2/23/2024 - entertainment-and-well-being

Was Stereo anticipating AI?

By Melissa Bargman

Was Stereo anticipating AI?

To read this note, it will be necessary to defuse the old recorders stored in the platerd, to clean the pua and to seek these forgotten vinyls in the most distant shelf of the mobile, is that it is usually below, disordered and usually hidden by other great objects more accomplices of the daily agitation in which we continually feel that we lack vitamins. There they are, a little cracked, with the faint cover, drop some cardboard pedacitos, survivors of the claws of time, and make us cough a little by the contaminated air of particles of years of silence in pause.

We pass Charly and its hotels demolished, the Flaco on its yellow bridges and drops a disk, with three boys in caricature style on a gray, simple and insipid view. What is it really? The gateway to a futuristic journey from one of the most legendary bands of national and Latin American rock. Soda Stereo, this power trio formed in 1982 by Gustavo Cerati, Zeta Bosio (Héctor Pedro Juan Bosio) and Charly Alberti (Carlos Alberto Ficicchia), edits his first album in 1984, sells more than 20 million copies worldwide and It gives almost 1,500 recitais in 97 cities of America and Europe.

Time for play. We all know the history of this band and more than once we sing “ of that love of light music, nothing libra” but much remains in the soda cup. On this occasion, we will not pass milestones or speak of records, we leave the data of Google Knowledge Panel. On the contrary, we will raise the American blind from some of the songs gathered in their 7 studio albums and look for a “message between lines” premonitorio of algorithms, satellites, Artificial Intelligence, networks, technologies and demases artilugios that define our life, among information cannibals.

Communication without emotion?

To begin this somewhat ambitious futuristic adventure, it is necessary to know (as in any investigation), the origin of our interlocutors. Cerati and Zeta They met in 1979 while attending the communication career at the University of Salvador together. It is not a minor given in time to make a deeper reading of your compositions.

Just listen to the intro of “Personal Nothing” in which a “emotionalless communication, an off voice with deformed expression”, a kind of robot, an automata, a chatbot, automatic translator, some product of Artificial Intelligence that seeks to imitate the human being in its way of learning and interacting. In the song, this desperate character complains that “it would be so good to play, but it’s useless, his body is latex”. If we put ourselves in time and space, this fantasy has as protagonist a body manufactured by zeros and a, screens that transmit through millions of terabytes, this “video image” in which our stereo character seeks heat.
This ambition to find another in the virtual world (now agreed real) is no more than a set of “Signos”, in which “you love me in the dark and sleep engaged in networks”... these networks, platforms, applications that we travel as mazes looking for friends, couples, casual encounters. Spaces full of identities built up to the least detail in front of which many discourage us by discovering that “There is no” or do not correspond with what has so deceived us. Expectations that are the result of this “Polaroid on the chair, brilliant appearance trick”: right? If we think about the brand logo that represents Instagram, the platform that focuses on a fully editable image with millions of filters. In 2014, Socialmatic managed to obtain Polaroid rights to manufacture an analog camera that was equipped with many of Instagram's features.

I want to be from Jet-Set

The appearances were always a recurring theme in the band’s songs, this search for reasons of “Why can’t I be from the Jet Set?”, the one with the needle pocket, but at least has a Rolex that “has stolen”. A Jet Set that in our virtual world implies reaching hundreds, thousands, millions of followers, retwits, “you like me” at any price, to fulfill the dream of becoming reference, “influence” in which brands deposit their ambition of sales and advertising.

Some criticism of massive and excessive consumption may be found that evidence the band's academic training. By taking the pua and returning to the first homonymous album released in 1982, you can sing the choir “Time is Money” that quotes Dorian Grey, the memorable Oscar Wilde character, who resorts to the most unthinkable ways not to age, this social requirement of staying young, impolute and resistant to the pace of time. It is not possible the mission of buying beauty products, undergoing treatments, following magical recipes that bomb us from the hundreds of sources of information we consume every day. Just look at “not ageing” on Google so that the searcher in just 0.30 seconds hits us “about 9,150,000 results”. Attention: When we reach the end of the results, we are likely to have a couple of canes or wrinkles more.

Retreating to the track 5 of the album, echoes another parodic expert of the consumerist society, “Dietetic”, of a “ dietary set that seeks an aesthetic paradise”. The song turns out to be, from the thought of superficial exaggeration, a raw portrait of the image cult society with “new decreme minds, gimnasia silhouettes” in which “I want you but you are so fat, I assumed you are not modern”. Behind songs that, in appearance, seek the classic dancing hit of the 80’, the band makes a description of a capitalist logic in which we lack vitamins, treating us softly.

