LEGIBILITY & CONTROL: SEEING LIKE A STATE: GEN X

MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE EPISODE 40

During Generation X society “moved from what Leslie Fiedler called a 1950s-era ‘cult of the child’ to what Landon Jones called a 1970s-era ‘cult of the adult’. As a Gen Xer I have always been listless, cynical and anti-establishment — characteristics that resonated not only with friends but millions of others around the world. The ‘loadsamoney’ culture was seen as uncool and uncouth by, the likes of us who prefer to travel or just get stoned broaden our minds, favoured jobs in creative industries over the more ‘yuppy’ sectors, etc.

For a good chunk of us what most people listen now isn’t music per se, but a systematic effort at keeping one target demographic wound up long enough to mine all possible data or to show it a bloc of ads. We just could not figure it out why things got this way. In Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott develops the central theme of “legibility”. Here we will apply it to the record industry attempt to make audiences legible, to arrange the public in ways that simplifies the functions of record labels, streaming giants, publishing companies regarding production, manufacture, distribution.

The early record companies were, in many crucial respects, partially blind; they knew little about the public, spending habits, their location, their identity. They needed a better metric, that would allow it to “translate” what they knew into a common standard necessary for a synoptic view making the record buying public more legible — and hence manipulable — from above and from the center.

Suddenly, processes as disparate as the creation of 33 1/3 formats, radio, tv, the standardization of legal discourse, Billboard, Grand ole Opry, Johnny Carson and FM take on a new meaning. In each case, executives took exceptionally complex, illegible, local social practices that exhibited a variety of local and try to assimilate them into an administrative grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored. On the process they’d transform them or reduced them to a convenient, if partly fictional, shorthand. These Corporate fictions transformed the world.

Scott stars the book with a homely beekeeping metaphor. Honey collection, the author says, was a complicated thing in the pre-modern times. Harvesting the honey meant driving the bees away and often destroying the colony. The arrangement of brood chambers and honey cells followed complex patterns that differed from hive to hive-patterns which did not permit smooth extractions. The modern beehive, on the other hand, is designed to solve the problem of the beekeeper. This separates the brood with a device called a “queen excluder.” Which makes it impossible for the queen to lay eggs above a certain amount. In addition, the wax cells are neatly arranged allowing easy extraction of honey, wax, and propolis.

From the point of view of the beekeeper, the modern hive is an organized, “legible” hive that allows the beekeeper to examine the state of the colony and the queen, measure its honey production (by weight), enlarge or contract the size of the hive by standard units, move it to a new location and, above all, ex-tract just enough honey.

Just as it saves a prison hassle and money if all prisoners wear uniforms of the same type, color and length, any concession to diversity is likely to result in a corresponding increase in staff time and budget costs. The one-size-fits-all.

SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT

On May 25, 1991, Billboard began using SoundScan to have a panoptic view of the 200 Overall Albums. After decades of gathering numbers through a flawed honor system in which staff members called all over the U.S. record stores and retail outlets and got the word from the executives about what was being sold over the past week, the industry leader began to use reliable sales reports to determine what was “hot” in popular music.

As defined by Foucault, Bentham’s Panopticon is just one example of an institution built to make its prisoners as legible to those in authority as possible. Foucault extends to monasteries, military units and prisons, hospitals, asylums, schools and factories and we can extend it to corporations, political parties etc, the same panoptic concept of legibility. In each case, the basic principle is to divide the entity-or community-to exclude confusion and to arrange it on the basis of “Each individual has its own position; and each place its person.”

Compared to uniformity, diversity is always more difficult to design, build, and control.

SoundScan started paying a small fee to record stores and other outlets to keep a daily count of the actual products sold every week. A computer program would hold a number of individual files, tapes and CDs based on the specific bar codes that are checked by store registers. SoundScan gathers all the data and then would sell it to a subscription league.

DISCIPLINARY SPACE

Artistic output can be evaluated in individual units in a completely legible way throughout the entire series of individual bodies. Avoid group distributions; break down social arrangements; evaluate confused, large or intermittent pluralities. Disciplinary space appears to be a tactic of anti-desertion, anti-vagabondage, anti-concentration, to eradicate the consequences of imprecise distributions.

