Fair warning: this is an angry rant full of righteous indignation. I live with many inconsistencies but one thing I have never wavered on is that using AI for recreation is morally indefensible. The costs are astronomical, and usually distant from us. That cost got a lot closer to me today.

My oldest brother was the first person in my family to start reading Wendell Berry about twenty years ago. But unlike most people who read him, are compelled by his message, and then continue living roughly the same way, he changed nearly everything about his life. It began where he was, a house in town, planting out every available piece of the yard with vegetables. Soon he was gardening several lots in the neighborhood and selling at a farmer’s market.

After doing this for several years he was able to move to an actual farm that had been neglected for many years. He has spent the last ten years doing the exhausting work of reclaiming the land, building infrastructure, and restoring the health of the soil. It’s not a hobby farm, and it’s most definitely not a vanity influencer farm. It’s dirty, a work-in-progress everywhere you look, and a completely beautiful and healthful place. It has never supported him financially but he’s worked harder at this farm than most people ever work at anything. If you visit for dinner most of the things on your plate will have lived or grown within sight of the porch.

I just found out that land on two sides of the farm have been purchased at astronomical sums to house data centers. If this goes through instead of looking out the front door and bay windows on pasture and the neighboring farms, it will be a view of a disgusting gray box emitting a 60 decibel hum twenty-four hours a day and clogging the air with diesel exhaust every time they switch to backup power. Perhaps the wells that water the livestock and provide their house water will dry up or become too contaminated to drink. What will they do then?

Despite the significant urbanization and suburbanization of America in the last decades, tens of millions of Americans still prefer to live in the country. Places where they can look out over land and trees and grass. Where animals live freely or are cultivated. Where there is some quiet and you can count on the “day-blind stars waiting with their light” to come out soon. A place where the stars aren’t completed blotted out by light.

But for everyone else, there is such pressing need for data computation. Are we expected to make our memes by hand? We couldn’t live in a world that doesn’t know what Donald Trump Jesus would have looked like. We couldn’t create fake versions of loved one’s voices to scam grandmothers out of their life savings without these vital calls. Who will make all these robocalls? People? The indignity. We couldn’t surveil our citizens going about their days with flock cameras, or permanently save the footage of everyone who appears on our ring cameras. What would we do without these data centers? Do we expect corporations to employ humans (with their expectations of salary and benefits) to do their work? There would be no slop to post to Facebook, no way to adjust our faces and bodies so they look their best when we post our selfies and gym mirror shots. Someone must pay the cost for these essentials, and that someone is a family in Pennsylvania trying to live their life on a little bit of land.

On the upside, most of these data centers will be abandoned soon. Once the venture capital poker game goes south and servicing the debt becomes un-actuarial, this gray box will stop emitting its 60 decibel hum. What a relief. Then all we are left with is an abandoned building, forever rotting where there could be a family living, perhaps with a kitchen garden and some chickens. Wasting their time mucking about in the dirt when they should be indoors ”making music” with Suno and having ChatGPT do their homework. What fools.

This rotting gray box will never disappear. The people who build it won’t come dismantle it and restore the land. They will just leave, hoping their balance sheets don’t suffer too much and relieved at the depreciation they can write off. The box will not die, it will just decay creating more poison in the soil with each passing year. Because we couldn’t write our own books, paint our own paintings, think about a problem and come up with a solution. We can’t sit in the shade of a tree playing a cheap guitar to pass an afternoon. We cannot just be men and women. We must be super-people, aware of everything, informed and outraged, deceived by the fakes, laughing at the slop, and too stimulated to count the cost.

I’m currently reading Lawrence Kramer’s evocative The Hum of the World, in which he posits sound as the primary underlying sensation of our lives. Verdict is still out, but it’s a fun book covering a lot of ground I already give attention to (music, sound studies, design, literature). I’m likely a member of the choir to which he preaches.

It got me thinking about one of the most striking sound environment contrasts I’ve encountered:

Last summer I co-led a study abroad trip to the Baltic states and our travel itinerary took us through the Helsinki airport, one of the cleanest, calmest, and most thoughtfully designed public spaces I’ve ever encountered. No bustle, no stress, just a wonderful place to be. Somewhere I might choose to spend time even if I didn’t have a flight.

