“Have you ever heard the sound of disappointment?”
I’m fully aware of how utterly cool this isn’t, but the other day I wanted to listen to a song from my childhood that felt apposite for the moment. What I didn’t realise was how self-referentially appropriate it would be. The song was “Here Comes That Sinking Feeling” from the 1985 album “Be Yourself Tonight” by Eurythmics. I hadn’t heard it for a long time and in my memory it was a snarling growling piece of music, like something hocked up from the back of the throat and spat out in one go. So imagine my surprise when the guitar kicked in and I was greeted by a slightly limp, quite gentle pop album track. Annie Lennox started singing “Have you ever heard the sound of disappointment?” I knew exactly what she meant, I was listening to it right there and then. I understand that our memories can distort or enhance things, music production has moved on a lot in the last 40 years and my expectations of the sound of a track have probably changed accordingly. But it still felt off to me, until I checked the album details: “Be Yourself Tonight (2018 Remaster)”. That last little addition to the title said it all: this wasn’t the track I wanted to hear, but a simulacrum of it reproduced (presumably) from the original masters, probably in order to make the album more ‘suitable’ to digital media, streaming and downloads.
When I first encountered this kind of digital disappointment, I assumed it was a teething issue. As a pretentious teenage boy in the 90s, Martin Scoursese’s Taxi Driver was obviously one of my touchstone movies. Id watched it many times on tired VHS tapes that I was pretty sure were not giving me the full glory of the original 1976 cinematic release. Consequently I was excited to see that they were going to release a digital remaster of the film and duly bought a copy on release (I’m not sure it had been able to buy on VHS for a while). I think I watched it once only and I may not have watched the film at all since, so instant and complete was my disappointment. Gone was the glamorously grimy 70s New York and instead something that looked like a tidy film set (which is weird because I’m pretty sure it was actually filmed in New York). Everything was clean and clear (even the grime) and it felt like all the mystery and reality had been airbrushed out along with the glare of the streetlights. Like I say I thought that was just a mistake, teething issue, digital technology was still new and it was understandable if people went a bit too far with it, accidentally smoothing out the rough edges that made a world unique. Even as more disappointing examples presented themselves, I would excuse it. It’s early days for digitisation I would keep telling myself.
The passage of time proved me wrong. Time and again a digital rendering or remaster of a previously analogue film or piece of music was flatter, duller and in some cases just plain bad. I tried to listen to the 21st anniversary edition of “HUP” by The Wonder Stuff once and couldn’t get past the first track (“30 Years in the Bathroom”) the intro had been redone, presumably because they couldn’t get clearance for the samples that probably no one even thought to clear the first time round, because hey, it was the 90s and who cared if you used 2 seconds of audio from some film. I could excuse that, no one wants to get sued, but then the music started and there was a whole guitar line seemingly missing from the mix. It might still be there, buried, but in the original it was front and centre, a staccato attack driving the song, making it slightly confrontational in a jaunty way. Without it the whole thing is a kind of limpid apologetic indie jangle that lollops along with no real purpose. I didn’t get much further before turning it off and going in search of a copy of the original recording on YouTube.
I realise all of this can very easily be dismissed as the purist rantings of a grumpy (nearly) old man, who thinks everything was better in the 90s when no one had mobile phones and we all had to talk to each other, blah blah, but it’s not just that. Firstly, I love technology and I hate talking to people, the internet and modern communications technology in general have made life easier for people like me. Whilst I’ve previously written on the need for personal communications to assist in empathy and understanding, I am not saying you should never send a text or a WhatsApp message. That stuff is super useful. But also this is actually important, and it isn’t just about being a geek or a purist. The main driver for all of those remasters or special editions is to make them fit a new reality, a digital one. It might be presented as a special anniversary edition, but the main driver for that edition is that the original doesn’t translate well to a digital format and so a new version needs to be created if the owner of the work (the record label or film studio, not the musician, writer or director) is to realise a return from that product on digital (streaming) platforms. This is presented to us as a win win, because we can get all of the things we love in one place at any time of the day or night. Except of course we can’t. I can’t get the original master of “Loveless” by My Bloody Valentine, the one that nearly bankrupted Creation Records, on Apple Music. I can get a digital remaster that took even longer to complete. It is not the same thing, it is good, but it is not the same thing. And I don’t have a choice in that. If I want the convenience, I have to listen to the remaster, I can’t choose to find out how the original sounds pushed straight to 32bit digital compression. I suspect it sounds dreadful but I’m not allowed to find out. Obviously this gives the lie to the idea that modern digital audio is ‘lossless’, because if it was there’d be no need to remaster original recordings, you could just push them directly to ‘lossless’ digital audio formats. Maybe this is now possible and you just don’t see it because all of the most valuable films and albums have already been converted to a digital friendly version at the time of earlier lossy digital formats. The damage has already been done, why waste money undoing it?
So some old music doesn’t sound as good to old people, so what? The problem is that this is a model that is universalised as we push everything into the digital realm. A digital representation of any thing is just that, a representation, it is not the thing itself. It is like taking a colour photocopy of the Mona Lisa and hanging that in the Louvre. It’s the same picture right? What’s the problem? Maybe nothing. But what if we’re photocopying emotions? I was in a meeting the other day when a potential vendor told me they could offer enhanced sentiment analysis of their AI chatbot’s interactions. I didn’t laugh out loud because that would be unfair. I’m sure in the majority of cases their sentiment analysis would be in the right ballpark, but if you’re outside that majority, the chances are the AI isn’t going to get you. If you’re neurodivergent for example, the sentiment analysis is almost certainly going to miss categorise your mood, as, by definition, you’re outside the mean.
