Hua Hsu, on Spotify’s “strategies for soundtracking the entirety of our days and nights”:

As a former Spotify employee once observed, the platform’s only real competitor is silence.…

Just as we train Spotify’s algorithm with our likes and dislikes, the platform seems to be training us to be round-the-clock listeners.

I don’t think too much emphasis could be put on those words: they are training us.

As Hsu points out, this sort of “practice” is on top of the quite common criticism of Spotify’s treatment of the streamed artists themselves. But the deal is just too good — and by now, too utterly normal — to refuse, so most people don’t bother to take issue with any of this, any more than they bother to take issue with the platform’s refusal to pay any royalties to artists who aren’t popular enough while the billionaire C.E.O. (ahem) cashes out $340 million in stock.

But all of that is an old song (especially for readers of Ted Gioia). Hsu goes on to talk about Liz Pelly’s book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. Pelly, says Hsu, is “aggressively moralistic,” (which, despite the phrasing, I can only read as a compliment in this context), and her book, which covers the history of streaming, from Napster to the present, is primarily about what is, for Pelly, an even greater concern than the musicians: what all this has done, and what all this is doing, to the listeners.

For us, the all-day-anytime-anywhere streamers, it’s hard to say we’re even capable of loving the music we hear, in any meaningful sense of the word “love,” since these new sounds, says Hsu, “float largely free of context or lineage.”

Instead of a connection to history, we’re offered recommendations based on what other people listened to next. I’ve never heard so much music online as I have over the past few years yet felt so disconnected from its sources.[…]

Before, it was impossible to know how many times you listened to your favorite song; what mattered was that you’d chosen to buy it and bring it into your home. What we have now is a perverse, frictionless vision for art, where a song stays on repeat not because it’s our new favorite but because it’s just pleasant enough to ignore.

I admit that when people talk about the “attention economy,” I automatically grant a certain amount of truth to that description: I have generally assumed that these companies are, in fact, vying for our attention. But this can only be true if we have no idea at all what attention actually is.

There is a famous line from Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace where she says that the cure for our faults is true attention, and that true attention, being so different from a tightening pride or will, is the same thing as prayer. But what she also says in that wonderful little notebook of hers is that attention “presupposes faith and love.”

In another, more famous line in an April 1942 letter to Jöe Bousquet, Weil says, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

And in another letter to Bousquet a month later, Weil says that from the age of fourteen she had been sustained by a faith “that no true effort of attention is ever wasted, even though it may never have any visible result.”

So it begs the question: in what possible way are these companies actually getting or even wanting our attention?

I think the answer has to be that they don’t want to have anything to do with attention. What they want is less attention in the room — any room, anywhere, for anyone. What they are doing is making attention less of a possibility at all.

(Pelly does, according to Hsu, come back around to what all this does to the artist. By increasingly curtailing their music to the Spotify method and market, they essentially become Spotify employees. That is, if they’re actually getting paid for their music at all.)

I know the Spotify criticism is an often repeated story, but this was a good reminder for someone who, like Hsu, sometimes borrows the “family account” and has been especially lazy about it lately. (And, in my case, annoys the shit out of his wife by flooding the queue with Chris Stapleton and Luke Combs.)

The real question sits randomly and hardly even acknowledged in the middle of Hsu’s piece: “I wonder if any of Pelly’s arguments will inspire readers to cancel their subscriptions.”

Doutbful, of course. But more imporantly, will it (or this meager post, for that matter) inspire anyone (myself included, for that matter) to find a better way to support, attend to, and enjoy the music they love?

One can certainly hope.

So, with any luck, for 2025, it’s gonna be Bandcamp, CDs, 98.9 WCLZ, and that greatest of all Spotify competitors: silence.

Weil again, to Bousquet:

The moment stands still. The whole of space is filled, even though sounds can be heard, with a dense silence which is not an absence of sound but is a positive object of sensation; it is the secret word, the word of Love who holds us in his arms from the beginning.

And my challenge to you if you’re reading this: Think of an artist who you enjoy who you have no recent memory of directly supporting, and — today, right now — support them.

I kicked things off with Bandcamp this year by preordering Jason Isbell’s “Foxes in the Snow.”

Happy listening!

David Frum:

Trump swore to uphold the Constitution in January 2017. He violated that oath in January 2021. Now, in January 2025, he will swear it again. The ritual survives. Its meaning has been lost.

