking. In 2014, the physicist compared our relentless development of AI to rolling out the alien welcome mat:

Last week, OpenAI and the U.S. announced the Stargate Project – even the name has extraterrestrial connotations. Stargate was a popular science fiction franchise about an alien wormhole that enables nearly instantaneous travel across the cosmos. (And don’t forget “Project Stargate,” a 20-year CIA program that studied “remote viewing,” “the ability to perceive and describe details about a distant or unseen target using extrasensory perception.”)

This new Stargate – financed by SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and the United Arab Emirates-based MGX – earmarks an astounding $500 billion to AI infrastructure over the next four years. Twenty percent of that will be deployed immediately.

The news came days before DeepSeek – China’s OpenAI competitor – released a free, open source chatbot that’s reportedly as powerful as ChatGPT and more cost-effective. Its arrival wiped a trillion dollars from the U.S. stock market. 

DeepSeek enters the fray as another China-owned app (TikTok) faces an uncertain future on American soil. The on-again, off-again “divest-or-ban” law stems from concern that TikTok’s Chinese parent company, Bytedance, is using the app to access US citizens’ data. Australia's science minister has expressed similar misgivings about DeepSeek, which quickly became the most downloaded free app on the App Store. 

In September 2022, the U.S. banned Nvidia – the chip-maker that powers many AI models – from exporting its powerful A100 chips to China. But it seems DeepSeek was able to stockpile enough of the chips prior to the ban to train its model, and when it arrived, Nvidia lost 17 percent ($600 billion) of its market value. Talk about insult to injury. It was the biggest one-day fall in U.S. stock market history. 

Marc Andreessen, the prominent venture capitalist behind the crypto-friendly VC firm a16z, called it AI’s “Sputnik moment.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said it was “invigorating to have a new competitor.” The game, it seems, is afoot!

Alas, a political arms race is a perilous development when many, many loud voices are calling for a more tempered approach to AI acceleration. Clearly there are existential concerns that supersede what all this means for music. But what does this mean for music?

When today’s outputs are already capable generators like Suno and Udio – where anyone can create a decent-sounding track in thirty seconds – what will music sound like after injecting a half trillion dollars into AI infrastructure? Amidst our slow descent into music-as-content parlance and a smoldering sense of disposability, how will we be affected by a greater cultural precedent for one-click songs?

Computing Taste

After a year sitting on my bedside table, I finally started reading Nick Seaver’s book Computing Taste. The “anthropologist of technology” reckons with algorithms and the “makers of music recommendation.” An early chapter is titled “Too Much Music,” a concept Seaver examines through technologists’ decades-long work to codify individual “taste.”

Where, exactly, does taste come from? For answers, Seaver taps French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus – “the set of embodied dispositions that people acquire as they are socialized and as they exercise when making judgments of taste.”

“A person’s taste in music,” Seaver extrapolates, “is going to be shaped by how the people around them act, the forms they encounter music in and a host of other situational factors.”

“Taste is not only something people have,” Seaver continues, “but it is also something they do.” It’s our “techniques” for interacting with the world – and this world, as Seaver notes, is filled with technology. As tech evolves, so too does taste: “[we] learn to like within particular media ecologies,” he wrote. 

Taste depends on form, so it takes shape differently for people listening to radio in the 40s as it does for people we’re dancing to a DJ set at the Mudd Club. The same is true for the CD era, the mp3 era, the Shazam-inflected streaming era – the technology is a container for the formation of our taste. 

So what of the burgeoning era of mood machines and generative AI? How will taste form when “disposability” is aggravated by an infinity of craftless, text-prompted outputs? Especially when the progressively louder voices of our technologists are telling us music is just mood-based wallpaper – expendable content in the stream.

Those Who Follow Crocodiles

The late Bourdieu was also resurrected in a December New Yorker article called, “How Much Does Our Language Shape Our Thinking?”

