Technological Utopianism
Revised 2024
The idea that technology leads naturally toward progress - aesthetic, social, or spiritual - is one of modernity’s most persistent myths. In electronic music, this belief has shaped not just tools and techniques but entire cultures of listening and production.
From the avant-garde laboratories of the 1950s to the modular rigs and AI interfaces of the 2020s, technological discourse in music often frames innovation as inherently positive - casting each new format, platform, or plugin as a step toward sonic emancipation.
This chapter doesn’t deny the creative possibilities of digital tools, but it questions the rhetoric that surrounds them - the idea that digital sound escapes friction, that high-resolution clarity is better, that more complexity equals deeper artistic insight.
The post-digital aesthetic emerged partly as a critique of this ideology - a refusal to accept the digital as neutral, seamless, or inevitable. But to understand what it resists, we first need to understand the utopian imagination that shaped digital audio’s cultural ascent.
From Control to Immersion
Since the mid-twentieth century, electronic music has been associated with technical mastery. In the electroacoustic studios of Cologne, Paris, and New York, the composer was positioned as a kind of sonic engineer - manipulating magnetic tape, oscillators, filters, and delays with scientific intent.
This control-based model persists in much digital music today. The idea that musical sophistication lies in mastering signal chains, sequencing logic, or parametric design reflects an underlying faith in command - the belief that better tools bring us closer to artistic truth.
In many ways, this is a continuation of what Jacques Ellul called the “technological imperative” - the tendency to adopt new tools not because they serve a purpose, but because they exist.¹
In digital sound cultures, this imperative becomes a subtle kind of immersion. Interfaces vanish. Automation smooths workflow. Systems suggest rather than ask. Listening becomes navigation.
But this immersion is not neutral. It is structured. It encodes assumptions - about what sound should be, how it should behave, and who is authorised to make it.
The Promise of Progress
The narrative of digital progress has shaped how audio technologies are marketed, designed, and adopted. Each generation promises more: cleaner interfaces, more powerful engines, higher fidelity.
From the DAW to the neural network, we’re promised tools that get out of the way. That “just work.” That let the music speak.
But these tools don’t disappear. They embed. They route sound through decision trees, presets, and signal paths that reflect the values of their creators.
As Lisa Gitelman reminds us, media are always socially situated - not just devices, but “protocols for making sense.”²
What seems like frictionless listening is actually an orchestration of defaults. The “perfect” digital signal is often just one that fits the system’s expectations.
Post-digital aesthetics interrupt that orchestration. They bring the medium back into the foreground - not through nostalgia, but through noise.
Friction as Refusal
When glitch music highlights artefact, or when a no-input mixer feeds back unpredictably, these are not just technical events. They are refusals.
Refusals of the polished surface. Of seamless playback. Of the ideology of always-on availability.
Kim Cascone framed this as an “aesthetics of failure” - a way of using digital errors to resist the rhetoric of technical perfection.³ In glitch works, the system’s breakdown becomes compositional material.
But the refusal runs deeper. It’s not just about showing the seams - it’s about withholding smoothness.
Post-digital sound art often takes the form of a jammed protocol - music that doesn’t fit the platform, or that sounds wrong in a gallery, or that crashes the app.
These are not mistakes. They are critical gestures. They ask: what is the system not hearing?
From Artefact to Infrastructure
Technological utopianism doesn’t just live in interfaces - it lives in infrastructures.
Streaming services, compression codecs, recommendation algorithms, spatial audio plug-ins - all of these shape what we hear, and how we hear it.
Benjamin Bratton describes this as planetary computation - a stack of systems, from hardware to software to governance, that increasingly determines the conditions of cultural life.⁴
In this view, sound art and music don’t sit outside infrastructure - they’re produced within it. Every sonic decision is also a systemic decision.
The glitch, then, isn’t just an artefact. It’s a symptom. A clue to how the system listens.
And the post-digital composer becomes not just a maker of sounds, but a reader of structures.
A New Realism
None of this means rejecting digital tools. It means listening to them critically.
The post-digital doesn’t mark the end of the digital. It marks the point at which digital production becomes self-aware - willing to foreground failure, to reroute expectation, to question its own foundations.
This is where sonic realism enters. A belief that sound is not just a metaphor or signal - but a thing that acts. A vibrational object that persists, regardless of the intentions or ideologies behind it.
Computer music, under this lens, becomes not just a technical field but a philosophical one - asking not just how we make sound, but how sound makes us.
Footnotes
- Ellul, J. (1964) The Technological Society. New York: Vintage.
- Gitelman, L. (2006) Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Cascone, K. (2000) ‘The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music’, Computer Music Journal, 24(4), pp. 12-18.
- Bratton, B. (2015) The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.