Chad Holley’s Shield the Joyous is a beautiful story of boyhood in all its over- and under-confidence. “How these things crowd in!” the narrator, Michael Haley, parenthetically notes as he recalls another memory.

That nearly says it all.

Being a boy myself who grew up in the 80s and 90s, so much of it was deeply relatable. From the jambox cassette player — both the “let it be so” soft-open version and the “boxy” one the that “sprang open like a mantrap”; to the Honda Big Red three-wheeler, which I can only assume from the descriptions is exactly the one I spent the 90s bombing around the Sidney, Maine farmland on; to the Episcopalian-Presbyterian divide — “We were not merely Presbyterian, but of the unabashedly Calvinist stripe, so I was not raised to believe in good people”; to the casual appearance of .410s and .22s — respectively, the first gun I ever fired, in a pasture across from the house, and, a thousand shells and 25 years later, the last gun I ever fired (hopefully forever), at a gun range for a friend’s birthday; and so much more — this was a torrent and a treasure of memory to read. There were many wonderful smiles and chuckles reading it.

I have mentioned before (in a post on Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual) that I think often of this quote from Julian Barnes, on the front-loaded nature of childhood:

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when that moment came, our lives—and time itself—would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.

True as that may be, there is a much more positive vision than the one found in Barnes. As I said in that post mentioned above, it is out of such unknowable, uncontrollable, chaotic childhood sludge that come all the tainted goodness and glory and light worthy of the name “life.”

I think the emphasis for Holley is on plain goodness. The goodness that, even with all the pain and tragedy and death life carries with it, a healthy memory — whether of the past 30 years or of the past 30 seconds — can both find and inspire… and perhaps even create.

Michael Haley may not, as he half-jokingly puts it, have been raised to believe in good people. But he has this to say about the father of the only Episcopalian family he knew growing up, which I think says “it” perfectly:

But good people, I would have to say, are the most compelling glimpse I’ve had of Goodness. And whenever in my life I have chanced to meet or so much as recall him, Mr. Peterson has offered to guide.

I have dwelt on the man’s good cheer. Equally evident, however, was what I think of as his honesty. There was something in the way he entered a crowd, the way he addressed people, the way he looked at you: he just seemed un-subject to the fear that makes others of us ignore things, like people and their pain. About his manner in this there was an unmistakable hint of choice. Perhaps even of formality. Or, better, form. But certainly nothing prim or prepared or, least of all, rigid. Rather the opposite: he seemed to have achieved in his bearing, by his choice, a sustained demonstration of openness, a continual and un-resented relinquishment.[…]

In him it seemed to answer all the oppressive strangeness and beauty of this life in a gentle and knowing spirit of paradox. In him it seemed to say, Yes, existence is indeed a flipping miracle, and if you care to see aught below the surface you must not swoon or rant or panic, but dial it back a touch, young man, and risk the restraint to settle in, deep enough, long enough, to observe the endless and exquisite ramification—from surface to bottom and back again—and even to glimpse, if you should be thus blessed, the true scope and nature of what is so miraculously on offer: what we, crushed by our wonder and our longing and our inability to summon the Name of Names, have denominated Love.

Leszek Kolakowski:

To conceive of the ‘self’ as an ontologically autonomous entity that is made actual (or becomes a person) through communication with the realm of good and evil also implies that the self is located in a historically continuous community and is aware, even if only dimly, of this belonging. In other words, a community, in order to be real, must include past and even hypothetical future generations, and to live in a spiritual space in which the past is actual. Respect for tombs and attempts to communicate with ancestral spirits are natural expressions of our awareness that this spiritual space is real. And here, again, the link between the reality of the self and our feeling of belonging to a historically defined community is confirmed by the way the two have declined together in our civilization. Our respect for tombs and for the bodies of the dead, our awareness of living in a human city that stretches back to the past and beyond the present to future generations, all fade away pari passu with the collapse of the reality of the self. The more the historical community is perceived as unreal, the less ‘I’ am real myself.

David Dark:

The prophetic task is to dramatize (with words, gestures, drawings, jokes, actions & available means) the moral unseriousness we’re otherwise compelled to accept as normal. I don’t think anybody’s a prophet all day long, but I think anyone anywhere can take up the prophetic task in big and small ways at anytime.

