{"id":400745,"date":"2022-01-29T00:19:00","date_gmt":"2022-01-28T21:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/neil-young-vs-spotify-and-the-gathering-storm\/"},"modified":"2022-01-29T00:19:00","modified_gmt":"2022-01-28T21:19:00","slug":"neil-young-vs-spotify-and-the-gathering-storm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/neil-young-vs-spotify-and-the-gathering-storm\/","title":{"rendered":"#Neil Young vs Spotify, and the gathering storm"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Neil Young vs Spotify, and the gathering storm<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n The fight the legendary hippie singer-songwriter Neil Young brought to the music-streaming giant Spotify on Monday over the privileged place it provides a wildly popular podcast by the contrarian comedia<\/a>n and former wrestling colour-commentator Joe Rogan app<\/a>ears to have ended as quickly as it began. But the wider war is gathering steam.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines,\u201d Young said. Either Rogan goes or I go, he told the Stockholm-based audio-streaming giant. On Wednesday, Spotify responded: Off you go, then. By Thursday, Young had decamped with his entire 45-album backlist and all his bread to Apple Music, while Rogan\u2019s big-tent circuses, with their sideshow freaks and thrill rides, will carry on, as before, with Spotify.<\/p>\n

It all sounds so frivolous, but it isn\u2019t, because the public-policy hostilities arising from our common captivity in the grip of COVID-19, now in the first days of the third year of SARS-CoV-2, are only becoming more pronounced with every passing day. Millions are dead, the stricken keep on dying, it\u2019s becoming increasingly difficult to discern what the basic facts are and the uproars are unfolding in the midst of what has been called a \u201ccrisis of epistemology.\u201d<\/p>\n

RELATED:\u00a0Misinformation from the U.S. is the next virus\u2014and it\u2019s spreading fast<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s the philosophical way of describing the erosion of common understandings about not just what the truth is, but about how we\u2019re all supposed to go about the work of figuring out what the truth is in the first place. Facts used to matter. Now, not so much.<\/p>\n

Rogan stands accused of engaging in dezinformatsiya<\/em>, as the Russians elegantly describe the traffic in dangerous half-truths and lies deployed as offensive weaponry in propaganda warfare. Specifically, Rogan\u2019s offside notions about vaccines and masks are widely understood to make him a dangerous menace to public health. While he\u2019s helpfully referred to himself as a \u201cmoron\u201d for suggesting young people shouldn\u2019t bother themselves with COVID vaccinations, the former \u201cFear Factor\u201d game<\/a> show host\u2019s Spotify broadcast, the Joe Rogan Experience, still draws roughly 11 million listeners per episode.<\/p>\n

I should straight away confess my own loyalties this week were to the cause of Team Neil. One must take sides, after all. Sorry, but that\u2019s how these proxy wars work. There\u2019s little room for conscientious objection, and the alliances that form up can draw the most disparate and ordinarily unfriendly parties to one another in the same blocs, rallying behind banners that wouldn\u2019t otherwise summon them.<\/p>\n

In all the epistemic chaos abroad in the Anglosphere\u2014it churns and roils its way through the culture only most noticeably in the undying allegiance of millions of Americans to the disgraced former president Donald Trump\u2014we\u2019ve reached the point where the pandemic\u2019s early public consensus and trust in government experts, in Canada at least, appears to be collapsing.<\/p>\n

Canadians almost invariably end up adopting the culture-war habits Americans torture themselves with, so there\u2019s now a \u201csmall fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa who are holding unacceptable views that they are expressing.\u201d This is how Prime Minister Justin Trudeau inelegantly described the convoys of truckers and their camp followers rumbling along Canada\u2019s highways in their Peterbilts and Kenworths, and Freightliners and Macks, intent upon converging in Ottawa this weekend.<\/p>\n

The On-to-Ottawa organizers insist they are against vaccine mandates imposed upon anyone, not just cross-border truckers, but many protesters appear to share more seething anger and frustration than any clear and coherent objective. Parliament Hill police were planning on about 10,000 people showing up. It\u2019s been a bit unsettling to consider how all this might end up playing out, because there are some genuinely nasty characters who have insinuated themselves into the anti-mandate protests. The Parliamentary Protective Service insists that everything would proceed according to routine this weekend, but it still seems unlikely that events will go on to resolve themselves quite as efficiently as they appeared to in the Young-Rogan conflict.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t just a quarrel about Spotify\u2019s royalty rates or shuffle features. The Spotify rumpus was at least partly about whether a musician like Young could use his enormous star power to force an audio-streaming company with roughly 380 million monthly users to ditch what could be described, in the most charitable terms, as the world\u2019s most popular streaming public-affairs talk show. But it\u2019s also about money. A lot of money.<\/p>\n

