Amy Winehouse: In Her Words (Amy Winehouse, Dey Street, 2023)

    This is at least the fifth book I’ve read about Amy since she died. Each one brings a unique perspective and has some kind of closeness to its subject matter, whether it is her life or her music, that seems free of lurid tabloid concerns. The next most recent one is Beyond Black, which is like the graphic design or couture companion to this text. In Beyond Black, we learn about the influences she took from certain designers, musicians, and writers. It’s notably free of her voice. We hear mostly from her friends who knew her before she was famous or just as she was entering into the worldwide conversation. Some of their stories are alternately heartbreaking and wistful because they humanize her in a way that mass media never could. It’s important to have these stories to help bring out the side of her personality that is mostly hidden when looking in from the top down. Honestly, if you were looking for just one book to understand her, Beyond Black would help greatly. If you want to understand her most powerful testament to the human condition, then Donald Brackett’s Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece does the job.

    The most powerful takeaway I have from this book is the profound sense of loss we all suffered from her death. She simply will not be able to share her insights with us any more. Yes, she “lives on” in reams of unpublished lyrics, but that’s more tantalizing than anything. She was famously unproductive after the success of “Back to Black,” so you have only your imagination to help you fill in the gaps of phrasing and instrumentation that might have accompanied the many lyrical excerpts throughout the years represented in her journals. You get a sense of how strong her sense of conviction in her abilities was when reading even her earliest to-do lists. In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine someone so driven wouldn’t have been as successful as she was.

    I can do without the occasional spreads of pull quotes with mismatched fonts. They look like the worst of tumblr or instagram inspirational quotes over hazy landscapes. Even if her words are meaningful, the decision to render them in this way subtracts from their power. It’s also unclear whether the words that appear on these pages are from her journals or from interview responses as they are uncited and do not appear elsewhere in the text. They read more like spoken language than written language and cover topics that might only have come up if someone else prompted her to think of them. Come to think of it, a book collecting her interviews would be an easy purchase for me.

    The bulk of the words in In Her Words are obviously Amy’s, but the framing her parents give throughout the text does not mention Blake Fielder-Civil at all. They mention that fame was hard on her but that’s about as close as they come. Her mother said of her signature beehive hairstyle in Loving Amy: A Mother's Story that it was as much about a tribute to The RONETTES as it was a physical barrier, a form of armor, that she wore to protect herself from the world. That observation rings true in that Amy needed protection from the media only because of how Blake brought her world down. As her father wrote in reference to “Back to Black,” in Amy, My Daughter, “I was blown away, beyond proud. But deep down, I never wanted Amy to write another album like it. The songs are amazing, but she went through hell to write them. I don’t like Back to Black as much as I like Frank; I never really did. And that’s for one reason only: all of the songs on Back to Black, apart from ‘Rehab,’ are about Blake. It occurred to me recently that one of the biggest-selling UK albums of the twenty-first century so far is about the biggest low-life scumbag that God ever put breath into. Quite ironic, isn’t it? Mind you, you don’t get albums written about really good people like Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, do you? Good people’s places in Heaven may be assured, but nobody’s going to have a chart-topping album full of songs about someone’s good deeds” (p. 80). Taking her father’s past words about Blake in mind, it’s no surprise that her parents wouldn’t have wanted to focus on him in these pages. Still, did he not figure into her journals at all, or was his presence in there too gruesome for the family to include?

(This review originally appeared in a slightly shorter version in issue #3 of the zine Anxiety's False Promise, published in March 2024.)

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Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails us in this Life and Beyond (Tamara Kneese, Yale University Press, 2024)

    When I heard the Tech Won’t Save Us interview with author Tamara Kneese last September, I immediately put this book on my reading list for this year. Her conversation with Paris Marx on that podcast intrigued me with the many examples of how (as the subtitle says), technologically oriented problem-solving can never eliminate the scourge of death. Their discussion of how social media profiles of dead friends have a haunting quality confirmed that I would need to read this book. Having done so in a week that involves another kind of misunderstanding or misapplication of technology as it relates to death (i.e., Elon Musk’s profoundly mistaken idea that over three million dead centenarians are somehow collecting Social Security payments in the United States), I found many relevant ways to connect what Kneese discusses to many aspects of the world of the living.

