Spotify Wrapped, the monoculture, and what it means to be human

Swing a cat in any direction in academia, and you’re bound to hit somebody willing to bloviate indefinitely and on command about “What it means to be human.” So much so that almost every beginning-of-year seminar has some programming devoted to it, which appeals to a certain kind of person that I am not—a Venn-diagram cocktail that usually includes stuff like “liking philosophy,” “liking the movie Gattaca,” and “wanting to be Wendell Berry.”

This kind of white paper content is usually easy to ignore and quickly forgotten.

Harder to ignore is Spotify’s annual release of “Spotify Wrapped,” which is an annual cultural moment in which it tells you what kind of music you like, and (at some level) what kind of person you are, by reminding you of all the songs you’ve listened to this year. As you can imagine, this sort of monocultural moment is really important to the 18- to 22-year-olds who are my students and have lived their lives mostly devoid of non-mediated monocultural moments. It is also important to me, but maybe for different reasons.

“Kluck, what did your Spotify Wrapped look like?” they ask and then pause while I old-mannishly fumble around with my phone for a few minutes, somehow missing the huge image on the app that says, “Your 2024 Wrapped is here.” And then we do a thing (that’s pretty delightful) where we all share a little about what we’ve listened to and what it says about us as people. I reveal that my Wrapped is an embarrassing mix of 1980s power ballads and early 2000s emo/pop-punk, which my students ascertain is the most Enneagram 4ish music imaginable (which is to say all heart and zero logic). This is all, of course, a certain kind of marketing genius since it is Pavlovianly getting us all to respond to a thing and talk about a product on command.

And then Spotify goes on to say, “Good job, buddy!” about everyone’s musical choices through a variety of taste-affirming slides saying this in different ways and through a very creepily AI-generated “podcast” featuring two “people” (who aren’t people) saying things about “me” that aren’t really about me per se but are about the data that Spotify has managed to glean through my music listening proclivities. I say “creepily” because the platform even attempts to make them sound human by introducing little coughs and interruptions and stuff. And I’m loathe to admit this, but they sound pretty real.

The cultural experiment they’re conducting asks, “Would you listen to something that is entirely about you even if the people talking about you are completely fake?” Which is another way of asking, “How narcissistic are you really?” I can imagine that in another decade, the Swiffer WetJet ad that I watch during a broadcast of USC and Notre Dame playing (sigh) flag football will feature an AI-generated image of me pushing the mop around the floor.

As you can imagine, this is all pretty nosebleed-inducing, existentially. And it, of course, made me hearken back to all of those “What it means to be human” seminars and view them through a new lens. And while I in no way think that anyone in the real non-academic world is going to actually listen to those seminars or read those white papers, it did occur to me that the real bifurcating lever in our culture may not be a conservative-liberal divide but, rather, a divide over people who opt in for these kinds of experiences in the future and people who don’t.

I can imagine, in my lifetime, a remnant of people who take walks and cut the grass and watch shows that don’t feature themselves, and this remnant being in the distinct cultural minority. There will be a few of us riding around in dumb cars and talking on dumb phones and sleeping in dumb, non-smart houses where we still use our hands to flip on lamps and start the espresso machine. This thought is oddly comforting.

Or maybe I’m just so tired of fighting about politics that fighting about this seems novel by comparison. Either way, this fight seems much more worthwhile.