Everything I Was Worried About Then, I Am More Worried About Now

A 2021 Footnote to Ways of Hearing

“Keeping our attention — or at least, keeping us engaged inside their program — is at the moment the goal of some of the most powerful corporations in the world.

“Online, it’s becoming more and more difficult to escape the influence of those corporations, and their algorithms that shape the subset of information we each see. They are replacing the freedom and chaos of the internet at large, with the control and predictability of their programs.

“But subverting that system is easy offline. It can be as easy as walking into a bookstore.”

(Ways of Hearing, Episode 5 / p. 105)

When I recorded the podcast series Ways of Hearing in 2017 (the transcript was then published as a book in 2019), it was easy to walk into a bookstore, or record store, or go to a gig, or meet with friends, or employ any of the other analog short circuits to digital life that gave me hope at the time. Not so much in 2021. The pandemic has forced us ever more online – we are now only deeper in the clutches of the corpora…