Cassette Mixtapes and Complex Systems

Mixtapes, variety, and complexity.

Introduction

The cassette tape has become a rarity. It came after vinyl, before CDs, and well before iTunes and much later on Spotify. While some artists choose to release a cassette tape alongside a digital version, this strategy is far from common. In some cases, tapes are the only format music is available, and collectors search for these cassettes in all of their usual rareness. However nostalgic, cassettes are certainly problematic; their sound quality pales in comparison to Spotify, they can be difficult to work with, and they are easily broken. At the same time, cassettes started a networked culture of music enthusiasts; they are often cheaper to produce and sell than vinyl, especially on smaller scales, and artists have long been able to release music on cassettes within their homes and be in total control of the process without a record label.

The cassette tape gave way to the mixtape, which predated the mix CD, and far preceeded the playlist of digital music. Making a mixtape was a simple process that could be achieved in two different ways. First, a cassette tape in a cassette deck with a record button could be used to capture songs from the radio. The right songs were added one after the other, after the other, side A and side B. If your audio equipment had two cassette tape decks side by side, the second option was to play a song on the first tape and capture it on the second. It was time-consuming, but the process of collecting songs was worth it for your own or someone else’s repeat enjoyment.

Complexity

A mixtape with a considerable amount of variety was a distinct possibility. Variety was likely the purpose of the endeavor: to create a tape with various musical styles, sounds, and tempos that are intended to evoke certain emotions.

For mixtapes, variety may have been wanted, but for complex systems, variety is an absolute necessity and a large part of what makes them complex. The need for variety is counter to hierarchical, command and control style systems that seek uniformity, predictability, and clear alignment with the objectives of the day. These dynamics purposefully lead to the reduction of variety. While it might be discussed from other perspectives as well, variety, on the other hand, is exhibited by the actions of the members of complex social systems in the quantity and quality of ways they can operate and therefore the number of possibilities they can pursue for communicating, acting, interacting, and self-organizing, for example.

Cilliers (1998) draws from Luhmann (1985), who states:

Complexity entails that, in a system, there are more possibilities than can be actualised. This can hardly serve as definition, but perhaps one should not be surprised if complexity cannot be given a simple definition (p.25).

With variety linked to possibilities, a complex system has so much variety within itself that it could not possibly materialize all of the possibilities available to it. The inverse must also be true. If a complex or rather complicated system has a limited variety, then it is not likely to have a surplus of possibilities and may indeed be able to actualize all of them.

The mixtape fits into this part of the discussion as a complicated, but not complex system. A diverse mixtape contains within its track selection, styles, and genres a considerable amount of variety. As such, this variety can produce possibilities as the tape is played that include making different sounds, affecting the listener emotionally, physically, and cognitively, and inspiring the listener to perform certain actions, such as owning particular things. There are a number of possibilities that a mixtape might actualize in sequence or simultaneously, the quantity and quality of which depend greatly on the listener and their disposition while listening, and the contents of the tape itself. While there are many possibilities, they are not beyond the cassette’s variety to produce them. Although the mixtape contains a variety that can produce many possibilities that may change circumstances far beyond it, the cassette tape does not have the variety within its parts to adapt to changing conditions, such as heat or other environmental factors that could damage it over time. Its variety and array of possibilities do not include sustaining itself in variable conditions, which would be the variety expected to exist in complex systems.

Variety refers to a generally positive state of difference and diversity within a system that occurs in the earlier abbreviated list of communicating, acting, interacting, and self-organizing, each of which is a possibility the complex system can adopt through variety in some way, but not to the degree that all possibilities are materialized, as Luhmann indicates that would be impossible. The variety of the system comes first from many places, including the cognitive, perceptual, emotional, relational, patterning, problem-solving, and opportunity-exploiting. As a foundational variety, the prior makes the listed actions of self-organizing and acting, and so on, possible. The greater the foundational variety, the greater the variety in action, the more possibilities the complex system can produce. Through greater variety, the system has a higher capacity for taking advantage of the opportunities it encounters while having more variation within itself than whatever it is that is a problem for it, and thus continues to sustain itself. The variety within complex systems, or social complex systems in the present case, is essential to complex systems in that it can produce self-organized adaptive behaviors that are advantageous throughout the course of the system’s functioning and survival.

Conclusion

A cassette mixtape and a complex system both have variety. The mixtape has within its plastic and tape the variety of music recorded on it that produces possibilities in the listener or listeners, from a change in emotion to conducting themselves differently. The cassette has a great number of possibilities, though none of which are related to the survival of the tape and its music.

Complex systems have enough variety that they can respond in diverse ways to internal and external problems and opportunities. Variety creates a diverse repertoire of communication, action, interaction, and self-organization that can lead to an adaptable selection of strategies.

Management must always be toward the most possibilities. Complex systems and their constraint structure must open toward more possibilities than the system could ever realistically materialize due to its overwhelming amount of variety, which continually changes at the foundational and action levels, creating dynamic variety in the complex system and producing more possibilities.

References

Cilliers, P. (1998). Complexity & postmodernism: Understanding complex systems. London: Routledge.