As a person of a certain age, the YouTube algorithm has decided to endlessly serve me irritating adverts that tell me I’m using ChatGPT all wrong. These are of course incorrect, I’m using ChatGPT the right way: not at all. Nevertheless I’m told that I just use it for search (I don’t because I’m only interested in finding websites that actually exist) and that young people are using it to build businesses and make millions by using it the ‘right’ way (there is no evidence to support this). The problem with these adverts* is that they somewhat undermine the claims about generative AI, namely that it understands what you want. The USP of generative AI is supposed to be that you just tell it what you need in your own words and it will be able to produce exactly what you want. Yet when anyone complains about the fact that this rarely happens first time, regular users of these tools will scoff at them and tell them that they’re not doing it right. They will then launch into an explanation about some convoluted process that gets them great results from ChatGPT. This will always involve doing effectively the same thing multiple times and will usually include suggestions for optimising your prompts. In other words it doesn’t understand you, or do what you want, it has an arcane system of trial, error and manipulation that may eventually get you what you want**. This doesn’t sound like the computer doing my bidding, it sounds almost completely the opposite to me. Once again we are expected to gloss over the changes to our lives in order to receive the ‘benefit’ of the digitisation and commercial exploitation of aspects of our culture. With generative AI the idea is that this is as much all consuming as possible - all culture, all art, all writing, - but it isn’t actually and that’s the problem. It’s a lot of all those things, but not everything, and by not being everything, it can only ever be the digital remaster. The most palatable, most average version with all the rough edges, all real life interest, all character smoothed out.
People are rediscovering vinyl and with good reason in my opinion. It isn’t perfect, but nothing is and nor should it be. A lack of perfection is what makes vinyl records interesting, and it isn’t just music, but all sorts of media are being rediscovered in their non-digital form. As people like Brian Merchant have pointed out, the tech elite think that removing all friction from life should be the goal of technology, when in reality it is the friction that is what makes life interesting. Friction is not the same as conflict. Friction is what happens when you have a conversation with someone that you disagree with, conflict is what happens when all friction has been smoothed out by technology and you are presented with a simplified version of their opinions that you can easily dismiss as wrong. The ultimate end of all this is a life where you are free from challenges and everything is ‘easy’ as long as you are happy to be given what is available from the machine rather than what you actually want. The goal of all advertising, marketing and now the ‘training’ of AI (ir the AI training you, not the other way round) is to convince you that everything you want can be defined by the machine, that to want anything outside the bounds of the digitised, simplified list of limited options available from the machine is abnormal. The worrying trends towards labelling and othering people outside of a very clearly defined norm that is evident in the tech aligned rightwing governments is another aspect of this. Difference, whether cultural, political, racial or neurological is inconvenient to the technology and abhorrent to the ideology. Fortunately for the ideologues, the technology precludes the diversity they abhor, and it continually trains its users to only think about the options available from the machine and consider all other options as weird, uncool or subversive. Generative AI goes one step further in that it decides what you want for you, because actually you tell it what you need and it decides what you want or like. For example if you are a student and you tell ChatGPT that you need an essay on the Third Reich, ultimately if you don’t check what it writes for you, it decides whether you think nazis are great or not. Outsourcing our lives to computers means they decide what we get, based on the limited options defined by their owners, and this is the problem with AI, it’s not thinking or giving you its own opinion, it is giving you one of a vast set of answers its owners allowed it to give. There is no scenario where you outsource any part of your life to big tech and you get exactly what you want in return, unless you want exactly the same thing as Big Brother.
My wife noted the other day that wherever you are in the world Gen Z look the same. I mean I suspect there are exceptions to this, and I imagine there have been international homogeneities for many years but I’m pretty sure that they were smaller and less all encompassing when I was in my twenties. To an old [argue whether I’m Gen X or Millennial here] like me, this is a strong indicator that the digital remaster of culture that I saw as a rather disappointing anomaly is actually just culture now. That’s all they’re got. Even if someone thinks up something cool and new and different, it’s a meme before lunchtime. It has been normalised and digitally remastered before it can have an identity that might run counter to prevailing cultural or political norms. But none of this would necessarily concern young people today, as there is a space for them to air their grievances, to be ‘heard’, then tagged as a demographic variant for the sales algorithm and a possible subversive element for the surveillance state, noting the the former might do the early stage analysis for the latter. It will be progressively harder to resist the homogeneity of the digital simulacrum of culture as more and more people grow up with its assumption of all culture or all of society, as an absolute with no alternative. It is important for all of us who know an other reality to speak it, to let people know that there was, is and will be another way of being human and being with other humans. There will be no singularity, not in the sci-fi way of intelligent machines taking over consciousness from humans, but there may be a shitty digital remaster version, where the owners of the machines use them to degrade our intelligence to a point where we think the way they want, look the way they want, experience desire the way they want. The singularity happens in reverse, the machines don’t get more clever than us they make us as dumb as them, happy to hoover up any old slop they sling our way. This is the real future AI promises and it shows how little the titans of technology value human art, human culture, human creativity, humanity itself. They think we should accept the lowest common denominator digital remaster of our lives. How does that sound to you?
“Have you ever heard the sound of disappointment?“
*apart from the fact that they are obviously a scam
**much like any other computer programme
