Marie Davidson’s 2018 album, Working Class Lady, spoke the language of commercial labor. This 12 months the cheeky Québécois dance producer takes up a brand new paradigm: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, to borrow the title of scholar Shoshana Zuboff’s 700-page vital survey of how large tech companies exploit human expertise by mining our knowledge. The e book is a main inspiration for Metropolis of Clowns, Davidson’s thundering, itchy, pneumatic new report, co-produced with Soulwax and Pierre Guerineau, her associate in Essaie Pas (who as soon as made an album impressed by Philip Okay. Dick) and L’Œil Nu. Their proto-electroclash beats and big-squelch synths evoke a swaggering heroine up towards chilly cement and server banks, a real-life sci-fi dystopia that’s a little bit bit The Matrix and a little bit bit The Substance: You’re within the system, and it’s feeding on you.
Within the surveillance economic system, you and I are neither clients nor merchandise however “the objects from which uncooked supplies are extracted and expropriated,” Zuboff writes (italics hers). That uncooked materials is our knowledge, extra helpful to enterprise than any one among us. Davidson quotes various Zuboff’s phrases and ideas immediately, together with the evenly modified textual content of opening observe “Validations Weight.” “You be taught to sacrifice your freedom to collective information imposed by others and for the sake of their assured outcomes,” Davidson reads via the clipped enunciation of an AI text-to-speech filter. The long-range final result of surveillance capitalist practices, Zuboff argues, is to implement certainty and homogenization—to make us much less human.
Metropolis of Clowns, in impact, takes place on the web, in a world of information assortment, advert concentrating on, and behavioral prediction. Davidson’s true emotions on supposedly cutting-edge know-how should not laborious to discern. (“I don’t want a VR headset to really feel emotion,” she snarked on Working Class Lady; “Actuality is disgusting sufficient.”) Zuboff’s e book, a meticulous investigation of a society the place innovation has seemingly shifted totally to the financialization of the digital, is equally heady in its online-ness. Transposing even a few of these ideas to bop music is hard, and Davidson in all probability deserves essentially the most credit score for managing to make it not simply danceable however really… fairly humorous?
Although Davidson’s model is commonly described as deadpan, Metropolis of Clowns has a pranksterish, virtually burlesque high quality. “Play this sport,” she invitations over ultra-basic drum machine and skronked-up Depeche Mode bass on “Push Me Fuckhead”: “Stare on the squares/What do you see?/What number of buses?/What number of bushes?” You seemingly by no means explicitly agreed to coach future AI platforms by fixing visible CAPTCHAs like these—certainly, they’re introduced as a needed safety measure. However perhaps you like feeling exploited? On the cyborg striptease “Demolition,” monitoring software program gears as much as dom you: “I don’t need your money/What I need is you… I need your knowledge!” Davidson engages along with her ambivalence in regards to the pleasure we expertise on-line, too, pondering whether or not she’s secretly a “bitch,” a cooperator, able to “give you my coronary heart proper on a selfie stick.” And are we certain that “Y.A.A.M.”—brief for “all of your asses are mine”—isn’t in some way associated to “All of your base are belong to us,” the iconic ur-meme with its personal gabber remix? (Extra like “all of your database” amirite?)
