Techno and technology
Techno has a strange relationship with technology… It is there in the name, it is about as obvious as it can get, but we tend not to think that carefully about how it shapes us and our music. Of course, right from early on, there has been this kind of techno-utopianism, Jeff Mills and his spaceships, that kind of stuff. Yet this is actually a rather goofy and limited understanding of science and technology, and one quite different from the much more complicated and confused world we presently find ourselves in.
Responding to a tweet about Facebook, Donato Dozzy wrote: ‘Things have changed so fast and I admit didn’t see this coming until it was way too late. And it’s not just about music.’ The rise of social media, smart phones, streaming platforms and many related technologies have come to significantly reshape how we engage with music, parties, artists and all the related scenes and communities. Reshape, and from the perspective of many of us, distort and damage.
When the pandemic started, I wondered if perhaps it might help reduce some of the negative trends related to the instagramification of DJing and parties. People would have nothing to post and share, I thought. Ah, how naive I was… Quite the opposite occurred, our engagement with music if anything has become more mediated and framed by social media. With people unable to attend parties freely, travel and so on, it has happened online: watching videos of the lucky few who are in places where events are happening, tuning into the never-ending array of streams from studios and living rooms, and blasting away on twitter. Certainly this all did allow for some kinds of engagement and connection, it was not without meaning, but it is hard also not to reach the conclusion that many of the worst trends have simply been amplified and deepened.
In the summer I logged out of my social media accounts. I recently came across a great description of engaging with these platforms as being like ‘emotional Russian roulette’. This was fundamental in me deciding to have a break, I felt I was losing control on shaping what I was thinking about and feeling, something that was most pronounced with Instagram. I wasn’t sure if I was quitting the platform permanently, but so far, I haven’t gone back, and have felt better for it. After about 6 weeks, I returned - in a more cautious and conscious way - to Twitter, a platform that I do still find useful and positive in terms of some of the interactions it generates. This reflects a very concerted effort I have been making to be more deliberate and aware of how I am engaging with these technologies, and how they impacting me.
It feels like there is a general sense that this just happened, somehow we have just reached this point where social media now distorts and warps how we engage with music, and yet, at the same time, we tend to be much less willing to think about how we are actively contributing to these set of dynamics, and that there could be better alternatives out there. We don’t have to just give up, we are not passengers along for the ride, we still have agency.
My thinking on this has been really assisted by this post listing 41 questions about technology by L.M. Sacasas. There is an accompanying Ezra Klein podcast with the author (alternate link). I strongly recommend checking these and thinking about them, both generally, and specifically in terms of how it connects to techno music. What they both discuss in really lucid and powerful terms is how we shape technology, and technology shapes us and our world. I think there is much here that is personally valuable, but also that we can apply in terms of starting to retake agency and control for the kind of music community and culture we want to preserve and develop.