Nick Hornby’s column ‘Stuff I’ve Been Reading‘ in the McSweeney’s writing mag The Believer is always the thing I turn to first, and this month’s (well, March/April – but it has to be rowed across the Atlantic in a bath tub, it seems) is one of the best for ages.

He is ostensibly writing about a book called The Train in the Night by music journalist Nick Coleman, which documents his terrible journey through sudden loss of hearing in one ear – a disaster for a man whose life was so engrossed in sound. I’ll leave you to consider the piece at your leisure, but the section that jumped out at me in Hornby’s article concerned the future of taste in a world of universal, free access:

‘Taste is a complicated edifice that has been under construction since the early 1970′s, and it’s now in danger of collapsing – not just because Nick (Coleman’s) relationship with his stuff has had to change, but because, in the new digital world, just about every form of engagement with art is up for reevaluation.

‘What will it mean, when we have access to every worthwhile piece of music ever made, and none of us own any of it, and none of us have had to save up for it, to choose between one album and another, to leave our homes to obtain it, even? Does that make us all the same? And what happens when your libraries disappear into one Apple’s clouds, young people? How will you decide who to have sex with then, eh?’

It’s an interesting thought… Though we may have unlimited space for virtual music and books, we do have limited time to listen and read. And thus we have to engage in some process of rejection and selection. The difference between the world as Hornby sees it now, and the world of record stores and physical purchases, is that your selections now cost you almost nothing, whereas in the past, having a limited budget meant that you really had to consider very carefully which album you were going to add to your collection that week.

With the removal of that financial constraint, the question is whether our tastes have benefited or not. In one sense, now that we have access to everything, we might be able to construct a far more interesting collection of things we listen to (or read) because we have such a wide palette.

But I’m not convinced. It’s a cliche that the super-rich have no taste. Vulgar, ostentatious things apparently fill their vast houses… and perhaps Hornby is suggesting why: because they have no budget, they have no discrimination either. So perhaps universal access to music serves to denigrate taste, rather than enhance it? We don’t have to practice so much discernment, so…we don’t.

Yet regardless of financial situation, taste is still about careful selection. With such a wide variety of things, perhaps it becomes too easy to go for the familiar and the obvious.

Either way, I wonder if those we regard as having very good taste are those who use a far narrower palette, focusing on a smaller number of things, and doing them very well, often picking things out from places outside of the obvious.

I very much enjoyed watching the first part of ’56 Up‘ last night – a programme that I’ve been aware of since… probably 21 up. What was particularly interesting about this episode – for those who don’t know it, the last one was 7 years ago – was that it was the first one to be broadcast in the age of social media.

Back in 1964, when these children were first followed aged 7, they were the first to have their lives on show. Having been followed at regular intervals for 49 years, what almost all of them have said in common is that they have needed to keep something of themselves back. They have needed a private life.

Now, it seems that all of us are creating our own personal reality programme. We broadcast daily, hourly, weekly – updating people with photos and videos and (often highly personal) messages about what we’re up. The vast cast of ‘Friends’ keeps changing and evolving, and plots can take dramatic twists… as well as have periods of utter banality. But the question is, how much of a private life are we holding back? Difficult to quantify, perhaps, but in subjective terms: do you hold enough back?

I’m currently reading Networks Without A Cause by Geert Lovink, which is one of the first serious examinations of the impact of social media. He quotes Zadie Smith:

‘We were going to live life online. It was going to be extraordinary. Yet what kind of living is this? Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn’t it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life, in this format?’

What happens with Facebook is that we end up learning a lot about others, and little about ourselves. And, importantly, the information we get about others is the product of a series of selection algorithms that we have almost no understanding of. In other words, we have outsourced much of our authority over our social understanding to a vast company that is, at the end of the day, only interested in making money through advertising.

