That's a Wrap

It's time, once more, to post our data

It’s Spotify Wrapped day today. You have seen the posts, you have posted your own. What’s the verdict? Are you neurodivergent? Basic? Are you a Sad Girl or a Sigma Male? Did you see the colors? Were you in the top 0.5% of listeners? How is everybody you know a top 0.5% listener? Did you listen to Art Pop? What does it mean to be in the top 0.5% of Drake listeners – do you work at a bar, are you “on aux?” Did you keep it interesting from sunrise to sunset? I did: I started the morning with Spooky Relaxing Nostalgia, seized the day with Energy Lit Bold, and embraced the night with Sorrow Mystical Minimalist. Do any of those words mean anything to you? Could they?

Wrapped Day has solidified itself, at this point in time, as one of the three true American holidays. Nestled comfortably between Commerce Weekend – that deluge of deals and emails from Black Friday to Giving Tuesday – and the Super Bowl, our orgiastic paean to bodily destruction, advertising, and chicken wings, Wrapped Day is a cathartic respite. Naturally, the American holiday exists to celebrate the American experience – namely, selling the last thing you have left (your data) to buy the only thing left to purchase (your new identity). Wrapped Day is the day that our data is given back to us for free, to post. Wrapped Day is when you learn who you are.

There is a delicious morbidity to Wrapped Day’s festivities. Wrapped Day is the taunt of all taunts from our data-harvesting masters. Look at what you give us every day, Spotify tells us. Can’t you imagine, Spotify asks, what these other mother fuckers have on you? Can’t you imagine your Google Wrapped, your front-facing-camera Wrapped, your geolocation Wrapped? Your Year In Instagram? This year you scrolled for 40,500 minutes, putting you in the top 1% of lonely souls – cheers to that! Spotify Wrapped is the endzone spike of the Internet age, the final scene of Network, the day that reminds you that everything you do is being tracked and so you might as well have fun and post about it.

And so Wrapped Day is fun – and funny – while remaining intensely bleak. It stands perfectly and with pride for the forces that wring enjoyment out of things as fundamentally human as listening to music. It proposes, for one, that you are what you listen to. Songs are moods, sounds are vibes, the art that somebody painstakingly creates is but wallpaper for your daily ritual. If you like certain music, you are a Sad Girl. If you like a range of music, sorry, but you’re an Eclectic Genre-Explorer. That’s an identity too.

There’s nothing wrong, necessarily, with allowing yourself to be defined in part by the music you listen to. I certainly am, and I take pride in that fact. The grim aspect, rather, is that the profit machine now tells you who you are. Don’t you see your Wrapped getting narrower, flatter, and more recursive by the year? Don’t you feel like Spotify is pushing you to listen to the same shit, over and over, mindlessly wringing any enjoyment out of your relationship to art? Does it not feel that somehow turning an act as intrinsically spiritual as listening to music into a generator of data and a marketable aspect of your personality is a step too far?

It’s only worth discussing to a point, I figure, because we don’t have much choice in the matter. Capital has always controlled cultural production, and the fact that the technologists are the ones in control of capital is something that feels worth lamenting but also beyond changing. Still, it’s always worth exploring ways to wrench the real and worthwhile endeavor of informing your identity through the art and culture you consume out of the algorithm and into your own hands. Over the past year, I’ve experimented with this by tracking, almost to the point of obsession, every bit of media I’ve consumed. It’s tedious, and perhaps obsessive, but I’ve found that it allows me to engage with culture with a level of intentionality and reflectiveness that the era of streaming and art-as-data has taken from us – searching out new art, appreciating familiar works, finishing the things I start. Streaming, like any other service that promises to make our lives frictionless, has only rendered our engagement with the world around us rudderless. So go on, put up some obstacles to the media orgy at your fingertips – you might find that you get new enjoyment, fulfillment and purpose out of the whole thing. You can be a Sad Girl if you’d like, but don’t let Spotify force you into it.