Humans Are the Signal, but Tech Treats Us as the Noise

When we autotune reality to digital perfection, what matters about human beings gets lost

It’s hard for human beings to oppose the dominance of digital technology when we are becoming so highly digital ourselves. Whether by fetish or mere habit, we begin acting in ways that accommodate or imitate our machines, remaking our world and, eventually, ourselves in their image.

For instance, the manufacturers of autonomous vehicles are encouraging cities to make their streets and signals more compatible with the navigation and sensor systems of the robotic cars, changing our environment to accommodate the needs of the robots with which we will be sharing the streets, sidewalks, and, presumably, air space. This isn’t so bad in itself, but if history is any guide, remaking the physical world to accommodate a new technology — such as the automobile — favors the companies selling the technologies more than the people living alongside them. Highways divided neighborhoods, particularly when they reinforced racial and class divisions. Those who couldn’t adapt to crosswalks and traffic signals were labeled “jaywalkers” and ridiculed in advertisements.

Today, we are in the process of making our physical, social, and media environments more friendly to digital operants — often ignoring the impact on real people. New studies on the health effects of cellphones and Wi-Fi are ignored or buried as fast as they can be produced, and our schools and municipalities become more heavily and irreversibly invested in wireless networks, smart boards, and other computer-based learning.

As if to celebrate their commitment to digital values, some school principals encourage teachers to post on social media throughout the day. Education becomes fodder for the feeds and subordinate to its promotion on the net. Lessons become valued for their ability to be photographed and posted. And teachers model for students the addictive behaviors these platforms are designed to induce.

Even the aesthetics of a culture eventually adapt to those suggested by its dominant technologies. Digital technology may have reduced music to MP3 algorithms that convey only the idea of a sound instead of its essence, but the digital environment has also reduced performers to autotuned commodities. The market has exercised such control over music since the advent of recording studios and their appropriately named “control rooms,” but today we see that dynamic amplified by new technology. The producer behind the glass is in charge of the mixing board and the performers — who are relegated to digitally separated tracks. “Isolated” from one another, to use music recording terminology, the performers lose the camaraderie and rapport of live group performance and instead sync themselves to a computer-generated metronomic beat. If they fall off the rhythm, even infinitesimally, there’s an autocorrect feature in the recording technology to force their performance back to inhuman perfection.

It sounds “better” — or at least more accurate to the pitch and rhythm. But what is the perfect note and pace, really? The one mathematically closest to the predetermined frequency? Any decent violinist will tell you that an E-flat and a D-sharp may look like the same note but are actually subtly different depending on the key of the song and the notes around it. Different musicians might even interpret the note differently depending on its context, or slide up to the note—intentionally emphasizing the effort required—or slide down after hitting it, as if diminishing in conviction.

Musicians also vary ever so slightly from the exact rhythm of a song to create many effects, or even just as a true expression of their approach to music and life. Ringo Starr, the Beatles drummer, famously lagged ever so slightly behind the beat—as if to express a laziness or “falling down the stairs” quality of playing. Ringo’s delay is human and so close to the “normal” beat of the song that it would be immediately corrected by production technologies biased toward making humans sound just as “good” as computers.

Our mechanomorphic culture is embracing a digital aesthetic that irons out anything uniquely human. Any quirks of voice or intonation—gravel, wobble, air, or slide—are reinterpreted as imperfections. The ideal is perfect fidelity—not to the human organisms actually performing the music, but to the mathematics used to denote the score. We forget that those notations are an approximation of music, a compromised way of documenting an embodied expression of human emotion and artistry as a system of symbols so that it can be re-created by someone else.

The figure and ground are reversed when the human performance is seen as an impediment to the pure data rather than a way of connecting people on both perceived and unconscious levels. The noises that emanate from the human beings or their instruments are treated not as expressions of autonomy but samples to be manipulated: raw material for digital processing or labor to be extracted and repackaged.

Human interpretation no longer matters, and any artifacts of our participation are erased. We may as well be machines.

This is section 42 of the new book Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff, which is being serialized weekly on Medium. Read the previous section here and the following section here.