Marie Davidson’s 2018 album, Working Class Woman, spoke the language of industrial labor. This year the cheeky Québécois dance producer takes up a new paradigm: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, to borrow the title of scholar Shoshana Zuboff’s 700-page critical survey of how giant tech corporations exploit human experience by mining our data. The book is a primary inspiration for City of Clowns, Davidson’s thundering, itchy, pneumatic new record, co-produced with Soulwax and Pierre Guerineau, her partner in Essaie Pas (who once made an album inspired by Philip K. Dick) and L’Œil Nu. Their proto-electroclash beats and big-squelch synths evoke a swaggering heroine up against cold cement and server banks, a real-life sci-fi dystopia that’s a little bit The Matrix and a little bit The Substance: You’re in the system, and it’s feeding on you.
In the surveillance economy, you and I are neither customers nor products but “the objects from which raw materials are extracted and expropriated,” Zuboff writes (italics hers). That raw material is our data, more valuable to business than any one of us. Davidson quotes a number of Zuboff’s terms and concepts directly, including the lightly modified text of opening track “Validations Weight.” “You learn to sacrifice your freedom to collective knowledge imposed by others and for the sake of their guaranteed outcomes,” Davidson reads through the clipped enunciation of an AI text-to-speech filter. The long-range outcome of surveillance capitalist practices, Zuboff argues, is to enforce certainty and homogenization—to make us less human.
City of Clowns, in effect, takes place on the internet, in a world of data collection, ad targeting, and behavioral prediction. Davidson’s true feelings on supposedly cutting-edge technology are not hard to discern. (“I don’t need a VR headset to feel emotion,” she snarked on Working Class Woman; “Reality is disgusting enough.”) Zuboff’s book, a meticulous investigation of a society where innovation has seemingly shifted entirely to the financialization of the virtual, is similarly heady in its online-ness. Transposing even some of these concepts to dance music is tough, and Davidson probably deserves the most credit for managing to make it not just danceable but actually… pretty funny?
Though Davidson’s style is often described as deadpan, City of Clowns has a pranksterish, almost burlesque quality. “Play this game,” she invites over ultra-basic drum machine and skronked-up Depeche Mode bass on “Push Me Fuckhead”: “Stare at the squares/What do you see?/How many buses?/How many trees?” You likely never explicitly agreed to train future AI platforms by solving visual CAPTCHAs like these—indeed, they’re presented as a necessary security measure. But maybe you like feeling exploited? On the cyborg striptease “Demolition,” tracking software gears up to dom you: “I don’t want your cash/What I want is you… I want your data!” Davidson engages with her ambivalence about the pleasure we experience online, too, pondering whether she’s secretly a “bitch,” a cooperator, ready to “offer you my heart right on a selfie stick.” And are we sure that “Y.A.A.M.”—short for “all your asses are mine”—isn’t somehow related to “All your base are belong to us,” the iconic ur-meme with its own gabber remix? (More like “all your database” amirite?)
A companion EP compiles four album singles, “Fun Times,” “Sexy Clown,” “Contrarian,” and “Y.A.A.M,” into a bangers-only set of dancefloor weapons, but Davidson is anything but a crowd-pleaser. There’s the track called “Push Me Fuckhead,” and that’s before she starts spelling it out—F-U-C-K Y-O-U—in the chorus of “Y.A.A.M.” Don’t like her attitude? Too bad: “Fake positivity is as cringe as it gets.” Oh, this track has zero subtlety and seems obsessed with hammering in the same acid-soaked melodic idea over and over? Well have you considered that it’s called “Contrarian”? I have a soft spot for women with this sarcastic, metacommunicative sense of humor because I’m one of them, but also because AI can’t touch it. Davidson’s willingness to flip off the same tech bros buying tickets to her sets is real, human, hilarious.
City of Clowns will go off in an un-air-conditioned warehouse, but the album’s philosophical basis underlines something that’s become stunningly obvious recently: Global tech is in ethical, moral, and political decline. Davidson’s album asks that techno—a genre founded in technofuturist hopes for a more advanced, more just society—reckon with the specific ways that surveillance capitalism has compromised those ideals. It’s no coincidence that Zuboff’s book begins with the revolutionary consumer embrace of the iPod, or that Liz Pelly touches on several of the same arguments in Mood Machine, her new history of Spotify and its influence: Electronic music, in the broadest sense, is not some artsy interpretative choice here but an origin point and proving ground for the contemporary data science extraction machine. That trending post-Y2K rave sound, the one that sounds a bit like Boys Noize or Felix Da Housecat, is also a historical marker of the period when surveillance’s foundations were laid.
Enough though: You are not supposed to be appreciating this stuff while scrolling. Does the so-called democratization of streaming platforms outweigh their manipulations and privacy invasions? Can anti-tech techno ever hold up conceptually? Should we be more offended by the feminized subservience of Alexa than the confrontational rudeness of “Y.A.A.M.”? Look, fuckhead, humans live with ambiguity and culture is how we enact it. Art smashes binaries and the only cartoon apes I recognize are Gorillaz. Time to log off and dance.