Callum Robinson, on the look of a shocked customer who, holding the price tag of a hand-crafted table, “fixed me with an expression of such disbelief, such towering contempt, that it takes my breath away”:

What I want to say is this: forget for a moment the weeks it took to handcraft this fine solid elm table, forget the years of experience brought to bear by the maker, the thousands of hours of training and practice, the costly mistakes, the electricity, insurance and overheads, the ream of arborists who brought down the tree, the sawyer who milled and dried the boards, the man in front of you, rooted to the spot, who painstakingly selected each one before handing over many hundreds of pounds for the privilege, and think on this—this table might last a hundred years, it might last four hundred. Your children’s children might still be sitting around it when you are but a memory. A vaguely amphibian headshot gathering dust on the mantel. All this and more I want to say, but of course I don’t. I probably couldn’t. My jaw is clenched so tightly that it might as well be wired shut.

When Robinson adds that it may last four hundred years, I get shivers down my spine.

But don’t miss that word “privilege” tucked in there. 

Don’t get me wrong; the worker is worthy of his wages, as Robinson makes clear. But from Substack to IKEA and all other things simultaneously monetized and cheapened — where is this pure pleasure, this privilege simply in making? 

Noah Smith:

…the world is created anew each generation. We still call China by the same name, we still draw it the same on a map, but essentially all of the people who remember the Long March, or the Rape of Nanking, or the Battle of Shanghai are dead and gone. The hard-won wisdom that they received as inadequate compensation for suffering through those terrible events has vanished into the entropy of history, and their descendants have only war movies and books and half-remembered tales to give them thin, shadowed glimpses. 

And so the new people who are now “China” are able to believe that war is a glorious thing instead of a tragic one. They are able to imagine that by coloring Taiwan a different color on a map, their army will redress the wrongs of history, bring dignity to their race, spread the bounties of communist rule, fulfill a nation’s manifest destiny, or whatever other nonsense they tell themselves. They imagine themselves either insulated from the consequences of that violence, or purified and ennobled by their efforts to support it.

Jason Peters:

My disposition in the old astrological sense of that word is to be, if not indifferent, uninterested. 

But not disinterested. My prejudice for the local is on full display. The local is where influence of the non-planetary and non-astral sort is still possible, as many of the contributors here suggest.

I do not mean to say that there is no national stage or that the drama enacted on it has no principal parts. We know perhaps too well that there is such a stage and such actors on it, saying their lines either well or poorly. And the Leviathanic theater that we have is what it is: the work of our own hands, a wooden horse bearing our ruin that we ourselves have pushed and pulled and heaved into our own city. […]

We need not search high and low for proof. This is simply a matter of scale and of the lessons that both scale and place have to teach us, if only we were their worthy pupils. I see no shortcut here, no way around this fact. Taking the crowded frenetic bypass means only that we will never see the center, which, for want of being seen and known, cannot hold.…

So here, then, is another lesson in restraint: to the extent that we cannot refuse and turn resolutely away from the abstract means of communication that so tempt the loose atomistic individuals that Robert Nisbet said we have become, to that extent we will cut ourselves off from an available apprenticeship in civility and citizenship. […]

Now it is no part of my program to legislate against the abstract means. That would be to assume that law can accomplish what only grace can effect. What I would have are people, large numbers of them, who, understanding the dangers of abstraction, willingly turn away from it and refuse its technologies. I would have them start with the comment box and all the various forms of anti-social media on offer. And here I will defend the Miltonic position: we are sufficient to stand though free to fall. However it all played out beneath that Tree of Knowledge, one thing is certain: exercising your freedom by saying “no thank you,” especially to a glozing serpent, can make a big difference. Perhaps all that’s at stake is our civic life and the health of the Republic, which suffers sorely from our lack of restraint and from the abstract forms of communication singing their siren songs.

Peter Hooton:

Bonhoeffer thus sets out to describe what Floyd calls “a theology of consciousness” which reflects the Reformation understanding of the cor curvum in se as the beginning of human sinfulness—the principal cause of our turning away from God and each other. What is needed to make room for revelation is a theological epistemology, or philosophy of knowledge, that places the object of knowledge, whether divine or human, safely beyond the controlling reach of the knower—a way of thinking which, as Floyd describes it, gives life to transcendental philosophy’s own necessarily flawed endeavors “to think critically rather than systematically, its attempts to articulate a genuine . . . dialectics of Otherness.”

