Slaves To The Algorithm: How Facebook Is Throttling Underground Culture.
▻http://thequietus.com/articles/23958-facebook-artist-social-media-rrose-hunni-d-jaws
We turn to the art in times of political strife - it helps us to navigate, and alleviate, our troubles. So what happens when one of the causes of that political strife is absorbing more and more of our arts and culture? Facebook has been affecting our political landscape for some time, and of course it’s affecting our art too - how we create it, how we discover it, and who can survive financially as an artist. Recently, we’ve also witnessed a number of Silicon Valley’s own disown the technologies they are responsible for. Facebook co-founder Sean Parker, former tech exec Justin Rosenstein (the engineer credited with the Facebook “like”), former Google employee Tristan Harris, and even one of Facebook’s earliest investors have all moved to publicly critique the ways in which Facebook and adjacent technologies shape our lives. Facebook has been denounced for manipulating users and for profiting from users essentially working for free. Vivek Murthy, past U.S. Surgeon General, said that using Facebook “sometimes feels like using heroin”. Smartphone ubiquity has come at a high cognitive cost, with the current generation of adolescents reporting deteriorating mental health.
I spoke to a number of artists about what they think of Facebook, whether they use it, and how they use it. Of the artists I spoke to, only a couple aren’t on Facebook at all. All of them had a variety of issues with the platform and, of course, a number of different ways to respond to them.
German composer Antye Greie-Ripatti, or AGF, speaks passionately about the internet - unsurprising for an artist who engages with technology as she does. Her 2002 debut album HEAD SLASH BAUCH played with translating HTML and software handbooks into poetry and pop. She had an ‘artist’s page’ set up without her consent some years ago, and hasn’t used Facebook for her work since. Most of her criticisms of Facebook stem from the lack of user agency and individual privacy, but she also laments the homogenising force of the platform: “I have my own website and I really liked exploring my own ways of communicating online. For example, I have a poem newsletter and people can subscribe to my poems. A few times a year, I them out to everybody, and that is my own way of communicating - to make something social, but not in a huge, marketing way.”