Mine, Mine, All Mine

1. No Longer Mine 

When I write, I like to listen to music. Most of my first book was written to a series of CDs I purchased from Amazon and ripped to my Mac – early turn of the century electronica, for the most part – Prodigy, Moby, Fat Boy Slim and the like. But as I write these words, I’m listening to an unfamiliar playlist on Spotify called “Brain Food” – and while the general vibe is close to what I want, something is missing.  

This got me thinking about my music collection – or, more accurately, the fact that I no longer have a music collection. I once considered myself pretty connected to a certain part of the scene – I’d buy 10 or 15 albums a month, and I’d spend hours each day consuming and considering new music, usually while working or writing. Digital technologies were actually pretty useful in this pursuit – when Spotify launched in 2008, I used it to curate playlists of the music I had purchased – it’s hard to believe, but back then, you could organize Spotify around your collection, tracks that lived on your computer, tracks that, for all intents and purposes, you owned. Spotify was like having a magic digital assistant that made my ownership that much more powerful. 

But as the digital revolution progressed, I’d purchase a new Mac every few years, and somewhere along the way my music got disassociated with proof of my ownership. It was all lost to poor DRM implementation, my own user error, or some combination of the two. I noticed my ownership rights retreating as my devices – and the platforms driving them – proliferated and gained power. And while I could have taken extraordinary measures to assert those rights, the truth was, it was inconvenient. I didn’t want to do the work. Now, two decades later, I no longer own a music collection. 

I also don’t own a book collection, at least, not one I’d consider complete or accessible in the way my bookshelf was twenty years ago. More than half of “my” books live on either Kindle, a platform I’ve stopped using, or Amazon’s Audible, a platform that, as far as I can tell, doesn’t offer any sense of ownership at all. Since the pandemic I’ve fallen into the habit of reading paper books at night, and listening to books while walking. But  Audible books don’t include the right to download a text file that you can keep forever. So while I’ve heard a book, I don’t own it in any sense of the word. I’ve merely paid a convenience fee to Amazon to have someone read it to me. I’m not sure that even counts as reading, to be honest.  

As for photographs and videos – I’ve tens of thousands of them scattered across the digital detritus of platforms like WordPress, Flickr, Facebook, Apple Photos, WhatsApp, Google Photos, and countless formats across countless computers, phones, hard drives, text threads, and SD cards. It’s the same for audio files: I’ve got hundreds of interviews, late night jam sessions, impassioned white board sessions, and lord knows what else, but over the years I’ve probably used a dozen different audio recording apps on top of at least two dozen phones and other devices. 

And then there’s the interstitial fascia of email, personal files, and the rest of the contents of the devices I’ve supposedly been backing up over the past three-plus decades. I’m currently researching a book covering the history of the Internet, and it’d be incredibly useful to have access to the emails and files I interacted with while we were building Wired, The Industry Standard, or Federated Media. But nope, those companies were built in the Before Times, as in, Before Google Workspace. I’m not sure what email service we used at Wired in 1992, but I’m pretty sure I couldn’t resurrect it in any case. Just like my ripped CDs, my first digital photos, and my recordings, those early digital footprints have been erased by the tides of platform change. And now, my future is highly dependent on those same platforms – Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, Microsoft. If they change course, or – perish the thought – if they fail, well, what then?

2. I Want To Mine

This raises much larger issues about how – or whether – we are intelligently architecting the possibilities that define our interaction with knowledge. Have we learned anything from this rocky three-decade transition from analog to digital, or are we simply repeating the same mistakes? 

Back when the Internet was young and I was a starry-eyed tech optimist, I thought the digital revolution was going to radically redefine my interaction with knowledge in a magical and broadly positive fashion. As the Internet took root, I was lucky enough to run editorial at Wired. It was our job to think about the impact of the digital transformation on … everything. We took as an article of faith that the transition to digital meant everything that mattered would become data – all our communications, all our interactions with the economy, all the content we read, watched, or listened to. Everything could be saved forever, parameterized in countless ways, shared non-rivalrously, searched endlessly. In short, everything could be mined – mined for insights, for value, for untold usefulness. Once it all was folded into a great digital loam, that rich earth would bear an abundance of insights, questions, answers, new opportunities, and even new kinds of services and experiences.

But it did not happen that way. Yes, everything did turn to data. But we outsourced the mining work to platforms, and unfortunately, everything turned to shit. Ezra Klein wrote a pretty good summary of the problem in The New York Times – though he focused on email, his conclusions ring true for all digitized media. “Too much ease carries a cost,” he writes. “I was lulled into the belief that I didn’t have to make decisions. Now my digital life is a series of monuments to the cost of combining maximal storage with minimal intention.”

