spotification

TikTok obsolescense

March 23, 2023 / ,

So I know it’s not like, an original joke — it has a Know Your Meme page and everything — but I really enjoyed this “there is a third thing” tweet.

A tweet by "your own personal jesus." It reads, "i hate it when people think i'm being serious or that i'm joking there is a third thing and that is what i'm being."

Why I’m writing about a tweet though, is the way I found it. Like pretty much every funny internet thing I see these days, it came from TikTok. I think some of that comes from the fact that I never made the very effortful decision to curate my Twitter feed into something that reflected my humor. I didn’t really use Twitter for a long time, and now I’m sure as hell not using it. TikTok, though, takes the work of curation off your plate.

What’s the trade-off? Lots, but what’s interested me lately is what happens when I think to myself, “wow that TikTok tweet slideshow was funny, I should track it down.” If I didn’t like it, this is a tremendous task. Even if I did like it, it’s not a cinch. It’s the black box problem: I probably couldn’t interpret how TikTok classifies my interests in the first place, so attaching any kind of tag to it would be useless. The Spotification thing again, but this time with no whip-smart music sages to name genres. (And how would you even name a genre of TikTok?)

I’ve seen some scuttlebutt about the fact that TikTok’s search function is awful — sometimes misleading since the introduction of auto-generated suggested search — but I don’t have a strong grip on why. I know Reddit has a similar problem. There, the issue is a) Google is just way too good at search and b) users are really bad at usefully tagging their own posts.

And thank god they are by the way! SEO is internet poison!

Going into the search function, or even liked videos beyond the 24 hour turnaround between liking a video and then sending it to your group chat, feels like being somewhere you’re not supposed to be. Nothing on TikTok was meant to live that long. Planned obsolence underpins the app’s entire model, for trends and conversations rather than technology.

TikTok’s culture is what’s designed to fail, over and over again, at a fast enough frame rate that it looks like a still image.

More is more

February 15, 2023 / ,

The sun in the sky with clouds.

You know how extremely smart people when someone does something a little authoritarian say “there’s nothing new under the sun?” That’s complete bullshit! There’s a lot of new things under the sun! Tic Tacs! F1!

Twitter’s ill-begotten For You algorithm is ostensibly mimicking TikTok’s For You algorithm. Lots of companies want to follow TikTok’s success. But this isn’t Assyria. We didn’t see the Hittites using big, wheeled machines and think, “Oh my god, if we started driving around in big wheeled machines we could gain a similar advantage over our enemies. This will revolutionize warfare!”

Imagine the scale of copying TikTok’s algorithm. Imagine the sheer data. Twitter can sniff at reproducing this technology because they’ve been squatting over the vastest surveillance mechanism ever conceived outside of religion. (I mean the data market as a whole, not any one app.)

We are long past the point of elegant solutions. Brute force is the greatest technological advancement in history. What we wrestle with now could not have existed at any point before now.

I’d say there’s kindness buried in that message, and most of us should be kind to ourselves — you can’t pull your attention off of TikTok because it’s a totally unprecedented stimulus — but let’s not give a pass to power structures that do dangerous things just because we’ve never seen the consequences before. Gianluca Mauro talks about the “Chaos Monkey experiment,” arguing that tech enacts world-altering changes while denying accountability. It is the proverbial monkey in the proverbial Netflix server room, unplugging shit and making you miss Dated & Related.

@gianluca.mauro The Chaos Monkey experiment #learnontiktok #tech #siliconvalley #ethics ♬ original sound – Gianluca Mauro

Or to put it another way: “Move fast and break things”  sounds like a lot of fun until you break things. Which someone probably would have known if they ever played outside with other people.

The Spotification of genre

February 12, 2023 /
Every Noise at Once, a scatterplot of music genres. "Deep adult standards" is currently highlighted.

I ran into this article by Cherie Hu about how Spotify assigns genre labels to its catalog. That is, algorithmically. It is 2023, after all.

Genre labels like “Escape Room” and “Vapor Twitch,” but also “Indie Pop” and “Hip Hop” — the neologized and the widely accepted — don’t come from a set of shared musical qualities. At least, not initially, and not directly. Spotify tracks the listening habits of its 456 million active users, and it defines genre based on the patterns that emerge. In Hu’s words, “membership in the Escape Room [or any Spotify genre] would be impossible if Spotify were using a purely musical algorithm.”

A poem that I think about maybe once a week is Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper.” In it, the speaker is passing through the Scottish Highlands when he hears a woman singing in a language he doesn’t understand.

Will no one tell me what she sings?—

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow

For old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles long ago…

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Wordsworth didn’t have Shazam. Under those circumstances, he’d have never heard the song again. Even up through the 20th century, you listened to a vinyl like you read a magazine, and from a physical (and potentially destructible) collection no less.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that streaming is probably the greatest creative revolution of all time. Not only that, but streaming platforms have the power to fundamentally reshape how we interact with art. We tell Spotify what we like, and it uses that information to make sense of the infinitely diverse creative impulses of musicians. The platform returns with a raft of brand-new genres that correlate strongly with our interests. Once, people had scarce, random access to data. Now, there is more data available than we could ever interpret on our own. We only get to see what we are shown.

We adapt ourselves to the “peculiar demands of machines,” to borrow language from Don Norman. This isn’t a bad thing, in my opinion. It’s not a good thing, either. For what it’s worth, the genre labels are still determined by people with immense, intangible knowledge of music. (Or at least they were as of 2016, when Cherie Hu’s article was published.) Algorithms excel at describing what many people are doing, but people still have a monopoly on good taste. Plus, they’re more fun to talk to when you find something you love.