Spinning the radio dials like mini roulette wheels was, in 1993, the best way to discover new music. Static, a snatch of a familiar song, a news report, then ah wait that sounds interesting. You’d walk into a record store with that song stuck in your head, and with any luck would walk out after a conversation with the clerk a few tapes richer, a few dozen dollars poorer.
One year later, everything had changed. For in 1994, the best way to discover new music was to email an AI.
“This sounds ****in’ moronic,” said one Dave Dell in response to the idea, convinced his love of Lustmord meant the AI couldn’t possibly match his tastes. Even he acquiesced: “I'll try it anyways.”
By the time The Cranberries released their hit single “Zombie” that September, over two thousand Daves had tried their luck, emailing Ringo with their favorite artists. To their surprise, they’d get a reply from what appeared to be early artificial intelligence, filled with recommendations of new music they’d love. Enough that, seven years later, science fiction writer Cory Doctorow would reminisce that “half the music in my collection came out of Ringo,” that nascent music AI.
Yet incredibly, Ringo was little more than those couple thousand users’ recommendations, averaged and redistributed via email. An email that users would quickly come to think of as a human, a friend, one in a quick succession of email-powered crowdsourced recommendation AIs.
The surprising wisdom of the crowds
It all started with what MIT assistant professor Paul Resnick called “A deceptively simple idea,” in 1994.
“People who agreed in the past are likely to agree again,” he postulated, an idea that’d been christened Social Filtering by MIT Thomas Malone seven years earlier. If you and another person both like the same song, or book, or author, there’s a pretty good chance that if one of you likes a new artist, the other will like it as well. The more overlapping agreements you have, the better one’s tastes should be predictive of another’s.
And, maybe, social filtering could be an organizing principle of the internet.
For as the nascent world wide web grew exponentially from a single website in 1991 and ten in 1992 to 623 sites in 1993 and over 10,000 by the end of 1994, the ancient prophecy that “knowledge shall increase” suddenly seemed more an omen of content overload than a portent of good things. Cataloguing and categorization could only go so far. It would be easy enough to find another Cranberries album once you knew you liked them. Finding the next new band that you’d love required something beyond lists. What good was infinite knowledge and limitless content without a way to discover it?
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