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T Bone Burnett: “The war of art and ‘surveillance capitalism’ — think of this as a prayer that we become reunited with ourselves.”
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Published: Apr 04, 2019
Category:
Philosophy
I quote this all the time: “Art alone endures. The bust outlasts the throne.” I used to hope it’s true. Now I pray it is. Politicians who are wholly owned subsidiaries of business are, literally, killing the planet. And the Internet I once loved is, increasingly, a sewer. At SXSW, on March 19, 2019, T Bone Burnett addressed one part of those disasters: the horror that Google and Facebook have become — and the bigger horror they have in mind of us.
Who is T Bone Burnett? A musician and a producer — and one of the ten smartest people in music. He produced the Grammy-winning soundtrack of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and the soundtracks of “Cold Mountain,” “Walk the Line” and “Crazy Heart,” and more alt-country records than I can count.
His speech is terrific, but long. I’ve excerpted it here. For the complete text, click here.
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I am going to begin with a quote from Marshall McLuhan from his 1962 book, The Gutenberg Galaxy:
“Instead of tending toward a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside.”
I would like to come to you today with a message of unity and love and peace, and I will try to get there by the end, but I have to begin by stating a fact that must be becoming obvious to most people by now — the fact that we are in a battle, a battle for the survival of our species, and our enemy, is within.
Three weeks ago in a landmark report on disinformation and fake news, the British parliament said that Facebook and other big tech companies “should be subject to a compulsory code of ethics to tackle … the abuse of users’ data and the bullying of smaller firms.” The report says, “Companies like Facebook should not be allowed to behave like ‘digital gangsters’ in the online world, considering themselves to be ahead of and beyond the law.”
The Guardian wrote that this is the first “comprehensive attempt of a major legislative body to peer into the … economy of data manipulation and voter influence.”
Damian Collins, chair of the parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee said, “The guiding principle of the ‘move fast and break things’ culture [is] that it is better to apologize than ask permission. We need a radical shift in the balance of power between the platforms and the people.”
In The New Yorker’s February 25, 2019 report titled “Private Mossad for Hire,” Uzi Shaya, a former senior Israeli intelligence officer, said, “Social media allows you to reach virtually anyone and to play with their minds. You can do whatever you want. You can be whoever you want. It’s a place where wars are fought, elections are won, and terror is promoted. There are no regulations. It is a no man’s land.”
Marshall McLuhan began his work as a follower of the French Catholic idealist philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard believed that the electronic universe was an extension of our nervous systems and would knit us together into a godhead, which he called “the Omega Point”. McLuhan, also a Catholic, started there, but by the end of his life, he believed that the electronic universe was a “blatant manifestation of the Antichrist.” Satan, he said, “is a very great electric engineer.”
The Internet has failed.
Here is a quote from Tim Berners-Lee, who drew the original diagram for the world wide web on a napkin, and who now has Dr. Frankenstein’s remorse.
“We demonstrated that the Web had failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done, and failed in many places. [The Web] has ended up producing—with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform—a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human.”
As the Internet pioneer Ethan Zuckerman of MIT recently wrote, “It’s obvious now that what we did was a fiasco, so let me remind you that what we wanted to do was something brave and noble.” What they wanted to do was to create a communication system that was decentralized and cooperative. One of the early networks that Stewart Brand and Ken Kesey built was called the Whole Earth Lectronic Link. That’s how utopian their aspirations were. But today there is a growing understanding that the internet has morphed into an insidious surveillance and propaganda machine.
Berners-Lee has said he is “devastated” by what his creation has become, and he is working to “re-decentralize” the web with a new project he calls Solid. I sincerely wish him the best of luck, but from where I stand, we would do well to scrap this first internet project- we should break up these advertising platform monopolies, and we should start from scratch to build an electronic communications system founded on hard and fast ethics rather than utopian fantasies.
(Thomas More coined the word Utopia from two Greek words — eutopia, which meant a good place and outopia, which meant no place at all.)
By now, it is clear that what was begun as a mission to connect and unite mankind has mutated into a pernicious distortion machine that has disconnected mankind and put us at each other’s throats, and in doing so has destroyed and is destroying institutions and knowledge that have taken centuries to develop.
As my friend Roger McNamee says, at this point it is all the rest of us against the 130,000 or so employees of Facebook and Google, whose objective it is to hybridize us with machines. Ray Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering, predicts that humans will be hybrids by the year 2030. Their goal is to automate us.
I undertake the pursuit of the solutions to these problems with optimism, because I believe in the power of music, paintings, theater, books, and movies- the power of art- to change the world. As the writer Toni Morrison observed, “The history of art, whether it’s in music or written or what have you, has always been bloody, because dictators and people in office and people who want to control and deceive know exactly the people who will disturb their plans. And those people are artists. They’re the ones that sing the truth. And that is something that society has got to protect.” I know that brave and passionate art is worth protecting and is more than just click bait for global advertising monopolies.
A relevant poem by Czeslaw Milosz, “You Who Wronged.”
You who wronged a simple man
Bursting into laughter at the crime,
And kept a pack of fools around you
To mix good and evil, to blur the line,
Though everyone bowed down before you,
Saying virtue and wisdom lit your way,
Striking gold medals in your honor,
Glad to have survived another day,
Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.
You can kill one, but another is born.
The words are written down, the deed, the date.
And you’d have done better with a winter dawn,
A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.
I undertake the pursuit of the solutions to these problems with optimism, because I believe in the power of music, paintings, theater, books, and movies — the power of art — to change the world. As the writer Toni Morrison observed, “The history of art, whether it’s in music or written or what have you, has always been bloody, because dictators and people in office and people who want to control and deceive know exactly the people who will disturb their plans. And those people are artists. They’re the ones that sing the truth. And that is something that society has got to protect.”
I know that brave and passionate art is worth protecting and is more than just click bait for global advertising monopolies.
Art is not information. Art is above information. Art changes everything.
The goal of art is to create conscience.
Art is not efficient.
Efficiency is not an attribute of the good.
Efficiency can be efficient for good or evil, but as it has worked out in practice, efficiency would seem to be a prime attribute of evil.
Without conscience, efficiency has the potential for apocalyptic evil.
These surveillance capitalists do not have the ethical foundation to be able to order society as they have presumed to do.
They lack conscience.
I will stay with the artists. Artists contain the accumulated knowledge of generations. Artists create conscience. The artists are our only hope.
You are equal to the task.
