How The NRA and Spotify Perform the Same Sleight of Hand
Guns and algorithms are machines that define what is possible, and therefore what is real
The Tool and the Dream
Music doesn’t slay people. People slay people. Or maybe that’s just my brain confusing metaphors, shaped by growing up blasting Slayer through my headphones on my Sony Walkman, trying to teach myself Dave Lombardo’s double bass chops. Either way, the confusion matters because the NRA depends on it, and so does Spotify.
Let’s begin with something simple: a drumstick.
A drumstick is a tool. It started as a tree and ended up as a drumstick because the world in which a drumstick could be imagined already existed. This is another way of saying that the existence of the drumstick presupposes a world where a drumstick is useful.
A drumstick is useful because we have drums designed to sound better when struck with a stick. In other words, the drumstick’s meaning is embedded in a cultural and practical horizon. Its telos, its end, its purpose, is to strike a drum and produce sound, hopefully pleasurable, although what counts as pleasurable or not is itself bounded by culture and context.
Now imagine this: I’m a teenager, headphones clamped to my ears, staring out my bedroom window and Slayer is playing tonight at Madison Square Garden. In my dream, I’m on a train headed to the show. Somewhere in that teenage fantasy, a crew member meets me at Penn Station: Dave Lombardo is sick, and Slayer needs someone who knows every song and who can hammer out double bass chops at Lombardo’s speed. Somehow, they find me and I’m rushed backstage, handed a setlist, introduced to the band, and shoved on stage.
Dream come true (flex emoji).
Until halfway through a thunderous fill, my hand slips. A drumstick goes flying into the crowd. It strikes someone in the front row. They collapse. A dream curdles into a nightmare.
The drumstick, once a tool for making beauty, becomes an instrument of death.
But let’s get serious again: Because we live in a world that presupposes a telos for the tool to strike a drum, not a person, this death is an accident. The tool deviated from its intended use as the drumstick was built to extend the hand, not to end a life.
The Machine on the Table
Now imagine yourself as a mafia boss, think Tony Soprano, and you have a “client” who is very late on his protection premium. You go down to have a chat. You sit across the table, talk about the weather, ask about the family. “Is Joey still playing first base on the Little League team?”
Then, casually, you bring up the matter of the late payment. “Is there anything I can do?” you offer, smiling.
When they insist that everything is fine, you slowly reach into your jacket, take out a handgun, and place it on the table. You never take your eyes off them.
Then you ask again, softly: “So why is the protection money so late?”
Within seconds, they walk to the lockbox, pull out a few bills, and hand them to you. You thank them, tuck the gun back into your jacket, and leave.
Nothing was fired. Nothing exploded. But something real happened.
The presence of the machine — the gun — changed the entire situation.
A gun is not simply a neutral object lying inert on a table. It is a machine, a system of parts organized to perform a specific function: to kill or to wound. Unlike a drumstick, which as a simple tool extends human capability in a singular way, a gun is an integrated system where trigger, firing pin, chamber, and barrel work together toward a singular purpose.
In the world we inhabit, where guns exist and have meaning, the machine does not wait passively for activation. It structures possibility the moment it appears.
Even untouched on the table, the gun was already firing virtually. By structuring what is possible, it structures what becomes real. The machine’s very existence shapes the horizon of potential actions, collapsing certain possibilities while conjuring others into being. This virtual power embedded in the machine fundamentally alters our embodied experience of reality. While a drumstick accidentally killing someone represents a deviation from its purpose, a gun pointed at someone fulfills its inherent design. A tool extends human capability; a machine structures what is possible.
The Marketing of Neutrality
Now, the smart people at the NRA, or maybe it was one of their lawyers, understood the structuring power of guns. They devised a marketing slogan that cleverly obscures the gun’s real ontology, reframing it from a machine embedded within a world that presupposes its use, into a passive tool, misused only by human error.
You all know the phrase, philosophically hilarious yet ontologically devastating: “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”
In a stroke of mystical marketing gusto that would make a veteran snake oil salesman blush, they replaced the machine’s inherent structuring power with the fantasy of inert neutrality, as if a gun were no more consequential than a paintbrush, a hammer, or a drumstick.
New Gatekeepers, Same Sleight of Hand
This same sleight of hand — the mystical inversion of machine into tool appears elsewhere. You don’t even need to leave your couch to find it. Just open Spotify.
Spotify really likes to present itself as a neutral platform for musical discovery, a passive tool at the listener’s disposal which “democratizes” access to the entire compendium of recorded music. But it is nothing of the sort.