RELATED:\u00a0How anti-vaxxers could disrupt the cure for the COVID-19 pandemic<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Rogan signed an exclusive contract with Spotify two years ago, reportedly worth more than $100 million, and Spotify is discovering that there\u2019s more profit to be had in podcasts than in archiving digital versions of yesteryear\u2019s hit singles. Young, who had six million monthly listeners on Spotify last week, sold his music catalogue to publisher Hipgnosis last year for $150 million. While Young says losing his him-or-me ultimatum would cost him 60 per cent of his streaming-service revenue, it\u2019s not like his abdication from Spotify will cause him any pain.<\/p>\n

Young\u2019s net worth is estimated at $200 million. Now that Apple Music has declared itself Young\u2019s new streaming home, Young\u2019s earnings shouldn\u2019t be disrupted all that dramatically. So as tidy as some of us might want it, this story is not so simple as a moral tale about a shaggy and lanky iconic veteran protest singer, in his 76th year, gallantly impoverishing himself by bravely sticking it to the man.<\/p>\n

In normal times, there\u2019s hardly anything even news<\/a>worthy about celebrities throwing themselves into causes. They do it all the time and they\u2019re often pretty weird. There are celebrities against circumcision, celebrities against Oprah Winfrey and celebrities against meat. There have always been celebrities against vaccines. Now there are celebrities against COVID lockdowns.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo more taking of our freedom And our God-given rights, Pretending its for our safety When it\u2019s really to enslave . . .\u201d That\u2019s a lyric line from a one of several anti-mandate songs recently released by Van Morrison, the usually mild-mannered Northern Irish musical icon whose lyrics are sometimes so ethereal as to be comparable to the poetry of the English mystic William Blake.<\/p>\n

Early on in the pandemic, Noel Gallagher, the force behind the chart-topping band Oasis, vowed that he would not wear a mask when he was out at the shops. Only last weekend, the Marvel star Evangeline Lilly joined prominent vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy at an anti-mandate rally in Washington D.C.<\/p>\n

Last September\u2019s celebrity COVID eruption was perhaps the most amusing. That\u2019s when pop star Nicki Minaj drew unwanted attention to herself by claiming that a cousin\u2019s friend in Trinidad had been abandoned at the altar by a bride who was displeased by the way a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine had made the groom\u2019s testicles swell.<\/p>\n

Nicki Minaj has 22 million Twitter followers. Joe Rogan\u2019s Twitter crew, incidentally, numbers eight million. And now there\u2019s a #DeleteSpotify thing on Twitter that\u2019s taking off.<\/p>\n

In this bizarre new world where celebrities are taken to be epidemiologists and the toxins of antisemitism are as prevalent on the \u201cleft\u201d as they\u2019ve conventionally been situated on the \u201cright,\u201d it\u2019s not especially helpful to dismiss all those angry truckers as a pack of howling white supremacists. Something\u2019s happening here, to borrow a Buffalo Springfield lyric from Young\u2019s late 60s heyday, and what it is ain\u2019t exactly clear.<\/p>\n

Jonathan Rauch, the journalist, author, Atlantic<\/em> magazine fixture and senior fellow in governance studies with the Brookings Institution, proposes a helpful way of comprehending the perplexing phenomena of the times. It goes like this.<\/p>\n

Just as the formalized political rules that derive from the American constitution are necessary to make American democracy work, the ways that knowledge itself is constituted are necessary for politics in liberal democracies to work. And the system is close to broken.<\/p>\n

In his just-published book, the Constitution of Knowledge: A Defence of Truth<\/em>, Rauch describes how the space occupied by what he calls the \u201creality-based community\u201d is shrinking. Its customs and conventions are falling away. The intellectual strata that has conventionally distilled truth from facts and data and goes about the work of constituting knowledge\u2014historians, social scientists, journalists, policy-makers, jurists\u2014is succumbing to cultures of enforced conformity that stagnate in their own hived-off echo chambers.<\/p>\n

Ideological rigidity, speech codes, Twitter-induced outrage spasms and a strict emphasis on consistency with \u201cnarrative\u201d are supplanting the social mechanisms that have long served to transform disagreement into knowledge. We are counselled to assess truth claims by sizing up the people \u201cwho are holding unacceptable views that they are expressing,\u201d as Trudeau put it. The norms and institutions forged over decades by peer review, humility, fact-checking, good-faith debate and the evaluation of truth claims against objective evidence, verification and replication\u2014it\u2019s all up for grabs.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just that facts don\u2019t seem to matter anymore. It\u2019s that it doesn\u2019t seem to matter that facts don\u2019t matter.
\n<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n