How was my 2023? Pretty good, thanks. I spent 60 hours at my local cinema and 51 days listening to music from 170 genres (chiefly “art pop”). Plus, I made a respectable 46 transactions at M&S. How about you?
December has always been a time to take stock: the highs, lows, memorable moments and best-ofs from the year just passed. But over the past half-decade or so, there has been a creeping, unmistakable shift in how we approach these informal annual reviews.
In recent weeks, I’ve received emails crunching the numbers on my annual activity from my streaming service, my local cinema, my bank and my buy-now-pay-later platform. I saw 27 films, mostly on a Sunday! I watched the reissue of the Talking Heads’ concert documentary, Stop Making Sense, twice! A quarter of my Monzo spending was on groceries! I listened to a lot of Taylor Swift, peaking in June!
It’s the friendly face of consumer tracking: superficial insights from the masses of data these companies have compiled, written up in a perky tone and heavily padded with “engaging” design. These shallow analyses are of little interest to me, let alone anyone else, giving a banal (not to mention, incomplete: I did go to other cinemas) account of my experience of 2023.
It all started with Spotify Wrapped, the streaming service’s end-of-year user review. As I wrote in 2021, this thin display of stats and meaningless genres rarely reveals much about our tastes and preferences, and generally supplants opportunities to connect over music with others and discover new artists to love.
But Spotify’s success with these one-way broadcasts of individual taste has inspired other companies to follow suit – not just cinemas and banks, but those with even less to show on their users’ preferences and behaviours.
On Wednesday, the journalist Julia Reinstein shared a 2023 summary from the company that makes her humidifier: she used the product 102 days in total, with a longest streak of 25 consecutive days. Or, as the brand put it: “Goodbye, dry air!” The insights resulting from this data are close to zero; all that is actually revealed is the constant, far-reaching surveillance we are under by big tech, and how dull it is to reduce human experience to numbers.
The fact that I saw Stop Making Sense twice does not reflect that the first was a rowdy, late-night screening, with people dancing in the aisles; nor that the second was a sober Sunday matinee, dominated by middle-aged men drawn by the restored sound. Nor does it capture the silly grin I had plastered on my face, both times.
I don’t have a Letterboxd account, but if I did, and the site demanded I rate Anatomy of a Fall (4/5, I suppose), this number would not express my ambivalence about Sandra’s culpability in her husband’s death, nor my deeply felt relief at the resolution of the dog storyline.
These rankings and ratings encourage us to reflect on and share our experience in ways that reduce our individuality – in little boxes, within character limits, and stars out of five. These inputs can be skewed so easily, they are often not meaningful even on a large scale, as shown by the recent scandals over “review-bombing” on Goodreads and Rotten Tomatoes. At the individual level, they present us primarily as consumers, defined by the content we have read or watched and the money we have spent.
These “wrapped” reviews might openly seek to flatter us, telling us that we are all “the main character” and in the “top 5%” of listeners or shoppers, but make no mistake: these companies do not care about you or improving your experience. Even setting aside its exploitation of all the artists less profitable than Swift, some of the glowing press for Spotify this year largely glossed over the fact that it marked the marathon production effort with redundancies, laying off a massive 17% of its workforce.
When I think back to 2023, it won’t be the times I spent listening to Lana Del Rey on Spotify that I will remember, but the hour I spent transfixed by her chaotic performance at Glastonbury festival. It won’t be the number of minutes of Taylor Swift that made a mark, but the emotional angst of a breakup I tried to expel by playing Mr Perfectly Fine on repeat for an entire day. And it won’t be Monzo’s dubious praise of my “Caterpillar cakeTM era” that sends me back to M&S in 2024, but the fact that it is a convenient stop on my usual walk home.
Indeed, in looking forward to the next year, I am hoping for more pleasurable, private encounters with art – and more moments of connection with people, not data points. After all, Spotify, Monzo and all these corporations might have their own “heads of experience”, sweating over how to renew our interest come next December. But I’m in charge of mine.
Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist
