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This worker is teaching people to use the iPads that will one day replace her. It’s an awkward phenomenon that now pervades a growing cross-section of industries, a type of techno-solutionism that’s unbearable because it insistently capitalizes on quick fixes for problems that didn’t exist to begin with. It’s also a disadvantageous mutation of principles that marketers have historically leveraged to make us feel bad about ourselves so that we’ll buy more shit we don’t need. It is all of these things, and it is also becoming the operating motive of the music industry.
preach
But who’s to blame? Saunier recognizes the tough spot so many artists and labels are in, where they’re unable to outwardly criticize their corporate overlords without risking total irrelevance. “The people I would blame the most are the greedy chauvinists in charge of companies like Spotify and [those] who own Google,” he goes on:
These are the companies that have presented themselves as hip, huge, harmless . . . In fact, they are ruthless and as hungry for profit . . . They’re shark-like. Just eat up everything, take all of the world’s creations. Digitize them and offer them back to humanity either for free or for an incredibly low price. And don’t pay, or massively underpay the creators, and just kick back and put your feet up, and know that if Greg from Deerhoof doesn’t like it, well that’s fine, because there are a million other people lined up behind Greg who are perfectly happy to volunteer their music to exactly such a scheme in hopes of doing something besides being a barista their whole life.
quoting Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier
[...] With this in mind, and when I worry over the publications, labels, and artists who have (reluctantly or otherwise) embraced Spotify, I can’t help but think of that airport restaurant server who teaches you how to use the iPad, thereby contributing to her own obsolescence. Why is the music press generating value for a platform that in every way plans to eliminate it? And what will become of music criticism in a world without records? Will publications review discovery feeds and write profiles of playlists? What good will criticism be when all of music has coalesced into algorithmically preordained Muzak?
I want to believe that it’s not too late to beat the billionaires and the bots. But earlier this year Spotify signed a lease for fourteen floors at Four World Trade Center. The company’s gone on a hiring spree, with plans to add a thousand employees. The new lease costs $2.77 million in monthly rent. And it lasts until 2034.
although I feel like there's value in a music press being more about personal storytelling (like that incredible piece on The National), I agree with her sentiment and also think that Spotify planning ahead for 2034 is fucking terrifying
A function of this marketable cultural obsession with microcelebrity is classism, which Teen Boss doled out in large supply. It’s fair to say that young people from a range of backgrounds need to find work in order to support themselves, their families, their futures—often as a means of survival. Clearly, however, this publication was not for them; there is a reason it was titled Teen Boss and not Teen Worker, or Teen Paper Route, or even Teen Business: the term “boss” signals power, authority, and elite status. If this appears obvious, just imagine the number of alternative approaches Teen Boss might have taken: a more consciously useful text could have taught preteens about financial literacy, or placed greater emphasis on the kind of off-the-books work that fits into an after-school or weekend schedule. Rather than, say, indoctrinating them into an influencer economy.
lol
“It’s too bad because girls at the ages [Teen Boss] is targeted to, ages eight to eleven, are going through a really tricky developmental moment where they become more withdrawn,” said Melissa Campbell of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) when we spoke by phone in February. Campbell explains that a girl’s self-esteem often plummets around age nine. “A lot of that has to do with whether or not you see yourself as a fully embodied person who is creating something in the world [or] whether you are something to be consumed.”
It’s here—beyond its meme-like absurdity—that Teen Boss reveals its particular strain of parasitic nefariousness: it fed on the developmental vulnerabilities of its young readers. “A magazine like this is really insidious,” Campbell added, “because it makes you think that you’re building your power, because you have a vision, you want to carry it out, you want to make something of yourself—but really what you’re doing is monetizing your experiences [and] setting yourself up to be consumed, literally, through your videos and your content and your personality.” The turn represented by Teen Boss, Campbell concluded, is that it was “being sold to you [as if] you’re embodied and in charge.”
It’s easy to laugh about Teen Boss; to see it as just a passing meme or a joke. But what it represents about the way young people are failed by platform capitalism is a serious concern. The problems with Teen Boss will outlive Teen Boss, and they speak to a society-wide dereliction of responsibility with regard to the effects of predatory tech products on our culture, on our ability to meaningfully hear ourselves and others, and on our willingness to communicate in a way determined by social need and not the profit motive. Vulnerable populations are made more vulnerable under these conditions, including kids and tweens especially.
Capitalism has always exploited and deadened the imagination. Platform capitalism takes this a step further by repackaging this exploitation and selling it as empowerment. By encouraging young people and teenagers to become influencers, these companies push them into a commodified space filled with negative forces that run counter to their interests.
i like the phrasing
“It is just so clear, marketing is terrible for children. It limits their imaginations. It makes them sick,” Campbell told me. “As a kid, you figure out who you are by being around other people. . . . It’s challenging enough to be developing your social relationships on these disembodied platforms. But when all of those platforms are also tracing out the contours of your relationships and trying to figure out who you are and what you want so they can sell more stuff to you,” she continued, “it creates new norms where young people just expect all of their relationships to be commercialized.”
yikes