Music + Technology + Random Nonsense from the Music Industry, by Ethan Kaplan

I read a lot of the circular press on a daily basis. That snake eating itself called the blogosphere. A world where a middle-age ex-Microsoft employee is somehow sage (and a nice guy it seems), and a middle-age ex-lawyer is the hype machine. Its a world controlled by AI, augmented connectionist intelligence and subtly mocked by the resident “cool kids” table under that tree in the quad. Most are upset that they never get to sit with the cool kids.

That is what I read.

Here is what I do.

I am the Sr. Director of Technology at the world’s largest major record label (according to share). I work in a big building, which looks like a ski-lodge/Wright/Eichler design situated right next to the Warner Bros. Studio lot. We used to have ties to them, but no longer. I have an office with a patio with Wassily mid-century chairs on it. Its rather nice in fact.

In my reading of the oroborus, I find a lot of times that the circular voices exist in the us-vs.-them world still. Meaning: the mentality that founded the thing we call both media and infrastructure extends to companies and individuals operating in a dialectic of “I want to be HUGE” and “I want to be punk rock.” No where is this more apparent than on Digg, which probably has done the most contradictory disservice to service to this new wave of a people-powered intelligence. Digg exposes a mentality that is contradictory in nature, where big companies are bad, unless big companies are totally awesome.

Of course the brunt of the “bad” is directed at those doing litigation against the “good” and just. This is to be expected and its pretty damn good to see. Mistrust is good. Hating of the acronyms? Fine. But in my daily perusal as well, I also find a degree of naiveté that is alarming. There is an abundance of criticism without an abundance of understanding.

One of my most illuminating things that I saw in the past year was at Gnomedex when everyone was harping on the music industry. I realized something at that moment: they had no clue what a record company did.

I’m not going to speak for the company, but I will speak for myself. So here is what I do:

1) I am the only technology person in a very large company. This means that on a daily basis, I am called many, many times about anything and everything that exposes a side of itself using binary data. This includes to some extent desktop support (even though that is not my job), but normally extends to due-dilligence about any technology we are thinking about using for anything.

2) I support 100+ websites. This is for both active and inactive projects, which is a challenge at times. I’m one of the few that works out-of-cycle on bands.

3) I research new technology, which means I have to operate like a VC, a hacker, a programmer, etc. I dig into things very deeply to find out exactly how they work, and I have a very, very finely tuned bullshit detector. This comes in very handy, as most people don’t expect a programmer at a record company.

4) I supervise about 10 active development projects right now.

5) I sadly never get to program much.

6) I try to evangelize and get people excited about technology in the company.

7) I interpret data for marketing from our traffic analysis.

That’s a rundown essentially. In a normal company I’d have a lot more people under me than I do, but I manage to get by through creative management, use of a community and no sleep.

Here’s my background:

I worked from 1995-2001 in the publishing industry. My mom had been the CFO of the Orange County Register since I was 8, and after she left in 1995, I started there as an intern. Since I was a little kid I’ve been interested in computers. In 1992 I got my first PC that was my VERY OWN and quickly killed it, resurrected it, then killed it again. I hacked the thing to death and Frankensteined it back. After that, my desire to be a doctor diminished and I wanted to do something with the binary. In 1992 as well I got a PPP/SLIP account through Cal State Fullerton. The first thing I did on logging in was go to find REM lyrics (of course).

My two loves by the time I was 16 were media (specifically journalism and photography) and the Internet. When I joined the Register, they quickly put me on the team launching the first OCR website. We launched in August of 2005 with a huge feature on the Fertility Fraud scandal at UCI. The Register later won the Pulitzer for it. At 16, I was the youngest person in the newsroom. I was also an arrogant ass (still am), so I fit in fine. By 17 I was writing software reviews, had migrated to a data-base driven architecture for the site, had written some weblog analytics software and was migrating slowly to the corporate company.

Fast forward a bit.

I was laid off on September 28, 2001.

Then I went back to school. I went to UCSB, worked on a lot of different things. The primary thing I worked on was Art, but Art using programming exclusively without any representational artifacts. This was different than most digital art, which primarily focused on visualization. I did my art through programming, using Java, PHP, C and any other language that would work for a situation.

My principle fascinations and areas of research were:

Connectionsim – the study of how interrelated things effect each other on a massive scale
Complexity – how systems of connectionistic entities work.
Artificial intelligence – self-explanatory
Augmented intelligence – emergence out of the intersection of computers and humans
Online identity – what happens when metrics of identity are concretized into data
Databases – likewise, how does the “databasing” of our Self affect the self.
OOP – use of OOP techniques to explore all of the above (as well as multi-threaded programming)

And the list goes on.

I work this way: curiosity drives everything. Its the reason I know everything about jet engines, everything about airplanes, everything about trains, computers, avant-garde art, punk music (1970-82 especially). I like pointing the compass, going very very far, then going back to 0 again. I like learning and knowledge and computers. When they all intersect, things happen that are unexpected and amazing. I also like taking the complex and solidifying it into data in order to recontextualize it in further complex ways.

Anyhow, what this leads back to is: I’m probably like a lot of you. I was raised in an environment in which I never found people like myself. Half the reason I worked at the Register is I found people like me there. I found people like me at UCSB and UCSD, and I’ve found them again at WBR and on the net.

But I think we get caught up a lot in our own hyper-real high school here. A high school of ONLY people like us, and we restratify from there. This is only natural dynamics of crowds of course. People seek order, and naturally we fall into line in the typical archetypes in order to express order through behavior. However, I’d like to think that if there was ever a group of people who could transgress stratification, it is us.

There has been a lot of talk about a Bubble 2.0 lately. People think the Bubble is a financial thing. I think it never got to the place where it could be financial really. Rather, I think that the Bubble right now is purely social. We’re finding ourselves lapsing into traditional stratification, and that is hurting Us. Its hurting us in the same way that high school did.

The beauty of scale-free networks is that they adapt and change in accordance to need and not necessarily to popularity. Balance is achieved by maximizing the potential of the individual not to suit the needs of the individual, but the need of the group at large. What we have going on right now within our sphere is not maximizing potential of individuals. Instead it’s pandering to the lowest common denominator of the polemic. By doing so, we’re not progressing. We’re not using the media for its full worth. Instead we’re falling back on what made the Old bad. When base intellect (expressed, not intrinsic) rule the masses, how are we any different than the media we criticize? How is a public throw-down on Daring Fireball any different than a Dateline expose? It’s not.

So what am I writing about? I started this thinking that maybe it would for people to understand that in every company we hate, there are (to quote the Talking Heads) people like us.

Patti Smith said this once:

“In heart I am Moslem, in heart I’m an American artist, and I have no guilt.”

We shouldn’t have guilt for being what we are, regardless of context. And likewise, we shouldn’t be outsiders in a sphere where there isn’t supposed to be outsiders. We are ourselves as expressed through data. The beauty of data is it is absolute in its reductiveness. Through our words we are discourse. Through our images we are visual. Both are reduced to the same intrinsic core. We can use math to understand the dynamics of personality, and AI to organize ourselves in a collective union.

This is beautiful.

This is empowering.

It is the closest we come to Being in data rather than just through it.

So let’s revert to being unstratified data as a collective and get beyond the High School rhetoric.

Lets get beyond petty wars of discourse and self-aggrandizing feelings of importance through rankings.

I’m proposing we all turn to No-Listers.

In order to be truely outside society, we have to rewrite the rules of what a society is.