There is a dual problem here: what do we choose to post, and what do we choose to hold back – and then how are these posts treated by sites once posted? The (perhaps) unconscious effect has been to create what has been called ‘The Religion of the Positive,’ where

”relentless promotion requires deliberate self-deception, including a constant effort to repress or block out unpleasant possibilities and negative thoughts.’

There is no (official)  ’dis-like’ button.

In a recent ‘Follow Friday’ on Twitter, the impish wannabe theologian Peter Rollins described me as a ‘grumpy old man‘ – which I was initially mortally wounded by, but, on reflection is perhaps something I should wear with honour. Why? Because there is something important about resisting the incessant urge to be positive. Shit does happen. But, equally importantly, there is something important about not sharing. And, though clearly I’m not going to list them here, there are both very dark and very bright parts of my life right now which are just not going to get an airing. Why? Because, as I mentioned in a tweet yesterday, psychological maturity – according to Salvatore Maddi – involves assuming responsibility for our lives , despite all the outside pressures that can easily be blamed for what happens to us.

In other words, don’t go crying to Facebook or Twitter when you need some sympathy or affirmation, or bleating about how beautiful your life is every time you get a decent cup of coffee.

To return to ’56 Up’ – a programme that has clearly affected the lives of the participants profoundly – the true hero of the piece has to be Neil Hughes, who, having been through periods of depression, mental illness and homelessness, has refused to be defined by the public projection of these things onto television, and has clearly kept parts of his self – positive and negative – far away from the cameras – something, one feels, that may have actually saved his life.

In short, do something amazing today, experience something profound today… and don’t talk about it. I guarantee, you’ll feel better, stronger and more balanced.

Re-pins, re-tweets, re-posts, likes, shares and reddits… sometimes social networks seem like a case of terrible digital reflux, where everything you consume is reprocessed, redigisted, remixed, reconstituted…and begins to repeat on you.

Surfing the net soon makes me ache for the quiet privacy and mystery of making original. Sketching, writing, playing, thinking without surfing, reading without interruption…

George Orwell once said ‘any speaker repeating familiar phrases has gone some distance to turning himself into a machine.’ Words which carry the unbearable irony of now being a quotation…

‘Lanier asks why the past two decades have not generated new music styles and subcultures, and he blames the strong emphasis on retro in contemporary, remix-dominated music culture. The democratization of digital tools did not herald any “Super-Gershwins”‘ instead, Lanier sees “pattern exhaustion,” a phenomenon in which a culture runs dry of variations on traditional designs, and becomes less creative in general.’ - Geert Lovink in Networks Without A Cause. (ht Barry Taylor for the share)

/logs off.

Quick thought on the ubiquity of sharing… Retweets, reposts, links, shares… there are countless ways to propagate information, funny stories, things of interest (and obviously I rely on that for people to end up reading here.)

But I began thinking yesterday… all of these shares are ‘non rivalrous.’ A rivalrous good, in economics, is one which is destroyed by consumption. If we have a pint of beer between us on a table, then me drinking means that you cannot – because my use consumes it.

An idea, on the other hand, is non rivalrous: if I have an idea and share it with you, then the knowledge has not diminished through use, but grown. As Thomas Jefferson rather poetically put it, ‘he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.’

The ‘sharing’ that is going on so much on Facebook and Twitter and other social networks is of this ‘non rivalrous’ nature. And we can see why it’s so popular – because it’s just so easy. It just takes a click of a button. And that’s a good thing.

But there’s a sense in which this sort of sharing does not cost me anything. And actually, that’s an impoverished view of what sharing should be about.

In the traditional sense, sharing has also been about hospitality. If I share my food with someone hungry, then that is rivalrous sharing, and that actually costs something. If I share my wealth, my property, my time – these are all things that are costly. And it’s this sort of sharing, this sharing that costs something, that I wonder may be being diminished in a more online world – even though we might not notice, because of all the other ‘shares’ that are flying around.

