My one and only Zuckerberg story
In search of smartdumb: Facebook, before they dropped the 'the'; inefficiency is a kind of smartdumb; the beautifully inefficient U.S. Constitution; Lucian Grainge owes me money but I like it that way
(16)
I only have one story about Mark Zuckerberg from college.
When The Facebook launched at Harvard in February 2004, I wasn't in a rush to join. Why would I? I was already on Friendster! But I gave in out of curiosity, and soon became one of the site's first thousand or so users. I existed on the internet then as a published music writer named "Nicholas B. Sylvester" – a styling formality I had somehow decided to keep from my high school newspaper days, when the editors insisted on full names and middle initials. Thanks again, Jason L. Schwartz and W. Sean McLaughlin!
I schlepped the totality of my government name into the signup page, logged in, and soon realized I was the only person on all of (The) Facebook who had his name like that. The unspoken point of the site (and perhaps cosmically why it rolled out just a week or so before Valentine’s Day) was to help with dating. And "Nicholas B. Sylvester" was doing me no favors.
You'd think I could just change it myself. But the site's code was in such a neonatal state, users didn't have the capability yet to revise their own names. It wasn't a bug, but you might call it an inefficiency.
If I wanted my name changed, I would have to reach out to Mark Zuckerberg directly, and Mark Zuckerberg would have to do it himself. I found Mark's email via Pine (zuckerb at fas, iirc) and sent him the request along with my compliments on the site. He wrote back within a few hours, and said he'd make the change after he got back from class that evening (Mark was still going to class). There were no firm promises made, but later that night, there he was: Nick Sylvester on thefacebook.com.
I've been thinking a lot about this interaction the last few weeks – how for the longest time, and for such a simple reason, I was rooting for Mark Zuckerberg. A flaw in the code had, ironically enough, made me a fan of Facebook. It would have been more efficient for everyone if I could have just fixed it myself. But the inefficiency forced me to become invested in the site. The inefficiency put me in direct contact with the site's creator, and allowed the site's creator to do right by me and my request. The inefficiency also made me feel like Mark Zuckerberg cared about me and other users. I wish I still had that e-mail. I wanted that site to win it all.
(18)
We’re hearing a lot about efficiencies and inefficiencies lately. I admit I didn’t quite understand Elon Musk and Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley elites’ support for Trump and “Governmental Efficiency” until I read this article over the weekend. The author Mike Brock does an excellent job of laying out the libertarian techno-solutionism we are up against, and why it’s so dangerous. Please stop reading this and go read that instead. I can’t recommend it enough.
Running a country like a CEO – that’s a premise of this administration – means ruthless efficiency. And at many tasks, humans are way less efficient than algorithms and LLMs and rule-based robots. America’s architects couldn’t have known what was coming, but if I remember one thing from US History in high school, it’s that the inefficiencies of our government were part of their design. The founding fathers didn’t want important things to be happening too quickly. The balance of power – perhaps the Constitution’s crowning inefficiency – forces people in power to slow down and make sure they’re not missing something. In the slow roll, they’re forced to come face to face with how broad governmental decisions will affect actual people. Inefficiencies, in a way, are a kind of smartdumb.
Of course, not all inefficiencies are great or deliberate. But when you worship at the altar of efficiency, you're only a few stations of the cross away from saying the great swath of us are useless eaters, and that the plants and animals we can’t eat are the most useless eaters of them all. You’re way closer to the untethered Zizian logic than you probably should be, cranked out and hoping that your AI sympathies will spare you in the uprising. Not my tempo.
(19)
Perhaps that’s why I feel the singe of “inefficiency” so acutely. Music is an inherently inefficient medium. There are more direct ways to get your point across. Perhaps music can be "efficient" at stirring emotions, but our ears tire quickly, are incredibly sensitive to bullshit, and can’t help themselves from intermodulating. Like a dog in a bathtub, recorded music can’t be held down to singular interpretation. The ease with which anyone can now remix and re-edit and repurpose recorded audio has made the musical propagandist’s job both a lot easier and a lot harder.
