On Antiviral Music

With the technological annihilation of personal privacy in modern society due to various tendrils of surveillance capitalism, both public and private, a radically private art has become a spiritual necessity of the twenty-first century. Antiviral music is an early twenty-first-century art form that serves this growing need. In the search for antiviral music, we look for Internet-accessible music that has largely averted the gaze of the attention economy as indicated by low numbers of views or hits, and that possesses a latent strangeness that is redeemable as an artistic experience. The scope of this chapter is limited to music. However, the concept of antiviral music can be applied to many other art domains, especially digital and networked art forms.