"The value of having a computer, to me, is that it'll remember everything you do. It's a databank"
About this Quote
Cale’s line lands with the offhand clarity of a musician who’s always treated technology as both instrument and witness. Coming from a founder of the Velvet Underground and a lifelong studio experimentalist, it’s not a gee-whiz celebration of gadgets; it’s a practical admission that modern tools don’t just help you make art, they keep receipts. “To me” is the tell: he’s staking out a personal, workmanlike relationship with the machine, not a utopian one. The computer’s “value” isn’t creativity, inspiration, or even speed. It’s memory.
That emphasis reframes authorship. In the analog era, the studio was a place of fragile traces: takes erased, ideas lost, myth-making filling the gaps. A computer as “databank” turns process into an archive. Every draft, every misstep, every late-night tweak becomes recoverable. For an artist, that can be liberating (you can iterate without fear) and quietly oppressive (you can’t pretend the earlier version didn’t exist). Cale is pointing at the double edge without sermonizing.
There’s also a cultural shiver here: the line anticipates how “it’ll remember everything you do” migrated from a creative advantage to a societal condition. What begins as workflow becomes surveillance logic, the same mechanism that backs up a session also builds a profile. Cale’s blunt phrasing makes the subtext sharper: we traded the romance of forgetting for the efficiency of permanent recall, and we did it willingly because it helped us get the work done.
That emphasis reframes authorship. In the analog era, the studio was a place of fragile traces: takes erased, ideas lost, myth-making filling the gaps. A computer as “databank” turns process into an archive. Every draft, every misstep, every late-night tweak becomes recoverable. For an artist, that can be liberating (you can iterate without fear) and quietly oppressive (you can’t pretend the earlier version didn’t exist). Cale is pointing at the double edge without sermonizing.
There’s also a cultural shiver here: the line anticipates how “it’ll remember everything you do” migrated from a creative advantage to a societal condition. What begins as workflow becomes surveillance logic, the same mechanism that backs up a session also builds a profile. Cale’s blunt phrasing makes the subtext sharper: we traded the romance of forgetting for the efficiency of permanent recall, and we did it willingly because it helped us get the work done.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
|---|
More Quotes by John
Add to List
