Spotify and the Death of Culture: Late Capitalism a Survival Guide

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Um, in this episode, what I want to do is start with an example that will kind of bring all the logic and forces that I've been talking about into focus, how they affect us as individuals, and then begin to broaden out into culture more directly. So again, we started with the overview of the logic and abstraction, the forces, the fact that we lose history that has all these impacts on us. But I thought it would be helpful to kind of give you an example. In this case, it'll be Spotify to help us understand and get a better feel of all these counterintuitive and unnatural seeming forces that are at work around us and that do cause the alienation and disorientation which we've been speaking about.

So Spotify now if you go back in history the music industry is not uh reputed as one of the uh more reputable filled with love and joy for all parties participating. But again this is kind of never want to say oh well capitalism used to be swell and then it all went sideways. It's this is not the claim. So I just you know repeat that there.

But if you go back in history, humans have been enjoying music, making music, playing music, dancing, singing instruments for as far as the archae archaeological record goes back. And there's actually a lot of reason to believe that music making as in singing and rhythm and vocalizations possibly and I would argue probably predate language, right? language. It probably grew out of music, not it's an add-on or something extra because you know song, singing, rhythmic, all these things exist in nature and other animals before you get language.

And so probably I just don't any reason why we wouldn't have had music and singing and chanting and sort of group vocalizations that predate actually the evolution of language. And so in any case, all of the record, archaeological, anthropological, is that music, the production of of this goes all the way back. It's fundamental to humans. We love it.

We love singing. We love dancing. ...