Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (The MIT Press)

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At some point, however, you begin to feel uncomfortable. You find yourself losing control of the application. As time goes on, the feeling becomes more intense, and you eventually enter a state known as the Fear Cycle: When loading, simply drag and drop each file onto Terra when it asks and it will load them for you. Alternatively, you can copy the contents of the file and paste them onto the game. Did you know that the CO2 equivalents generated by consumption of recorded music have not declined in the era of music streaming—supposedly an era of music dematerialized, rendered virtual—but instead have as much as doubled? Kyle Devine knows, and in Decomposed he teaches us about such things with intelligence, humaneness, and passion. His book is at once a history of materialities of recording, from lac beetle resins in the 1920s to today's energy-sump server farms, and a manifesto for ecological scrutiny of our musical behaviors.

Devine’s findings may, at first glance, provoke a helpless shrug. Every field of human endeavor entails some form of environmental destruction, and the music industry is perhaps no worse than any other. A sour critic might point out that printing a book about the political ecology of music makes its own contribution to the despoliation of the planet. But Devine isn’t interested in inducing guilt; he simply wants us to become more aware of the materiality of music. He writes, “There is a highly intoxicating form of mystification at work in the ideology of musical culture more generally.” As a result, music is “seen as a special pursuit that somehow transcends the conditions of its production.” Devine’s critical history of recording formats throws a necessary wrench into that mythology of musical purity.Harvey Molotch, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, NYU and UCSB; author of Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers and Many Other Things Come to Be as They Are Within a short time, cloud native has become a driving trend in the software industry. It's a new way to construct large, complex systems. The approach takes full advantage of modern software development practices, technologies, and cloud infrastructure. Cloud native changes the way you design, implement, deploy, and operationalize systems. Hmm... We just used the term, Cloud Native. Your first thought might be, "What exactly does that mean?" Another industry buzzword concocted by software vendors to market more stuff?"

If you follow the guidance from past 15 years, you'll most likely build the system shown in Figure 1.1. Your cellphone rings. It's your friendly recruiter - the one who calls daily with exciting new opportunities. Gary Tomlinson, John Hay Whitney Professor of Music and Humanities, Yale University; author of A Million Years of Music In “Into the Wild,” the book I wrote about McCandless’s brief, confounding life, I came to a different conclusion. I speculated that he had inadvertently poisoned himself by eating seeds from a plant commonly called wild potato, known to botanists as Hedysarum alpinum. According to my hypothesis, a toxic alkaloid in the seeds weakened McCandless to such a degree that it became impossible for him to hike out to the highway or hunt effectively, leading to starvation. Because Hedysarum alpinum is described as a nontoxic species in both the scientific literature and in popular books about edible plants, my conjecture was met with no small amount of derision, especially in Alaska.

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MIT Press Direct is a distinctive collection of influential MIT Press books curated for scholars and libraries worldwide. MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology. Devine's critical history of recording formats throws a necessary wrench into [the] mythology of musical purity." Kyle Devine opens us to oil wells, studio albums, digital accessories, and much else —creative, horrible, and in between—on which music reproduction depends. Itself rendered with precision and elegance, Decomposed is fit for music lovers, social scientists, and all citizens of a tremulous earth. I was perplexed. Clausen was an esteemed organic chemist, and the results of his analysis seemed irrefutable. But McCandless’s July 30th journal entry couldn’t have been more explicit: “ EXTREMELY WEAK. FAULT OF POT[ATO] SEED.” His certainty about the cause of his failing health gnawed at me. I began sifting through the scientific literature, searching for information that would allow me to reconcile McCandless’s adamantly unambiguous statement with Clausen’s equally unambiguous test results.