Satellites (Noticing us)

“The peligran streets, the bars close”. Yeah, it looks like the 2020 quarantine description, doesn't it? A kind of pandemic pre-monition dating back to 1985, on the B side of the album “Personal Nothing”. A somewhat apocalyptic context in which Cerati impels “Apague this monitor”, expels them out of their orbit and states that out of the atmosphere is where it feels better because “there are satellites around us, observing us”. In the best style of persecutory denunciation begs “to remove the blockade, let me, let me go, I want to take a walk”. 37 years later, there seems to be no escape out of the atmosphere of mobile devices, surveillance cameras, GPS we take in our pocket... watching us. These billions of bits that build an almost perfect portrait of our lives (gusts, friends, relationships, interests) travel in real time by submarine cables (in our country, located in Las Toninas) that connect the most recognizable places in the world. Although we're a million light-years from home, they can find us.

Satellites don't stay behind either. The UCS (Union of Concerned Scientists), an organism that carries forward an updated content of the amount of satellites orbiting on earth, andIn January 2022 detected approximately 4852 satellites orbiting around the planet. These artificial bodies that watch and fly over us as invisible giants, fulfill the most diverse functions and are owned by governments and companies. It is no less to underline this question: without going further, Elon Musk bought the social network Twitter for $44 billion. Musk also owns the Space X company which proposes to launch a constellation of 42,000 satellites into space. Your mission? Connecting the world, beyond geographical, natural, economic barriers. A little ambitious, huh? It is no less than controversial and alarming platform owners also control the traffic of the information we generate.

The Internet service provided by this satellite constellation will be provided by the Starlink company, which is already registered in Argentina since March 15, 2022 in the Bulletin Official. It is not yet available for your hiring, but it will certainly be a matter of time until we are observed and connected by this new technology. You can't delete the monitor anymore because we take it with us.

Nobody knows about me, and I'm part of everyone.

In the City of Furia of platforms and networks, its millions of transients leave a footprint of each of their practices, searches, interests, interactions, in short, signs such as “water collections” of codes and algorithms, bases of these intangible infrastructures that organize and model life. As the song says, these signals are “my insecure part”: it never remains clear who has access to the data we generate. What happens in front of a hack? How far is that we produce on the network? Who follows us on Instagram on Twitter, Tik Tok, who is our friend on Facebook? As it suggests “The Rite” on the album “Signos” of 1986, the one who sings that “sueles find me anywhere”, each second will be closer... now easier than ever.

In the patches of the platform society, we can often feel like this “man to the Water” that months sailing, decides to jump from covered, floating around the river, involved in the current between voices that are stirred. We consume unwavering amounts of information, from the most diverse sources, fake news, we top up with trolls, fake accounts, hack risks... challenging rites, destroying myths. There are no fables in the city of Furia anymore.

It is increasingly difficult to find firm ground from where to check the truthfulness of the facts, from where to root, the figure of reliable publishers or sources disdains as a drifting ship impossible to control and check in front of the compelling speed of content production: according to a report of Statist, one of the world’s most important statistics portals, in July 2021, “65% of the world’s population had access to the Network which represents 5.170 million people. Of this total, more than 92.5% used their phone or mobile device to access the internet.” What happens only in about 60 seconds on the network? , another of the major international data analysis companies calculated that in a minute of 2021 on the Internet: In Tiktok there were 167 million videos, Facebook Live received 44 million visits,6 million people were online shopping, by YouTube there were 694,000 videos, posted 575,000 tweets, Microsoft Teams linked 100,000 users and Instagram shared 65,000 photos.

The tremor will no longer pass on the Internet, so it will remain awake. This “TV Surrender” is now impossible to erase.

Black Box End

“And yet you can open your black box.” Thus culminates the album Nothing Personal and the end of this futuristic journey, seeking signs of premonition in soiree poetry. It seems an optimistic message for present users, tied to algorithms known as black boxes: their complexity is unwavering for the average navigator and sometimes for the very manufacturers of these imposing code boats that lead us to navigate through the endless data networks lodged in stormy clouds.

It takes miles of review of regulations in the light of new practices to contemplate the diversities, complexities, power relations, all that white noise that endures, but that allows us to communicate, learn, work, create, debate, express... live. Anyway, taking beauty from this chaos, it's virtue.

Quotes cited in chronological order:

Soda Stereo (1982)

  • Time is Money
  • Dietary
  • TV overdose.
  • Why can't I be Jet Set?
  • Missing vitamins
  • Thrat gently

Nothing Personal (1985)

  • Nothing personal
  • When you pass the Temblor
  • Watching us (Satellites)

Signs (1986)

  • Signs
  • Profuse
  • The Rite
  • There are
  • American Persia
  • Black Box End

Animal Song (1990)

  • Music Ligera
  • A Million Years of Light
  • Man to Water
  • Between Cannibals

Dynamo (1992)

  • In Remolinos

Natural Force (last soloist work by Gustavo Cerati, 2009)

  • Let it fly

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Melissa Bargman

Melissa Bargman

Hi, I'm Melissa, Social Communicator and Professor of Comparative Legislation at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires. I am dedicated to the research of new technologies and their application in everyday life, their regulation, their opportunities and risks in society.

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