Nostalgorithms

Nostalgia is a feeling, to start with. We have songs and photographs we happen upon that conjure nostalgia. We have articulations of nostalgia, in poetry, in the lyrics of songs, in films, TV shows, novels. And now, we have algorithms that serve up content (songs, photographs, news) that make us feel nostalgic.

The “Your memories on Facebook” function fascinates me, as a potential mechanism for conjuring nostalgia. It's hard to know precisely how the algorithm works - how and when it decides to bring a photo up from the past and ask you whether or not you'd like to share this photo again on your timeline - but it appears to bring up pictures from the same day of the year in previous years, most likely at least 2 years from the past. It also is likely that photos/memories are chosen based on the amount of "likes" or comments they received at the time. 

That’s certainly one of the simplest approaches, and it works well enough, but perhaps not as well as it could work. I’ve only really heard people talk about this aspect of the Facebook experience (as is the case with many aspects of any kind of technology) when it doesn’t work. People make note of the times when Facebook served up a picture on an ex or, worse, a deceased love one. It’s clear that it doesn’t work perfectly, and yet it works well enough to persist. 

Does that algorithm learn from the times it presents unpleasant memories to users? Probably. Perhaps it starts by serving up memories, allowing a certain period for the memories to “steep," and, after a period of trial and error, it would be possible to identify certain types of memories that people elected to share. These types would be defined by objective qualities the shared memories had in common, qualities that set them apart from the non-shared memories. The algorithm is “dumb” in the sense that it doesn’t know anything about the concept of nostalgia, or the individual users’ lives, or about human emotion in general. But if you give it enough data, enough pictures, enough memories, it will probably get better at serving up pictures that you want to share, pictures that tap into something that we would call nostalgia. It learns not to serve up those pictures of your ex.

Perhaps there's an unseen pattern or signature to nostalgia that could be revealed by the algorithm. It's not just a matter of how much time has passed that makes us nostalgic for something. It has to do with the specific contours of social relations and feelings, all of which leave an imperfect imprint in our social media archives (less and less imperfect as more and more of our social/emotion lives are channeled through social media). 

Here's an example pattern using data that a social media company like Facebook could collect: Optimal nostalgia resides in the pictures with that person you appeared with in other pictures and exchanged frequent IMs with for a period of three years after which there were fewer and fewer pictures of the two of you together and fewer IMs until the trail went cold, but you were still "liking" and occasionally commenting on their posts, though this wasn't reciprocated, suggesting a kind of unreciprocated longing for re-connection. Or maybe it takes into account the time of day at which it was posted (maybe people are more nostalgic about things that happened at night) or the place (maybe nostalgia clings to certain places more than others, or it requires a certain physical distance from our current locations, at least 1,000 miles). Maybe it's all there, residing in the metadata. 

I think about nostalgia in terms of music, too. Pop music (and movies/TV shows that use pop music) have worked with a crude version of the nostalgia principle for decades, if not centuries. Artists arrange a song in a familiar way, or include a certain familiar phrase or melody, so as to strike a particular emotional chord in the listener. Genres are revived in part out of nostalgia. But algorithms could give us something much more fine-grained, more personalized. Imagine that your entire music listening history was archived (as will be the case for people starting to listen to music in the age of streaming services like Spotify, Pandora, or YouTube). The program would know that you really loved a particular song (you played it 100 times that one week in 2010) but then seem to have forgotten about it (you haven't played it since). One of life's great pleasures is hearing that song you loved but have not heard in years. Part of you knows the rhythm and the lyrics, but another part of you has forgotten them. Your ability to sing along with the first verse feels instinctual, but you can't remember exactly what the chorus was until it comes crashing in, and you think, "how could I have forgotten this?" 

Maybe the music program is integrated with your preferred social media app. The social media app has a rough indication of your mood and what's going on in your life. It can make a pretty good guess as to when you're ready for an upbeat song and when you're ready for something more introspective. Maybe it knows that you found a love song when you weren't in love and seemed to like it but couldn't listen to it too frequently because you weren't in love. And now that it knows you're in love, you're ready to hear it again. Maybe it knows that the lyrics to another song will be more poignant to you now that you're 40. 

There is a visceral revulsion at technology colonizing overly-personal or artistic realms of human experience. All fine and well if the algorithms make shopping more efficient, but nostalgia? Memories, and our experiences of them, are tied to identity. This may account for the way in which we need nostalgia triggers to feel serendipitous. The idea of an algorithm writing poetry is a bit unsettling, but what about an algorithm that can conjure the feeling that inspires poets in the first place?

