Marie Davidson’s 2018 album, Working Class Girl, spoke the language of business labor. This 12 months the cheeky Québécois dance producer takes up a brand new paradigm: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, to borrow the title of scholar Shoshana Zuboff’s 700-page vital survey of how large tech firms exploit human expertise by mining our information. The guide is a main inspiration for Metropolis of Clowns, Davidson’s thundering, itchy, pneumatic new document, co-produced with Soulwax and Pierre Guerineau, her associate in Essaie Pas (who as soon as made an album impressed by Philip Okay. Dick) and L’Œil Nu. Their proto-electroclash beats and big-squelch synths evoke a swaggering heroine up towards chilly cement and server banks, a real-life sci-fi dystopia that’s a little bit bit The Matrix and a little bit bit The Substance: You’re within the system, and it’s feeding on you.
Within the surveillance economic system, you and I are neither prospects nor merchandise however “the objects from which uncooked supplies are extracted and expropriated,” Zuboff writes (italics hers). That uncooked materials is our information, extra worthwhile to enterprise than any one in all us. Davidson quotes quite a few Zuboff’s phrases and ideas straight, together with the flippantly modified textual content of opening observe “Validations Weight.” “You be taught to sacrifice your freedom to collective data imposed by others and for the sake of their assured outcomes,” Davidson reads by way of the clipped enunciation of an AI text-to-speech filter. The long-range final result of surveillance capitalist practices, Zuboff argues, is to implement certainty and homogenization—to make us much less human.
Metropolis of Clowns, in impact, takes place on the web, in a world of information assortment, advert concentrating on, and behavioral prediction. Davidson’s true emotions on supposedly cutting-edge expertise usually are not arduous to discern. (“I don’t want a VR headset to really feel emotion,” she snarked on Working Class Girl; “Actuality is disgusting sufficient.”) Zuboff’s guide, a meticulous investigation of a society the place innovation has seemingly shifted completely to the financialization of the digital, is equally heady in its online-ness. Transposing even a few of these ideas to bop music is hard, and Davidson in all probability deserves essentially the most credit score for managing to make it not simply danceable however truly… fairly humorous?
Although Davidson’s model is commonly described as deadpan, Metropolis of Clowns has a pranksterish, nearly burlesque high quality. “Play this recreation,” she invitations over ultra-basic drum machine and skronked-up Depeche Mode bass on “Push Me Fuckhead”: “Stare on the squares/What do you see?/What number of buses?/What number of bushes?” You doubtless by no means explicitly agreed to coach future AI platforms by fixing visible CAPTCHAs like these—certainly, they’re offered as a obligatory safety measure. However perhaps you like feeling exploited? On the cyborg striptease “Demolition,” monitoring software program gears as much as dom you: “I don’t need your money/What I need is you… I need your information!” Davidson engages together with her ambivalence in regards to the pleasure we expertise on-line, too, pondering whether or not she’s secretly a “bitch,” a cooperator, able to “give you my coronary heart proper on a selfie stick.” And are we positive that “Y.A.A.M.”—brief for “all of your asses are mine”—isn’t by some means associated to “All of your base are belong to us,” the iconic ur-meme with its personal gabber remix? (Extra like “all of your database” amirite?)