Of course, if something costs nothing…it can be worth very little. And, conversely, I’m thinking more about the importance and worth of rivalrous sharing, and how much more rewarding that can be than a quick click.

So…I hope you share these thoughts widely. But then I wonder if you might try to share something that is a little more costly than a retweet…because it’s that sort of sharing that will, in the end, change the world, a little at a time.

Interesting article on Ceasefire looking at Zizek and de Botton, which includes this great quote from Kafka:

“Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves.

“What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make use feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like suicide.

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.” (Franz Kafka – letter to Oskar Pollak 1904)

There are times when we need something relaxing to read, a ‘nice’ novel like… The Art of Fielding, for example, or something by William Boyd – a writer I love.

But Kafka is right… books for me are really more about taking an axe to the frozen sea within us. Each page a new blade, cutting deeper. I’m a fan of much of De Botton’s work, but the critique in this essay is that he is not attempting to change the world, just adjust our attitude, our place within it. Whereas, the writer argues,  Zizek is interested in deeper change – which is precisely why he uses so many jokes (including one here about asking a stranger if they had had sex with a dog – which caused me to choke in a lesson I was supervising just now) – to lower our defences, and allow dangerous thoughts in.

Some sensational updates to the post yesterday on the 3D holographic resurrection of Tupac:  it’s not a hologram at all, but a very sophisticated 2D projection. Still an incredible effect, but no R2D2 / Princess Leah show just yet.

However, tucked away at the bottom of a Wall Street Journal article on the subject, which Kevin posted in a comment yesterday, comes the following intriguing statement from the company responsible for the Tupac show:

Mr. Smith said the company has used the same technology to resurrect several late executives.

“We’ve brought past CEOs and things that like that back to life,” Mr. Smith said, without getting more specific, citing non-disclosure agreements.

OK PEOPLE, YOU HEARD IT HEAR FIRST: STEVE JOBS IS STILL RUNNING APPLE…. AS A HOLOGRAM!

I have to say, I’m pretty stunned… I really didn’t know this was yet possible, but there’s a great piece in The Independent today about the holographic resurrection of Tupac Shakur at the recent Coachella festival – using technology developed by the British firm Musion. The footage above – start around 15 seconds in – is not of him live, but him as a 3D holographic projection on stage, with some new words dubbed in. Extraordinary.

It’s clearly a great day for Star Wars fans, as the scene where R2D2 projects a hologram message from Princess Leah to Obi Wan is now a reality… and the Independent piece talks about where the technology could go from here. The Beatles back on stage? Yep. Mariah Carey performing simultaneously in 5 countries? Already happened. Simon Cowell getting Frank Sinatra to perform for his birthday… yep, been done. Jesus Christ…where could this end?!

This has caused me some serious thought, because one of the elements of the book I am writing on piracy concerns the return of music to its traditional roots whereby acts make their money from performances. Making money from recordings is, or was, a temporary window of opportunity, which media piracy has brought radical change to. What I’ve wanted to argue is that live performance cannot be pirated, and so this remains the domain where musicians will be able to make their living – from the unique live experience.

But it seems now that as 3D holographic projection gets better, which it surely only can, then we could potentially see a situation where a live performance is…pirated. Where people gather to watch someone perform live, but in fact are just watching a virtual person, an avatar. And that may mean I need to rethink my position again on the possible invasion of digital piracy into material reality (as I mooted in this post on 3D printing.)

I’m currently writing a lecture about the Turing Test, which reflects – by which I mean, mirrors back on ourselves – on what computers trying to act like humans can tell us about being human. Given 5 minutes with an interlocutor, how would you convince someone that you were human? With great knowledge? Hmm, internet has that covered. With wit, or a slagging match?

As we see more and more machines become more and more human, it’s going to be more and more important that we have a solid (as opposed to hollow-graphic) understanding of who we are. Because surely it’s a hypothetical lack of that self-reflection that would feature in the fictional pre-histories of dystopian cyborg pieces like Bladerunner. We’re not there yet, but we need to consider the path ahead now.

