Potholes in my lawn

When I get to the end of my life, one of the only concrete achievements I will be able to point to is the fact that I was once in a band that released an album. We even got a single of the week in the NME the week of my 21st birthday, which was back when the NME was still cool. I know, right! Occasionally, when I'm worried people see nothing but the middle aged professional systems geek me, I wheel out these facts to prove that I was once marginally cool. If my guests are particularly (un)lucky I'll wheel out the album at a dinner party, or at least queue it up on Spotify (I don't actually own a physical copy).
It was on just such an occasion that I went searching for our album on Spotify and came up blank. It wasn't there. It had disappeared. I looked in a playlist where it had been (not that I listen to it all the time mind you) and found that it wasn't there. Some time later I found an option in Spotify that shows or hides 'unplayable' tracks and when I changed this setting, the album reappeared although only as a set of greyed-out tracks that were no longer playable. As the days went past, I noticed a whole bunch of tracks by other (more significant) artists were also greyed out. For whatever reason some music had simply been removed from Spotify. I had no way of knowing if that is because of licensing issues, artist refusal, administrative incompetence or some other reason entirely; all I knew was it was no longer available. I only knew this because I went looking and changed the default settings on my account, had I not been such a vain tosser I might never have noticed that music disappears off my playlist all the time. In effect Spotify has final say over what music I listen to. Obviously with music, there is a simple solution to this: buy CDs or at least mp3s that are not then at the mercy of the whims or licensing negotiations of an Internet music provider. With other things it is not so easy. In the 19 years that it has been in existence, we have become very reliant on Google; we trust it to tell us everything that is out there, but how can we be sure that what google tells us is everything is everything. The truth is that we can't.
One of my favourite albums growing up was De La Soul's '3ft High and Rising'. I know every word of that album because I practically wore out a tape copy I'd borrowed off a neighbour when I was 13. I have a vinyl copy, but I never listen to it because my record player has been unplugged for 3 years (and also because I am extremely precious about it). This means that I never listen to that album, because it does not exist in the digital world. I have looked: it is not on Spotify, Apple Music or any other digital service that I am aware of. I'm reliably informed that this is because it doesn't have clearance for the myriad famous samples that appear on the album, samples that if you love that album are an instant hook into the original the first time you hear it: a pre-vetting of some great music, expanding the horizons of young hip hop fans the world over. Unfortunately the shortsighted commercial imperative of absolute copyright enforcement overrides any consideration of longer term financial gain through association and '3ft High and Rising' remains unavailable in any digital form. This means to all intents and purposes it no longer exists; as how much of our reality is defined by its online identity? The kids could go looking for it in record shops, but they're unlikely to do so in any numbers as there is no awareness of it. Some might see the vinyl revival as a sign that the kids are turning away form the digital world, but mainly they are buying novelty vinyl versions of digital tracks, or popular classics on reissue. Vinyl records look retro cool above all else; an instagram fad for a generation of image collectors.
 In the pre-digital world there was always a popular version of the cultural truth that was occasionally contradictory to, and occasionally complimented by subcultures. Now there is no 'subculture' that can exist without the validation of the popular cultural truth, as this is defined. Really there is no subculture, because all culture is validated and defined by the framework of the digital hegemony. Furthermore, cultural history is filtered through that same framework: there are many albums from my youth that I cannot find online and so do not really exist in cultural fact any more. Whilst some people will fight for the right to be forgotten online, there will be vast chunks of late 20th and very early 21st century culture that will be forgotten simply because they never existed online in the first place. Im sure it was always the case that chunks of cultural history just disappeared, but at least in the past they would have been forgotten due to any number of random factors, not just the binary dead hand of digital commerce.
 This week Google and Microsoft announced that they will put illegal file sharing sites further down the rankings of their search results. We should note this, because this is how your reality is now defined: extreme right wing organisations can make up anything and remain right at the top of search engine rankings, but if someone wants to share music without paying for it, that's too morally repugnant for us to be exposed to. I am not a defender of music piracy in particular, but its singling out for banishment from search engines certainly speaks to the priorities of the companies who govern what form of truth we are exposed to. Unfortunately, we don't know what else we are being 'protected' from. We don't know what reality they have decided for us.