Read the previous sections of Modern Rituals Vol. I: The Dance Music Reformation - The Introduction here and Part I, Social Media and Social Tensions, here.
Each article is accompanied by original abstract paintings, also by Whitney Wei. All essays are available, read aloud, in audio format.
History reveals to us the network of causes and effects that have shaped the world we live in, and many of the beliefs that we unquestioningly hold. For example, the dominance of science as our default mode of inquiry came from the Scientific Revolution. Post-Reformation, many people were in conflict about interpretations of scripture. This prevailing subjective insecurity gave rise to the idea of objective security, namely acquiring knowledge through empirical observation and logical reasoning. Three hundred years later, these have become the irrevocable tools with which we have dismantled and restructured the world.
These ideological inventions change our state of consciousness in all encompassing ways. Our experience of being human has been scraped of old superstitions, but along with it, a sense of wonder and otherworldly meaning. If the feeling of transcendence, which contributes to life’s essential richness, cannot be proven in scientific terms, it is, therefore, not “real.” This doctrine has become so naturalised over the generations that people forget it was once a construction. Media theorist Neil Postman articulated this shift in the term scientism or the widely accepted belief “that faith in science can serve as a comprehensive belief system that gives meaning to life, as well as a sense of well-being, morality, and even immortality.” The current narrative of technological growth at all costs springs from scientism.
Social media, another totalising invention, must have profound effects on our collective consciousness by the same token. The real danger here is not the use of social media itself per se, but the algorithmic or content logic that pervades daily life. We spend so much of our time on these platforms that, even when we exit out, we pilot our lives through its distortions. People aren’t just using Instagram, they are turning into the living embodiment of Instagram, even offline. As we’ve already reached a critical mass of people in its capture, how is this then changing the dance music microcosm?
Dance floor consciousness and what I deem content consciousness are inherently incompatible. The former demands presence. The best nights require revellers to focus on the length of the musical journey. In turn, participants must dissolve their selfhood in order to attain synchronicity with the collective. Dance floors feel sacred as a form of liberation technology because they allow the individual to be part of something greater than themselves.
This, of course, is entirely at odds with content consciousness that fragments one’s attention between first-hand experience, the conceptual mediation of that experience, and its inevitable presentation to others. Engaging in the depth of a long form experience is more difficult than ever if one’s mind is constantly unsettled, scrolling and scanning for the next source of dopaminergic stimulation. Content consciousness also reinforces the agony of ceaseless self-surveillance for the individual, preventing them from connecting with their authentic response to the music.
Heightened social comparison isn’t relegated only to the apps. It carries into every day spaces where judgement and division constructs invisible barricades between an individual and their peers. The default cognitive mode of self-objectification and performance never ends because the more frequently someone spends on these platforms, they’re essentially training their minds into this perpetual operating state.
Engagement with all facets of life then becomes superficial, of looking the part and extracting its photogenic elements for cultural cachet, yet having none of the character, embodiment, and even self restraint that is absolutely vital to its fulfilment. Those things, unfortunately, don’t have the same aesthetic command, and its development cannot be documented and shared in quite the same way—which is to say, for many, it is worthless. Of course, no one engages with what were once apps for photo sharing or posting dance challenges with this intention. This cognitive mode is the byproduct of engineered platform manipulation that insidiously permeates one’s experience of reality.
Historically, technology tends to have a gradual and then totalising effect. Think about our regulated and mechanistic concept of time, for example. Benedictine monks in the 12th century invented clocks in order to synchronise their prayer schedules, only to unknowingly lay the groundwork for timekeeping that was appropriated by merchants of commercial enterprise. Now when we think of time, we’ve assimilated to think of it in terms of scarcity and industry, of being locked into its narrow constraints, and it is near impossible to access a world with alternative measures.
From the perspective of an artist, with social media, there is also an inevitable degradation of craft. The pressure to continuously self-market—turning oneself into a consumable commodity—and the immediacy of engagement metrics takes an artist away from the delayed gratification of deeper work such as digging or production. What’s more, social media heavily trains the eyes as opposed to the ears. Mark Ernestus once told me in an interview that vision accounts for about 80 per cent of all sensory input, whereas hearing contributes about 10 per cent.
Considering this, we can deduce that the more hours we put into, unknowingly, to train one faculty, the less we exercise the other. A divestment in concentrated listening signals its devaluation. Over time, this translates to superficial music selection and production. The consequences of content consciousness are visible in electronic music through the flattened aestheticization of rave culture and the rise of the Instagram DJ. Neither is really about the music itself, but rather its conspicuous lifestyle. It’s about the 50,000 EUR LED light display rather than the dark room with a top notch sound system.
Social media is also fuelled by mimetic desire—the “like” button as case in point. No longer do people cultivate their own differentiated tastes and styles in private, which is confusing and often time-consuming work. Emerging artists are now able to look at optimised models of success and marketable beauty, ready-made identities all around to reverse engineer, leading to cultural tension as individuals compete for the same objectives. Those objectives, of course, are also dictated by platform capitalism. A brief scroll through Instagram reveals a glorified shopping platform, where influencers, magazines, brands, or an overlapping combination of three, peddle consumerism as an elliptical goal.
Gratuitous displays of material status or even its postured simulation strains against the original ethics of underground dance music culture. Many of electronic music’s founders created the music as an emancipatory force against their social and economic marginalisation. Many of the first venues of electronic music were abandoned factories or empty warehouses that reclaimed and reappropriated fringe spaces from capitalism.
There are trade offs everywhere. The greater the chase for constant quantified validation, the more the individual is willing to forgo experimentation. The constant practice of self-scrutiny and thus self-cherishing, atrophies one’s abilities to empathise with and respond accordingly to a crowd. Music transforms from a sacred practice into a content opportunity.
Essentially, all the crucial trademarks of an excellent DJ or producer are being systemically stripped away by the nature of the platforms we’ve become supplicant to. Once the older generation of ravers pass away, will the original values of electronic music pass with them? There is an intrinsic incompatibility here that we all sense, but haven’t been able to properly articulate. We’re witnessing an algorithmic seizure of human consciousness that makes profound forms of collective experience structurally impossible to uphold.
Attention isn’t merely an apparatus for productivity. It is truly one’s greatest source of sovereignty and resistance. British philosopher Iain McGilchrist argues that attention is a moral act that shapes reality. The act of focusing on something gives it importance, enlarging its presence in our lives until it becomes the dominant worldview, as “what a thing is depends on who is attending to it, and in what way.” With an increasing number of individuals who attend to electronic music culture through algorithmic logic, so it shall be, creating the culture in its own narcissistic image, anaesthetised by the artifice of engagement, and destroying its unquantifiable ethics in the process.