In Act and Being, Bonhoeffer seeks to expound a “genuine transcendentalism” and its correlate, a “genuine ontology,” with reference to Kant’s distinction between the transcendental unity of apperception (our self-conscious ordering of the various elements of experience) and the Ding-an-sich, the thing-in-itself (which lies always outside or beyond our experience). Floyd believes a genuine transcendental philosophy and a genuine ontology to be possible for Bonhoeffer only when a relationship is maintained between the act of thinking “and something transcendent to thought—ontologically distinct from the thinking subject—neither of which ‘swallows up’ the other.” This requires a dialectical form of thinking that is able to sustain “both thought—understood to be always ‘in reference to’ but not totally able to grasp reality in its entirety—and the ontological resistance of authentic otherness itself—both act and being.” It must be able to accommodate both the transcendental act of faith and the ontological being of revelation. The only alternative is systematic and totalizing thinking (“idealism,” for Bonhoeffer) which is of no value to theology because it apprehends “neither the true act of thinking-within-limits (the goal of genuine transcendental philosophy) nor the nature of the being of what-is-thought, yet remains beyond-thought—something transcendent (the goal of genuine ontology).”

Bonhoeffer argues that a “genuine ontology” requires an object of knowledge—a genuine Other—that “challenges and limits” the I; that resists being drawn into the I as a contingent object of cognition. Indeed, “the object of knowledge must so stand over against the I that it is free from becoming known.” It does not depend on the I, whose being and existing it precedes in every respect. Knowledge is suspended in “a being-already-known.”

This, as Floyd says, is why the concept of revelation is so important for Bonhoeffer—“it names that situation of openness, where reality is always and only to be understood ‘in reference to’ the thinking subject, whose process of thought is ontologically ‘suspended’ in being that it has not created.” It demands the recognition that human existence is always already a “being in.” The reality of revelation is the reality of our being already in Christ, where life plays out in manifold “acts of existence.” We have our being in Christ, in whom “alone is unity and wholeness of life,” and can speak, in this context, of a genuine ontology and a genuine transcendentalism only if we define “being in” in such a way that human knowing, “encountering itself in that which is,” is able simply to accept the being of existing things without seeking to press them into its service.

---

The Terrace

De la vaporisation et la centralisation du Moi. Tout est là.
            —Baudelaire


We ate with steeps of sky about our shoulders,
High up a mountainside,
On a terrace like a raft roving
Seas of view,

The tablecloth was green, and blurred away
Toward verdure far and wide,
And all the country came to be
Our table too.

We drank in tilted glasses of rosé,
From tinted peaks of snow,
Tasting the frothy mist, and freshest
Fathoms of air.

Women were washing linens in a stream
Deep down below,
The sound of water over their knuckles,
A sauce rare.

Imminent towns whose weatherbeaten walls
Looked like the finest cheese
Bowled us enormous melons from their
Tolling towers.

Mixt into all the day we heard the spice
Of many tangy bees
Eddying through the miles-deep
Salad of flowers.

When we were done, we had our hunger still;
We dipped our cups in light;
We caught the fine-spun shade of clouds
In spoon and plate;

Drunk with imagined breathing, we inhaled
The dancing smell of height;
We fished for the bark of a dog, the squeak
Of a pasture gate.

But for all our benedictions and our gay
Readily said graces,
The evening stole our provender and
Left us there,

And darkness filled the specious space, and fell
Betwixt our silent faces,
Pressing against our eyes its absent
Fathomless stare.

Out in the dark we felt the real mountains
Hulking in proper might,
And we felt the edge of the black wind’s
Regardless cleave,

And we knew we had eaten not the manna of heaven
But our own reflected light,
And we were the only part of the night that we
Couldn’t believe.

— Richard Wilbur

(That line from Baudelaire: “On the vaporization and centralization of the Self. Everything is there.”)

The turn and finish in this poem just knocks the wind out of me.

It’s worth quoting something Bonhoeffer added in one of the passages Hooton references above: “Knowledge cannot have recourse to it as something available at one’s convenience, but as that in the presence of which it must suspend itself ever anew in knowledge.”