    In her first chapter, Kneese discusses how social media profiles have become shrines to the dead, but only after some effort by users. It was 2007’s Virginia Tech shooting that changed Facebook’s policy about automatically deleting the profiles of deceased users. Prior to that, the site, like many others, would remove such profiles once an admin could prove a user had passed. The initial form of this digital preservation was simply to allow the profiles to continue existing. Later developments meant that certain users could act as custodians for the profiles of the deceased; posting new content is not permitted, but accepting friend requests or changing profile pictures are allowed. This chapter reminded me of how the MySpace profiles of deceased friends were eventually overtaken with spam in the weeks and months after their deaths. What was once a socially mediated digital gathering space and tribute wall became an untenable mass of corrupted and confusing links due to some of the profiles of my deceased friends having been overtaken by bots. Kneese rightly points out that the creators of social media platforms do not begin building their sites with death in mind. Someone like Zuckerberg, who started Facebook as FaceMash while in college, was not thinking about mortality, but about the relative attractiveness of his collegiate peers (p. 40). So, it only makes sense that the site would struggle with how to grapple with the complexity of death in a social setting.

    While some social media companies and other tech start-ups were not thinking of death at the beginning of their founding, others have made that calculation part of their business plan. Enter Legacy Locker, Eterni.me, and iCroak. These companies promise to be there for users when their time comes by offering the possibility of profile management after death. Everything from email to passwords to makeshift memorials can be part of a loved one’s digital legacy. You can also set up emails to be sent postmortem should you want to get in the last word in an argument with a company like DeathSwitch. (What thrilling pettiness!) But, as you might assume from either never having heard of these companies’ names before, or knowing them only in the past tense, the market for such sites is not stable or large enough to support potential users. In other words, the companies that promise eternal storage and management of a deceased user’s online traces have themselves gone defunct.

    The third chapter works with the idea of “disrupted inheritance,” meaning the times when executing a will or trust is complicated by the involvement of technology. This can mean anything from not having access to the usernames and passwords of the deceased’s financial accounts to the possibility of life’s extension through chatbots or other technology that uses the voice or likeness of the deceased. This stuff, to use a technical term, is icky. I kind of understand the idea of wanting to live forever and to see what the future holds for humanity. But the reality of doing so through the technology that exists today means that someone has to be your digital caretaker. Kneese again returns to the limited perspective of the “straight cisgender white men with finance chops” who create digital preservation services (p. 134). The implication is that the kind of person who conceives of an idea like preserving a digital life after death probably has many assumptions about the kind of person who will do the preserving, which is likely not a straight cisgender white man.

    In this chapter, I also had the nagging question of why anyone would really want a digital simulacrum of their loved one in the first place. It’s trite to say dying is part of life and that’s what makes it meaningful. Marcille from the manga Delicious in Dungeon comes to this realization (spoiler alert) when she becomes the dungeon master late in the narrative. She realizes that being able to outlive your loved ones because only you possess immortality is truly a curse. Having someone else maintain the digital version of you so you can do a compromised version of the same seems even worse.

    Speaking of immortality, the fourth chapter addresses how the smart objects we leave behind can become untamable in our absence. Without regular use or maintenance, they can fall into ruin. Kneese describes a house full of such objects in Provo, Utah, that is meant to be fully self-sufficient for its guests. Of course, caretakers who do not take care will defeat the purpose of such a house, which is what happened when the owner let visitors rent it via AirBnB. The guests did not know how to operate the smart blinds when they stopped functioning, so they remained closed. So, even the property we leave behind as some kind of monument to our existence cannot function without someone else carefully maintaining it.

