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Silicon Valley’s delusion machine

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The AI Super Bowl — And Everything Else

I was watching the 2022 Super Bowl with family back in Massachusetts when an ad starring Tom Brady came on. Which obviously caused quite a stir. It was for the crypto trading platform FTX and it inspired my mom to finally ask me what cryptocurrency is. I tried my best to explain and even drew out on a napkin a rough approximation of how a blockchain worked. After a beat of silence she just said, “I don’t think I get it, but that’s nice.”

I felt echoes of the 2022 crypto Super Bowl while watching the deluge of ads last night for artificial intelligence from companies like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Salesforce. The marketing — and the product — is slightly clearer this time around. It doesn’t require a literal diagram to explain how to use a chatbot, but the result was the same: Here is something Silicon Valley has decided you need and you’re going to have to use it. And it can be hard to remember that up until around 2020, Silicon Valley did not typically operate this way.

Most of the big tech companies that are now shoving AI down our throats got as big as they did, not because they sold us a revolutionary new product they dreamed up out of nothing, but because they found, oftentimes, insidious ways to solve a digital infrastructure problem with a private business. Google figured out how to help us find content we were already looking for, Facebook figured out how to help us find people we already knew, Amazon, physical products we already wanted, etc. Yes, these companies would eventually flood the airwaves with ad campaigns, but Google was already a multi-billion-dollar tech company and Chrome had over 100 million active users when they dropped their first Super Bowl commercial, “Parisian Love,” in 2010. That still-very clever ad told a story about someone one falling in love through the mundane Google searches everyone makes every day. Google’s Super Bowl ad last night, “Dream Job,” depicted a dad getting ready for a job interview by talking out loud in his kitchen to an AI voice assistant, something I am very confident no one has done ever. But that doesn’t matter because Silicon Valley believes they are big enough now to create the future, rather than scale up to meet it.

(tfw you’re being normal and casually talking to an AI in your kitchen like it’s a person.)

But this isn’t just about tech companies being out of touch with how actual human beings use their products. If it was, Google could have chosen to advertise how someone uses Gemini with an ad that featured employees at a Vietnamese content farm generating millions of AI images of amputee veterans praying to crab Jesus or something.

This would all be simply annoying and kind of embarrassing if November's election had gone differently. Thanks to apps like TikTok, Shein, Temu, and, most recently, DeepSeek, we know that China has caught up to the US and its tech industry has figured out how to innovate in ways ours can't or won’t. You might not like machine-learning-based short-form video apps or gamified social shopping platforms, but they are genuinely new ways of interacting with the web. And US regulators can’t actually stop the tide from turning — at best, the US will become an island surrounded by a global internet run by Chinese software. But what elevates this from lame to genuinely dangerous is that this delusion that Silicon Valley can now decide how the future should look has infiltrated the highest levels of the US government. And AI is the technology powering this delusion.

As we speak, Elon Musk’s DOGE team is reportedly planning to use xAI to “streamline” federal contracts and OpenAI is talking to the White House about using their AI for nuclear weapon security. And OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank are partnering on a new company called Stargate, funded by a massive investment in AI thanks to President Donald Trump. Journalist Maximillian Alvarez recently described the current AI invasion as an attempt to take over “government and ensure we have no more choice in the matter.” And if they succeed, it won’t just be Super Bowl commercials that no long reflect reality. The entire country will be running on Silicon Valley’s delusion machine. And whatever the future of computing is that was supposed to arrive, never will.


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Good Song About The Coup

Instagram post by @veryveryvinny


One of the hardest pills to swallow about our current constitutional crisis is that a majority, though slim, of the country voted for it. And, sure, there are a million stories emerging right now about Trumpists realizing that, yes, the leopards will eat their face too. But the managerial class, on both sides of the political spectrum, that truly believed in atomic age neoliberalism is really struggling to make sense of the general glee felt around the country as President Donald Trump destroys the institutions that, well, make America, America. The hope, it seems, is that eventually Trump’s team will sever something in the system that will truly infuriate and activate voters. Never mind that that’s literally not how most coups play out. Boiled frogs and so on.