Its aim was to establish presences and absences, to know where and how to locate, to establish useful communications, to interrupt others, to be able to monitor the behavior of each one at every moment, to evaluate them, to judge them, to calculate their attributes and merits thereof.

It turned out that people were buying much more punk, hip-hop, pop, R&B and alternative rock albums than was claimed by the old system. The industry’s shift was nearly as fast. Then bands confined to their ponds of music (from Nirvana to Ice Cube to Garth Brooks) were free to float in the mainstream. Nobody knew what to do in the face of songs unexpectedly skyrocketing the chart (compared to the slow climb of the past) and hip-hop and metal albums landing in the top position (both N.W.A and Skid Row sat on top of the Billboard 200 in the SoundScan era’s first month).

Hollywood studios and Fast Food chains teach you to want to not have what they don’t provide

Architecture is designed in such a way as to’ make people docile and knowable,’ to’ permit inner, articulate and thorough command,’ to make visible those who are within it; in more general terms, an architecture that would work to transform individuals: to function on those who are shielded, to hold on to their behavior, to bring to them the effects of power, to make them known to alter them.

Success is a product of success. If an album does well, it will be checked out by people and they will see what the fuss is about. The big record companies started pouring lots of marketing money into acts that they found could succeed in the mainstream. Cue in Metallica’s Black Album sitting among records by Natalie Cole and Michael Bolton.

The practice of discipline presupposes a system that coerces by observation; an apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to see cause power effects, and in which, conversely, the means of coercion make clearly visible those on whom they are applied.

Instead, we see two key elements of the record industry response typified: first, the tendency to reinterpret the objectives so that it called for outcomes that would make it easier for them to deliver, and second, their ability to reinterpret those objectives in line with their corporate interests toward strictly quantitative criteria of performance.

The productivity was judged by numerical results that allowed aggregation and, perhaps more importantly, comparisons. And when officials learned that their future depended on rapidly delivering impressive numbers, they unleashed a cycle of aggressive emulation.

That is followed by a process in which the metis is reversed engineered. Reverse engineering means to take a finished product and break it down to its constituent parts. Usually it’s done to try to figure out what the Artists did in the first place to create the product.

Anyone who makes anything at all usually engages in a bit of reverse engineering at some point.There are differences, however, between reverse engineering a band and doing the same thing to a car. The main difference is that each musical element loses some of its potency when considered apart from the other musical elements with which it partners.

In other words, in a bid to understand why a band is so effective, for example, you’ll isolate parts of the style from everything else, but in so doing lose some of the power.

The best example of SoundScan’s changing musical landscape is Nirvana and the band’s Nevermind blockbuster record. A few months after Billboard released its first SoundScan chart, Nevermind and its subsequent lead single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Interest is building on alternative radio, around the Nirvana tour and within the industry, resulting in respectable sales of albums that are now accurately reported on the Billboard list.

The start of country and hip-hop as mainstream musical forces were seen in the early 1990s. Fans purchased huge numbers of records from Tim McGraw and Snoop Doggy Dog, and SoundScan / Billboard proved to be true. Those two styles have proven remarkably commercially successful decades later, even in a period where millions of fans stopped buying records.

Corporations can afford to expand production by adding extensive inputs and being fairly inefficient in terms of output per input unit. On the other hand, small-scale producers need to be extremely creative in finding ways to make more efficient use of limited resources without exposure to large amounts of capital.

It is big, capital-intensive oligopoly companies that actively suppress competition from smaller, lower-cost, more productive outfits can afford to be inefficient partly because American industry developed throughout most of the 20th century mainly through extensive input addition rather than intensive extraction of more output per input unit.

There’s been a dark aspect to Nirvana’s influence over the past few decades. If everyone who bought one of the 30,000 copies of the Velvet Underground’s debut album started a band, as Brian Eno once claimed, then everyone who bought Nevermind went on to start a shitty nu-metal band. In many ways, the album — which remains one of the best records ever recorded — was also, tragically, sort of a Pandora’s Box for grunt rock. Puddle of Mudd, Limp Bizkit, Creed, Nickelback etc

In fact, contrary to Galbraith, it is often the broad organization’s market power that allows creativity to be suppressed. Through erecting entry barriers against more efficient techniques, the large and inefficient manufacturers, having cartelized a market among themselves, have thus segregated themselves from the competitive ill effects of inefficiency.

