The Fight Against Metrics
Jazz, metrics, and finding your way
Several weeks ago, I linked to
’s post on dopamine culture:
And in particular, this chart:
A friend reached out to ask whether this was just showing the process of modernization; whether film → TikTok was any different from handcrafted pottery → injection-molded mass-produced dinnerware. He wondered whether there was something about these industries that Gioia was decrying, or if it was a more general get off my lawn rant about modernity. While I obviously can’t speak for Gioia, I do have some suspicions.
As it happens, before Ted became a prolific Substacker, he was (and is?) a jazz musician and writer. I own two of his books, How to Listen to Jazz and The Jazz Standards, and recommend them both.1 Unlike EDM, pop, or country, jazz steadfastly refuses to be domesticated and mass-produced.2 Maybe the improvisational nature of the genre makes it inherently resistant to standardization. Or its penchant for really long songs and live sessions.
Jazz is not an easy genre to learn. Playing an instrument well is never easy, but jazz demands all the same technical skills as any other genre while adding on improvisation, significantly more complex chords and harmonies, and rhythmic challenges ranging from syncopation to how-is-he-keeping-track-of-the-beat drum solos (jump to about 4:40). It’s hard to imagine a glut of short-form jazz inundating TikTok because it’s hard to make enough of it.
So at some level, I suspect if you’re a serious jazz musician today, you can’t help but view the present state of culture with dread. Perhaps Ted harbors some mild artisanal distaste of mass-produced culture. I can’t blame him.
But I don’t really think that’s the crux of his complaint. His complaint centers on the evolution towards instant-gratification dopamine release, not mass production. No one—retail addiction edge cases aside—is getting high off buying decorative pottery at Target.3 The problem he is critiquing is the habit-forming addictions enabled and optimized for by modern tech. Meta wants you to keep scrolling on Instagram, and the PMs who work there are explicitly measured against KPIs that support those goals.
It’s the democratization and mass production of content combined with the metrics-driven optimization that is assaulting us today.
I’m reminded of this excellent interview with C. Thi Nguyen, a professor of philosophy who writes about games:
The podcast is worth listening to in its entirety, but one part that stuck with me is a discussion on metrics. Nguyen says metrics are “adapted to be comprehensible at scale”; to be used in situations that don’t require high context or background knowledge. He gives an example of it being hard to understand some weird delight you have in playing a particular game, versus a metric like sales data. If you’re a developer, it’s hard to optimize your game for delight!
This may sound suspiciously like legibility, and it is, but Nguyen is not anti-metrics. He acknowledges that you simply can’t function at scale without metrics. Large scale inherently comes at some cost of context. The PMs on Instagram are not malicious cogs in some infernal dopamine machine. They are like all of us, conscripted into the modern world of apps and optimization that has subsumed us all.
But as an individual, Nguyen warns us that if you get completely captured by metrics, you are “letting the demands of large scale and utterly contextless understanding strike into your soul”.’
…which I think is what Gioia and so many others are reeling from today.
We were unprepared for the dual onslaught of ever more powerful dopamine hits fused with the relentless metrics-driven efficiency of modern technology. And as we endlessly consume content engineered to appease contextless gods, we risk surrendering our taste to the leveling forces of instant gratification. For legibility, uniqueness is a bug, not a feature.
The remedy may look something like learning to play jazz: a long road towards mastery, fueled by your own tastes and desires over public approval, and a refusal to optimized. Jazz’s emphasis on spontaneous improvisation and allergy to rigid formulas might hold a lesson for us that being comprehensible at scale is overrated.
It is not an easy road, but nothing worthwhile ever is.
How to Listen to Jazz is better if you are newly interested in jazz and want to discover the repertoire; The Jazz Standards is better for someone who already likes jazz and wants to explore more.
Yes there’s all sorts of modern forms and fusions like acid jazz and trip hop and I’m fine with all of them, but unlike pop and country, the traditional forms of jazz are not only alive and well, they’re what people think of when they think of jazz. No one thinks you’re talking about Merle Travis today if you ask them if they listen to country music. Which is a shame, really.
One industry he doesn’t mention but that I think he might include in his criticism is the food industry. Modern junk food and fast food is designed for instant gratification, and you can see the effects in the rise of adult obesity in the US from 30.5% to 41.9% in the last two decades.
Brian, you constantly pound out bangers like this. I think one of the only 2-3 substacks I make time for. That dopamine stuff is truly scary. Even me, sometimes I get drawn, and then only hours later realize - shit, got trapped again. My shield is meditation, being mindful, and sometimes the practice works. What scares me is - what hope is there for children to evade this? Truly concerning.
Seems this is the area our regulators should be focusing on, instead of Elon, Tesla, Spacex, etc.
Oh well, perhaps Neuralink will be antidote to this in the future.
Thanks for writing this.