Utilization Threshold refers to the limits on the amount of time that a given machine in a system, or a system itself, is in operation: in other words, it describes and examines the process of using something (or someone) as effectively as possible. While utilization is employed mainly to refer to industrial operations and the most productive use of resources, in another way, it can also refer to the way that humans are employed and manipulated in all manner of social circumstances. Here humans become resources and the industrial language game allows the speaker to treat us as units or objects whose productivity must be ordered, organized in order to be maximized.
The concept behind this idea is utility, which speaks to how something or someone might be useful, productive or otherwise beneficial. And this becomes the basic ethical question that animates the thoughts and concerns that inspired The Utilization Threshold. The utility function, in economic and social terms, has come to be known as utilitarianism, a modern philosophical system that seeks to maximize benefit for the largest number by considering alternatives and arriving at choices said to accomplish the maximizing objective.
What is forever missing in this idea, is a discussion examining the asymmetry of social power it supports by avoiding a look at the face of social power itself – who truly benefits most from the grand economic, political and social decisions and how might institutions themselves mediate such complexities as our modern world presents?
Musical Pieces
Circuits in the Sky (6:34) Cyberbreak (5:24) Entrance of the Machine (4:26) Landfill Graveyard (6:10)
The Machine’s Heartbeat (5:49) Nano Dance (5:29)
Sub-Con-Science Overload (6:08) The Utilization Threshold (4:21)
Viral Utopia (6:00)
Music has become a meta-language for the ordinariness and triviality of human emotion.” Jean Baudrillard
Credits
All Codec 13 compositions by Pierre Ouellet & Jim MacDonald
Published by Venture Publishing (2019)
Recorded, mixed and mastered at Venture Studio Toronto (2019)
Album Art and Design by Catherine Piro
Original cover image by Paul Young.
“Utility is the quality in commodities that makes individuals want to buy them, and the fact that individuals want to buy commodities shows that they have utility”[12Joan Robinson
