WRITING Commodified Disruption from Facebook to Soundcloud Rap Jan 25, 2020 Drew Wilimitis Jan 25, 2020 Drew Wilimitis Until 2014, Facebook embraced the motto “Move fast and break things”, succinctly capturing Silicon Valley’s endorsement of technological disruption. While not as concise and explicitly stated, it’s not hard to find a similar punk ethos behind the phenomenon of SoundCloud rap, with its collective appearance and attitude that is aggressively countercultural, often to the point of self-caricature, and with its lyrical content that wavers between genuine emotional catharsis and performed pre-teen apathy, often to the point of self-indulgence. If you juxtapose the image of Mark Zuckerburg appearing strangely robotic before the US Senate with some combination of rapper ‘Lil’-x with haircolor-y and a face tattoo of object-z, the comparison starts to fade. However, with a few more adjacent examples, a pattern starts to emerge. Let’s also throw in Banksy, the anonymous street artist whose work is often provocative and critical of consumer culture, and let’s also consider the popularization of mindfulness meditation and its adoption by the productivity and lifehack movement. A theme starts to become clear: these are all examples of social and cultural phenomena that profess to be fundamentally “disruptive”. In one way or another, these movements are driven by an attempt to challenge the essential nature of the modern capitalist structure through which they have come to exist. However, in each instance, the attempted resistance has been co-opted by this very capitalist system in a way that ultimately reinforces this existing socio-economic framework. I argue that this ability to subsume and instrumentalize systemic resistance demonstrates an essential feature of capitalism?-?it evolves and solidifies in response to opposition; it is antifragile. Along with every second-year undergraduate at a liberal arts college, I too can attest that, when read critically, Marx’s critique of capitalism can really change your life, man. Capitalism is one of those few topics that manages to almost entirely elude productive discourse and definitional clarity, despite the enormously disproportionate need to talk about it. It feels almost like writing about God in the that the danger of the conversation going wildly off the rails looms large with each passing mention of such a loaded word. For the sake of this analysis, I will focus primarily on two related aspects of capitalism: abstract labor and the commodity form. Believe it or not, there once was a time when human beings did not spend the great majority of their time and energy trading their labor power in order to earn a wage. There once was a time when life after young adolescence was not almost entirely oriented around getting a “job”, nor did “job” even exist as a conceptual or economic category. There was a time when you didn’t have to try and decide between 29 different flavors of Pop-Tarts. In saying this, I’m not making a normative claim about capitalism and I’m not advocating for anything in particular. I’m merely trying to make the point that capitalism is historically specific, but the fundamental structures of modern society are often mistakenly conceived to be innate, historical universals. Marx expressed the radical social and economic transformation of capitalism in part as a transition in the primary form of human labor from concrete labor to abstract labor. Concrete labor is specific human activity that is directed towards producing objects with particular use values. Imagine an early, pre-industrial, pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer spending a nice afternoon sharpening rocks and collecting wood to make some arrows. This individual is expending energy to produce something for a particular use, say to go hunting for mammoths. The product of this labor is seen more as an end in itself; the arrows are valuable primarily in the sense that they will be instrumentally useful to its creator, not in the sense that they will be exchanged for monetary value in an open market. The hunter-gatherer has a personal relationship to the products of this concrete labor, and the specific peculiarities and characteristics of these arrows and the efforts that went into their production are essential qualities of these labor products. Now imagine a factory worker as part of an assembly line manufacturing dishwashers. This laborer is producing goods in order for them to be sold for money in a commercial economy, and hence this commodity is valuable primarily in the sense that it has an exchange value. The producers of these goods have an almost entirely impersonal relationship to the products of their labor. They typically have no intention of using these goods, and the specific characteristics of the laborer and his efforts are not defining characteristics of the commodity (how would you describe your relationship to the manufacturer(s) of your dishwasher, assuming it wasn’t actually designed by robotics?). Nearly everything about the relationship to labor has become abstract because of the way in which the products of labor are now valued primarily as commodities to be exchanged in a marketplace, wherein the specific products of almost all the incredibly diverse forms of human labor, from dishwashers to arrows, from music to machine learning software, are now transformed and homogenized into an abstract, quantitative value. It is not the case that Marx claims all labor has become abstract, or that the products of labor no longer have use value. Modern commodities like our Pop-Tarts have use value?-?they provide a delicious, well-balanced breakfast, or as Kellogg claims, they are “the filling, frosting, and sprinkles that dazzle our taste buds and make us dance with delight”. Also, some pre-capitalist goods were traded and so they have some exchange value as well. Throughout history, many forms of human labor involved some combination of concrete labor and abstract labor, and therefore produced some combination of use value and exchange value. However, only in modern industrial capitalism do we start to see abstract labor becoming fully realized to the extent that it becomes the primary form of labor and begins to re-structure our relationship to work, society, and the natural environment, as well as our own identities. Consequently, the primacy of abstract labor produces commodities whose value is derived primarily by exchange value, as they are globally traded and mass manufactured. Lil Pump celebrating 1 million Instagram followers with a Xanax cake [2] We can now turn to an analysis of some of these modern social phenomena along these two fundamental axes of the capitalist paradigm. In an article titled “The Rowdy World of Rap’s Underground” , John Caramanica described SoundCloud rap as “a swelling subgenre that takes its name from its creators’ preferred streaming service?