In 2001, writes Manvir Singh, Bourdieu wondered if humans are “brainwashed by linguistic patterns.” “The real question is whether a language itself has features that affect how its speakers think,” Singh writes. “Does speaking English rather than Hindi make you less casteist, and maybe more capitalist?”

Similarly, does growing up on AI-generated music and mood machines make you less discerning, and easier to advertise to?

Questions like these are often associated with the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf. Whorf was best known for proposing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which suggests a language’s structure does indeed shape an individual’s worldview.

In reality, Whorf only proposed “traceable affinities” between the two, but that nuance was largely forgotten and he became the “mascot of linguistic determinism – the position that language is the ultimate arbiter of thought.” His oversimplified theory became “the target of relentless discrediting.” 

However, Singh notes, the latest research points to some truth in “Whorfianism.” Take this study on sound:

Surely, then, there’s some link between linguistic structures and the way we see the world – just as there’s a link between the sounds we hear, our “embodied dispositions” and the media ecologies from which tastes emerge.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the premise of Ted Chiang’s novella, “Story of Your Life,” which gained renown via its film adaptation, Arrival. 

What happens, the film asks, when 12 alien ships suddenly appear on Earth, trying to deliver a message in a language – rendered in cyclical inkblots ejected from the aliens’ tentacles – that we can’t understand? 

Dr. Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams, is a linguist tasked by the U.S. military to decode the aliens’ language and, ultimately, discover why they have come to Earth.

After weeks with the creatures, Dr. Banks pieces together a syntax and discovers that they have come to offer a “weapon.” Or could that be the word for “tool?” The uncertainty brings the world to the brink. World powers devolve into predictable modes of tribalism, and it’s up to Dr. Banks to bridge the gaps in our worldviews – linguistic or otherwise – so we don’t destroy one another.

The film’s score – composed by the late Johann Johannsson – is fittingly tense, and its tethered to the human voice, rendered amidst percussive clicks, brass swells and emotive strings. It feels like the constituents of some language we haven’t learned yet.

After I saw Arrival for the first time, I sent an email to Johannsson’s team to arrange an interview. “For me the linguistic aspect was something that interested me very much,” he told me. “Using the voice as a textural instrument… I wanted to use those basic building blocks of language as the basis of the score. There are no actual words being sung; they’re syllables. There’s this stuttering quality. A hesitation. Almost like there’s a language being formed.”

Ultimately, we learn that speakers of the aliens’ nonlinear language can experience time in a nonlinear way. It’s their gift to humanity – a common language that helps people see beyond competing worldviews and, at long last, care for one another.

When we find common language – like music, or love – we can see through cruelties like ICE’s recent direction to employees to use the term “alien” instead of “immigrant.” As Bourdieu understood, language is “not merely a method of communication, but also a mechanism of power.”

We may not be able to experience time nonlinearly so that we can listen to all of the songs, but we can learn the language of power. And when we do, we can reject those trying to convince us there’s too much music, that it’s content, that it’s disposable.

Coda

In 1977, two golden records were attached to the two Voyager spacecrafts and sent hurtling through space. A committee chaired by Carl Sagan was tasked to choose the records’ contents. Included are greetings in 55 languages – including one in English by Sagan’s son, Nick – and music composed by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Stravinsky – as well as various folk music and recordings by Guan Pinghu, Blind Willie Johnson and Chuck Berry.

Jimmy Iovine – at the recommendation of John Lennon – served as the record’s sound engineer. (Sagan wanted to include The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun,” but the label EMI, which owned the copyright, declined : / ).

The record was inscribed with "To the makers of music – all worlds, all times" and then sent into the cosmos. The two voyagers are now in interstellar space, 15 and 13 billion miles away, respectively – the farthest human-made objects from earth.

Also included in the time capsule is a message from then president, Jimmy Carter, who died last month:

Now go outside and listen to music – it’s a beautiful day.

My name is MacEagon Voyce. For more music and less noise, consider subscribing to The Beat. And if you already do, consider sharing with a friend. Thanks for being here.