The city of Austin and the South by Southwest Music Festival both pride themselves on their forward-looking perspective on the technology industry. But keynote speaker T Bone Burnett wasn’t quite as optimistic Wednesday about the utopian future once predicted for the internet.
Digital technology has failed us as a new, improved communications system, Burnett said. Instead it has become an “insidious surveillance and propaganda machine.”
He singled out Facebook and Google as corporations designed to “dehumanize … and automate us.”
Burnett’s perspective was first outlined at the 2010 Future of Music Summit (full disclosure, in an interview with me) where he met a mixed reaction. The veteran producer-songwriter referenced that conversation Wednesday: “People called me a Luddite.” Back then, he advocated wariness of the big corporations moving into the tech sphere, and urged artists to stay away.
At the time, that sounded like heresy to artists and consumers increasingly relying on digital technology to distribute and access music. But if anything, Burnett doubled down on that message at SXSW, and in an era when election hacking is on the rise and artist income on digital platforms has stagnated, his message couldn’t be ignored.
The tech companies are in the information harvesting business, and they have figured out how to turn that into millions of dollars in revenue. The creators of music and art are particularly coveted because “the right information at the right time changes lives,” Burnett said. “Your information is extremely valuable,” he advised, even though tech companies rather than artists are the ones profiting from it.
Burnett underlined the importance of creating a sustainable digital economy for art and music. In a time of global economic and ecological crisis, “artists are our only hope,” Burnett said. “The sciences … religion … politicians have failed us.”
He sounded very much like the ’60s iconoclast he once was and essentially still is when he rhapsodized that music and art can change the world, but that technology companies – much in the way of the corporate record industry of the 20th Century – are in the business of watering down if not suppressing that impulse.
Burnett’s delivery was calm, understated, but his wordplay was pure fire-and-brimstone, as he turned Facebook, Google and their digital peers into villains, a “tyranny of programs and programming,” “surveillance capitalists” devoid of ethics or morals. He presented music and art as the mortal enemy of these goliaths, truth-tellers who would set us free.
“The goal of art is to create conscience,” Burnett said. “You are up to the task.”
The audience appreciated the passion and rewarded him with a standing ovation, even if Burnett was short on specific solutions beyond advocating for more government oversight, reformed privacy regulations and greater protection of creators’ rights. Even as he sounded the alarm, Burnett found himself the subject of a widespread social-media conversation, powered in part by Facebook and Google. He fielded questions sent via another social-media platform.
“I never touch the stuff,” he said of the digital technology powering the question-and-answer session. “Fortunately I have a staff that handles this.”
Perhaps the best way to connect with Burnett’s presentation was to acknowledge that it at least tried to have this artist-driven festival confront some uncomfortable truths about the way forward. Burnett not only suggested that the new corporate boss is much like the old boss, he is far more pernicious.
Greg Kot is a Tribune critic.
greg@gregkot.com
Twitter @gregkot