CBS News partnered with YouGov on a poll out this week showing that the majority of Americans are still all in on Trump. More than half of responders believe Trump is “tough,” “energetic” (lol), and “focused” (lmao). And the majority of those polled approve of what he’s doing, overall. Now, there’s some quibbling over on Bluesky about how serious to take this poll, but I think that’s a lot of cope tbh. Similarly, I saw reports on social media that Trump was booed at the Super Bowl last night, but based on what I’ve read, Taylor Swift got the majority of the boos last night, not the president.

Here’s the thing, though. None of this actually matters. All kinds of stupid, awful, ugly shit is popular. That doesn’t mean we have to accept it as inevitable. And, most importantly, it doesn’t make it above the law. Hopefully, someone can forward this email to Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Might help him brainstorm some better ideas for wrestling back some power in 2026.


The Bluesky Coalition Did Not Last Very Long

—by Adam Bumas

As Democratic Party leaders like Jeffries and Chuck Schumer continue the outward messaging that they’re just little birthday boys, there’s been a pretty wide desire for more direct political organizing that can effectively resist the subversion of the federal government. So far there’s been a few successes, but over the weekend, we saw a big failure on Bluesky of sorts.

On Saturday, journalist and Western Kabuki host Juniper tried to build an Axis of Posting with Will Stancil, the longtime Twitter warrior and wannabe establishment Democrat. Juniper called for Stancil to “heal the divide between the far left and liberals online,” and create a united front of political messaging on the internet. Stancil was initially positive about the idea, but in less than an hour Stancil had started getting into it with Juniper’s followers, and once the replies and quote-tweets got four or five deep, the idea of the coalition had completely been forgotten.

There’s a lesson here! Both Juniper and Stancil clearly agree on quite a lot about politics. It would definitely be good for both to agree on simple and succinct messaging that’s easy to internalize for people who aren’t posting about politics all day. But there are probably better places to figure that out than on the Misinterpreting Your Post App.


Talk Tuah, Leaked

An unreleased episode of Haliey Welch’s podcast, Talk Tuah, leaked last week. In the episode, Welch starts crying at one point, as the co-host of the episode, FaZe Media CEO Ricky Banks, tried to explain what happened with the disastrous launch of the $HAWK coin back in December. Welch has not made any public comments since the coin was pumped and dumped at the end of the year. Welch and her team are now facing a class action lawsuit over the coin.

The TL;DR of what happened, according to Welch in the leaked episode, is that a “friend of a friend” was running $HAWK and though things felt “a little weird” as it was launching, she was unaware of how much of a rug pull it would end up becoming. She also said that she was only interested in doing a memecoin because she wanted to donate half of the money to her animal rescue charity Paws Across America.

Reading between the lines here a bit, it seems fairly clear that Welch fell for all the standard crypto BS uninitiated investors get told at the outset of these kinds of projects. The tell here is Welch’s mention of how she was told the project would be “positive” and “community-based” which is the same kind of multilevel marketing speak I’ve heard at countless crypto events over the years.

Look, here’s a good rule. If a 30-something man with flavored-vape vocal fry dressed like a professional snowboarder tells you that crypto is good a way to make friends, you need to run as fast as possible in the opposite direction. You are a mark.


Reddit Is Obsessed With The New York Times Beans

—By Adam Bumas

The New York Times Cooking app is popular enough it’s had its share of viral moments over the years — most infamously, Alison Roman’s shallot pasta back in 2020. More recently, r/NYTCooking has become a hub for this beautiful little outgrowth of the social web.

For the past month or so, users on the subreddit have been making and posting pictures of this recipe for “Creamy, Spicy Tomato Beans and Greens”. The subreddit was so overwhelmed by posts about the beans (here are some of the highlights) that, on request from the community, the mods started a Beans Megathread. And today, the Times’ official Reddit account will be hosting an AMA with Alexa Weibel, who created the recipe.

Congratulations to everyone involved, and especially to the top commenter on the beans recipe, who says “Loved it! I substituted everything with a Taco Bell burrito supreme. It was a hit!”


Crucial Updates From The Philly Police Scanner Last Night

You can — and should — click the link above and read the whole thread. It rips. Go birds (unless they’re playing against New England).


Did you know Garbage Day has a merch store?

You can check it out here!



