Too often we hear, “technology is neutral or agnostic,” meaning it is just sort of there, and it’s us humans who, via our interaction with it, determine whether it is used for good or bad. This is both lazy and wrong.  As Heidegger explained in a lecture in 1949, “Technology is revealing.”^1,2

He goes so far as to say, in fact, that technology is a “mode of disclosure.”³ 

This rings profoundly true when you view today’s technology through this lens: today more than ever, our use of technology has the effect of revealing who we are. Not simply in what we post on social media (though…), but generally the ways in which we use technology.

Before I go deeper I must caveat this piece in as clear language as possible. Heidegger’s affiliation with the Nazi Party and his silence on the Holocaust are abhorrent and indefensible. They cast a permanent shadow over his legacy and must never be ignored or minimized. This essay engages his ideas in full recognition of this history and with a firm rejection of the political ideology he supported. For deeper context, see Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy and Richard Wolin’s The Heidegger Controversy.⁴

We can in fact organize ourselves into two distinct groups with respect to our usage — and again, Heidegger gives us precise (and timely) ways to do so: Enframing/Challenging Forth versus Poesis/Bringing Forth.

What we’re trying to achieve with Harmonic is Bringing Forth, both in terms of music and those who reveal this music to us…the fans/curators. There is an unnatural — but, as you will see, diabolically skillfully constructed — paradigm that exists today in which the fans/curators who reveal the art that is brought forth from artists are dislocated and disconnected from each other to obscure this true relationship so that platforms may continue to fool us into believing that their existence is benign or even necessary. It is neither.

We aim to change this with Harmonic. Read on.

Enframing

Heidegger utilized word play…invention and twisting and nesting ideas and thoughts; pushing people to think below the surface level in the same way great poets and lyricists make you reconsider words:

“You don’t like weak women / You get bored so quick / And you don’t like strong women / ‘Cause they’re hip to your tricks.”⁵

“You got that beachfront property in your lap… I’m just playing, baby, this the land of the free.”⁶

So too did Heidegger.^7,8  He twists the German word Gestell, which is a noun that translates to “a frame, rack, scaffold, or apparatus; a physical structure that holds or supports something” to become a verb that when translated becomes “Enframing”:

“Enframing is a way of revealing having the character of destining, namely, the way that challenges forth… This destining is not something that man does. Enframing is rather a destining that sends man into the ordering of the real as standing reserve.”⁹[emphasis mine]

Standing Reserve

And there it is: standing reserve.

We’ve all heard/used some variant of the phrase: “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product” or “If you don’t know who the product is, it’s you.”¹⁰ I use it frequently in my classes and it tends to hit with the students. I can almost see the shift in their understanding when they recognize that vis. their usage of, among other things, social media, well… they’re the “standing reserve.”

My favorite Kantian ethic can be summarized as “never treat others as a means to an end, but, rather, view them as an end and of themselves.”¹¹

Standing reserve is again Heiddeger turning language inside out. It comes from the German Bestand and can mean “stock,” “inventory,” or “supply” in ordinary German.¹² In other words, “Standing reserve” is simply, a la Kant, a means for others to exploit.

As Heidegger puts it, “Whatever stands by in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as object,” meaning that once someone becomes standing-reserve, he/she/they is/are no longer encountered for what they are, but only for what it can be used to accomplish.¹³

Challenging forth

The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored.” —Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology

“Challenging forth” is a sort of game-mechanic. In Hooked by Nir Eyal, he puts forward the “science” behind habit-forming behavior, which is summed up by the concept of a variable reward that leads to further “investment.”¹⁴

Heidegger describes modern technology as a “challenging-forth;” a mode of revealing that forces the world to appear only as usable, extractable, and on-demand. Eyal’s Hooked model illustrates the engineering of habit-forming products by triggering users into loops of variable reward and investment. In both frameworks, the human is not invited but activated—not encountered as a subject, but positioned as standing-reserve. What’s revealed is not truth or presence, but predictable behavior.

In other words, systems are designed to lure us — via game mechanics like “variable rewards” — into willfully producing for the system’s benefit.

Once you frame so much of modern technology into these terms it is impossible to see it any other way.

• Spotify’s algorithmic playlists (e.g. Discover Weekly, Daily Mix)
  
  • Designed to extract listening patterns, not encourage presence.
    
  • Users are trained to skip quickly, feeding the system’s refinement loop.
    
  • Artists are revealed as content inventory, not creative subjects.
    
• TikTok sound trends
  
  • Music is flattened into viral hooks, detached from the song’s full context.
    
  • Users are nudged into creation, not because of inspiration, but platform pressure.
    
• Royalty systems (e.g. pro-rata payout models)
  
  • Reveal music as quantified engagement, rather than artistic experience.
    
