Foucault and LastFM
This is a thought, not an essay. It's only half serious. I will be posting short thoughts more frequently. 1
LastFM is an app that tracks what music you listen to for future reference. It's like a yearlong spotify wrapped. The value of LastFM and apps like it is what Michel Foucault meant by "The self as a work of art." When you are viewed, the Gaze of the other implants itself in your psyche. Soon you view your own actions via the Gaze of the Other. This is often presented as a bad, limiting thing. But it is by this very same mechanism that we enjoy things. A further joy is actualized when looking at a sunset to confess the beauty of it to another. A sunset is lesser in solitude.
So what a scrobbler does is make an audience for your performance. That isn't to say that it makes your choice of music fake or planned, although that is a possible outcome! An audience enables you to create a self worthy of being viewed. This is the aesthetic project of ethics, for Foucault, and the avenue for happiness. 2
Pleasure and power (power exerted over you; suffering) are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they compliment each other and vie for the same thing. The power being exerted over you via surveillance also enables a greater happiness. This is also how fetishes work, of course. LastFM is voyeurism, actually no it's exhibitionism. This is why Hegel's lord-bondsman dynamic is more about the raising3 of self-consciousness via the Other.
It is for the same reason that people record entire concerts. Sure, it's a ledger. It proves that you are in fact a concert-goer, and concert-goers have social value. Greater than this, is the affirmation from the Other which actualizes joy. In the panopticon, the prisoner imagines the gaze of the guards in order to self govern. Watching the phone which films the concert you are physically —not virtually— seeing it through your Other's eyes