immanence

I’ve written before of the ways that contemporary media, with their recording/archiving and modeling/projection functions, enable a simultaneous opening up of the past and the future, even as they leave us dependent on them so that our own capacities for memory and prognostication fail when our media fail. As we continue to build a universal image machine, we become more vulnerable to the technological pandemic to come.

There’s another dimension to this, which is that surveillance, once it becomes decentralized as a matter of corporate functioning (every company wants to know what its clients and competitors are doing and wanting), takes on its own agency and slithers out of the control of its users.

Here’s a case in point.

I received a copyright infringement claim from YouTube yesterday (from CD distributor CD Baby) on a piece of my music that was originally released in limited-edition cassette in 1991 and later on Musicworks 64: Sound Ecology 3 (a magazine issue/CD release) in 1996. Given the nature of the music (drone-based electronica), I thought at first that this was a joke — someone who mass-distributes superfluous copyright claims in the hopes that one or two might stick. But then I looked up the piece of music I’m supposed to have copied.

It turns out that the claimant’s client, a Japanese guitarist and experimental composer, sampled a full minute of my piece “Resurrected Fields” on his 1999 recording “Brain Wash” (it’s at 3’45” to 4’45” of Fragment3, which you can listen to here). It’s taken 22 years for this unacknowledged use of my music to be found out… by a false copyright infringement claim. In other words, because his record label, Paleblue, is distributed by CD Baby, and because CD Baby employs some sort of surveillance software that scours and analyzes audio on YouTube to see if it matches audio whose copyright it controls (software I had no idea existed), this musician’s use of my music was caught out by the artificial intelligence system thinking that I was using his music.

The rub is in the fact that their system knew his music, but not mine. It took his as the standard to be compared against. The result is that history has been written backwards by the copyright tracing technology.

What this reflects, for me, is a kind of “edge effect” whereby a technology that is in the business of surveilling and policing a growing global database — in this case, YouTube’s audio files — mistakes its own archive for reality. It fails to recognize that what’s beyond it — in this case, any music it hasn’t catalogued yet, or that hasn’t made it to YouTube yet — shares the reality in which it claims to operate. In its effort to ensure that this musician’s music is not being illegitimately copied by someone else, it incriminated him for stealing my music (sampling over a minute of it without acknowledgment) eighteen years ago.

My point is not to criticize anyone for sampling and reusing other people’s work. I’ve done it myself, though I believe it should be done respectfully, with acknowledgment. (I also happen to be a fan of the musique concrete style collage genre that this musician works in.) It’s also not to ask for reparations. Neither my music nor his use of it have made either of us much money, as far as I can tell; and anyway, I’m glad that he liked it. For that, I consider him a friend.

My point, rather, is about the perverse effects of surveillance in the service of capital in a world where surveillance technologies are decentralized, with parts of the world being digitized, archived, databased, and patrolled at different rates than others. In this situation, with the universal image machine still being built (by multiple hands serving multiple masters), it’s inevitable that your own dogs might come back to bite you. But please keep them off my lawn.

(That’s to CD Baby. And nothing against dogs; it’s their owners that make them an annoyance.)