-?which in the last year has become the most vital and disruptive new movement in hip-hop thanks to rebellious music, volcanic energy and occasional acts of malevolence”. SoundCloud rappers like Lil Peep, XXXTentacion, Tekashi69, and Lil Pump have all been incredibly talented at using streaming platforms and social media to increase their popularity, often embracing the cartoonish images, memes, and over-exaggerations they become in a kind of self-aware, absurdist comedy. As evidence, look no further than Lil Peep’s face tattoo of the word “crybaby”, the self-fulfilling prophecy that led Tekashi69 to rise and fall like the classic gangster anti-hero he pretended to be, or Smokepurpp’s remark that “When people laugh at us, we laugh with them; we know it’s funny”. [1] Social media and online streaming platforms have enabled these artists to distribute their “disruptive” music and viral memes as digital commodities produced through an increasingly abstract, distributed network of alienated labor. The nod to the computing “cloud” in SoundCloud’s name is indicative of the way it enables mass reproduction and de-localization of digital music. When SoundCloud rap is appropriately viewed as a commodity produced through human labor, its distribution and reproduction throughout the cloud give rise to an interesting positive feedback loop. The commodity form in modern capitalism leads to an increased rate of commercial exchange, eventually giving rise to this digital mass reproduction. When art is mass-reproduced, it tends to become further removed from its original creator, resulting in a decline of authenticity?-?the origin of art becomes more obscured and meaningless in the presence of mass-reproduced copies?-?and popular culture becomes more homogenized as it’s seized by the industrial apparatus and manufactured as a commodity. In response, there is a growing demand for art that breaks free from this inauthentic cultural system by attempting to shock the consumer, or by not taking itself seriously and using irony to send a message that the artist is aware of this system in which they exist. The crucial insight of Marxist analysis here is that since society has reified the exchange value of commodities, we place value on this art, and therefore have a demand for it, primarily as a commodity to be bought and sold. Therefore, the consumer demand for SoundCloud rap is met with even more mass commodity production by a system of abstract labor, and this propels the cycle forward again. The original sentiment of protest and resistance becomes adulterated in this process of commodification, and ultimately becomes fodder for the engine of capitalism. A common misunderstanding of Marxist theory is that it vilifies the wealthy elite and describes economics as a system of personal domination, where the working class is oppressed by the capitalists. In analyzing the way that capitalism co-opts the seeming disruptive influence of SoundCloud rap, it is the underlying system of capitalism itself that drives the commodification and mass reproduction of art, not any particular greedy capitalists nor the unrefined tastes of Generation Z. Capitalism has this ability to distill disruptive sentiment down to this mechanical process of commodification, and it doesn’t just survive cultural resistance; it becomes more entrenched as a result. The system of commercial exchange increases exponentially over time, and together with the related exponential expansion of technology, industry evolves and propagates as this densely connected cortical tissue, molding consciousness as it winds and folds through society. With a market cap of some $500 billion, it’s hard to imagine Facebook has really broken anything. It’s undeniable that Facebook and other social media companies have existed well within modern capitalism, specifically with regard to the mode of production that relies on abstract labor and commodity exchange. In some ways, these tech companies have even extended the primacy of exchange value and fully abstracted the nature of social and economic relations. Facebook exists to seize and control human attention, optimizing for the time we spend on the site in order to sell our attention to advertisers. However, it is not that Facebook or any particular tech company is acting maliciously. Rather, it is the underlying capitalist system itself that coerces Facebook to produce and exchange commodities. By structuring the website towards this end, exchange value is induced on human attention. Facebook not only seeks to draw us in by exploiting features of the pre-existing human mind; it also produces a certain human subjectivity, one which is cultivated and mined for wholesale exchange value on the market. This subjectivity is engineered through sophisticated algorithms that leverage the full extent of computing power and available data to both modify and generate user behavior, and to shape beliefs in order to construct reality around them. This economic modality?-?where we are actually the products and advertisers are the consumers?-?comes to abstract away the very notion of subjectivity by inverting the subject-object relationship in this way and equating the two through generalized exchange value. The commodity is no longer merely an object of the material world, nor is it merely an embodiment of the abstract, generalized value of these objects; the commodity is now the human subject. Marx also pointed to a contradiction in capitalism that is becoming increasingly relevant. As technology expands, automation displaces human labor as capitalism provides this system that seeks to lower production costs, allowing the capitalist elite to extract surplus value. Since the working class does not have any ownership or control of the means of production, they will not survive without wage labor. At this point, society becomes susceptible to proletariat revolt or the prospect that capitalism will be truly disrupted by sufficiently advanced technology that renders human labor obsolete. Thus, capitalism “sows the seeds of its own disruption”. It might also take something altogether different to subvert the capitalist paradigm. Perhaps technological innovation and even advanced Artificial Intelligence will be persistently contained within a capitalist schema that grows in parallel, always one step ahead, not recoiling from threats but continuing to meet them with an eager response. Maybe something like AI or catastrophic wealth inequality would just be a glitch, a glitch that produces this brief moment where the system reveals itself, and we’re able to step outside this frame we’re operating in, returning to something more innately human and transcendent. Maybe the seeds of disruption lie therein, from which we grow collectively aware of this system, regaining some measure of agency and self-determinism, dictating a global future that aligns with a more genuine human nature.