One of the most striking aspects of the space was the soundscape. Though people were moving around with their luggage and lots of things were going on, it had a calm hush. There was clearly significant thought put into the ambient sound (including a lot of sound absorption), with gentle nature sounds at a quiet level that seemed to cue everyone to how much noise was appropriate (the nature sounds were somewhat louder and busier in the restrooms; also very effective). When an announcement was made the background sounds would lower and everyone would be quiet to listen, rather than it blaring over whatever noise was already existing. Rather than covering noise with more noise, the gentleness of the ambient soundtrack nudged everyone to reduce their own sound output to match it. We found ourselves speaking in the subdued voice of a nice restaurant or public library.

We flew from Helsinki-Vantaa directly to Dallas-Fort Worth. The only things these airports have in common are airplanes and a dash in their name. What a rude awakening. If the details of Helsinki were calibrated for calm, DFW was designed by a sound sadist. The floors are 6 inch tile with large grout lines. Practical and durable perhaps (though who wants to install thousands of feet of 6” tile is beyond me), but the grooves mean that a rolling suitcase clicks on the grout lines several times per second. When a thousand people are rolling suitcases the din is hellish. Of course you still have to talk, so you speak louder. And of course they have to make announcements, so they blare them even louder. And to top it off in some areas there is muzak.

Perhaps a coincidence (perhaps not), folks at DFW seemed rather more stressed and angry than the Finns. While I’m sure it’s possible to get tetchy in Helsinki, I think it’s nearly impossible not to when assailed with the endless racket of Dallas.

Earlier this week I watched the Oscar-nominated 2025 film Train Dreams. I had no idea what we were in for, it’s a film I watched on the recommendation of my most cinephilic brother, but I really enjoyed it. While the choice to have a narrator driven film with little dialogue probably limits its overall impact somewhat, it accomplished a lot (and in under two hours, which I appreciate more and more these days).

Reading old books and watching films that take themselves seriously (some old and some new) is a reminder of how thoroughly irony has infected everything in our culture. One of the most remarkable things about Americans of the 50s and 60s (at least as depicted, and in my experience of elderly folks as well) is how seriously they take things. Seriously enough to get involved and do things that make communities work.

I recently played a gig at a luncheon for the local chapter of the National Federation of Music Clubs. (Basically groups of private music teachers who work together on things like competitions, scholarships, etc. organized by state and local chapter.) The amount of ceremony and ritual this involved was mind-blowing. Singing of hymns, reciting of pledges, the reading of a collect, bestowing honors and awards. Then I played about 30 minutes of music and we ate the worst salad I’ve ever had. The thing all these folks had in common was they were of my parents generation or older. It is unimaginable to me that people my age would organize in this way. There are lots of reason, but partly because we just don’t take ourselves that seriously.

I haven’t checked, but one imagines the enrollments in things like Kiwanis, Rotary, Elks, and other fraternal organizations is declining rapidly as the Greatest Generation has all but gone and the youngest Silent and oldest Boomers begin to die away in large numbers.

Robert Grainier, the subject of Trains Dreams, takes his life and his work seriously. His profession as a logger is incredibly dangerous and must be taken seriously to survive. Even the most careful must be lucky enough to avoid accidents to make it to old age. But he also has a sense that the work, something he seems to have fallen into as a young man, is important in a significant way. More specifically, it is destructive. The loggers are small crews of misfits living for weeks in the deep wilderness, but the most aware of them sense they are changing the world as they sever the interconnected threads of the forest one by one. Robert and some of the oldest members of the crews—like one of his only friends, Arne, the powder monkey—understand that the world is changing and they are foot soldiers on the wrong side of the battle.

As he gets older he more frequently encounters the brashness of the younger loggers. They believe that there are so many trees that by the time they cut them all down the next forest will have grown up to replace it. Robert’s concerns are not just about sustainability though. As the opening monologue of the film tells us, there used to be another world you could find around a corner in the forest. An older, more magical world, that could be stumbled into. Something like Terebithia or Narnia, where the deep magic still rules. Even if the trees regrow they won’t be the same as the ones they cut. Robert understands that the world he was born into is quickly fading and a new world he understands little is taking its place. The young loggers, born just a few decades later, never found themselves in the old world and don’t fear its loss.

