Engaging opacity: Spotify and the poeisis of algorithmic backends

Markham, Tim (2023) Engaging opacity: Spotify and the poeisis of algorithmic backends. In: Parks, L. and Velkova, J. and De Ridder, S. (eds.) Media Backends: Digital Infrastructures and Sociotechnical Relations. The Geopolitics of Information. Champaign, U.S.: University of Illinois Press, pp. 95-109. ISBN 9780252045349.

Abstract

The music streaming platform Spotify is sustained by a backends that goes largely unnoticed by users, from its algorithmic deign and energy consumption to the way streamed artists are paid (or not). Counter-intuitively, however, this chapter argues against an ethics of transparency and accountability regarding Spotify’s backend architecture. Drawing on recent work by Louise Amoore as well as Judith Butler’s reading of Spinozan ethics, opacity is fundamental to accountability. The partial knowability of Spotify’s history, design and capacities is thus the essence of what it means to find oneself always already in an environment of which it is partially constitutive. Far from advocating ignorance, a phenomenological approach grounds an ontological understanding of media backends that is agile, self-generative and above all ethical.

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