{"id":22211,"date":"2015-04-22T20:01:55","date_gmt":"2015-04-22T20:01:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=22211"},"modified":"2015-04-22T20:10:46","modified_gmt":"2015-04-22T20:10:46","slug":"the-hymn-of-axicom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=22211","title":{"rendered":"The Hymn Of Axicom"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Give this pretty song a quick listen.<\/p>\n<div class=\"lyte-wrapper fourthree\" title=\"Vienna Teng Aims 05 The Hymn of Acxiom\" style=\"width:640px;max-width:100%;margin:5px;\"><div class=\"lyMe\" id=\"WYL_0mvrKfcOnDg\" itemprop=\"video\" itemscope itemtype=\"https:\/\/schema.org\/VideoObject\"><div><meta itemprop=\"thumbnailUrl\" content=\"https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/0mvrKfcOnDg\/hqdefault.jpg\" \/><meta itemprop=\"embedURL\" content=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/0mvrKfcOnDg\" \/><meta itemprop=\"duration\" content=\"PT3M48S\" \/><meta itemprop=\"uploadDate\" content=\"2013-07-15T07:15:29Z\" \/><\/div><div id=\"lyte_0mvrKfcOnDg\" data-src=\"https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/0mvrKfcOnDg\/hqdefault.jpg\" class=\"pL\"><div class=\"tC\"><div class=\"tT\" itemprop=\"name\">Vienna Teng Aims 05 The Hymn of Acxiom<\/div><\/div><div class=\"play\"><\/div><div class=\"ctrl\"><div class=\"Lctrl\"><\/div><div class=\"Rctrl\"><\/div><\/div><\/div><noscript><a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/0mvrKfcOnDg\" rel=\"nofollow\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/0mvrKfcOnDg\/0.jpg\" alt=\"Vienna Teng Aims 05 The Hymn of Acxiom\" width=\"640\" height=\"460\" \/><br \/>Watch this video on YouTube<\/a><\/noscript><meta itemprop=\"description\" content=\"Go order the album! http:\/\/viennateng.bandcamp.com\/album\/aims From the site: USA Today interviewed Vienna for an exclusive preview feature. From the story: The Hymn of Acxiom is...a beautiful work that gets progressively creepier as it continues. Teng uses the piece to capture the way people related to technology and the information gathered about them, and there&#039;s almost a religious quality to it. &quot;I think the reason we agree to be spied on, basically, is that, on some level, we do want to be known,&quot; she says. &quot;There is that unsettling parallel with religion and the way technology works now. At some level, as human beings, we have this deep need, this deep desire to be understood, to be seen, to have the sense that someone knows everything we do. &quot;Then there&#039;s the question of what that entity does with that knowledge. In religion, the message is that God loves you and embraces you while holding you accountable for being your best self. Whether Acxiom databases do that is much more questionable.&quot; Lyrics: Somebody hears you. You know that. You know that. Somebody hears you. you know that inside. Someone is learning the colors of all your moods, to (Say just the right thing and) show that you&#039;re understood. Here you&#039;re known. Leave your life open. You don&#039;t have. You don&#039;t have. Leave your life open. You don&#039;t have to hide. Someone is gathering every crumb you drop, these (Mindless decisions and) moments you long forgot. Keep them all. Let our formulas find your soul. We&#039;ll divine your artesian source (in your mind), marshal feed and force (our machines will) To design you a perfect love\u2014 Or (better still) a perfect lust. O how glorious, glorious: a brand new need is born. Now we possess you. You&#039;ll own that. You&#039;ll own that. Now we possess you. You&#039;ll own that in time. Now we will build you an endlessly upward world, (Reach in your pocket) embrace you for all you&#039;re worth. Is that wrong? Isn&#039;t this what you want? Amen.\"><\/div><\/div><div class=\"lL\" style=\"max-width:100%;width:640px;margin:5px;\"><\/div><\/p>\n<p>If you go to YouTube and look at the related videos, you'll see that it has generated a bunch of YouTube covers by school choirs. For obvious reasons, it's popular with choirs - even though all those harmonies in the song are the same person, multi-tracked.<\/p>\n<p>OK, but what's the song about?<\/p>\n<p>Here are the lyrics:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Somebody hears you. you know that. you know that.<br \/>\nSomebody hears you. you know that inside.<br \/>\nSomeone is learning the colors of all your moods, to<br \/>\n(say just the right thing and) show that you\u2019re understood.<br \/>\nHere you\u2019re known.<\/p>\n<p>Leave your life open. you don\u2019t have. you don\u2019t have.<br \/>\nLeave your life open. you don\u2019t have to hide.<br \/>\nSomeone is gathering every crumb you drop, these<br \/>\n(mindless decisions and) moments you long forgot.<br \/>\nKeep them all.<\/p>\n<p>Let our formulas find your soul.<br \/>\nWe\u2019ll divine your artesian source (in your mind),<br \/>\nMarshal feed and force (our machines will)<br \/>\nTo design you a perfect love\u2014<br \/>\nOr (better still) a perfect lust.<br \/>\nO how glorious, glorious: a brand new need is born.<\/p>\n<p>Now we possess you. you\u2019ll own that. you\u2019ll own that.<br \/>\nNow we possess you. you\u2019ll own that in time.<br \/>\nNow we will build you an endlessly upward world,<br \/>\n(reach in your pocket) embrace you for all you\u2019re worth.<\/p>\n<p>Is that wrong?<br \/>\nIsn\u2019t this what you want?<br \/>\nAmen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It starts out like a pretty standard sappy love song. But once you get past the first couple of verses, you might suspect that this might not be a song about hope and love and your precious fragile soul. It gets a lot darker: sounds almost jealous, possessive, sinister. But there's something else in there: formulas, design, need, lust, pocket, your worth. What's all that about?<\/p>\n<p>It's a song about data mining and targeted advertising. Axicom makes software that reads your online email and figures out what you like so that advertisers can show you ads. This song was written by a former Axicom employee.<\/p>\n<p>So, is the joke on the choirs who maybe don't know what they're singing about - they just think it's a love song with pretty harmonies? Or is the joke on audiences who don't have time to figure out what the lyrics are really about and think they're just hearing a pretty love song? Or is the joke on Axicon? Or is it on all of us who are willing to put our correspondence through Axicom's algorithms?<\/p>\n<p>via <a href='http:\/\/davidbyrne.com\/'>David Byrne<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Give this pretty song a quick listen. If you go to YouTube and look at the related videos, you'll see that it has generated a bunch of YouTube covers by school choirs. For obvious reasons, it's popular with choirs - even though all those harmonies in the song are the same person, multi-tracked. OK, but [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22211"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22217,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22211\/revisions\/22217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}