Research
Measuring and Articulating the Value of Live Performance in Aotearoa
Around the web
"Machine code is written in 1s and 0s; human code is written in feelings" - Nick Shackleton-Jones
“There’s been a conscious effort to re-brand music as content by big tech, triggered by the growth of new music-makers during the pandemic. This sinister pivot is intended to devalue music, to both introduce apathy to the next generation of music makers – or ‘creators’ – to undermine existing music remuneration systems and to knock music off its pedestal and reduce it to ‘data’ that’s fair game for training in the age of AI.” - Declan McGlynn
Luminate’s 2024 year-end music report
How art lost its way: An unserious culture lacks the ability to sustain high art: “What Merce [Cunningham] said of dance—that it runs like water through your fingers—is true of everything”
“We may justly wonder: how interesting is intelligence to human beings? Interesting enough, certainly, but rarely the most fascinating thing. It is the same with art. Indeed, few people are as intriguing to us as famous singers, actors and writers. Newspapers are filled with gossip, sex scandals and speculation about the private lives of celebrities. Our fascination with art is deeply connected to our fascination with the human personality.” - James Marriott
Roger Linn responds to Behringer’s “LMDrum” - a newly released drum machine that blatantly copies the LinnDrum: “It's worth noting that Uli [Behringer] never asked my permission to either copy my visual design or my drum sounds. Though in 2020, he did kindly invite me to collaborate on a future drum machine, and I respectfully declined because of concern about Behringer's past business ethics and legal practices.”
Inside Zildjian, a 400-year-old cymbal-making company
“The amount of space these technologies take up in our lives — and their ever-diminishing utility — has brought us to a sort of cultural tipping point. I’ve sensed it over the last year, when my social feeds seemed to finish their years-long transformation from a neighborhood populated with friends to a glossy condo development of brands.” - Anne Helen Peterson
Generative AI is a “cultural technology”
Hayao Miyazaki on AI animation: “I can’t watch this stuff and find [it] interesting. Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted. If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”
“LLMs absolutely warrant criticism. We need to be talking through these problems, finding ways to mitigate them and helping people learn how to use these tools responsibly in ways where the positive applications outweigh the negative.
I like people who are skeptical of this stuff. The hype has been deafening for more than two years now, and there are enormous quantities of snake oil and misinformation out there. A lot of very bad decisions are being made based on that hype. Being critical is a virtue.” - Simon Willison
The decline in critical thinking will kill us long before AI
Podcast: Appetite for Distraction
Terms of service summarised and rated (by AI)
Listening and watching
Things we’re interested in
“I will be brief because some of my readers are not here for educational philosophy. For decades many in my network have championed actual education, the long-stretch goal of which is essentially self-actualisation. This is a term popularised by Maslow, but even Aristotle was pontificating about our human states of becoming. Education is, briefly, not only acquiring skills but realising our free will, potential and unique unicorn properties so that we can survive the shitshow that is existence. At least until we’re dead, education’s purpose to help us survive and thrive, not just get a job.
In society, education is both contrasted and conflated with other terms like learning, training or skill development. The field is semantically messy, and at the end of the day many don’t care about actual education. For society writ-large, the purpose of education is not self-actualisation, but rather compliance, conformance and control. I’m not talking about educators, you fluffy, beautiful bandits of resistance leaders, I’m talking about the systems around and through which people have access to education. Learning to learn, being intellectually curious, bravely looking the human condition in the face – these are not economically responsible endeavours. Thus, they have traditionally been reserved for the privileged (and the possessed).” - Laura Hilliger
Why Netflix looks/sounds as it does: “That audiences clearly prefer the films of the past has been an inconvenient fact for the streamers who tout themselves as the future of entertainment. But rather than address the problem by improving the quality of their programming and distribution, the streamers obscure the failure of their originals even further with PR bluster. Ever since it moved into original content, Netflix had been making ridiculous claims about its films and shows with little to no pushback from the Hollywood press… Until Netflix, one of cinema’s essential qualities, the thing that distinguished it from television, was the way it commanded an audience’s attention. Whether a movie grossed big numbers or bombed, a box office report carried an inadmissible truth: the vast majority of the audience experienced the movie in full, and its taste couldn’t be ignored… Here, streaming platforms have achieved a strange paradox. Never has a group of studios gained so much control over the production, distribution, exhibition, and reception of movies by making movies no one cares about or remembers. Having not only failed to discover a new generation of auteurs, the streamers have also ensured that their filmmakers are little more than precarious content creators, ineligible to share the profits of any hit. It’s a shift that has induced a profound sense of confusion.”
Wasn’t streaming meant to help us escape ads?
“They say “Just enjoy it,” and you sit there puzzled, calculating how anyone enjoys Wish, The Marvels, Gremlins 2, etc. For charity sake, you make excuses in your head for them; giving the movie the benefit of the doubt; you know, in the sense of “maybe I missed something the first time,” or “perhaps I reated you too harshly.” Or the grand excuse: “perhaps it will grow on me.” But friend, can the taste of cement ever grow on anyone? Garbage may be recycled. But who can redeem the taste of faeces? Then you sigh deeply and accept your fate that you are stuck in this world with people who love the taste of wet cement.” - The Busymind Project
George Lucas: “Nobody knows what to do. The stories they’re telling are just old movies… There’s no original thinking.”
We need more warnings about amusing ourselves to death
From Ofcom (UK): Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes Report
2024 Edelman Trust Barometer: Trust in companies, media, institutions and science appears to be in decline
“For a generation craving reality over polish, the traditional influencer model is increasingly seen as just another form of advertising cluttering their feeds — easy to spot and even easier to scroll past. Brands need to rethink their approach, focusing on genuine connections rather than relying on influencers who may no longer hold the sway they once did.” - Tumblr in partnership with Archrival Survey
Reuters Institute: 87% of media leaders say that newsrooms are being fully or somewhat transformed by Gen AI
“There is more hype and obfuscation about what the technology can and cannot actually do. This can lead to embarrassing mistakes, and for journalists to feed into the hype machine, by, for example, anthropomorphising AI technologies, and mythologising tech companies.” - Nowness Art Review AI Report
Love it! AI is like Tinkerbell: It only works if we believe in it
Google report 82% of “young adults in leadership positions at work said they leverage AI in their work”
Betteridge's law of headlines: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
Question
Will streaming subscription prices continue to rise?
Closing notes
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