AUTHOR: IVO MARTINS
EDITION: Guimarães Jazz Journal 2025 - Câmara Municipal de Guimarães/ Associação Cultural Convívio/ A Oficina DATE: November 2025
At At the beginning of its implementation, the network was organized to be as user-friendly as possible from the users’ point of view and to serve us in a simple way. It was built from binary elements (bits and bytes) mutually interconnected, crossing information at extremely complex and unexpected levels, conceived to achieve predictable and intuitive results. The idea was to develop a system in which our actions would remain eternally stored online, in a memory that transcended us even when they were deleted by ourselves. Later, though sooner than we thought, the power of the digital opened itself to an infinite and abyssal reality, something contrary to our nature and finitude — a situation that was permanently amplified by the intervention of new exploratory elements such as, for example, the most recent generative artificial intelligence. These new elements take advantage of all the excesses and extravagances we manifest in our choices and are technically amplified, forming new portfolios of options, new alternatives, new possibilities for navigation. This means that these processes no longer belong to us, since our behaviors feed the network and trigger other behaviors. Thus, the totality of what we do forms a galaxy of interventions that lies somewhere in a temporal limbo between the present, the past, and the future — a multiplied reality, an indistinct and incessant whole that is permanently self-updating. In this movement, we are dragged by unstoppable waves of waste, things we feel in the vibrations of the internet — a process that explores the tendencies, inclinations, and propensities of people who like to consume more than they need, thus keeping users focused on satisfying their false needs, increasingly numerous and disposable.
If we were to be more forceful in our analysis, we would say that around the digital a complex system is being built — in a strange era of extreme inequality — with unthinkable forms of exclusivity that separate those who are tuned in from those who are not. When we look more closely at its content regarding music, jazz, and art, we detect strange phenomena such as the expropriation of our experiences; the hijacking of the division of learning; structural independence from the people it should serve; the covert imposition of the collective hive; the rise of an instrumentalist form of power. The radical indifference that sustains this extractive logic — the construction, ownership, and manipulation of the means of behavioral modification — justifies the abolition of the fundamental right to privacy protection, generating as a consequence the degradation of the individual’s status as the center of democracy, dissolved in the insistence on psychic stupefaction. Among many other things, we feel that this structure, largely dispensable, has shown itself increasingly expansionist in the direction of domination that neoliberal logic had already foretold. In light of this, we may say that the network justifies itself, in the same way that the market justifies itself; and we, as actors in this process, are secondary elements in a somewhat schizophrenic mechanism of serial reproduction, in the course of which we are transformed into an equation/synthesis of words found in the combination users/consumers/listeners.
//////
Currently, there is no stabilized and complex language of online functioning in the digital space — something like a universal process of real-time communication. Therefore, as we navigate it, we do not need to relinquish our own specificities, our individual characteristics, our idiosyncratic peculiarities, within a context that appears increasingly flexible, movable, and interactive. This reality, though artificial, is simultaneously uncontrollable and infinite. Translations of meaning are practically instantaneous, and we are only at the beginning of a new paradigm of total mediation — and therefore, more complete — which, ultimately, will have the capacity to completely replace the user.
In these circumstances, the consumer/listener almost always resorts to elementary procedures required and facilitated by the very machine they use; and many of these procedures are straightforward, easily perceivable, and accessible to the vast majority of people, since the network, like us, has also learned to use many of our own seduction strategies to capture our attention. In this process, it multiplies or emphasizes each new fact into new sets of facts, in a logic where the most important thing is to attract our gaze. To achieve this, the matrix uses, invents, and prepares images that capture us, creating from them new centers of interest. Each new digital “event” generates successive similar events; or, put differently, each thing becomes an endless source of other things which, in many aspects, surpass what we can do and which we all accept as normal. When these things happen in the domains we inhabit, we do not feel in the dark, nor does our ignorance seem to bother us.
