A few Strokes from crazy

The bytes, megabytes and gigabytes are eating away at who I am. Computers are trying to tell me who I am and what I should like, and are doing so more and more each day.

One example is my internet radio stations. The main one I use is Pandora.

I’ve created seven different stations on Pandora, all with the music I like but all different. A couple of my stations are Americana-oriented, two others are alternative rock based, one is rock en espanol, another is aimed at the singer-songwriter genre (Tom Waits, The Blue Nile etc.) and another is mostly oldies. To set up such stations a listener has to program in an artist or a variety of artists. I usually do the latter.

On none of these stations have I programmed in The Strokes. Yet on all of these stations, which play greatly divergent genres of music, The Strokes are played extensively.

It is as if Pandora is telling me that I really like The Strokes but don’t know it … yet.

I do kind of like The Strokes. Yes, they were a bunch of rich private school kids from New York City, sons of fashion designers and famous musicians and such, who formed a band that ended up sounding like a lowercase combination of the New York Dolls and the Rolling Stones. The Strokes are fine, but I don’t want to hear The Strokes constantly, despite what Pandora insists.

Musicians and bands I actually program into many of my stations, including Radiohead, Arctic Monkeys, David Bowie, The Beatles, the Avett Brothers, Spoon and Portugal, the Man get a lot less play on all of my stations than do The Strokes. The Strokes also get played more than any other artist on my Pandora Shuffle station, a supposed mix of all of my other Pandora stations.

I figure the reason The Strokes are played so much on my stations had to be either the mix of music I like makes the megabytes believe I can’t get enough of The Strokes, or The Strokes are paying off Pandora to get played a lot on people’s stations. As a conspiracy theorist, I prefer the latter notion.

Fed up with my All-Strokes radio on Pandora, I tried Pandora’s main internet radio competitor, Spotify. I took a good amount of time and programmed in all of the music I like to my new Spotify stations.

And what did those stations play more than anything else? The freakin’ Strokes.

But it doesn’t stop there with these bytes biting away at my essence. My work email now has a program where, when a person is writing an email, it jumps in and suggests the rest of the sentence one is writing.

Initially I was offended by this. “How dare you?” I thought. “I’m a writer and a writing teacher. The last thing I need is some android brain telling me how to write.”

I tried to ignore the suggestions for a while, but then I started realizing the program could predict, with some accuracy, what I might or should write next. So much for me thinking I had some unique turns of prose, right? Either the program had figured out how I write or my writing style is not all that unique.

I hate this program not only because it’s smart but because it will make an old writing teacher such as yours truly obsolete, an anachronism. With such programs in play, it means everyone who can take suggestions can be a good writer.

But if this program ever suggests I write a sentence about how I really love The Strokes, I’m kicking it right in the gigabytes.