23 April 2010: "Hype Machine Employee Responds to Bitter Music Critic’s anti-Hype Machine tirade"

This post is about perfect Bayesian equilibrium. Though more and more subjects are involved with the production and dissemination of cultural product through the intercession of various interactive technological modalities enabled by networked interfaces distributed throughout all levels of the social body, Carles fears, rightly, that the process of cultural distribution is paradoxically becoming more and more automated. The surfeit of information generated by the influx of new freelance participants in the grand social project of marketing trends and the exponential multiplication of nodal points in the peer-to-peer relations among cultural consumers has overwhelmed the flow of relevant information (always a touchstone concern for Carles), diverted it into innumerable silt channels striating the networked information society. We demand automated sorting systems, truth procedures for eliminating effluvia. We want our culture purified without extinguishing our apparent autonomy in the aesthetic field.

For Carles, the conflict between popular-music critics, who characterize the pre-postpostmodern mode of cultural dissemination and the interdictive function of mass-media-propagated gatekeeper/hegemons, and the new internet-mediated forms of direct-to-end-user distribution of cultural product (product that once served as the object of gatekeeping discourse but now eludes such structuration) epitomizes the problematic of aesthetics in a meme-ified age. Writes Carles, assessing the argument between Mp3 aggregation service Hype Machine and popular music critic Christopher Weingarten:

Maybe the hype machine was created to kill music journalists, since they aren’t as functional as just streaming a song + deciding for urself. Seems like that is a good idea, but maybe it has ‘morphed into a whole new problem.’ Wonder if ‘the truth’/optimal system is somewhere in between. Maybe the government should give us preloaded iPods every year.

At stake: the role of the state in controlling the ebb and flow of trends and the evolution of tastes; i.e. regulating the flow of culture and the rate of turnover to suit the production and distribution capacities of the remaining culture-industry conglomerates and their satellite industrial supports. Another way of phrasing Carles critically important and incisive question: Have consumers been adequately constituted in their novelty-seeking subjectivity such that they can be trusted to decide for themselves and reach the conclusions that capital requires. Will consumers by virtue of the ways in which their identities have been constituted in highly networked social media formations, supply effective consumer demand sufficient to reward and repay the continued investment of capital in the cultural, affective and consciousness industries, discounted appropriately for inevitable temporal lags. Or should temporal lags become the "optimal" essence of capital formation itself? That is, the lags between trend formation and widespread adoption become the gaps for capital to exploit, the very essence of the investment opportunity. Those lags would require functionaries like Weingarten to police them, preserve the space, prevent "leaks" of cultural product before their appointed time -- the leaks that such services as Hype Machine thrive on and which have fashioned the "whole new problem" to which Carles refers.

In other words, Carles wants to consider two modes of disciplinarity with regards to cultural consumption (and its tertiary role as a form of symbolic production). As he points out, "Every1 is trying to be ‘first’," at the same time as they seek to be "‘exclusive’." The result is a game-theoretical situation (Carles dubs it "meme games") in which a non-cooperative game structure is transforming synchronically to a cooperative one as the players contest the very fact of whether their moves are simultaneous or sequential. What comes first? Hype or the product to be hyped? In the problematic of trends, is attention an end or a means? Is the function of players to share information to yield likely aesthetic and commercial successes? Or is the aim to use hegemonic discourse about popular culture to make cultural ubiquity a zero-sum game? DO we win or lose if the cultural output is limited to a few winners, while gatekeepers consign vast portions of the semiprofessional cultural output to obscurity and inconsequentiality?

The very fate of the libidinal economy hangs in the balance -- what will we be permitted to desire? Also, it is a question of the future of labor (Carles signals this dimension of his analysis with a sly allusion to the traditional union rallying cry: "Whose side are you on?"), of whether cultural product will be a matter of leisure consumption for the masses while only a select few are granted license to perform and produce and comment on it, or will our work become a matter of transforming ourselves into vectors, into living and breathing hype machines? Can we play dead to the ceaseless flow of new cultural information to process? Will we ever be adequately compensated for processing this information? IS the first to know about one trend always the last to know about its insignificance in a larger hierarchical schema? This may be a game that no one wins, though all are forced to play.