    In the concluding chapter, Kneese reflects on the search for immortality in many of these forms and mentions the idea that some humans are eager to be like the ocean waves or mountain peaks, lasting well beyond “the collapse of civilization and catastrophic climate change” (p. 185). They want an immortality project—evidence that they lived and so will not be forgotten. This is a fool’s errand; these natural elements of Earth do, in fact, reflect evidence of humanity’s trace. How the waves and mountains have changed are evidence that we have lived, even as we destroy the planet. A book like Death Glitch is an immortality project itself, in that it provides a novel contribution to a field of study. Through these interviews, personal anecdotes, and histories of failed start-ups, Kneese has certainly guaranteed she will be remembered when her time comes.

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Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation (Antonio A. Casilli, The University of Chicago Press, 2025)

    The title of the book might make you think of a number of other texts or songs. For me, it matches the syllabication of OZZY OSBOURNE’s “Waiting for Darkness,” so I say it in my head in that same cadence. I also think of the sign held by the guy on the insert of the first TRAGEDY album, which reads “I’m tired of waiting for nothing.” You might also think of other songs having to do with the difficulty of patience, such as TOM PETTY’s “The Waiting,” or KILLING JOKE’s “The Wait.” Truly, though, the reference we are meant to make is to Beckett's “Waiting for Godot,” as Sarah T. Roberts, author of Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, explains in the book’s foreword. (Saskia Brown translated the book into English from the original French; as Roberts explains, the title’s pun lands a little better en Français because robot and Godot rhyme in that language.) In that play, the characters wait and wait for Godot, who never arrives. In the same fashion, Casilli tells us that the promises of artificial intelligence are based on a similarly fruitless eternal wait. There is simply no way to do artificial intelligence without involving humans. In other words, there’s nothing artificial involved in the intelligence at all.

    Key to the text is the subtitle, which refers to the subcontracting of the work that is involved in making AI seem genuine or real. Through a variety of examples, Casilli demonstrates how the supposedly automatic processes promised or enacted through AI are merely a series of layers of obfuscation involving human labor. He explains in the introduction how “Human workers are not being replaced by sophisticated and precise artificial intelligence applications, but by other humans, who are hidden from view, underpaid, and facing work instability” (p. 6). So it’s not just the concealment that’s the issue. Merely exposing the man behind the curtain would be a cool trick, to be sure, but Casilli does more than that. By revealing that the people who are doing this work are subjugated as they do the work, he makes a strong case for resisting and abstaining from this technology altogether.

    In further elaboration of his argument, Casilli makes the case that it’s not robots or machines helping humans with labor, but just the opposite. Human involvement in apparently automated processes is reduced to maintenance tasks that the machines cannot handle themselves. He calls this process taskification, whereby human skills or abilities are whittled down to such a degree as to be mere tasks (p. 19). It makes me think of my past job as a dishwasher, or, excuse me, a dish machine operator. I could spend a few pages enumerating each of the individual tasks I had to do for that job, from busing to rinsing to arranging, before I used the dish machine. Then after it had done its task, I had to dry and store or rewash the dishes. Each of those tasks has many smaller and smaller tasks embedded inside it. Knowing where to put each dish, utensil, or tool is essential, as is knowing which item is most in need by the kitchen staff during a particular shift. My point is that there were only a few items that I ever had to hand wash instead of letting the machine do that work for me. In terms of taskification, all the things I do between closing and opening the machine are unable to be automated. I’m there just to serve the machine. God help me if it breaks down during the lunch rush, too. So, a device as ordinary as a dish machine can reveal the complexity of an allegedly simple task and can also help us understand that the machines train us to do certain tasks to assist their functioning. The human hands cannot be removed from the process. To the diners enjoying their food, the work in the kitchen is mostly hidden, but it’s certainly not automated.

    If that manual labor example doesn’t work for you, then consider how Casilli deftly blends the two meanings of digital when discussing the nature of digital labor. It is work both done by hand (tapping, clicking) and done in service of technology. As he says, the taps or clicks are “the smallest of all tasks, perfect for training AI” (p. 13) and these actions are, of course, done with the fingers. This sentence concludes the Introduction and vaults us forward into the rest of the text with the promise of further cleverness and insight as it relates to the modern workplace.