After a break of several years (for reasons I won’t spoil for those who have not watched), Robert returns to a logging job to find that the work has changed as well. A steam-powered tractor, replacing the horse-drawn skids, rumbles through the forest. Revving chainsaws rather than rhythmic axe work now reverberate around the jobsite. He struggles to start the machine (a problem over a century of small motor innovation has not solved) until a younger sawyer grabs it from him, pulls the choke, and cranks it up. Leaving him behind for good.

Though unsaid, Robert clearly understands that this change in technology means the forest, like himself, will not be able to keep up. He leaves logging forever and, in one of the most beautiful scenes of the film, baptizes himself into a new life in the clear cold river.

The ending years of his life are spent contemplating its beginning. A life which featured alternations of violence, joy, absence, and finally a great loss. His life parallels the life of the forest, a place of beauty, danger, and exploitation. How to make sense of all this he has seen? And especially in a world he hardly recognizes outside of his one acre homestead?

His work after logging consists of odd jobs until he comes to own a pair of horses and wagon. He then makes his living as a driver. One of the people he meets driving is a woman (who looks quite similar to his wife) who works as a forest ranger. Her job is to sit in a high observation tower watching for fires and reporting on the changing landscape of the virgin forests due to logging. Though it goes unsaid, his awkwardness at being part of this change is palpable. (Despite the narrator, this film is good at showing even if it tells a lot of things).

Joining her in the observation tower one day he sees for the first time how the forest looks from above. Its beauty is affecting, and this change in perspective finally allows him to voice the loss he has endured to her, seemingly for the first time. She has likewise suffered loss and finds solace in her isolated work, but she is able to empathize with Robert.

This singular experience of perspective and sympathy directs the end of his life toward searching and considering what his life has meant, what all these events good and bad have been about. He occasionally forays into the cities where he encounters electricity, television, and circus shows whose obvious fakery does not blunt their capacity to stir something in him.

These scenes in the city are important, because they show his seeming immunity to amusement. He encounters these new developments with the same seriousness he approaches everything. He tries to understand rather than escape from his reality in them.

One of his final interactions with technology is paying for a ride in an airplane to “see the world as only the birds see it.” In a clear visual reference to the similar scene from Malick’s Tree of Life, Robert has an experience, similar to the one on the forest watch tower, of gaining perspective on the overall events of his life.

Women are conspicuous throughout Grainier’s life. Though never knowing his father and mother—he is an orphan who was put on a train to the west—he is intensely devoted to his family. Meeting his wife Gladys, or rather being met by her, gives shape to his early life. The joyful intrusion of a daughter brings him meaning as more than a worker and provider. The forest ranger helps him process his grief, and the pilot (who is somewhat surprisingly a woman) shows him the meaning of his life from the air.

These relationships, while they exist, are his life. After they are gone he spends his time earnestly trying to understand them and the world he inhabits. His work does not consume him, in fact it eventually expels him. He has no interest in social life beyond his family, and his pleasures come only in their purest versions: eating, playing with his wife and child, experiencing nature.

Robert Grainier is a man utterly devoid of irony. He does nothing in jest, though he can be playful, and does not shrug off any of the roles he finds himself in. Most of all, he doesn’t hide himself behind a false self but lives his own life with seriousness and joy.

This was striking, because it is harder and harder to take yourself or your life seriously. The performative nature of life online, and increasingly our politics, media, and all other things, means we drape ourselves in irony to hide in plain sight. Too busy costuming a role to be who we are and live our own life in quiet and contemplation—a well-examined life lived well.

“The only way to change the past is with the quality of attention you give to the present.”

