Monomorphic

In his highly timely and readable 2009 book “The Postdigital Manifesto”, Swedish writer and historian Rasmus Fleischer discusses the effects of the digital on our relation to music and sets out his vision for how we can make music listening more meaningful. Fleischer is a prolific blogger (almost exclusively in Swedish) at Copyriot, and is probably best known for co-founding the Swedish think tank Piratbyran. As a side project, I am currently in the process of translating this book into English. It will be released in some form when it is done. The original work was released without copyright, so it is quite likely that some kind of PDF will simply be made available for download.

One of the central ideas of the manifesto is that our relation to music is dependent on physical presence and responsibility. Physical presence as opposed to the illusion that distances and places are made irrelevant by the internet and digital communications. Responsibility as opposed to the idea of mindlessly shuffling through a very large or infinite archive of recorded music. One of the ways in which music conveys something is when I choose music to play to somebody else, and I take responsibility for the effects of the music on that person or on a group of people.

Fleischer constructs the idea of a “postdigital situation” and holds it up as a model for how music is to be valued, critiqued, understood, and, essentially, how it is to take place, or come to matter. The postdigital situation is constrained by a physical space where music is being performed and listened to, where responsibility relations exist and evolve, and where bodies are set in motion. The digital world, the internet without boundaries, can be a means of gathering people in such a space and informing it, but it does not replace it. The “postdigital” goes beyond the naive idea of the digital, which ignores places and crowds.

Olle Olsson at SICS has also discussed this book in English. More to come!

The first time I found myself onboard an airplane was when I was 9-10 years old or so. At the time, travelling by myself to visit my aunt who lived on a remote island was a big experience. In particular, I think, the sensation that the environment was managed in the extreme made a big impression on me. The temperatures and winds outside my seat window were a hostile element, but human technological achievement successfully shielded me from these dangers. I could take part in the collective human pride in this affirmation of technological ability.

Much later, when I was a student in London, I was subject to budget constraints and went for the cheapest flight whenever possible. Accordingly I found myself flying with an Irish airline, Ryanair, quite a lot. This enterprise is marked by its grisly yellow and dark blue colour scheme and continuous experimentation in lowered flight standards, comfort and safety, all for the sake of lower prices. For a 1-2 hour flight between England and Sweden it was fully acceptable.

Recently I have been flying between Japan and Sweden quite a bit. The intercontinental flight can last more than ten hours, and takes on quite a different character from short flights. Some of the essential absurdities of any flight journey become increasingly difficult to ignore during this time period.

Firstly, there is the fact that the airplane that more than a hundred passengers ride in is a sealed off, highly fragile, mobile cross-section of society and a habitat for human beings. Airplanes need continuous replacement, draining and replenishment of food, waste, excrement, water, fuel and electricity. The air pressure and temperature inside the cabin are artificially maintained. The similarities with an imagined future biodome on the moon are not a few. What happens if an airplane has to land on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean and doesn’t have enough fuel to fly back, or there is some kind of technical problem? All of these buffered flows which the airplane must always replenish would be interrupted, and our very lives are hooked up to those flows.

In addition, hundreds of people are placed very close to each other for an extended period of time with minimal lateral separation (although there is some longitudinal separation in the form of seat rows). A certain neuroticism is provoked. We become hyper-aware of our neighbours and what they do, what they talk about, how they dress and what habits they have. We try our best not to notice. And this lattice, this packing of people, is surveyed from above by the panoptic eyes of the flight stewards and hostesses. Observation not only from above but also from peers becomes essential in maintaining order in a closed-off society where governmental violence cannot reach and the usual norms might easily be violated. Security breaches are to the greatest possible extent preempted by the pre-flight security theatre, and what remains of risk is contained by observation and observability effects.

This pressurised air and pressurised micro-society is spiced up, or muddled, slightly by the increasingly confused roles of the stewards and hostesses. In the jet set era, the air hostess was an object of attraction, an apple of the eyes of businessmen, an icon of liberty who had authority but no doubt also a certain intoxicating effect which helped to pacify. Today she is more clearly authoritarian, but the old role has not quite been erased from people’s minds. Something oedipal threatens to take place. Is this person who serves me food a nurse, a security guard, a mother as well as a possible lover? The neuroticism of the family extended into international airspace. All authority figures merged into one. Male stewards only slightly less confusing.

Fortunately airlines are very happy to serve up small doses of wine and beer to take the edge off the situation. Flying is absurd, but for the moment we have no other way of getting around.

The architecture of the Internet is fundamentally decentralized, a fact that continues to impress to this day. The breadth and depth of the sea of applications and uses we have made of it, and its resilience, impress perhaps all the more, because many of our experiences from everyday life tell us that some of the strongest things in society are singular and centralized — huge companies and governments, for instance. I’m actually not an expert on internet architecture, but my understanding is that the only thing that is fixed in it is the DNS system, which relies on some top level hardcoded IP addresses and coordination.

But even though the Internet is built on a decentralized architecture, it also supports applications/services that are highly centralized in their architecture and in their intended use. Google and Facebook are two very famous such applications. On the other extreme are applications that might be called P2P, including notorious file sharing systems such as Bittorrent, and also simple email (which was designed for decentralized use but is becoming heavily centralized with services like Gmail).

In recent days there’s been much discussion about Facebook’s role, particularly since it has been taking more and more liberties with the vast amounts of data about it users that it holds, scaling back the notions of privacy and integrity as they see fit. Many people are calling for decentralized alternatives to Facebook to rear their heads, and I suppose people have been calling for decentralized search engines as well for some time.

Much seems to be at stake here. What’s the future direction of the internet? A few giants holding all the data, monopolising certain functions, or a distributed network of peers, creating functionality together? The debate is ideologically charged and could be mapped into a big government/small government discussion, although I think it would be fruitless to do so. What is certain is that radically different applications can be created using the centralized/decentralized models and that it is rarely a case of merely “porting” an app from one architecture to another, the way you port an application from C to Java. On an abstract level, the two models could serve as substrates for the same functionalities (such as social network services), but the concrete implementations would have very different characteristics.

Do we create centralized applications because our legal systems, property rights systems, and so on, have not evolved at the same pace as our infrastructure, so that our tendencies, habits and ideals from a brick-and-mortar world are preserved in the world of fiber and switches, appearing ever more outdated?

In Sweden this debate has been especially pronounced recently with companies like Flattr being firmly on the side of decentralized models. Flattr is trying to be a universal donation system for content on the internet, and the vision behind it is a large number of decentralized creators of “content” (which are themselves consumers).

I’m not sure which model will win in the long run. I prefer to think that both models have a role to play and that they can coexist nicely. But lately it seems as if the centralized model has had a bit too much momentum. Let’s dig deeper into the decentralizing potential of the internet!