P.S. here’s a hidden stoat.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***

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tante
4 hours ago
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"current AI invasion as an attempt to take over “government and ensure we have no more choice in the matter.” And if they succeed, it won’t just be Super Bowl commercials that no long reflect reality. The entire country will be running on Silicon Valley’s delusion machine. And whatever the future of computing is that was supposed to arrive, never will."
Berlin/Germany
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The Open Source Torment Nexus

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One of the most popular memes when it comes to talking about the tech sector is Alex Blechman’s tweet about the Torment Nexus:

"Alex Blechman @AlexBlechman Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus 5:49 PM Nov 8, 2021. Twitter Web App"

One can interpret the tweet in a bunch of ways. As a comment on the level of reading comprehension that billionaire tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or some ghoul that Peter Thiel funded constantly show: Calling one’s products or comapnies “Metaverse” and “Palantir” does not express an understanding of who and what is criticized in the respective works of fiction. And we are not even asking for nuance here.

Another interpretation is that the products that are being brought to market as massive innovations seem to be less than stellar. Best case scenario they are just weird stuff nobody asked for (think Juicero), most of the time they are “here’s a thing you kinda want but you have to pay rent for it now instead of buying it and we might shut it down any time”. And a lot of the time they are just bad for you, products that insult your existence as a human being.

Obviously there is no objective way to make these calls, to decide what is dumb but meaningless or what is evil. People have different values, different needs and sometimes can accept different levels of crap for a specific product or service.

We talked about this a bit in the Q&A part of my talk at Fluconf that gave a bit of criticism of the Open Source movement and its beliefs. But while my argument in the talk was mostly that the beliefs that Open Source is based on might not actually be based on or support the actual political values that people might have there is value to having Open Source software. Software that you can use and change to suit your needs and demands (if you can of course).

But Open Source software does not happen in a vacuum, it is written by people. Often to serve their needs, sometimes to serve a community’s needs: To provide a better solution for users. The “Open Source Alternative to proprietary X” thing.

If you’ve been on the Internet for about 7 seconds you will have come into contact with guys (using a gendered term here because they are mostly male) who will respond to any criticism of or issue you have with a proprietary software with “Just use this Open Source tool”. It’s a bit annoying because a lot of the time that answer doesn’t come from a genuine desire to help based on empathy and an understanding of the problem the original post expressed. But It’s also oftentimes better than one might think.

The Open Source community has gotten quite good at replacing proprietary tools with open source solutions. The feature set might not be 100% there and some things might not work but there are totally valid alternatives to Slack or Chrome or Microsoft Office (if you really just need office tools and not something that specifically depends on MS’s ideosyncracies). There are whole websites dedicated to listing Open Source alternatives to proprietary tools with at least one of those alternatives being pretty much a copy.

This has tremendous value and provides a bunch of people with the software tools to do their thing – me included. But when building those replacements the Q&A at FluConf made me wonder: Are we maybe doing a tech-bro? Are we not properly reading and understanding the texts we reference?

Any artifact is a text. You can read for example any piece of software as a document about the beliefs and assumptions of the programmer about the users. The software tells you how the programmer sees and understands the user. It’s just a form of text that is maybe a bit harder to read and it might have animations and sounds and can send bits somewhere.

What triggered this train of thought was me thinking about social media platforms. With Meta and X and all US tech companies finding their love for fascism currently many people want to jump off those platforms to find a better home. And there are Open Source Alternatives to Twitter/Instagram/WhatsApp/etc. Which in general is good. Maybe. Sometimes.

(Quick sidebar: I’m gonna use an example of an Open Source project here but don’t read this as me shitting on that project. People can build what they want and have their reasons for doing things. My feelings and needs are not “right” and other perspectives are wrong. I’m using the project as an illustration.)

I don’t use Instagram. Not because I don’t like seeing pictures or because it is “beneath me” and not even because it’s Meta and Mark Zuckerberg bend the knee to Trump. (In fact I have an account I use to follow tattoo artists but that I only use for exactly that research because tattooers live on Instagram sadly) I don’t use Instagram because it’s bad for my mental health. The affordances and the social practices of Instagram have lead to every picture (and the people and lives in it) looking like an ad. Perfectly designed and sculpted representations of better lives of better people. It just makes me feel bad about myself, my looks, my life. For me Instagram is the Torment Nexus.

Now that might just be a me-problem. But when I see an Open Source project like Pixelfed that basically attempts to provide users with a federated, open source drop-in replacement for Instagram I wonder: Are we just building an Open Source Torment Nexus? Because Pixelfed looks like Instagram. Has all the bones of Instagram. The same basic logic of the app (maybe the recommendation algorithms aren’t as aggressive but you can always patch that). There is nothing that would lead me to believe that – should Pixelfed get very popular – it would not also develop similar esthetics. Would also help people feel bad about themselves (if they are vulnerable to that kind of thinking).

And Pixelfed isn’t the only tool here. Bluesky is basically a carbon copy of Twitter a few years ago (not technology wise but in the way that interactions work, the way in which status is produced). Mastodon isn’t that different either. Which in this case doesn’t feel as bad for me – but I also liked Twitter.

It feels like too often we are bound to think about what’s possible in the framing of what businesses think is possible. I recently argued against scale and that topic is a perfect example: Meta needs any new product to scale to millions if not billions of users. Amazon needs to scale products to the whole world. Google needs to scale. Microsoft needs to scale. And they all need to do the things you need to do to scale. Build interaction loops that enforce you coming back to an app or platform regularly ideally daily, to make it a habit. Build tools promising you a view on everything, to give you feelings of power, understanding and control.

We here on the open, decentralized, free web don’t need to do that. Pixelfed does not need to scale. Mastodon does not need to scale. At least not in the way that Facebook needs to.

We are doing a tech-bro. Just like Peter Thiel calls his surveillance company after the stones the evil wizards use in The Lord of the Rings because he doesn’t seem to have understood that those are the baddies we are building tools that are built for growth hacks and scamming VCs out of their money because we don’t read them properly. Because we just take what’s there and make it open source.

Just is doing a lot of work in that last paragraph. The amount of work that goes into duplicating those proprietary functionalities is incredible, awe inspiring. Thousands of people put work into building those tools, often without payment, without a lot of thanks. Spending their limited time on this planet contributing to the commons with software.

But recognizing the amount of work and time and life that goes into building this huge pile of software shouldn’t we spend it on something good? Something that is actually good for the people using it? And are we always so sure that the things we build do that, enable that?

We should stop building the Open Source Torment Nexus. Because the problem with the Torment Nexus is not the software license or opaqueness of the code: It’s the part with the torment.

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tante
15 hours ago
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"It feels like too often we are bound to think about what’s possible in the framing of what businesses think is possible."
Berlin/Germany
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Why is everything binary?

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All of my videos are black and white, but especially this one.
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tante
3 days ago
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"If you encounter a broken web interface, which you will, today, probably multiple times, this setup is fundamentally why it sucks so badly. It’s not the binary in your computer at fault; it’s the binary we ascribe to our brains."
Berlin/Germany
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Compromising the Centrist Way

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This cartoon is by me and Becky Hawkins.


TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has four panels. They all show a little seating area in a food cart pod (basically an outdoor food court), where two people – a man in a blue sweater and a van dyke beard, and a woman in a green cardigan and a red skirt – are talking as they enjoy their drinks.

PANEL 1

BLUE: As a centrist, I think we need compromise on climate change. The left can’t fix it by itself!

PANEL 2

BLUE: The left needs to be less didactic and more open-minded and willing to make compromises.

GREEN: And what compromises should the right make?

PANEL 3

Blue makes “air quotes” with his fingers, while Green leans forward, hand rubbing her chin.

BLUE: For instance, the left should stop saying we need to pay attention to “social justice” when we design climate policies.

GREEN: And what compromises should the right make?

PANEL 4

Blue smiles, pleased with his conclusion. Green stands up and yells, her arms in the air.

BLUE: And the left needs to accept less regulation. And stop all the alarmism.

GREEN (angry): And what compromises should the right make?

CHICKEN FAT WATCH

The chicken fat here is in the “Holy Crepe” special of the day board on one of the food carts in the background. In panel one, it says “Today’s Special: American’s Apricot Talent.” In panel two, it says “Today’s Special: Nutella Mockingbird.” In panel three, it says “Today’s Special: Between a Guac and a Chard Place.” And in panel four, it says “Today’s Special: A Cream Deferred (vegan).”


Compromising the Centrist Way | Patreon

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tante
4 days ago
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When you start making compromises with right-wingers they don't meet you in the middle, they drag you further out right.
Berlin/Germany
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Innovation is a distraction

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The headline is of course a bit of a provocation. Not all Innovation is a distraction, there are many areas in which meaningful work happens any day to generate some form of relevant new product or process or technology.

But there are also so many areas in our lives, so many problems that affect us individually or collectively where Innovation is a distraction from actually solving them.

Take the climate crisis that does absolutely affect us all and will affect us all even more in the future (unless you are one of the billionaires who are one of the main causes of it). We hear a lot about how we need to innovate to address climate related issues, build new somethings and …

Let me stop you right there. That is bullshit.

We do absolutely know what we need to to to fight the climate crisis: Reduce carbon emissions radically. Which we have known for decades (I was taught about the “greenhouse effect” in motherfucking school 30 years ago and my schools never have been especially avant-garde). We know that we need to stop burning fossil fuels, stop eating as much meat, invest in cleaner energy sources and insulate houses, etc. We know.

But it’s inconvenient. The solutions we know, we have researched, we have tested, are annoying. They force us to change our lives, force us to rethink our social and economic structures (Oh who would have thought: An economic system based on limitless growth and consumption would lead to bad outcomes. Let’s start a research project!). And who wants to do all that?

The demand for more Innovation (and sometimes even the request for more research) has become a way to legitimize not doing anything. A way to say “the unpleasant solutions we have are not perfect but in the future there might be a magic solution that doesn’t bother us and everyone gets a fucking unicorn”.

Nuclear fusion has had a bit of a narrative renaissance: With AI bros trying to boil our planet they need more power and because admitting that this will lead to more carbon emissions it’s great to claim that fusion will totally solve that in a clean and abundant way. It’s just that this clean working fusion doesn’t exist. Don’t get me wrong: There is one meaningfully useful kind of fusion that we can harness to generate energy and it is happening remotely on the sun. But fusion power plants? They do not exist. And arguing that we should invest a whole lot into developing them because they would be amazing to have stops us from doing the required work.

I’m not against someone coming up with clean nuclear fusion. Be my guest. But we do not have that yet and the climate crisis is raging. We need to harness solar, wind, geothermal and other renewables to change our energy production and we need to stop doing certain things that are a waste of energy. Reduce consumption and change production of energy. And if while we are doing that you find an even better method of energy production in a fusion reactor or fucking Narnia, cool.

But talking about nonexisting things as if they existed is not just a waste of time and money and brainpower. It is increasingly harmful. My talk on Empty Innovation at last year’s re:publica talked about we get sold a lot of stuff as innovation that’s nothing and how that is a method for powerful people to stay in power, to not change the system or have it changed.

I think this aspect is slightly different. Because this one also is us all buying in: We are so happy to “do more research” or “bring forward innovation” if it means that we can just keep doing what we’ve always done. If it means that we don’t need to change.

Innovation often is the promise that the things that affect us, that might destroy us, will magically not affect us. If we just believe enough. Calling it juvenile would be unfair to teens who do go out into the cold to demonstrate, who do reduce their consumption. It’s ignorant. And it will get many people killed. Unless we stop being distracted by the promises of shiny things and get our heads in the game.

I am making up a number now but my gut feeling is that we need 0 innovation to tackle at least 90% of the problems that challenge our societies, us as individuals and mankind as a whole. We just need to grow up and start doing the actual work. The German writer Bertolt Brecht called it “die Mühen der Ebenen” (loosely translated as “the troubles of the plains”): We are no longer climbing up the hill to reach higher and higher grounds – strenuous activities made possible by the hope of wonder and enlightenment – we have to start trudging through the plains in the hope of reaching our future.

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tante
6 days ago
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"my gut feeling is that we need 0 innovation to tackle at least 90% of the problems that challenge our societies, us as individuals and mankind as a whole. We just need to grow up and start doing the actual work."
Berlin/Germany
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AI Music As Walmart As Utopia

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AI Music As Walmart As Utopia

In Utopia as Replication, Fredric Jameson makes a spicy argument for looking at Walmart as a utopia. It is a pretty readable essay as far as Jameson goes. He of course isn't suggesting that Walmart as it actually exists is any kind of utopia, but uses it as an example precisely because, despite its position as a malevolent colossus of capitalism, Jameson believes that 'the utopian impulse' — a kind of flickering potential of how things can be better — can be seen everywhere, even here. He points to things like how Walmart is so large it has for all intents and purposes defeated 'the free market', something most of us can only dream of doing! How it can make life (sort of) affordable for the poorest Americans, how it drives useful technical innovation through its global logistic needs, things like that. Things that could, at the flick of an ideological switch, be used for good instead of the evil Walmart actually wields.

Don't get me wrong, it doesn't feel particularly encouraging, but such is the plight of the earnest utopian I guess! Hopelessly addicted to the glimmer of better futures, picking up the heaviest, most doom-riddled objects and hungrily examining them in search of a quick a fix, a tiny glimpse of how us humans could use these overwhelming global infrastructures we have built for ourselves for the betterment of humanity instead of accelerating us all into ULTRA-DEATH-CENTURY.

But what's worse than looking for utopia? Giving up on utopia, I suppose. And so in the same spirit that Jameson approaches Walmart, I want to take a look at a comment that was doing the rounds a few weeks ago from some guy called Mikey Shulman who is the CEO of 'AI Music' company Suno. This is what he said that caused outrage in the little collection of feeds through which I see the internet:

We didn’t just want to build a company that makes the current crop of creators 10 percent faster or makes it 10 percent easier to make music. If you want to impact the way a billion people experience music you have to build something for a billion people [...] And so that is first and foremost giving everybody the joys of creating music and this is a huge departure from how it is now. It’s not really enjoyable to make music now […] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.

To see how well that's working out for him, here's a song generated by Suno using the prompt '65daysofstatic'.

AI Music As Walmart As Utopia
'65daysofstatic'
0:00
/217.321859

I can't help but wonder how many lakes of fresh water I evaporated getting the Suno servers to make this... Sorry, earth.[1]

Listen. These days I am as luddite as a raised hammer still glistening with slivers of freshly-obliterated silicon. So do not mistake anything that follows as any kind of tech-solutionism or even tech-optimism. But I do think there is a way of looking at this (dumb, wrongheaded) statement and seeing the spectre of utopian impulse quietly haunting it.

I want to put aside the bit at the end about how "the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music". Because while I do not subscribe to or have any patience for the 'tortured artist' archetype, if Music in its broadest sense is as important as I/we/many people believe, then I think that there's a case to be made that making it doesn't always need to be enjoyable. It is perhaps not the best metric to gauge something that is so valuable in so many different respects. It brings to mind Mark Fisher complaining about how some of his students "want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp - and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension - that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche."[2]

I often enjoy having made music, or at least I do for a little while, before I start noticing all the ways it could have been better, but I cannot honestly say that I always enjoy the process of making music while I am actually doing it. (I am very aware that this could well be a 'me' problem rather than a 'no — it's the concept of music that is wrong!' problem.)

ANYWAY. What I do want to focus on is the bit where Shulman says "if you want to impact the way a billion people experience music you have to build something for a billion people" and in particular "giving everybody the joys of creating music". To be clear: I do not for a second think that what Shulman is building, even if it worked (which it will not), is in any way a good idea. But here is the utopian reading that I gleaned from it:

Imagine a way of the billions of people on earth being able to effortlessly articulate all their feelings using music as a mode of instantaneous communication between each other. Imagine how powerful music could be if it was liberated from the limits of the culture industry and allowed to fulfil its true potential, if it was no longer trapped in commodity forms, in song forms, no longer wrapped up in the spectacle of 'musicians' as people set apart from their audience. If the boundaries between music-maker and music-listener were collapsed.

What would that sound like? Well, what it won't sound like is whatever slop the Suno app churns out. But even if an answer isn’t clear, like all utopian interrogations, where it is still useful is in how it illuminates the edges of the thought space. And more than anything, it reminds me of Attali's utopian notion of 'composition', something that moves beyond the codes and rituals we now associate with popular music and blurs the lines between composer and listener. In Attali’s composition, people spontaneously compose and listen simultaneously, without being bound by expectations or standards. “A music produced by each individual for himself, for pleasure outside of meaning, usage and exchange”.