  • The system incentivizes attention-maximization over depth or intention.
• Instagram’s infinite scroll
  • Variable rewards embedded in content discovery — feeds reveal dopamine, not depth.
• YouTube autoplay and recommendation engine
  • Challenges content into relevance by what will keep viewers engaged, not what deserves attention.
• Goodreads reviews and reading logs
  • Presented as a social catalog for readers, but quietly feeds Amazon’s metadata, recommender systems, and advertising infrastructure.
  • Your ratings, shelves, and highlights train the platform’s commercial models more than they support literary discovery.
• ChatGPT prompts and interactions
  • Every question, correction, and prompt becomes training data for OpenAI.
  • Even when you’re seeking clarity or expressing vulnerability, you’re contributing to system optimization—not shared understanding.

Each of these systems trains us to produce behavioral data, not to experience meaning. 

Of course. We are all standing forth as “training data.”

In the age of streaming, gamification, and algorithmic personalization, we are no longer the audience; we are the training data. What Heidegger called standing reserve now describes our daily digital existence: We reveal ourselves not to be seen, but to be modeled. 

Our preferences, movements, and moods are captured, optimized, and fed back into systems designed to predict behavior, not foster understanding. This is the logic of challenging-forth; where beings are not encountered as themselves, but only as resources to be extracted. And most unsettling of all, we participate willingly, nudged by variable rewards and the illusion of agency. We do not scroll, stream, or post to express, but rather to make and amplify product.

This makes me sad.

‍

Bringing Forth

“Bringing-forth brings hither out of concealment into unconcealment. Bringing-forth comes to pass only insofar as something concealed comes into unconcealment.” —The Question Concerning Technology, p. 10

Art does not originate from an externally motivated, transactional impulse. Rather, it emerges authentically on its own terms; a process that Heidegger refers to as poiesis, or “bringing-forth.” In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger explains that poiesis is “a bringing-forth, poiesis, which brings out of concealment into unconcealment.”¹⁵

This, poiesis — from the Greek ποίησις, meaning “to make” or “to bring forth¹⁶ — is related to the word "poetry," but in a broader philosophical sense, poiesis refers to any act of creation that brings something into presence on its own terms; a process of bringing-forth from concealment into unconcealment.¹⁷

Heidegger identifies three domains where poiesis is most visible: in nature, as when a flower blooms; in craft, as in the shaping of a clay vessel on a wheel; and in art, where a painting or poem opens a world for revealing.¹⁸

Importantly, this emerging — whether art, craft or nature — occurs on its own terms; i.e. an autonomous action, not one goaded into being via a systemic carrot, absent any coercion or external/variable reward. 

Heidegger refers to this as “Aletheia”:  truth as unconcealment. 

The word "aletheia" (ἀλήθεια) is an ancient Greek term traditionally translated as “truth.” Its etymology reveals much more; it literally means “unconcealment” or “disclosure.”¹⁹

Art, when created absent coercion, is always an unconcealment of someone’s internal self — and, thus, is truth.

Harmonic

None of the above is to be construed as some call to abandon technology. Quite the opposite. Rather, it’s a call to look for ways to leverage technology in the service of Poeisis — bringing forth — rather than what it has heretofore been leveraged towards: Enframing.

This is what we are aspiring to do with Harmonic. 

Since I’ve gone so deep in the etymological realm… I ain’t stopping now. In Pythagorean and Platonic thought, harmonia referred not just to music, but to the cosmic order; the fitting together of opposites, numbers, or elements into a greater whole.²⁰

I’m good with this. The fitting together of opposites seems like a noble (and perhaps critical) exercise in these times. I also like the idea that numbers, which are inherently signifiers of a more quantitative/technical and less artistic mind, are meant to coexist with art.

This, combined with the core element of “revealing,” is really at the core of what we’re trying to do with Harmonic.

We're All Curators

We’re all curators at one level or another. We look to discover and reveal. And when we find something that an artist has created which helps us to understand ourselves better (the role of the artist), we can’t wait to reveal. 

Similarly, as artists, we are perpetually revealing of ourselves and hoping that, in so doing, we connect with some other.

The great hoax of modern advertising — and arguably the modern world — is that marketing and commerce is meant to give you the consumer what you want. Sadly, no. As seen above, it is to lure you into the standing reserve so that enterprise value can be built from your efforts, which you give of freely for some abstract variable reward (often microdoses of dopamine).

Additionally, for this to work most profitably, a sort of monoculture must emerge in which marketing is meant not to give you what you want, but rather — as I wrote about extensively here — to convince you that you want what everyone else does. And thus, scalability.

But the cost of this is really nothing less than a loss of your self and your soul. 

Additionally, it’s all sort of a lie. Despite the algorithm's best efforts, think about how you discovered your favorite artist. Many, many times it’s via a friend’s recommendation. Businesses know this; NPS rules über alles.

But it’s at its most beautiful when some piece of art finds its way through all the gamification and algorithmic gambits due to it just simply moving someone so much that they have to tell (reveal) others. I’m looking at you, Anora, White Lotus, and MJ Lenderman's "Manning Fireworks."

And so that’s it. We’ve designed a site in which independent artists can have a place where artists can put forth their truth and their fans can reveal them… Harmony.

Why Harmonic

Artists and fans need each other, and yet the commercial impulse towards bifurcating this most elemental relationship has so far extracted away this natural relationship that no one raises an eyebrow about the fact that the streaming services that exist only because artists provide music disconnect these artists from their fans. 

