I’m late to this one, but I like Liz Pelly’s take on Spotify Wrapped. It’s not just about music—it’s about what happens when we let corporations automate our memories:
Spotify Wrapped now feels like just another example of something personal and precious that is being automated away from us; another example of a supposedly unbearable task of thinking and writing being “offloaded” in order to make life more frictionless.
The post is essentially about friction—and why we need it. She argues that working through the process of remembering what mattered to us and thinking critically about our year is what keeps us sharp and curious. When we just accept what a streaming service tells us about our taste, we’re not just outsourcing a task. We’re losing our own sense of what connected with us and why.
It encourages music fans to believe that the records they streamed the most must be the ones they liked the most, which is surely not always the case.
Her suggestion is straightforward: write your own list. It doesn’t have to be polished—a notes app screenshot, a handwritten list, whatever. Just something that came from you, not from an algorithm optimizing for engagement metrics.