Angus Finlayson at FACT presenting a pretty convincing case for seeing Diplo as a globe-trotting privateer in quest of booty-shake booty, whose modus is the re-presentation of "the
innovations of lesser-known global scenes – Brazilian funk carioca, New Orleans bounce... Dutch bubbling house" in such a way that manifest deb(i)ts are transmuted into credit for the re-presenter...

which makes him the perfect icon for connectivity, the telemetric data-flows that underpin the world financial system, the entertainmentscape and our personal communications... the same system that enables lightning-fast transfers of capital allows for an unprecedented mobility of cultural capital from local scenes to "ambassadors"



as Diplo says at the start of the Blackberry commercial, he travels the world "collecting influences"

but you don't really need to physically go anywhere to be this kind of hunter-gatherer

computer/smartphone + Interweb places the homebound, sedentary individual at the crossroads of all this post-geographical traffic

Arthur Kroker foresaw all this years ago, argued that sampling and digital music technology anticipated what would happen to culture/economics in the era of globalisation:

"...the harvesting of energy from the local and the bounded for the global and unbounded.... Ours is a time of non-history that is super-charged by the spectacular flame-out of the detritus of the bounded energy of local histories... archived body parts are disguised in the binary functionality of data and pooled into larger circulatory flows... Nietzche's body and conscience vivisectionists, vampiring organic flesh, and draining its fluids into cold streams of telemetry... "

(all quotes from Data Trash, Kroker's book with Michael A.Weinstein)