I was at a music policy conference in Seattle this past week and a renowned session and touring musician offered an incisive observation about the term “gatekeepers” that I think can help enlarge my broader argument here. Their comment emerged within discussions about the supposed democratization of access to music — how platforms like Spotify are often framed as a natural, inevitable developments rather than contingent technologies shaped by specific interests.
The musician pushed back strongly against this naturalization claim. They pointed to the the sleight of hand in Spotify’s assertion that it has removed music’s gatekeepers. What Spotify has actually done, in their estimation, is install new gatekeepers, but these new gatekeepers are not human they are mathematical equations that operate according to a machinic logic unintelligible to temporally bounded, physically embodied humans.
To illustrate the point, the musician addressed a famous booking agent sitting in the room stating: “You are a gatekeeper in the traditional sense, but you’re fundamentally different from Spotify’s gatekeeping.”
He went on to explain that traditional gatekeepers exist in time with us, embedded within the community. They take risks and actions that are socially bounded and help define a culture. This embodied presence also exposes such gatekeepers to feedback not only through ticket sales, or album sales, but through the full spectrum of cultural information.
The algorithm, by contrast, structures musical possibility itself wholly outside of its manifestation, and totally without risk or context.
Like the gun on the table, Spotify exerts its influence virtually, reshaping what is possible and thereby determining the reality of music creation and consumption. It does not simply filter what already exists; it actively determines what can exist in the first place.
The machine that is Spotify is already structuring the musical world through the musicians it now governs, musicians who alter their creative process to align with its machinic logics. Human expression bends toward the platform’s embedded telos: keeping listeners locked in a passive, lean-back consumptive state. Like the shopkeeper rushing to the lockbox to produce a pile of bills to ensure his continued existence, musicians now mutate their own expressions to secure their relevance within the platform economy.
Music as Knowledge, Algorithms as Constraint
Before I close this out, I want to make another provocative claim: that the world we are living through right now, the one being dismantled before our eyes through haphazard, indiscriminate, unfeeling actions, is the inevitable consequence of the virtual structuring performed by Spotify’s algorithm on our cultural expressions through music.
I argue, alongside American philosopher Susanne K. Langer, that music is not merely entertainment or emotional decoration; it is a presentational form, a symbolic form that carries within its structure vital epistemological information. What is transmitted through the presentational form of a song, a performance, or a communal ritual of sound, in all of these varied forms, is another slice of reality being revealed, just as real and important as the discursive logic we rely on to build the mediated realities of science, governance, and everyday rationality.
Furthermore, music, in its symbolic unfolding, transmits knowledge that discursive reasoning cannot contain: knowledge of temporality, embodiment, feeling, social coherence, loss, becoming, and resonance — all of which are real as 2+2 = 4.
When we allow machines to restructure the virtual possibilities of music into algorithmically optimized content, we are not just altering the structure of a song, we are losing a fundamental dimension of knowing, a way of engaging with reality that reveals human life within a coherent, meaningful universe.
Of course, I am not saying that Trumpism or the crumbling of the post–World War II global order is solely Spotify’s fault. That would be absurd. Spotify is not the cause, but it belongs to a network of causal forces that our conventional epistemological frameworks fail (or refuse) to properly recognize. In a world increasingly mediated by algorithms that structure possibility according to machinic logic rather than human understanding, platforms like Spotify are not innocent conduits for human creativity. They are active agents in the ongoing transformation of cultural consciousness, reaching into the very temporal unfoldings of human experience and constraining its expressions to their logic — fundamentally altering not what is heard, but what can be made, what can be imagined, and ultimately what can be known.
In this sense, they are participants in the broader dismantling of relational, symbolic, and temporal dimensions that once anchored human social life.
In 1958 Langer closed a lecture she gave on the cultural importance of art with this prescient warning:
The arts objectify subjective reality, and subjectify outward experience of nature. Art education is the education of feeling, and a society that neglects it gives itself up to formless emotion. Bad art is corruption of feeling. This is a large factor in the irrationalism which dictators and demagogues exploit.
Beyond the Machine’s Reach
Is there a future for music in this environment?
Yes, but only where the machine’s reach remains incomplete. In spaces where human bodies still gather, where sound unfolds through risk and contingency rather than prediction and control, offline.
Where gatekeepers, performers, and listeners share the same air, the same uncertainty, and the same risks, and where, through the act of expression unconstrained by the machinic logics of our platform economy, symbolic knowledge is revealed, knowledge that binds us to a reality we all can feel and which an algorithm can only conceal.