We are putting forward just one value. Honesty. We strive to be honest about what we do. This means acknowledging our privileges, considering the impact of our decision, and owning the results.

Can an institution within our capitalist society survive if it is honest? Honesty eases the cognitive dissonance and denial that individuals within that institution face. Honesty may reveal weaknesses to the competition. It may also make it more difficult to make decisions internally that make our institution less competitive.

However, capitalist institutions today spend a lot of their resources on PR. The goal of PR is to twist or manufacture the truth, in order to achieve certain objectives. What if PR resources went elsewhere?

Consider Facebook’s values:

1. Be Bold
2. Focus on Impact
3. Move Fast
4. Be Open
5. Build Social Value

These are PR. What would happen if instead facebook publicly acknowledged that its goal was to be profitable, and the best way to do that was to maximize its market share without destroying the planet (their market) in the process? It is not inconceivable that this kind of honesty would provide a competitive advantage. The public is fed up with the cognitive dissonance accelerated and delivered via the 21st century attention economy. Anger toward biased media outlets are one of very frustrations shared by the American right and the American left. Trump won on a platform of open racism, misogyny, and hatred directed at the liberal elite… as opposed to the deep cognitive dissonance offered by Clinton.

In the past, I’ve written about the music industry, and the desire to empower progressive musicians. Can musicians afford to be more honest than other businesses? Musicians sometimes use authenticity (or the perception of authenticity) to market themselves. Musicians are frequently criticized for “selling out.” Musicians are also frequently criticized peddling unfavorable messages. Think of Kanye West, Meghan Trainor, and countless others.

Many years of working with and for musicians has taught me that being a master musician with a powerful message is not enough sustain a career in music. In order to sustain a career in music, musicians also have to be skilled businesspeople — or collaborate with skilled business people. Consider these honest statements from music or music industry professionals that we usually don’t hear:

• I want my voice to be heard by millions of people. I want to be famous.
• I am part of the entertainment industry. My paycheck is dependent on my ability to entertain, and keep entertaining.
• I am marketer of feelings.
• Musical clickbait is a path to economic success. Clickbait is optimized for clicks, not for honesty.
• Art will not save the planet.

So can we exist in a capitalist society as an honest institution for musicians? Maybe. Note that honesty does not imply full disclosure, or even “the full truth.” We can fulfill our personal value of honesty, while simultaneously not disclosing the motivations for every choice. This is a value itself. The honest way to describe it:

• I will not engage with everyone who criticizes me.
• I will not justify every choice that I make.
• Some of my choices are not just.
• Some of my actions are not consistent.

These sound pretty conservative. I do not know if this is a good position to take. I also do not know if this stance would be accepted by the public. However, I believe that most institutions in capitalist society roughly follow this logic internally, and spend a lot of energy concealing the internal reality from the public.

At the beginning I asked:

Can an institution within our capitalist society survive if it is honest?

My hypothesis is “Probably, although honesty may cause unsustainable public backlash.” Perhaps a deeper and more interesting question is:

Can an institution within our capitalist society survive it is honest and just? That is less clear.

Like the movies, popular music is both an influencer and an indicator of public opinion. Artists can use music to apply pressure to a political regime, and to explicitly communicate a feeling to a large group of people. A good example is Jimi Hendrix’ performance of The Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock in 1969, which expressed a complex combination patriotism and protest simultaneously. No words alone could communicate the same message.

It sounds like popular music is an opportunity to influence public opinion, but there is a problem. Playback on contemporary hit radio stations is the largest factor in determining which songs become hits. Record labels have a huge amount of power determining which songs get played on the radio. Songs that pop labels produce are not written by artists. They are written by songwriting teams, and engineered for mass appeal. It is difficult for an independent artists to create music that competes with the record label song writing machines. Childish Gambino is the exception, not the rule. This is where the geniuses in Silicon Valley will propose:

We’ll use machine learning identify the the musical qualities of the hits that Max Martin wrote for the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Pink, Avril Lavigne, Usher, Jessie J, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, and many others. Then we can “disrupt” the business of writing songs, and “democratize” the process of making hits!

