Time to get serious…
You’d better start getting serious.
You see what is happening, and how fast it is moving, right?
Logically, how long until they start in on their enemies lists, weeks….a month?
How long until they dogwhistle and embolden the current version of brown-shirted militias (Proud Bois etc) to begin going after people at the street level, arming them with information about who their enemies are, where they live, what they drive, where they frequent, how they can be expected to react, all gathered from the databases that all of us have willingly surrendered to for as much as decades, since the owners/CEOs/stakeholders of those social media companies that KNOW all of that about all of us have started holding hands with fascism?
And if you think that’s fantasy thinking, why in the world would you think that in the face of what’s happening?
These people are ALL about a punishment mentality, and they have been publicly voicing their desire to punish the “others” for their imagined grievances for literal decades, how can you possibly imagine it WON’T go there?
Do you actually think they’re going to stop at deporting a huge swath of “illegal” humans?! And if so, why would they?! Their lists are much longer than that, and they are currently and have been saying so, all along.
Not to mention that “othering” has now become entwined with corporate/shareholder interests in the form of prison/transport/private security/cyber-security corporations who stand to gain MUCH in this environment. And if you think THOSE people are concerned about Patriotism and Principles, it’s time to change your diapies….
You’d better start thinking about getting off Social Media, learning about secure programs for communication, start using “dumb phones“, learn what a “Faraday bag” is and start using it for certain things in public places.
“Those times” are not coming, they are here, NOW, and the time/distance between now and there is already none.
And on top of it all, the collusion and collapse of a “responsible and free press” means you likely won’t hear about it except anecdotally, in ways that you won’t believe or don’t think you can trust, it will all seem too outlandish and/or crazy.
In every historic time that the social structure has collapsed or rotted enough to be taken over by these kind of people, a huge part of the regular population stood by in disbelief that what was happening….could actually happen.
They couldn’t believe that their world had shattered in such a thorough way, and so they put their head down and tried to go about their everyday life, hoping that normalcy would return, while all around them their world convulsed and crumbled, till “the knock” and pounding was on THEIR door, and it was too late.
You think these people are mean childish fools who are like giant toddlers who have managed to somehow to get the keys to the car and start careening down the road giggling hysterically until they crash and mommy comes to get them, and you’re right, they ARE that….except they are mean and angry and violent and filled with vengeance about imagined grievances and the kind of entitled malevolence only those who are on top of society and feel that is being threatened can have, and they CAN drive, and they ARE capable of attaining organization, and they are armed and they are salivating at the chance to exact punishment and retribution upon those they blame for those imagined grievances, and their mommy is NOT coming to grab them by the ear and sort them out, she’s cheering them on and teaching them to hate and how to “other” and to act.
In a historical sense, what is coming can be seen from a country mile away, and it always does, so don’t get caught flat-footed, just because in your innocence and arrogance you can’t believe they mean “yes you too!”…
And yeh….maybe I’m wrong.
But I’m not wrong so far, and you never thought it would get even this far, did you?
So what does it cost you to learn a bit about your own security, just in case, to start pulling back on habits that you already feel are negative trends in your anyway, to think just even slightly that there may be a real danger to you and your’s?
You have some plans in place for earthquakes/floods/fires depending on where you live, right?
Why not put a little thought into what you might do if I AM right, and the danger could come from people around you, and not just nature?
The social contract has already been broken, and the consequences historically are not mysterious and hard to predict.
Again, I hope like hell I’m just utterly utterly wrong, and believe me no one would be more pleased to be Chicken Little here than me. But I’m not wrong so far, and who could have imagined it would even go this far and not be stopped?
https://ssd.eff.org/module/communicating-others
https://ssd.eff.org/module-categories/basics
https://ssd.eff.org/
My thought on AI’s effect on music
I was watching Rick Beato’s YouTube on what’s happening with AI and music a bit ago… and I had some thoughts, which I first started tossing around in a text discussion with a friend on it, then started putting in different places like Facebook etc, then realized I wanted to pursue it some more…
Interesting that his kids knew it was AI, I wonder why that is….
I think the thing that saves us here is that none of these AI models can model on things that have not previously been done. AI gathers what it “knows” from Large Language Models (LLM’s), and so it cannot build something without a database of examples to build from. So, who knew that there was going to be a sound like Nirvana’s until there was? Who knew there was gonna be a sound like Led Zeppelin until there was, basically fill in the blank of anybody that was sort of really unique and original.
So the thing that is the problem in commercial (ized) right now is that corporations have done everything they can to make sure that Music is as homogenized and bland as possible, so it’s easier for them to sell into their existing distribution/advertising pipes. If my thinking is correct, this will likely change, because it will make listening to Corporate/Commercial music uninteresting (more so) because people can come up with whatever they want via AI and then just make a playlist out of it as Beato says in his video.
But new and hella original stuff? That’s going to be very difficult for AI to deal with until it gets good models for it, which will mean that a new mode of music or something that’s quite different from what has been put into their models, has to build up copycats/derivatives and a “database” from which to generate an LLM from etc. etc. .
In this version of the pressure on music from AI, AI can never fully replace humans since it cannot come up with distinctly new and original music on it’s own, because that’s not how it works. As it works now, it pulls from the previous, so it will always be derivative, or at least as AI is done NOW. Of course this is really the first real iteration of it, so evolution being what it is, that will change, and maybe the basis for my thinking will have to change as well.
So perhaps for a time, this could be a good thing, for MUSIC.
For the recorded music business, yeh, not so good, in fact for MANY musicians and artists also, it will be catastrophic. People who make their living generating music for TV shows/movies/videogames, basically any kind of secondary or background music use, they’re clearly fucked, as the corporations will IMMEDIATELY begin to use this to generate perfectly functional background music that they “own”, and thus will not have to pay for, and that will be the end of that cottage industry and I mean FAST. There’s a good chance that a very FEW jobs will be created overseeing that process, which will likely be filled by some of the current producers of that type of material since they’re very good at taking the direction from the corporate entity and filling the requirements as described, which makes them the perfect people to design request prompts to AI, but everyone else in that business? Doomed.
Probably the only place where musicianship will matter going forward is going to be live in living rooms to concert arenas, with the caveat that “live” is already very compromised in many cases. While a whole other discussion can be had on that subject, fact remains that there is something that happens live that is kind of magical, and I have a hard time seeing that change because of AI, tho of course we never know what the future holds.
In the favor of the existing systems is the fact that because all AI output is derivative from what has been put into it, there’s a very good legal basis for stopping the use of this kind of software because of copyright protections. Which is what the newspapers are attempting right now, so that will be very interesting to watch. But this thing is racing like a 70mph forest fire, and the courts are notoriously slow in cases like this, so while cases shamble along through the system, AI will be setting up systems that will become such an entrenched part of business and life, that it will become impossible to come back from it.
All that said, it’s pretty shocking how good it’s getting already, as you can hear in the Beato piece.
Good luck out there my friends, it could be a long music winter in AI land.