    The heart of the book, for me, was the distinction between three types of digital labor: on-demand digital labor, microwork, and social media labor. Each of these forms of work provide different affordances to employers. In the example of on-demand digital labor, there’s an aspect of delivery or courier work that I had never considered before. Not only are bike messengers doing the work of taking a delivery from point A to point B, they are also generating information that helps to train global positioning systems, target advertisements, and inform dynamic pricing (p. 70). These processes all happen even when the couriers do not have deliveries to make or are not “working.” There’s an argument to be made that because they are supplying data to the company by simply moving through space, they should be compensated for producing these data. My jaw fell slack as I read that idea for the first time. There’s a similar explanation of how the passengers of ride-share services also unwittingly supply data used to inform surge pricing by refreshing the app or moving to other locations in search of a cheaper fare (p. 72). Again, the idea here is that there is human work involved in this digital labor (both senses) that is concealed through the use of apps or other platform interfaces. There’s nothing automated about it at all.

    The human factor is even clearer in this process when microwork is involved. So, humans decide what food to order for delivery or what destination to reach via ride-share and they generate data as a result. Someone somewhere has to annotate and interpret those data so they can be of some utility to another human. This is known as microwork, where tasks are fragmented into the smallest possible unit of completion and offered up for correspondingly low wages (p. 78). Think of times when you’ve had to disambiguate an image to prove your humanity when completing a purchase online. Then imagine doing that for hours on end for dollars or cents as a reward. Think of trying to parse a poorly encoded voicemail for transcription. Tasks like these, among myriad others, comprise microwork, without which artificial intelligence would cease to exist. Again, it’s not the mere revealing of how this process unfolds that is important. Casilli points out how microworkers “do not benefit from the protection of standard employment, and their rights and skills are not transferable from one platform to another” (p. 103). So, it’s a poverty trap, not a way to move up the social ladder.

    Another trap befalls the social media laborers who offer their work for free in the form of blogs (ahem!), restaurant or product reviews, or videos of a-day-in-the-life or video gaming conquests (p. 123). These forms of “hope labor” are pernicious because they almost guarantee that the producers of the text, video, or audio will stay trapped on a certain platform instead of transcending it by getting hired as a professional or becoming successful enough to charge money for their work (p. 123). In all three of these cases, the labor of humans helps to obscure what is meant to be an automated process, and the labor itself is not subject to the same guardrails against wanton exploitation as traditional jobs.

    There’s a still more sinister edge to some of the platformed work Casilli explores. The vectoralist nature of much of this work means that those doing the work must use their own devices, vehicles, phones, and Wi-Fi to do the work itself; yet, they do not share in the profits (p. 195). The companies benefit from outsourcing these tools necessary for the job and the workers are the ones who need to maintain them. It reminds me of how rare it is to see a company-branded pizza delivery car anymore. Even in a small business, the owners don’t want to take on that cost when they can put it on to the worker. That same shift happens in many different directions and more harmful ways in the gig economy, even as it helps to make AI seem inevitable and magical. There’s nothing inevitable or magical about it, though. It’s humans all the way down in a race to the bottom.

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This is What it Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says about You (Susan Rogers & Ogi Ogas, Norton, 2022)

    At the GRAMMYs on Sunday night, ALICIA KEYS received the DR. DRE Global Impact Award. During her speech, she mentioned how she “always had to fight for a certain level of respect as a songwriter, composer, and especially a producer. It’s strange that we don’t think of women as producers like Quincy, or Dre, or Swizzy. But, female producers have always powered the industry: Patrice Rushen, Missy Elliott, Linda Perry, Grimes, Solange, and so many more.” With a small qualification, you could add to that list Susan Rogers, a co-author of this text, as she was previously the engineer of the PRINCE albums “Purple Rain,” “Sign o’ the Times,” “Parade,” and others. (She has said that her credit on “One Week” by BARENAKED LADIES paid for her kids to go to college.) So, she is an engineer, not a producer, but was still intimately involved in some incredibly important music. Our concern today is the book she co-authored with Ogi Ogas and how it can help you better understand why you like the music you like. 

