authenticity
We learn by copying.
We borrow words. We try on looks.
First we imitate our parents, then the kids around us.
There is no authenticity that does not begin as forgery.
You can buy greeting cards that have a longer recording time.
But this “ancient” copier for sounds is still highly coveted by artists.
Why?
What produces aesthetic value?
Is it the market; i.e. what rich people want?
No, as the NFT apes debacle illustrates what rich people want is immaterial to aesthetics.
Creativity comes from friction.
Pain transmuted into beauty. Privation turned inside out into plenitude. Limitations rearranged as possibilities.
The value of the sampler shown above comes from its artifacts (noise!) and workflow (labor!)
A company that tries to eliminate noise and labor may produce a better copier but a better copier can’t produce better art. (More, yes. More counterfeits, for sure.)
Here’s a fake house song I made this past weekend.
It started with an Instagram clip of Bowen Yang quoting Tina Fey’s warning to him lest he continue to speak freely in public: “Authenticity is dangerous and expensive.”
As I looped him saying the word “viral”, I kept hearing a different word that wasn’t in the original recording:
Spiral.
As in poetry, I had stumbled upon a new meaning through chance: two words that happen to rhyme in my language, alternately pulling together and pushing apart.
Viral. Spiral. Frictionless reproduction. A vicious cycle.
It’s how I often feel these days; how much of the world feels.
But Yang hadn’t said what I’d misheard.
Did I go to an “AI” to “synthesize” Bowen Yang saying “spiral”?
No, I searched for a video of him saying it.
Sure enough, he’d said it here.
Perhaps I’m lying to myself by thinking that the route I took brought me closer to the human in us both.
But we humans do that. It’s our best trait. To hope
Every novelty is a copy malformed.
The process of copying is what makes us original.
The more detailed our copy, the better we understand the source material.
The better we understand the source material, the deeper we can alter its structure.
All truly new things are thus disruptive.
They cannot emerge from the tools at our disposal but must be wrested from them.
The more expensive the factory, the less likely it is to produce disruption, let alone freedom.
Everything we have ever copied using computers has now been copied into a giant clipboard.
This clipboard is an imprint of our collective unconscious.
It’s ludicrously expensive to maintain and the companies that have done so are desperate to find commercial applications.
As a result we are being shown a profusion of parlor tricks, almost all of which are intended to produce the affect of a person. (Finally!)
Our politics right now are so unstable, so deficient that we have barely wrapped our heads around what is happening.
Instead of using these trillions of dollars to create hundreds of millions of better educated people, we are building three or four fake persons that can be owned by a company. (To further consolidate power.)
Inspiring one another is too hard for our smooth brains. So instead we’ll breathe into clay and call it a day.
The more realistic the person, supposedly the better the product but in my experience it’s quite the opposite.
It’s the so-called hallucinations that are truly generative.
YouTube
TwoSetViolin is a fun classical music “show” on YouTube. If this is your first time meeting them, please check out this video. Otherwise, here’s their great take on AI music.
I love Adam Neely’s music show even more (more often about jazz) and this was his recent take on AI music.
Bonus
I’ve been teaching our kids how to clean our car every week just as my father taught me when I was their age.
We make it a game, as it should be.
They learned how to be prep cooks during the pandemic and now we watch amazing cooking videos together. When they finish their chores, we play Overcooked. We mute the music and calmly guide each other. (On occasion, they watch the UK version of Kitchen Nightmares.)
When done right, (with know how!) work becomes sacred play.
The men who are seizing power, again, have a pronounced disdain for work.
Grifters and grinders, they don’t know its beauty and dignity.
To be charitable, they don’t know what craft is.
But, it’s more likely they correctly understand craft as as threat to their power.
As a ritual, we’ve been lighting candles “to improve our luck”.
Really, they’re just reminders. We light them and then walk away. We forget about them. We return and find they’re still shining. A thing that is beyond our control.
Fortune.
For the time being, I’ve given up on applying for more jobs. The definition of insanity is “doing the same thing and expecting different results” and if 50 applications yield 0 interviews I think the data is pretty clear this is not the route to take when you’re a 50 year-old c-suite level employee.
So, yesterday afternoon, as I continued to wait for an answer on two leads, I began a new ditty based on the sound our car makes when the door is ajar.
I recorded the melody while I was cleaning the car with the boys last Sunday. You can just hear their voices. Not ghosts, but humans in the machine.