Exposing the Digital Age's Perfect Lie

How Oval's album 94diskont reminds us of the digital world's many glitches and need for grace.

I was born into an age that dared to believe in the possibility of perfection. Leaning on the hope of technological salvation, the digital age believes computers, data, and artificial intelligence can overcome the flaws of humanity to create perfect truth and a better reality. That sounds dramatic, but we put more faith in our digital systems on a daily basis than we can possibly realize. When we look for truth, Google is a couple of clicks away. When something goes wrong with our digital devices, it’s assumed that its human user is to blame, not the irreproachable device. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that we trust the fidelity of our digital world more than humanity.

We see this narrative play out in the music of the 1990s with the rise of the CD which promised a high fidelity listening experience without the dusty scratchiness of the vinyl record or the warbly frailty of the cassette tape. To this day, people swear by the CD as a pinnacle of technological achievement and entirely faultless music listening experience. Thank God for German electronic musician Markus Popp, aka Oval, who dared to expose the brokenness of the format and argue that even a digital world is far from perfection with his 1995 record 94diskont.

In a Pitchfork retrospective about the album, Mark Richardson writes, “Before Oval, no one heard the CD.” The CD was supposed to be invisible—an undetectable vessel connecting performing humans to listening humans across space and time with the magic of ones and zeroes. 94diskont, however, detects the undetectable and allows us to hear the distorted glitches of the format. Pieces like “Store Check” and “Cross Selling” are filled with anxious, foreboding energy as they expose glitches in the Matrix with muddled electronic loops and skipping dial-up bleeps.

Oval’s masterwork here is the bookending “Do While,” a collection of broken, hazy loops which whirl for 29 minutes alongside a relentless, ticking electronic beat. While the album’s inner tracks feel like body paragraphs in an essay, “Do While” is the intro and conclusion, inviting us to hear an argument in the beginning and then asking us to reflect on what we’ve heard in the end. The song’s ambient nature provides a perfect space to consider Oval’s argument—perfection in the digital age is a lie.

This thesis was certainly true in 1995, and it is becoming truer now. As I listen to the repeated loops of 94diskont—sometimes distorted, sometimes warped to deliver a note entirely different than the intended one—I’m reminded of the lie of social media. We’re to believe that a conversation or relationship fostered via Facebook, Snapchat etc. should be no different than one fostered in person. Experience, however, proves this false.

Instagram filters and cropped photos offer a chance to glamorize reality, while the comments sections on Facebook offer a physical safety barrier, allowing us to speak our minds openly and with very little consequence. I personally have participated in far more heated conversations this year over Facebook than in person. If social media was invisible—if it offered a perfect representation of human relationships—I should be having at least an equal amount of in-person arguments. But this simply isn’t the case. Instead, social media conversations, like Oval’s music, are much more prone to looping fragments of thought and distortions of true intentions.

As I listen to 94diskont, I’ve been reflecting on The Bible Project’s recent podcast about the idea of grace and what that meant to the Biblical imagination. As the hosts discuss, the Biblical idea of grace contains two connected meanings—one, it describes a beauty or favorable nature of a person (think of how we describe a “graceful” dancer); two, it describes a response of treating someone with kind compassion (think of how we describe a “gracious” gift-giver). In many instances, a “graceful” person elicits a “gracious” response.

That seemed like a bizarre tangent to go off on, but here’s the point: The digital world is not graceful and thus does nothing to elicit a gracious response. When we separate humans with a graceless screen or a glitchy CD, we allow ourselves to forget the grace we normally extend to our fellow human beings. This is the invisible distortion inherent in the seemingly pristine online landscape. With 94diskont, Oval helps us to remember this distortion—a distortion our hubris wants us so deeply to forget as we further isolate ourselves into individual echo chambers and create loops of hazy, meaningless thinking.

It may sound like I’m down on all technological advancements. I’m truly not. In fact, I’m typically on the defensive end of technology debates. Listening to Oval’s 94diskont, writing this piece, sending it to you to read—none of this would be possible without the technology I’m critiquing. CDs, social media, and the internet are all vessels for people to connect, and as such are things to celebrate in one sense.

However, we can never forget that they are indeed vessels, subject to warping. We can never forget that the digital world, like our physical world, is entirely broken. We can never in our hubris think we can save ourselves with a digital Tower of Babel. Instead, we must go into the brokenness and humbly offer grace where it’s not naturally elicited and seek to repair the glitch.