Let’s return to my original frustration – the music now filling my ears. It’s an algorithmically curated playlist chosen by a global corporation motivated by profit. As long as the company continues to grow, as long as enough of us continue to pay our monthly subscription and shrug off the inevitable price increases, the company is not that motivated to change things. Spotify has only three viable competitors: Google (via YouTube), Apple and Amazon. Each of them are also platforms, governed by similar economic motivations. None of them are incentivized to change the model of how they interact with their customers. 

I don’t have to do much to get my music feed – I indicate that I’m looking for electronica, I choose a never-ending playlist, and that’s that. The entire service is optimized to eliminate friction. Asking questions, making choices, futzing around, using third party apps – that’s friction.  To paraphrase Klein, they wish to “lull me into not making decisions.”

But…I can’t help but think that there’s a better way. Wouldn’t it be cool, I sometimes idle, if I could make just one playlist called “All of It” – a playlist that has everything I’ve ever loved, ever owned, ever experienced. A playlist that holds what I lost – all those albums I purchased, all those mix tapes I ripped from the airwaves. And all the bands I’ve gone to see live – if ever there was a thumbs up that mattered, it’s paying money to see the music in person, right? 

It wouldn’t be hard to make this playlist. Spotify – or a third party, if Spotify ever allowed such an ecosystem to develop – could build an app that asked me to list albums I used to own. It could then match similar albums and ask if I owned those as well. Man, how fun would it be to rebuild that library? Then it could ask about bands I’ve seen. The Romantics at the Ambassador in 1982? Yes, I was there! My Morning Jacket in the rain at Bonnaroo in 2008? Changed my life! If I did have such an asset, I could start to interact with it – ask it questions, give it input. Absolutely, I’d tell it, play the occasional ELO tune, but please don’t assume I want an ELO-inspired feed just because I binged “A New World Record” in a fit of nostalgia the night before last. 

But I’d not make an “All of It” playlist just to listen to my old stuff. We all get tired of hearing the same tunes over and over. Music wants to be constantly refreshed with the new. How might I recreate the intentional action reflected by the purchase of music? This is where technology – and in particular, the promise of generative AI – could prove truly useful. 

Back in the early days of Amazon, I’d use a website called MusicPlasma to discover new artists. This was an open web service that used an openly accessible feed of Amazon’s purchase data to recommend new artists based on your current preferences. If I was digging the first Gorillaz album, MusicPlasma would guide me towards Alt-J, MGMT, or Cage The Elephant. I used the service as a front end to purchasing new work – on Amazon, of course, where MusicPlasma had an affiliate deal. There was a very strong incentive for all parties – myself, the music industry, and Amazon – to support the “Web 1.0” ecosystem that produced MusicPlasma. It drove music sales, after all. 

But when no one buys music anymore – that open web model falls apart. Happily, a version of MusicPlasma is still around (it’s now called LivePlasma). But it no longer drives purchases – why would it, when nearly all of us lease feeds of music from platforms? LivePlasma now uses YouTube viewership APIs – Amazon long ago deprecated its purchase data feeds. I’d be surprised if Google doesn’t cut off its own data feeds at some point soon. After all, if a service fails to drive the core profit model, that service tends to die. 

3. Mine Own AI 

Alas, there will never be another innovation like MusicPlasma. So how might the kind of innovation it represented flourish in what has become a data-starved desert?

If you’ve been reading my last year or two of posts, you can guess: it’s those magical genies of generative AI. A properly-trained AI agent could watch my Spotify usage, review my past Amazon purchase behavior, start asking me questions about bands I’ve seen and like, and pretty quickly it could take the place of MusicPlasma. It could start building me new playlists of music that would be far superior to Spotify’s auto-generated muck. Apply this same concept to Netflix, to e-commerce, and – why not – to your email and your contact database. The idea scales!

But I don’t think we want those magical genies to work for Amazon, or Spotify, or gods preserve us, Facebook. I want those genies to work for me, and only me. I want that AI to be mine, the way music used to be mine. That will only be possible if we architect society’s relationship to data in a radically different fashion from today’s platform-driven models. 

As I wrote a year ago, today’s commercial internet encourages businesses and services to create silos of our data – silos that can not and will not connect to each other. Because of business model  constraints (most big services are “free,” revenues come from advertising and/or data sales), it’s next to impossible for anyone – from an individual consumer to a Fortune 50 enterprise – to create lasting value across all those silos.

I’ve written about this problem over and over and over again, so I won’t bore you with a lengthy recap. This post is already too long. But let me at least reiterate this point: If we outsource the magic promised by generative AI to the large platforms, we’ll get exactly the same model we currently have. And that model won’t drive innovation in how we interact with the world. It’ll just give us more of the same old shit.  

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