Prince and the art of making yourself scarce

Among the surprisingly strong feelings I experienced after Prince's passing (especially while watching some of the relatively-high-quality concert videos people have been posting) was a kind of shame at having taken so long to recognize how good he was. Part of the reason the strength of the feelings have been so surprising is that I was never a big Prince fan. This wasn't the normal level of regret one feels when an artist dies that you may have taken for granted. This was a sense that I might have been a much bigger fan of Prince had I listened to more of his music. But the answer to the question of why I didn't listen to more of his music, I think, has much to do with the unique way Prince produced music and managed access to it.

On the one hand, he produced a huge amount of material. This may have diluted his "brand." I don't mean "brand" in the commercial/corporate context, so maybe that's not the right word. I just mean that when I thought of Prince, I thought of all the music I hadn't listened to. It's subjective whether the material was consistently good (and it is rare for any artist to produce a lot of consistently good material; far easier to produce a few ground-breaking albums, call it quits, and leave the audience wanting more), but the mere fact that there was so much of it raises this question: where do you begin? The choice to listen to Prince wasn't whether or not to spend $10 - $40 on a few albums (as the choice might be to buy all of Guns n' Roses' oeuvre). There were hundreds of songs, and while there is some consensus that his earlier albums were among his best, there were plenty of gems scattered throughout the rest of his career. It would seem random to buy one late-era Prince album and ignore the others, but buying them all would cost a lot.

This leads us to the unusual way in which he regulated access to the music. Ever since 1999, the year Napster went mainstream, musical artists have had to balance the added exposure that comes with free distribution with the fact that giving things away for free is no way to make a living. Streaming music like Spotify and Youtube's Vevo channel are kinds of compromises that allow artists to make some money (arguably too little) while music consumers are able to listen to whatever they want either for free with advertising or for a small subscription fee. The more artists transfer over to that model, the more appealing the service like Spotify becomes. From the perspective of the music consumer, you could keep paying your monthly fee to Spotify and get to listen to what most new artists produce, or you could pay 10 bucks to listen to one album by one artist. The shift in value was incremental and difficult to notice - it wasn't like a single label or artist deciding to provide their music in a certain way tipped the scale. But at some point, the scale tipped. Music is as valuable to individuals and society as it ever was, but the value of individual artists or songs shifted when we started consuming music in different ways.

Thinking about how I missed the boat on Prince until now makes me think about how we recognize artistic excellence in today's world. I get a sense that there is a kind of skepticism about it now, a desire to ask, "how good could he possibly be? Wouldn't more people have been listening to him and making a bigger fuss about his music over the past several decades?" The question of who gets celebrated as a musical genius isn't just a question of subjective judgment of talent (though it is that, too). It's a question of how output and access influence our estimates of excellence. If something is even moderately awesome, we all hear about it, see video of it, and post it on social media right away. Encountering some of the videos of Prince's performances is so jarring because we've become accustomed to a world without secrets (and that includes secret genius). It's one thing to unearth an under-appreciated artist or work. This practice has become commonplace online: a sophisticated content curator spends hours digging through the detritus of YouTube so that we don't have to, and presents us with an overlooked or forgotten work of genius.

Prince's work was different. It was sitting there in plain sight; it just happened to be behind a paywall. That wall came down (at least temporarily) in the wake of his death, and it really did feel like something brilliant that had always been in your immediate vicinity had been suddenly revealed, rather than feeling as though a curator dug up a hidden gem.

I also get the sense while watching videos of the unbelievable live performances that Prince wasn't made for the world of sampling and covering, of copying and pasting, of virality and memes, not only because of what he produced and how he managed access to it, but also because of his performance of self. A large part of the appeal with Prince is the performer, some un-copyable charisma that he had. Whereas a Beatles or Metallica melody might sound interesting if interpolated by another artist, a cover of a Prince song would just make whomever was covering it look positively un-charismatic by comparison. Access to Prince's live performances is (or at least was) limited to begin with (similarly, this is a reason why Hamilton can still be a phenomenon in the age of digitally reproducible art). It's true that when the artist dies, the recordings (including the recordings of live performances) will live on, but the recordings are once-removed from the actual ecstatic experience of being there, with the performer, with the crowd. So watching them also makes me sad. Once the performer dies, the party's over.