Substrate

But I've also become allergic to that language—the rhetoric around "solving problems" and "building things" that springs from the privileged mindset of the lone techno-savior. I suspect this mindset is one reason the old-school punks didn't quite make it. Sometimes, there are no clear-cut problems and nobody needs to build anything new. Sometimes we just need to talk about it. If we build anything, it should be not software, but consensus. I, too, want to help shape these emerging computational layers to be less coercive and extractive, more expressive and equitable, before it's too late. So I think the most effective thing I can do now is to join various publics, listen to how people understand and engage with technologies, and let that understanding shape my work as I work to shape that understanding. I don't know how to do it yet, but I'm trying.

Indeed, what Spotify calls “streaming intelligence” should be understood as surveillance of its users to fuel its own growth and ability to sell mood-and-moment data to brands. ​ When a platform like Spotify sells advertisers on its mood-boosting, background experience, and then bakes these aims into what it recommends to listeners, a twisted form of behavior manipulation is at play. It’s connected to what Shoshana Zuboff, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, calls the “behavioral futures market”—where “many companies are eager to lay their bets on our future behavior.”