It was this comparison between Attali's ideas and Shulman's nonsense that got me started writing this post in the first place, but I'm a thousand words in now and it's not like I have a well thought out conclusion to any of this, so I'm not going to get any further into that. But the last chapter of his book Noise: The Political Economy of Music is all about this and well worth a read if this kind of thing interests you.

Inconclusive Conclusion

If Shulman is actually a believer in anything his company is doing rather than just cynically trying to make his millions before the AI bubble bursts, then he is making a basic category error in what 'music' actually is. He seems to think that, broadly speaking, it can be reduced to a collection of sounds organised through time. These sounds are captured as an audio waveform, which can be replicated by computers to vibrate speakers at repeatable frequencies to recreate those sounds for a listener.

It is such a limited conception of all the other stuff that music is, that is so intimately wrapped up with what it is to be a human being, existing in a world with fellow human beings. A nice line from a recent Jon Greenaway newsletter:

To engage with [any text] is to allow yourself to become a different person - or, to put this another way, it was Fred Jameson who pointed out that you never read a text fresh for the first time, but are always already reading it through the various ideological and historical layers of association and meaning that we bring to the text. Thus for the reader, the process of formation - of Bildung - is to become attuned to those layers of association, not to strip them away from the text (reading as an act of purification) but rather of coming to see those things as binding and entangling the text (and you!) to the wider structures of ideology, history and politics.

It's the same with music too, right? Nobody's composing or listening to a new song with a fresh, spotless mind. We've all got an encyclopaedia stuffed full of music knowledge inside of us that any new music gets filtered through. It's all in discourse with each other and within ourselves.

In an AI model for generating music, the various nodes that make up its training data are presumably tagged chunks of melody/rhythm/patterns/spectral frequencies etc. pulled from analysing loads of songs stolen off Spotify. Technically clever for sure, but lacking in fidelity by many orders of magnitude when compared to our own musical encyclopaedias in which each ‘data node’ is a living, relational constellation of ideas and meaning and memories that are tangled up with our entire existence.

So what is to be done about all this? I think what it comes down to is contesting the idea of what 'music' was, is or can be. And this contest is an asymmetrical battleground. The tech goliaths against luddite musicians (and when I say 'musicians', I mean people who have never played a note on any instrument but who value music as a nourishing, invigorating part of their life as much as I mean composers). And so I think it might be worth interrogating what 'luddite musician' could actually mean. Because I refuse to accept it means a retreat from computer-based music back into hippy folk music and acoustic guitars. But what if the technology we should be smashing are these frameworks of understanding what music was/is/can be?

I reckon what Attali was getting at is that the future of music 'composition' is nothing less than living! It is humans, being. It is the rhythms and sounds of embodied, collaborative communication, unshackled by the sonic grammars scorched into us by the musical industrial complex. That is what music could be. It's not pressing a button on a website.

And so this is the utopian glimmer I can extrapolate from Schulman, as dim as it is. Suno is no Walmart. It's a lazy slop generator with seemingly very few users. It's a dumb idea even if it worked, which it doesn't. The biggest success it can hope for is to make lives harder for the composers of generic library music as corner-cutting ad agencies turn to it for soundtracks as they churn out cheaper and cheaper ads. But. The idea that 'music' is not just 'songs by other people', but is rather the name we should give to something that we are all exploring, experiencing, composing, listening to and dancing to together, some kind of collaborative, relational effort involving billions of people striving for joy, that is something I can get behind.


  1. There was one interesting part of this audio slop for me, incidentally, which is the last few seconds where the song rings out. It starts as a delay trail but then I guess the computer forgets it's supposed to be a delay and turns it into a weird fade that sounds like a wind tunnel and then at the very end a kind of ethereal creeping horror of frequency modulation. It's like sine waves trying to emulate silence or room noise or something, and somehow to me really amplifies the way in which computer has zero understanding of anything that it is doing. ↩︎

  2. I haven't eaten a hamburger for about thirty years but if I'm being honest the idea of doing so is probably still more appealing than reading Nietzsche. ↩︎

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tante
7 days ago
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"The idea that 'music' is not just 'songs by other people', but is rather the name we should give to something that we are all exploring, experiencing, composing, listening to and dancing to together, some kind of collaborative, relational effort involving billions of people striving for joy, that is something I can get behind."
Berlin/Germany
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