This is not a technology that I’ve worked on directly, but it is almost certainly a project that making its way into production at this moment. The problem: How can we insert greater diversity sounds and perspectives into popular music? While pop artist Ke$ha was signed to a label, her producers had commercial success selling her as a sexualized party girl with songs like Tik Tok and Right Round. But Ke$ha didn’t want to that to be her image. She wanted to remake pop music with a message and with her own voice, and this presents challenge. In the words of songwriter and lyricist Bonnie McKee:

“People like hearing songs that sound like something they’ve heard before, that’s reminiscent of their childhood, and of what their parents listened to. I mean, every once in a while something new will happen, like dubstep, where it’s like, ‘This is robot future music!,’ but most people still just want to hear about love and partying.” (Seabrook, J.. The Song Machine, 2017, Chapter 21)

Is it possible to write a song that is entertaining as it is informative — or as popular as it is progressive? In Ke$ha’s newer songs you can hear a tones of the 60’s rock and roll, and they espouse positive and progressive messaging, writing about abuse, depression, and heartbreak, and marriage equality. Despite the backing of Sony owned RCA Records, singles on her new album did not get achieve the commercial success that her earlier songs did.

Her story illustrates a larger picture. Female artists are sexualized and exploited, and the labels and executives profit handsomely. No one said it more simply than artist Sinéad O’Connor in a 2013 open letter to Miley Cyrus after Cyrus’ performance at the American Musical Awards ceremony. Popular music is already produced be a mechanical and formulaic process. As machine learning optimizes pop to capture our collective attention, how artists stay competitive?

Who is positioned to address the the problem? Is it the artists? The songwriters? The producers? Record Labels? A consortium of all of them? No one can do it alone. Stories of sexism in the entertainment industry, and the lack of women is leadership roles,  suggest that women may be best equipped to lead the industry toward solutions. However, we cannot but the burden of making progress on women alone. The fight against the industrial song machine will not be one easily… especially if they are the ones with the resources to tap machine learning for the purposes of crafting the perfect musical hook. The obvious problem with using machine learning to write songs, is the same as the using machine learning to identify people: Inheriting bias, and perpetuating inequality. These are our problems, and machine cannot learn the solutions for us. Norbert Wiener probably said it best in his 1950 book The Human Use of Human Beings:

“Any machine constructed for the purpose of making decisions, if it does not possess the power of learning, will be completely literal-minded. Woe to us if we let it decide our conduct, unless we have previously examined the laws of its action, and know fully that its conduct will be carried out on principles acceptable to us!”

I am naturally introverted. Although I love interacting with people, I like to spend slightly more than half of my time working in a solitary way. I love programming; especially when I get to develop elegant programing solutions to complex problems.

Fortunately, the world is filled with complex problems, so this gives me an unlimited supply of interesting ways to spend my time. But there’s a catch. Like anyone who voluntarily signs up for a “Technology and Social Change” class, I have had to face an inconvenient truth:  Technology does not solve complex problems. Apply technology to a problem, and that problem becomes more complex. I want to believe that I can spend my time solving interesting technical problems, while simultaneously making the world a better place. In reality, it takes engaging with the world and the people in the world to make a positive impact.

I’m not the first introvert to figure this out. For many years, Zuckerberg was convinced that a more “connected” world is also a better world. From the outside, it looks like he is beginning to understand that Facebook has made the world more complicated, and has probably not made the world a better place to live. We all want to believe that solving complex programming challenges can map to solving societal challenges.

A wealth of research in anthropology and psychology suggest that people are not equipped to handle relationships at the scale of the internet. Consider the work of Robin Dunbar, who compared the brains and social patterns in primates, and extrapolated that animals are cognitively limited to maintaining approximately 150 meaningful relationships. Or the writings of economist E.F. Schumacher that convincingly illustrate how large scale institutions  negatively impact our quality of life while also ruining the environment.

It would appear that to make the world a better place we have to look up from our computer screens and engage with the world around us. Can I please just go back to writing code now?

My Story

I’m a 3rd year PhD. in the Opera of the Future Group here at the MIT Media Lab. I’m interested making art and music that takes advantage of the unique capabilities of the internet. The democratization and diversification of media was one of the original utopian promises of the internet. We don’t have to look backwards very far to see the enthusiasm from Wired Magazine in the 90s and the libertarian internet ideals of John Perry Barlow. The reputation of the internet has soured since then. In reality, taste in popular music continues to narrow, and more and more music is distributed through fewer and fewer channels. Is this an inevitability? Is the future of music one where all content comes from Spotify, and success is measured by market share? One where the biggest platform with the most data mined from its users dominates the competition via the “network effect” popularized with the advent of the web 2.0? Surely if I just code the right solution, we can push things toward a diverse world of dynamic music and media? Can I please just go back to writing code now? This is a technical problem that requires a technical solution, right?