"Offering us as a cure the very thing that caused the illness" - Slavoj Zizek
In January of this year, Spotify removed the music of Neil Young from its platform after he threatened to pull it himself in protest against misinformation spread on the podcast The Joe Rogan Experience. Joni Mitchell soon followed suit. Our beloved singers had committed heroic acts and our class of media pundits appealed to Spotify to further play censor. But in focusing on veracity and Culture War sub-battles, the discourse around Joe Rogan’s podcast and the issue of its “platforming” has failed to address the real issues: the exploitative threat of Spotify itself and the void of power and authority that haunts the political centre.
Joe Rogan, in all his banality and enthusiasm for dubious popular science, reminds us that we have the right to be wrong. In a moment defined by hysteria over “post-truth politics,” amplified by appeals to scientific authority during the Coronavirus pandemic, being wrong represents one of the great transgressions. Rogan invites diverse voices to his online platform and allows them to be wrong. Fine. These voices fill mostly dull, overlong interviews – fodder for the unquenchably curious, but also information (as in our newspapers, television screens, billboards) that we should be able to consume, discern and discard as we please and without mediation. As with these more traditional outlets of information, however, the conduit through which Rogan broadcasts his information and misinformation – Spotify – is not a public forum. That is to say, the traditional newspaper is subject to significant editorial and ideological scrutiny; Spotify is subject to market forces (and of course, naturally, the market's own concomitant editorialising and ideologies). As such, the spread of information deemed wrong outside of this traditional domain now calls to task our postmodern providers of order and ephemera (and the order of ephemera): no editors to issue retractions, no politicians to issue statements, but technocratic wizzes to fill an ideological void.
The trouble with the discourse around The Joe Rogan Experience begins with Rogan’s own position vis-à-vis these more ‘traditional’ outlets of information. Fundamentally, Rogan disturbs the apparently otherwise-stable ontological categories of internal/external that define the liberal orthodoxy: those of science/scepticism, truth/mistruth, ordered/disordered, couth/uncouth… not to mention capitalism/communism, technocracy/populism, authoritarianism/libertarianism. In this disruption, Rogan plays the role of blood, sweat or nail clippings (among others) in the genre of horror: as being “me/not me, inside/outside, and living/dead” and therefore horrific in being ambiguous or interstitial (blood is a life-giver when inside, but horrific when out; a long finger nail is a sign of good health, but disturbing, dirty, when clipped and disembodied). So, Rogan is both internal and external to this orthodoxy: he has large financial backing, is widely popular, is simultaneously both-sides and neither of the left nor right, primarily hosting uninteresting middle-of-the-road guests; he also, in being both-sides and despite (or because of) his mainstream status, gives platform to the fringe of accepted or established thought (vaccine sceptics, pseudo-scientists, and so on). His views and his guests – and, even further, Spotify as both absolutely quotidian but also still relatively new and, in its mechanisms, surreptitious – disturb and disambiguate our recognised categories. As such, the man with a $100,000,000 Spotify licensing deal and 11,000,000 listeners per episode becomes strangely external, vaguely symbolic of the peripheries, of the “Culture Wars” and – by extension – the right-wing.
Of course, Rogan isn’t really on the right, and only some of his guests are of this persuasion. Rather, by being a centrist – that is, being of both the right and the left, but mostly neither – Rogan holds a mirror to his critics: if it is he who “platforms” that which is external to liberal-centrism, it is liberal-centrism itself that facilitates, feeds, funds it. Our Silicon Valley machines of desire (Spotify, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) present one such case of this. Established by “near-divine figures,” these companies promise what Stuart Jeffries calls a “profane liberation theology,” one that proposes to free the user from the stresses of indecision, inconvenience and, ultimately, self. Of course, “in reality we are made into instruments, keeping the system we should overthrow on life support.” Our dependence on these technologies, and their total submersion into the functions of traditional media, creates a cycle that is hard to break: these companies may be born from a post-1968 countercultural ideology of liberation but they serve only to embolden neoliberal techno-tyranny. As such, the solution to misinformation on Spotify becomes a call to that very company to play censor. So, Rogan’s mirroring of liberal-centrism back at itself is inadvertent but important, if also likely futile: the think-piece writer at The Guardian (or wherever else) looks at Rogan and sees that which their ghastly ideology creates but ultimately neglects (that is to say: what does the European Union create other than more refugees; what does a vaccine mandate create other than more sceptics; what does the liberating technology of Spotify create other than further bondage?). I recall an advertisement, probably fictitious, for a “chocolate laxative,” brought to my attention by Zizek: “Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate!”
The cry for Spotify’s intervention is thus a call to the guidance and authority of the big Other: an appeal to the symbolic order to correct the disordered, destabilising object (here it is misinformation or, in sadder and more plain terms, a podcast). Living in an increasingly fragmented or atomised age – post-society, as per Thatcher – and one that is at the behest of an all-infecting neoliberalism, in which platformed corporations (including those ostensibly “public” ones) perform moral arbitrator, this appeal of course reaches only as far as Spotify, which occupies the role of social engineer and phantasmic organiser of subjectivity. If government has been cast off for being simultaneously too overreaching and too incompetent, the facilitators of our age of convenience – those above mentioned platforms – become the Daddy that the sapless subject reaches to for guidance. For who else will fulfil our desire for authority?
Of course, Spotify’s principal crime is – and always has been – its total enmity towards artists, those inconvenient workers who provide Spotify with its product but demand remuneration in return. Spotify pays just £0.003 per stream, requiring at least 1200 streams from one user to equal the share that an artist would receive from a single CD sale. And yet it is dubious claims about vaccines that drove Neil Young and Joni Mitchell from the platform and created the media storm that threatened, if only superficially, to unsettle the platform. Economic exploitation is tolerable but being wrong deserves the fury of a liberal media whose interests lie not in serving the public good, nor a pursuit of “truth,” but the defence of platform capitalism. This issue stems, of course, from the fact that politics has become largely depoliticised. As Sam Kriss puts it, referring back to the words of one “millennial capitalist” who flogs “political tomato sauce”: “When people say that tomato sauce is political, what do they actually mean?” They want the tomatoes to affirm that black lives matter.” He continues: “food might be political now, and sitcoms, and novels, and every conversation with everyone you’ve ever known, but the sole exception seems to be politics itself.” Banks may have plunged millions into a crisis of debt but they can find redemption in the brandishing of the depoliticised icon of the rainbow flag. And here at the End of History, how we listen to music or talk shows or podcasts has become poisoned by this ‘politicisation’. Our provider of entertainment, Spotify, – for all its underpaying and devaluation – must take the moral duty to remind us that mistruth is bad and that disruption to the accepted order must be promptly dealt with. What is bad for business is bad for the public and companies such as Spotify must oblige. We might march against government, but why (and how) would we march against Spotify, which mostly exists and functions in – and as a result of – our imagination? That basic tenet of the Frankfurt School rings ever-true: society won’t rise against its oppression but become stupefied, for in the space that real power has vacated, wherein our actions and interests are increasingly privatised, sedated by algorithms and a willed repression, we begin to desire our own domination.