Imagine we are on the platform of a station waiting for a train. The locomotive passes us by at high speed, and the speed at which it moves does not allow us to board it, since our biological limitations prevent us from keeping up with its pace. The same happens with the contradictions of the internet system — reproducing disparities, conflicts, and difficulties that prevent us from keeping up with it when confronted with its speed, its excesses, the number of processes per second, and the quickness of its operations, whose impact creates new misalignments. All these elements have favored and facilitated the functioning and expansion of the internet, partly at the expense of our capacity for intervention. That is why, when we observe and perceive all these things, we get the impression that we are inside a somewhat irrational and uncontrollable process that surpasses and excludes us, where everything becomes outdated quickly according to criteria that are not ours. The solutions found are rapidly discarded, rendered obsolete, reformulated, or adapted to become more effective, simpler, more interventionist — though short-lived. It is in this vertigo of change that we live, and in which we often lose ourselves.
To understand music and jazz has always meant to understand our time; but when we enter the fast time of the network — a vertigo exposed in the amount of data it processes, in its speed of treatment, in the billions of operations per second — our temporal mismatches with that reality can become insoluble, and we risk experiencing an irreparable rupture between what we are and the acceleration of references that compose our external field of intervention. In such a context, it becomes difficult not to say that things are rushed, and that to think slowly proves to be an obstacle since, among other things, it does not allow us to make timely reorientations. Without a chronological framework of reference, we no longer have time to apply our conclusions and establish lines of orientation according to what we think; and, in this sense, some restraint in our decisions and considerations is advisable. In the network, everything is unfinished and everything remains in progress; and many of the things that exist within it carry with them different kinds of problems that compel us to find solutions from which new and varied conflicting elements emerge.
//////
Today, much of music and jazz exists in digital ecosystems powered by optical fiber, and in this sense, the internet is an extremely volatile and interesting field for understanding how certain musical phenomena move and unfold. Its observation and analysis allow us to understand how the various forces at play influence musical genres, and the conclusion we reach is that jazz has evolved in these more recent times as if it were an informational phenomenon — perceived as a contemporary case, both musical and extramusical.
Considering this circumstance, it is legitimate to ask ourselves how jazz drains its influences into contemporary society — or does it? — or how its specificities reach the people who receive them, both inwardly and outwardly — or does the current listener operate only through impulses and feedback loops without a critical basis for intervention? Associated with dissemination there are many other factors, some close to this music, others distant; and not all of them contribute to the changes occurring in jazz. Sometimes, the more distant cases — those that seem parallel to jazz — best symbolize contextual shifts; other times, the less visible elements become the most significant in bringing about change.
The network is filled with situations more or less observable, specific or generic, that encompass and influence the musical world; and in turn, that world also influences the network. If you like, we can say it the other way around: this movement of influence is circular and mutually diffused, operating in different directions — what is disappearing reappears; and, conversely, what is appearing disappears. What results from all these displacements of meaning is the chain effect of novelty; but there are also processes that work in the opposite direction — for example, cases far removed from jazz that have become important due to a set of unforeseen coincidences and opportunities.
Today, it is practically impossible to understand the degree of influence of jazz and music in contemporary societies, since the communication and information that structure the digital matrix distort many of our perceptions. The network uses the effect of surprise to attract the listener, and novelty divides everything; we, the listeners, do not know its inner workings, and the most important factors may configure situations external to jazz, which exert upon this music — and upon us — influences and pressures of great significance. Faced with this state of affairs, we find it important to know certain realities that may help us improve our listening capacity and better understand the paths we travel.
In short, we can say that we must take into account certain aspects related to the dissemination of jazz through musical sound products that circulate across the countless platforms of digital distribution — spaces that are permanently altered by technological advances, constantly updating and optimizing mechanisms of seduction. These technological innovations are constantly forming new fields of intervention, new tools of attractiveness that sometimes expand, sometimes recede, in dynamics that are increasingly uncontrollable and, paradoxically, increasingly efficient.
//////
Some say that listening is a way of thinking while walking — or, if you prefer, a way of walking while thinking. We like the metaphor of the traveler wandering through the territory of music and jazz in a dynamic manner, just as we like the idea of thinking about music and jazz as a way of walking inside a process of reflection that is both individual and collective.
However, the things we have been saying result from pauses we take along this journey of discovery — a resting time that we use to think about the imaginary path of a listener who is also a pilgrim in the vastness of jazz. As we mentioned above, this musical genre is currently located within an expanding musical field, where we have access to everything and where each listener moves with their own body and on their own feet: a pilgrim full of sensations, emotions, convictions, and memories — a body accompanied by senses, knowledge, and reason.