I’ve been reading Brian Christian’s excellent book The Most Human Human over the past week or so – inspired by the very good Radiolab on ‘Talking to Machines.’

One thought from it that’s made me think a lot is the concept of the Japanese word mu.

It comes in a section where Christian is describing the art of conversation – the premise of the book being that he is trying to win the prize for being ‘the most human human’ at the annual Loebner Prize competition where chat-bots and humans are interrogated by judges in the famous ‘Turing Test to see if the chat-bots can fool a majority of judges that they’re human.

One difficulty in English – which is also its great beauty – is the question that has no appropriate answer. The most popularly used example, though rather distasteful, is the question ‘have you stopped beating your wife?’ Answer yes, and it implies you once did… answer no, and, well… you are still doing it.

But the Japanese in their Zen Buddhist tradition have a response in this situation, which is: mu. There is no direct translation of this character, but it can be taken to mean a rejection of the dualistic premise of the question. It represents what might be called an unasking of the question.

And that, it seems to me, is something we need in our common syntax. In politics, in theological investigation, in poetic exploration. Because so many of the propositions that are put before us damn us both ways, and so often the answer I want to give to the options life throws up are… mu. I am unasking that, because the foundations upon which that has been asked are not ones I wish to stand on.

The question these stories continue to raise are about what ‘giving’ should really be about. It seems to be becoming the norm that something needs to be gained in return for a charitable gift: whether that be a block of wood, tax relief, or the entertainment of a celebrity being humiliated in some telethon event. Bono’s ‘Brand RED’ has taken this to a whole new level: rather than give to charity and raise money for causes, we can consume for charity instead.

All of which seems… wrong somehow. Not in the true spirit of the gift, which is, ideally, something invisible, something where the ego gets nothing in return. In ‘Other’ I explore this ideal ‘contentless’ gift, and show how it is almost impossible to achieve… but it is an ideal we ought to aim for – to give not to feel better ourselves, or to reduce our tax, but to make sure the life of the other is improved.

Ended up going to see Orbital last night – some nice throwback tunes in the rather odd, but acoustically brilliant Royal Albert Hall. The gig was good, but as is normal with this sort of ‘live’ electronic stuff, there’s not a lot to look at musically, and with the beats going around my mind starting turning too.

It was a ‘spectacle’, I suppose… there were huge sounds, and (perhaps as a compensation for the limited activity on stage) lots of big visuals too. And it got me thinking about Guy Debord’s thesis of ‘The Society of the Spectacle:‘

Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation: “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.” Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as “the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing.”

The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which “passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity”. “The spectacle is not a collection of images,” Debord writes, “rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”

He wrote this in 1967.

What struck me last night was just how prescient some of this was, especially with the advent of digital social media, and the ubiquity of mobile devices with cameras. As the guy I went with quipped last night as the gig began: ‘so glad I’ve got my phone, I really wanted to experience this through the grainy image of a 3″ LCD screen…’

It just brought a phrase to my mind: we’re not so much in the society of the spectacle, but the society of the spectacles: everything mediated through a lens, through a screen of some kind. ”The spectacle is not a collection of images, rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” That, it seems to me, is a pretty perfect description of what was happening last night, and, in a way, there was something troubling about it because, to quote Debord again, what we had was ”passive identification with the spectacle supplanting genuine activity.”

And yet there was a sense that people wanted more than that. That they genuinely wanted to break through into activity, but the layers upon layers of mediation made that hard to do, especially after so long.

I loved the gig, and had a really great night, but it made me yearn for something more raw. For people with instruments and amps, and nothing else. For craft and meaning, sweat and passion. And no screens. No mobiles. No grainy footage. Just people wanting to be somewhere, not worrying about how they can tell other people what a great time they had…when really they weren’t there at all, but watching from behind a glass.