Autotune has no soul
In an interview with Shane Parrish, Douglas Rushkoff talks about how we try to autotune ourselves:
I feel like we're trying to autotune ourselves. We're living in a digital media environment where everything is quantized. It's either here or there; you're either on this node or that node. Our value system, accordingly, is to get people either up to the C or down to the B, but not in that weird squishy place in between. Fuzzy logic is about reducing; it's not about maintaining the fuzziness. It's about: you're here, or you're there. If you need more granularity, okay we'll give you another half step. … You're still always on the mark, and what we do by doing that is make a judgement as to what is signal and what is noise. If you're going to autotune James Brown reaching up for the note or coming down for the note—no, no, you don't autotune him—he's on the note. What have you done? You've filed off the soul. The signal in a James Brown recording, the actual signal, is his soul reaching for that note. That's why we call it soul: it's reaching. That's what makes his interpretation of the song different than Brittney's, different than Rhianna's. If we autotune everybody in our music, we're trending toward auto-tuning everybody in their lives. The metric you put on the wall is the metric you're gonna get. [1]
I find the idea that we're autotuning ourselves—that our lives are being auto-tuned—fascinating and scary. But it truly is everywhere, especially in politics and social norms. Anyone that doesn't hit the right note is considered noise.