With the industry divided into a handful of large producers with the same inefficient methods and the same pathological organizational structures, there is no economic penalty for inefficiency as all are similarly inefficient. The dominant firms can agree to delay adoption of new culture until their existing plant and equipment is worn out.

To take one instance, the major car manufacturers signed an agreement in the late 1950s that no business would announce or implement any breakthrough in anti-pollution exhaust devices without the competition of the others; we exchanged patents and settled on a cost-sharing system for patents.

STREAMING

Music streaming manipulation — artificially boosting stream counts to improve chart positioning, increase market share and royalty payments, or for other non-legitimate purposes — is a real problem. Streaming manipulation devalue or shut out legitimate artists, but also since payments are calculated as a percentage of total plays, any inflated streaming counts reduces the per-stream payouts for everyone.

SoundScan revealed in 2014 that it would integrate streaming on-demand information into the best-selling album weekly list. Under the new system (currently in place), 1,500 music streams are equivalent to one album sale on the Billboard chart on a platform such as Spotify or Beats Music. In addition, , 10 digital track sales (even if they are all the same song) are now equivalent to one album sale.

This leads to Album stuffing by stuffing an album with many, often short, tracks.

• Drakes 2018 album ‘Scorpions’ had 25 tracks.
• In 2017 Chris Brown released a 45 song albums. “Heartbreak On A Full Moon” was certified Gold in less than 10 days even though none of the songs from it made it to the top 40.

You can also do playlist stuffing taking full advantage of the rule that streames songs receive payment after 1 minute is played by stuffing a playlist with short tracks.

• Thunderstorms: Sleep & Mindfulness, produced by Filtr Sony’s playlist brand, has 16,000 followers. This playlist is made up of 330 tracks, all just over a minute long. The songs were produced by a production house presumably paid by Sony and at 1 minute each calibrated to earn maximum revenue.

Fake Streams — This practice uses bots and other methods to rack up large stream counts.

• MyMusicViral is one of many sites that offer 100,000 Spotify plays for under $200. The same number of Soundcloud plays are just $115. Another service offer 100,000 YouTube views for $500.
• For $100 or less you can purchase your own Spotify bot and there more than a dozen free videos on YouTube that teach you how to use it.

Streaming Data Inflation — Reporting inflated streaming numbers. So far the only streamer credibly accused of this is “artist owned” streamer Tidal. Beyoncé’s and Kanye West’s streams on TIDAL were manipulated to the tune of several hundred million false plays… which has generated massive royalty payouts at the expense of other artists.

Authority and submission

The authority-and-submission-based society is a civilization without the means of self-correction. Any cyberneticist recognizes that feedback is lacking from such a one-way channel of communication and can not “intelligently” act.

No one challenges directives from above in a rigid hierarchy, and those at the very top are so disconnected from the actual work situation that they never see what is going on below. Communication is only possible among equals . The master race never abstracts enough data from the us to know what’s happening in the world where society’s real production takes place….

The Army is the epitome of authority-and-submission, and the Army’s control-and-communication network has every weakness that a cyberneticist’s nightmare could conjure up. One-way communication creates opacity from above; two-way communication creates horizontal legibility.

A corporate hierarchy interferes with the decision of what Hayek called “people-on — the-spot,” and with the aggregation of distributed awareness of circumstances. Most artistic jobs involve a fair amount of mētis, and depend on the initiative of musicians to improvise, to apply skills in new ways, in the face of events which are either totally unpredictable or cannot be fully anticipated. In a structured world, rigid hierarchies and rigid rules of work just work. When the world is uncertain and culture is always uncertain, the key to success for those in direct contact with the situation lies in empowerment and independence.

No matter how intelligent managers are as individuals, a bureaucratic hierarchy makes their intelligence less usable. Their very nature hierarchies still separate those at the top from the reality of what is happening below and force them to work in imaginary worlds where all their intellect is useless. The only solution is to give discretion to those in direct contact with the situation.

DISCRETION AND PAPERWORK

The problem with the relationship of authority in a hierarchy is that those in control can not afford to grant autonomy to those in direct contact with the situation, given the conflict of interest.