As a music producer, I exist at the nexus between art and commerce. My job is to negotiate the balance of efficiencies and inefficiencies. Low end is something I have to negotiate everyday. Deep bass frequencies – 20 to 40hz, let’s say – are among the most emotionally satisfying things a body can experience. But they are wildly inefficient, requiring considerably more energy and headroom than “more efficient” frequencies from let’s say 100 to 8000hz. If you have a record with a considerable amount of deep bass frequencies, like in genres like dub techno – with the same amount of power exerted, your final recording simply will not sound as “loud” as a record with the same energy concentrated in the mid frequencies. Some of that has to do with our own ears, a technology that found that frequencies around 1000hz got us humans the most bang for our buck. Everything from stadium loudspeaker systems to Spotify’s decades-old volume level limiting algorithm essentially “penalize” music that isn’t efficiently using the audible frequency spectrum. The end of the loudness wars has been greatly exaggerated. There’s a reason dance music so easily sounds like shit on streamers.
Another example of efficiencies I have to negotiate: song structures. One easy way to out yourself as a horrible person in the music industry is to say, “You know what they say! Don’t bore us! Get to the chorus!” The artists and I might make a section we absolutely love, that makes us feel all the things we want to feel from this piece of recorded music. But we are up against the cold unfeeling logic of songwriting efficiency, i.e.: is this section necessary? Is this word necessary? Can’t we just repeat this other word? I am trying to get ahead of this conversation as a music producer, so that I can say with certainty: Yes, random 22-year-old A&R who watched one Tiktok about Mike Caren, once, this is necessary!
The received wisdom is that the chorus is the money shot – it is the point of the music. Verses and prechoruses are useful only insofar as they make the chorus seem more exciting. Intros and outros are wildly inefficient, and bridges are only important if you’re trying to win one of the GRAMMYs that nobody outside of the industry really cares about. The most efficient songs are not the ones that make you feel something more deeply over time, but the ones you understand on first go. The logic can get brutal quickly: Is a song even working if people aren’t dancing upon impact, or if you aren’t singing along by the end?
Other stuff: I am negotiating the efficient realities of a raw upfront vocal against the fact that some raw vocals are, ahem, too efficient. I am negotiating the balance between familiar efficiencies like having some kind of rising noise effect into a chorus and unfamiliar but potentially daring left turns or simply dispensing with industry sturm und drang entirely.
Another way to put it: I am negotiating how much a song should be recognized as a song, and whether it hurts or helps the artist at that juncture in their career to make music that more resembles supposedly “timeless” music, even though “timeless music” usually just means commercially released songs from the last 60 or so years. (If you want an easy way to out yourself as a horrible person in the music industry who’s also down to dabble in some light racism, you can say, “It’s not really good music unless you can play it on the guitar.” Enjoy.)
Songs – music with a vocal melody, with a clearly defined repeated chorus supported by verses in between – are the atomic unit of the recorded music industry, partly because songs are the most efficient music technology when it comes to extracting and maintaining the most number of people’s attention. Speaking with no music, i.e. podcasts – are even more efficient, but that’s a different post.
As a producer, I am negotiating a lot of technicalities too, like the efficiencies of digital recording. It’s incredibly more efficient than magnetic tape, but you only need to look at what music technology has arisen in its wake: Universal Audio’s skeumorphic remakes of old compressors and EQs from the 70s; non-linear console emulations; plug-ins that replicate oscillator drift and every possible kind of electrical hum. We are missing something about the inefficiencies. I think this is where Simon Reynolds perhaps oversimplified. It’s not nostalgia or retromania that is driving the demand for those technologies, but the simple fact that there were attendant frictions and creature comforts of past inefficiencies, and comprise a certain je ne sais quoi that human ears find essential to enjoying music.
Similarly, but for another time: You see all these new DSPs in the wake of Spotify's ruthless efficiency trying to rescue the artistic context that’s been lost now that Spotify has essentially become the artist. How do we approximate even the simple immersive experience of buying a CD and reading the liner notes on first playthrough?Hint: The solution is not “immersive” audio!
I watch with empathy as tech company after tech company shows up to solve the music industry’s collaboration problems, rights management problems, payment problems, etc. There are so many problems! But maybe not all of them are problems, at least not all the time. Every music industry worker intuitively knows to leave room for a little inefficiency. Can’t pay the engineer? Give him 5% publishing! No contract? No problem. Here’s all my work. For free! If you don’t pay me, I just won’t work with you anymore. Working in this industry is bound by social contract – and an act of faith that it will all work out eventually.
I've heard the following advice credited to Benny Blanco: “When negotiating splits and credits, never let any one record be bigger than your entire career.” Credits and songwriting split negotiations can break your heart. But let’s take a beat and appreciate, at least for now, how it forces us to at least try to be human with one another, at a moment when so many powerful men are determined to keep us from doing exactly that.