“I know that Spotify is the devil and the absolute disgust and we must get out of there, but, please, share yours, I love seeing them, and then we will all go somewhere else,” publishes the writer and journalist () in his stories from Instagram. The thing about Spotify not being cool is said by . The fact that we all want to see everyone’s wrapped is a fact. But why are we so excited to know which song we listen to the most this year or to know our musical age? It is because it is an identity issue, and there is nothing as important in this century (politically and humanly speaking) as identity.
And what is identity, according to Spotify’s Wrapped? Well, basically, give you the opportunity to be who you think you are and show it to others. Not that they tell you what you are like, because you can’t know that based on whether you’ve heard more. Lux o The Life of a Showgirl. How you really are (empathic, happy or evil…) Wrapped is not going to tell you, and nobody really cares, because technology has super good news and it can assure you, at the end of the year, that you have become exactly the person you thought you were, not who you really are. And how can you prove it? Well, let’s see, because your top five artists are Nation of Language, Safe Mind, La Roux, Garbage and Jade, for example. And that is so important that you are going to share it so that everyone knows… who you are.
That an algorithm can grant identity is an issue as important for multinationals as it is for political parties, which . A change that the extreme right has internalized (ideas are worthless and you can be president of the United States by saying that migrants) and that the left does not fully accept. Progressive parties maintain a discourse in favor of equality (very 20th century), when what creates fans, clients or voters is identity; specifically, being different (never the same) and preferably superior. The word equality is fine morally, but rhetorically it no longer sells because it does not build identity.
The obligatory question is how to sell and how to build an identity in the 21st century. Until now we have thought that identity was the intimate expression of what we are and required diving into each individual, building a plastic and even poetic communication of what each person feels and trying, in short, to build and decipher ourselves. However, the identity that triumphs today is the public (not intimate) judgment of who we are. A list to prove it, a number of likes or a political proclamation about fruit that says nothing, but who you are. It is no longer that political convictions decide the votes, but rather that many votes are secured based on the identity they promise to grant: being more Spanish than the rest, for example. You can vote like this, just like you can listen to music on Spotify because, although its CEO has invested 700 million in the war, it has an algorithm that takes 20 years off according to our “musical age.” And, of course, there is no one who can resist.