Systematic incompetence arises, inevitably, from a situation in which a bureaucratic hierarchy must create some measure to assess the competence or of an artist whose real work they know nothing about and does not understand what a good job is, they will be forced to rely on subjective metrics.

The paperwork burden exists to give a bureaucracy that is out of touch with the actual production process an illusion of transparency and control. If we are only able to design the perfect form, we can eventually know what is happening.

Executives are required to look into a system that is inherently invisible to them as they are not directly involved in it. They are forced to perform the impossible task of creating reliable metrics to measure actions based on self-reporting.

The need for updated documentation is based on the assumption that enforcement must be reviewed as those being monitored have a fundamental conflict of interest with those enforcing the legislation and can therefore not be trusted.

And since the artist has a fundamental conflict of interest with the superior and does not internalize the advantages of applying his intelligence, it can not be trusted to use his/her intelligence for the organization’s benefit. Any discretion may be abused in such a zero-sum relationship.

control trumps efficiency

When given a choice between efficiency and control — between a larger pie and a larger slice of a smaller pie — The Record Industry usually prefers to maximize the size of their slice rather than the size of the pie. Capitalist profit requires not only efficiency but the combination of efficiency and control. Without control the capitalist cannot realize that profit.

When artisanal production was more efficient, it was difficult for the capitalist to appropriate the profits of a dispersed craft population. The possibilities for evasion and resistance are numerous, and the cost of procuring accurate, annual data was high, if not prohibitive.

Taylorism’s goal was to abolish hidden knowledge and the rents associated with it. Taylorism was a way in which “Artistic labor as a mechanical system… could be decomposed into energy transfers, movement, and work physics.” This “simplification of labor into isolated mechanical efficiency problems” facilitated “scientific control of the whole labor process.

For the record company executive, the newly invented assembly lines of culture permitted the use of unskilled artist and control over not only the pace of production but the whole labor process.

Not only this new form of Taylorism disempower artists; it also inspired executives. It was a subspecies of what Scott calls the “high modernist ideology. Most priorities can be deduced from the parameters of legibility, redistribution, and centralization. To the extent that the organizational structures can be easily controlled and directed from the center

In any case, mētis and dispersed knowledge can never be completely Taylorized out of the creative process. Attempts by those in authority to reduce flexibility by reducing tasks to uniform routines and predicting all potential contingencies in the rules can only lead to a serious deterioration of performance,

In other words, all socially engineered formal order structures are simply subsystems of a larger system on which they are essentially dependent, not to mention parasitic. The subsystem is dependent on a number of processes that it can not build or manage on its own. The more streamlined, slimmer and simpler the formal order, the less robust and the more susceptible to disturbance

The willingness of the Artist to cooperate consummately rather than perfunctorily, to contribute their dispersed knowledge, is arguably the source of a great deal of a firm’s equity, and accounts for the gap between its equity value and book value (i.e., the market value of its physical assets). Yet, as we shall see below, management treats labor and its skills as a direct cost under the conventions of Sloanist accounting, rather than as a capital asset that costs money to replace, and does its best to periodically decimate its human capital.

That kind of deliberate deskilling Artistic at the expense of quality, in order to shift resources upward from cultural production to CEO salaries and bonuses, could only occur in an industry where competition in quality of has been suppressed by cartelization. When the market is controlled by a handful of giant oligopoly firms with the same dysfunctional culture, firms can afford shoddy, half-assed quality.

Performance” itself is a meaningless metric. With Sloan’s “overhead absorption” as with Soviet central planning, the scheme of internal transfer pricing based on product usage and the transfer of costs to the consumer by cost-plus markup ensures that any use of inputs that can be incorporated into the “price” of finished goods — as such — is an output.

The dominant players in an oligopoly industry can get away with all these types of irrationality-suppressing new ideas, disqualifying their own A&R and replacing mētis with techne, because the big boys share the same organizational culture.

NON-STATE SPACE VS INDEPENDENT

The nonstate space is a direct inversion of the state space: it is “state repelling,” i.e. “it represents a cultural setting singularly unfavorable to manpower- and grain-amassing strategies of states. States “will hesitate to incorporate such areas, inasmuch as the return, in manpower and output, is likely to be less than the administrative and military costs of appropriating it.”