Yes, you pay for your streaming service, but do you think that money reaches the artists whom you listen to in anything but the most abstract manner? (And don't forget, if the artists you listen to don’t stream enough times as dictated by the platform, they get nothing at all.)²¹

And do you think that the artists are able to know who is streaming their work or connect with them in order to recognize them and provide them with other opportunities to show their support? 

No. The platforms own the relationship between the artist and fan; both are simply standing reserve.

How Harmonic Works

We aim to change that. Now fans are rewarded when they curate; they are brought into Harmony with the artists; they are on the same team. Far from being standing reserve, they are Aletheia: bringing the artists’  truth as unconcealment.

And, because the goal of all of this is sustainability not just for musical artists, but for those who express themselves through discovering and writing about work — call them journalists or curators, who (again, standing reserve) today curate and journal for the scraps of dopamine and are viewed as standing reserve by so many platforms — we bring them into the economics as well.

The vision is the musicians are now able to generate more money and thus sustainability via the exposure from these curators/journalists who also are able to generate more money and sustainability for their work. 

If this makes — for whatever reason — a curator uncomfortable, you can either allocate what would come to you via your leading others to discover and purchase the music you introduced to the artist themselves. In any case, the relationship is between you and the musician.

Nearly a decade ago, I wrote about a Nirvana state for music in which my friend Andy Weissman posited that there shouldn’t be three or four streaming services, there should be millions; we should all be curators and streamers.²² Thanks, Andy, this is a step in that direction: Now, anyone can have their own record store and curate it as they see fit and in so doing, bring the relationship between artist, fan, and commerce into Harmony.

¹Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), 13–44.

²Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 3–35.

³Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 12. “Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place.”

⁴ Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, trans. Michael B. Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

⁵ Joni Mitchell, “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” track 10 on Blue, Reprise Records, 1971.

⁶ Frank Ocean, “Super Rich Kids,” track 4 on Channel Orange, Def Jam Recordings, 2012. Featuring Earl Sweatshirt.

⁷ Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 111–138. See especially the essay “The Nature of Language,” where Heidegger treats language as a site of revealing, not mere expression.

⁸ Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 25–27. Young explores Heidegger’s belief that language reveals the truth of Being, and how this led him to coin or revive etymologically rich terms like “Gestell” and “Bestand.”

⁹ Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 25–26.

¹⁰ The earliest documented use is: Andrew Lewis (username “blue_beetle”), comment on MetaFilter, August 26, 2010, https://www.metafilter.com/95152/Userdriven-discontent#3256040. “If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”

¹¹ “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end, and never merely as a means.”—Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, [Ak. 4:429]

¹² Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 17–20. Heidegger reinterprets the German word “Bestand,” which ordinarily means stock or inventory, to describe how modern technology reveals all things—including people—as standing-reserve: always available, ordered, and ready for use.

¹³ Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 17.

¹⁴ Nir Eyal, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (New York: Portfolio, 2014), 25–26. Eyal outlines the “Hook Model,” comprising four phases: Trigger, Action, Variable Reward, and Investment. He emphasizes that variable rewards—unpredictable outcomes—are particularly effective in creating habits, as they tap into users’ intrinsic motivations and keep them engaged.

¹⁵ Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 1

¹⁶ The term poiesis comes from the ancient Greek ποίησις, meaning “to make” or “to bring forth,” derived from the verb ποιεῖν (poiein), “to produce” or “to create.” Heidegger adopts this term in The Question Concerning Technology to describe a pre-technological mode of revealing, a process of allowing something to emerge into presence on its own terms. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book IX, 1049b; and Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 10

¹⁷ Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 10

¹⁸ Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 10–1

¹⁹ See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 12.
And see G.S. Kirk et al., The Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 270.
Aletheia, from a- (“not”) and lethe (“forgetfulness”), denotes truth as “unconcealment” in early Greek thought, particularly as interpreted by Heidegger.

²⁰ See Plato, Timaeus, trans. Donald J. Zeyl, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997), 123–125 (31b–33b); and James S. Cutsinger, “The Pythagorean Doctrine of Harmonia,” in The Philosophy of Music, ed. Edward Craig (London: Routledge, 2005), 42–45.
In Pythagorean and Platonic thought, harmonia referred not merely to musical consonance, but to the cosmic structure of reality—a fitting together of opposites, ratios, and elements into a greater, intelligible whole.

²¹ Spotify for Artists, “Modernizing Our Royalty System,” Spotify, last modified November 2023, https://artists.spotify.com/en/blog/modernizing-our-royalty-system.
As of 2024, Spotify requires that a track reach at least 1,000 streams within a 12-month period to be eligible for royalty payouts, meaning artists whose tracks fall below that threshold receive no payment at all.

²² George Howard, “Union Square Ventures’ Andy Weissman on the Blockchain and the Music Rights ‘Nirvana State,’” Forbes, July 19, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgehoward/2015/07/19/union-square-ventures-andy-weissman-on-the-blockchain-and-the-music-rights-nirvana-state.

‍