    You’ve probably seen books like this one before. You are someone who is indebted to music for your lifestyle, personality, or joy, and so you get to a point where you want to understand it better. I’ve read at least two books like this one (This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel Levitin and Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty by Ben Ratliff) and this is easily the most engaging and informative of the three.

    For one, there are not a lot of moving parts here. Rogers and Ogas list just seven aspects of music that we can analyze to determine our tastes: authenticity, realism, novelty, melody, rhythm, lyrics, and timbre. The first three have little to do with music itself and can be applied to any human creative endeavor really. The last four are purely the domain of music. They do not require much explanation either—the concepts are easily understood. Compare this manageable list with the 20 ideas Ratliff enumerates in his text, which include simple ideas such as speed, repetition, and loudness, but also more esoteric ones such as wasteful authority, discrepancy, and quiet / silence / intimacy (as distinct from another idea—closeness).

    It was cool to learn that Ratliff had seen D.R.I. at CB’s in like 1984 and was maybe familiar with JERRY’S KIDS and the inimitable drum fills of Brian Betzger. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t make for a strong book. Rogers and Ogas may not have a passing familiarity with first wave American hardcore, but they do know how to command my attention. There is a reference to seeing a “hardcore show at the Middle East club in Cambridge” that involved a “brutal mosh pit,” though (p. 64). Later on in the book, it’s implied that this might have been a CONVERGE show or similar. So, does that count as hardcore to you? It did to teenage Tall Rob. But these days… Still, when I mentioned this to someone who lived in Boston around that time, he told me “There is at least one notoriously violent CONVERGE show from the Middle East where... Jake threw a body bag into the crowd and said he wanted to see it filled.” So maybe the authors were there that night?

    In the chapter on novelty, Rogers and Ogas take up the idea of inventiveness within constraints. It was at this point that I couldn’t put the book down. They explain how there are “records that advance traditional genres [and] aim to present a controlled degree of surprise within the reliable confines of familiarity” (p. 69). They continue with a comparison to basketball, arguing that “What makes a new game enjoyable to a fan is the drama and suspense of reaching the outcome, which is dependent on the execution of well-established plays and strategies by extremely proficient players” (p. 69). So both formulaic hardcore songs on my favorite records and expertly executed BLOBS and SLOBS in a basketball game both appeal to the part of my brain that likes things to be well-organized and in just the right spot. (This is most of my brain, tbqh.) Having someone explain to me why I like what I like in a simple way with a relevant analogy to go along with it also pleases me.

    In the chapter on realism, Rogers and Ogas ask you to consider what you visualize when you listen to a song. They compare the experience of listening to CCR’s “Born on the Bayou,” where you might imagine the band playing in the song live, or even the bayous and byways they sing about, and the experience of listening to a DAFT PUNK song from the Tron soundtrack, where you might have some abstract colors and images in mind as they conjure a world from synths and keys (p. 36). The authors go on to explain that what you visualize has to do with the instruments used to make the music and that most people visualize one of the above ideas or the band playing the song live, or even you, the listener, singing or playing the song live.

    This immediately called to mind something Pat West wrote in an issue of Change zine. He explains how “Just like back in public high school, I keep thinking everyone else must be having a great time while I sit here in my small room listening to punk hardcore, lip-synching to BAD BRAINS, CRO-MAGS, and GOVERNMENT ISSUE. If I hadn’t recently started pretending to be the lead singer of LIFETIME or SPAZZ, not much in my life would have changed since 1987” (Change, issue #11, 1998). So yeah, I think hardcore lends itself to visualizing yourself singing along to the songs or moshing along in the imagined pit. Rarely do I imagine the studio situation that led to my favorite hardcore recordings. It’s the live experience, through and through. I’m grateful for being able to better understand that part of my listening practices as a result of reading this book.

(The final six paragraphs of this review originally appeared in issue #3 of the zine Anxiety's False Promise, published in March 2024.)

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