Non-state spaces benefit from different forms of “friction” which raise the transaction costs of appropriating labor and resources and expanding the scope of the compliance arm of the state to those areas. I propose that the concepts of’ state space’ and’ non-state space,’ when separated from Scott’s immediate spatial sense and extended by comparison to realms of the music industry, may be useful to us in the Western societies where there are no geographical spaces beyond the control of the corporation in all appearances.

METAPHORICAL NON STATE

Historically, when spatial distance and inaccessibility were not controlled, constructing a non-state space meant selecting living technologies based on the need to be less legible. The deliberate choice of a more “primitive” lifestyle for the sake of independence, and the conscious choice of less productive cultivation methods and a smaller surplus.

In order to put this in Western economic terms, transforming innovations now offer the ability to remove the need for this trade-off between independence and living standards. We want to make ourselves as ungovernable as the Zomia people, without the hardship of living in the mountains and swamps and surviving mostly on root crops.

Recent technological advances have greatly increased the scope of the non-state spaces that Scott defines to non-spatial, non-territorial forms. Citizens can get rid of state space by embracing technology and organizational strategies that make them illegible to the government, without any real space movement.

New micromanufacturing techniques offer unparalleled potential in the field of physical production to prevent enforcement of industrial patents and other common barriers to entry into the country. The greater the distance between an area and the middle, the higher the value intensity or value-to-weight ratio a unit of production must be worth appropriating and moving to the capital.

The further away from the center of a city, the greater its economy’s share will cost more than it’s worth exploiting. It is somewhat similar to the principle of EROEI in the energy field; if the purpose of the state is to obtain a surplus on behalf of a privileged class, the “governance tax” reduces the amount of surplus generated by compliance effort output.

Anything that decreases the system’s “EROEI,” the size of the net surplus that can be collected by the corporation, would cause it to shrink to a smaller operation balance.

The more expensive enforcement becomes, and the smaller the profits the state (and its corporate partners, such as enforcing electronic copyright laws) can receive per unit enforcement effort, the stronger the state capitalist or corporate structure is, and the more areas of life it retreats from as incapable of governing costs.

CONCLUSION: NETWORKS: Eric Raymond in The Cathedral and the Bazaar,

Genuine principles of the free market provide tremendous potential for development as tools against neoliberalism and corporate rule. The issue of research’s time horizon is directly relevant even to those for whom the Holy Grail is the maximization of yield. Unless they are exclusively interested in immediate yields, regardless of the consequences, they must focus on the issue of sustainability or Hicksian income.

Therefore, perhaps the most critical practical divide is not between those who would model policy with cultural and social goals in mind (such as maintaining the small band, the environment, or diversity) and those who would like to maximize output and benefit, but rather between short-sighted producers and long-sighted producers. Finite player and infinite games. After all, focus

resilience and sustainability of diversity.

What economists consider Hicksian income is income that does not destroy variable endowments that will enable the income stream to continue indefinitely into the future.

Power, or authority, creates a fundamental conflict of interest in which one should have an interest in rendering itself as opaque as possible. Power, whether in a corporate hierarchy or a society ruled by a state, is a way of externalizing costs on others and appropriating advantages for oneself.

Record Companies and Streaming Giants have an interest in maximizing their rent even at the expense of making culture less competitive, just as a corporation’s management has an interest in maximizing its wages and benefits at the expense of overall productivity.

In both cases, those in a position of authority seek to organize the organization and society as a whole in order to maximize its legibility and the total net amount of derived resources-even at the expense of suboptimal output.

Authority distorts the information flow and the desire to produce as efficiently as possible in every situation. The existence of people in power who operate financially in a zero-sum arrangement with those from whom rents are derived, creates an incentive for those below to reduce their legibility to those above.

This creates an incentive to organize to maximize rent extractability, even at less efficient production costs. In short authority, far from being the remedy for the war of all against all, is its cause. And in so doing, it destroys rationality, knowledge, and cooperation.

The more areas of economic life that are rendered illegible to the corporation through technology, the less the differential in standard of living between state and nonstate areas. This is mirrored by the agility, resilience and flexibility of networks.