This listener is like a kind of radar-man, someone who captures everything and absorbs all the sounds of the universe — a being who has always existed and who will certainly continue to exist, although we do not know exactly what their future path will be. Extending this metaphor, we can say that jazz, being a journey through the unknown, is by its very nature an aleatory phenomenon; but this “making by walking” of jazz among various popular musics now takes place within a virtual reality that is more complex and even more unpredictable.
If in the past this listener had some autonomy regarding the path they intended to take, today their course is increasingly guided from the outside — as if we were navigating through GPS instructions. In this sense, we can say that the current course of jazz is a kind of sound map increasingly programmed, defined, and controlled: in some cases, linked to shortcuts sold and commercialized through satellite communications; in others, following routes previously established by the powerful internet machine.
This circumstance suggests that we may have lost, in the process, some of our former freedom — a freedom suggested by the possibility of following our own paths, whether trails, tracks, or mere traces. The important thing was that they were discovered by us.
In contemporary times, we all walk on the great highways of information and communication; we travel through optical fiber in automatic connections that are offered to us — connections which, though unclear, make unnecessary any effort to establish a relationship between listener and music, and do not bother those who follow them. This means that we have given up the effort to establish interrelations, intersubjectivities, and intercorrections between the musical medium and the walking-listener — which makes many of the itineraries of current jazz the product of a pre-fabricated activity, conceived and executed for a more or less fixed listener.
The internet machine exposes the user to an ever-growing number of possible mapped sound routes — musical theme parks, already studied and formatted as safe tourist trips — offering few real alternatives for choice or wandering. The next step will thus be to reproduce the world in images through meta-realities, with music and jazz serving as the soundtrack. In that world, we need not make difficult decisions, since we can live our entire lives in the shadow of machine expectations — expectations suggested by artificial intelligence — unable to embark upon our own projects, without a path where we can explore our capacities or express our own authenticity.
If a system uses information to explain the world, that same system is closing off our capacity to imagine it; and if images are products — which they are, in such systems — it becomes increasingly difficult to go beyond the reality presented to us. Thus, our imagination, which should be free, is now enclosed in external procedures and intervention protocols, because what is transmitted to us through images limits our ability to create our own fictions.
Images are finished products and, no matter how much they try to explain the world, they cannot — because the destiny of images is almost always short-range, shallow, immediate, and too obvious — often the quick, superficial, and instantaneous reflection of a reality that presents itself in an evident way.
Today, curiously, we live in a contradictory time — an era of intensive immateriality which, though intangible, is determined by what we see. The notion that we can act freely in a territory ruled by the surveillance of images becomes, therefore, a kind of mirage in a desert of ideas; and we may wonder whether surveillance, besides undermining our concept of freedom, does not also make us more susceptible to being seduced by the dark, obscure, unfathomable side of the network.
Placing ourselves outside algorithmic schemes can become, in theory, an excellent means of liberation — fostering interpretations, reshaping readings, determining understandings. Yet many of these activities are personal, thus reinforcing and confirming the importance of the true act of listening — and vice versa.
When we return to the reality in which we live, we return to the beginning of our questions. When we affirm that listening implies taking risks, we are forced to ask: what risks are these? What must we face? To what extent can not fearing, not dreading, not being intimidated by what is strange to us help us to relativize the failure and uncertainty of the unknown? Each person is a case; and, in that case, each listener is an unrepeatable element in their relationship with music and with jazz.
Nevertheless, when we are left without a network, our constructions collapse — because it is in the very nature of the network to expand without limits. When it ceases to grow, the machine itself collapses, dragging us with it, because limits are inconceivable and it is impossible to easily discard all those who wish to step away from it.
When this need for digital expansion is interrupted, whether we are on a desert island or in an urban jungle, people find it difficult to perceive what is happening around them — because the world we live in contains many other simultaneous worlds, including the imaginary ones: those in which we travel through books, in an immobile journey along trails of printed ink; or in pixels, on the screen of a computer or mobile phone.
However, with the help of our imagination, we easily understand that we can accumulate various comforting fantasies within an immaterial place that has become our inner refuge inside a shell of external conditioning.
TRANSLATION: MANUEL NETO