• David Whyte A year ago, in March 2025, after a fairly steady increase in time staring at my phone each day, I decided it was time to do something about it. The exact tipping point has escaped my memory. Most likely it was a combination of things that finally impelled me to make changes I knew I wanted. What I wanted to do was obvious. I wanted to spend several hours per day fewer looking at my phone. Those hours I wanted to turn into paying better attention to my children, being more focused at work, reading books and periodicals, and generally being more present. Maybe thinking a stray thought now and then. The why (I was spending too much time on my phone) and the how (to stop) were not as clear. I consider myself a reasonably mature and disciplined person. How was I accidentally spending several hours per day more than I said I wanted to starting at this stupid thing? An honest answer to this question had to be made. There is some amount of difference between the person we like to think we are as and the person we actually are. The size of this gap varies person to person. You probably know someone with a very large gap and others with a smaller or gap. I did not think of myself as someone who looks at his phone for 4-5 hours a day. But I was, because I did. You are your habits. I eventually figured out why. I had to come to terms with the fact that I was looking at the phone to cope. At that time, having not-quite-two-year-old twins was challenging (in a very normal sense, many people have much more challenging lives, but it was difficult nonetheless). It was simply much easier to look at the phone than to deal with two needy and often crying children. Or at least to disappear for a few minutes of pleasure after dealing with them. I would say coming to terms with this and facing it as a personal deficiency was the most important factor in this project. More accurate self-knowledge being attained, I had a fifteen year habit to kick (first smart phone: 2013, iPod touch: 2010). If will power alone was going to work, it would have already done so. I was fairly sure a change in habits would require a change in equipment. I was ready to look for a dumb phone. If you’ve explored this you know that it gets overwhelming quickly. Lite phone, wise phone, the brick. All kinds of startups (and more all the time), most of them delivering what appear to be very unimpressive tech at purity-test pricing. I didn’t see myself spending ~$500 on a phone the purpose of which was to do fewer things and that only does those things when it’s in a good mood. I wanted the sturdy utilitarianism of my first flip phones with a few of the most useful tools of the smartphone. I needed a list. (That is the second Frog & Toad allusion for those keeping track.) I came up with what seemed like a modest list:
• Navigation
  • I briefly considered a dedicated GPS, but Garmins are also expensive and appear to have made absolutely no UI progress since I last used one circa 2010. Oh, and most of their new features also require connection to a smartphone. I also navigate on foot and by bike occasionally. It needed to stay on the phone.
• Podcast app/music streaming
  • I listen to podcasts and music daily. I usually listen to CDs in my car, but there are lots of times I want to have access to streaming media away from my car or computer.
• Bluetooth
  • To connect to devices which play the podcasts and music.
• Calls, texts, and group texts (you know, a phone)
  • If you have always been on iPhone you need to emotionally prepare for the violent reaction your iPhone friends will have when your texts now come through in green bubbles instead of proper blue bubbles. This is real. I was willing to compromise on just about everything else, but these few things painted me into a surprisingly small corner. The number of phones offering actual navigation and streaming media without a large screen and everything else in the world is quite small. This was all a bit of a non-starter, until I found Jose’s Dumbphone Finder. This tool allows you to select your nonnegotiable features then shows what phones are available. This brought me to what was quite literally the only option that met my criteria, the Tiq M5 Mini. I ordered one for $190 on eBay, which arrived broken. When its replacement came I switched my SIM card over and used this phone exclusively for the next 6 months (except for a ten day period when I was leading a study abroad trip in Europe and needed more firepower; for that I just swapped my SIM back to my old iPhone).  The M5 Mini is indeed a full-featured smartphone running Android, which I actually prefer to the well-dressed bully that is iOS. And along with the physical buttons it has a touch screen and supports voice-to-text, which is really the only way to do anything on this phone. The thing is though, that screen. It’s tiny. It has terrible colors and a slow refresh rate. It really doesn’t draw you in. It was exactly what I was looking for.  It is a very mediocre piece of hardware. Slow, laggy, takes almost 5 minutes to boot up, don’t even think about multi-tasking. Unappealing and just barely able to get the job done, but priced accordingly. This is what you want to reset your brain. The friction wears down those pleasure receptors quickly. The first few weeks I would impulsively reach for this silly little phone only to think “what am I going to do with that?” This was exactly what I was hoping to fix - the habitual reach. It was also a great conversation starter. Millennials were nostalgic; other dads at the park would rush over to ask me about it. Gen Zs were curious and slightly horrified. The physical buttons were a wonder to them. I showed some of my students how I could text with T9 and broke their brains. I felt like Jed Clampett. I used this little guy for about six months. Then I dropped it in the toilet. It dried out and seems to still work, but while it was in the rice I switched back to the iPhone. And guess what? I’m ok. In fact, now that my itchy trigger finger was reformed, the iPhone helped me be on the phone even less since it was good at doing the few things I wanted it to do. No black and white screen, no parental controls, just fixing my own broken default attention. Here is my five step guide to spending less time on your phone: 

1. Face yourself. 1. Say out loud or write down in your most private journal that you are a person who spends X amount of time on your phone every day. If you do not like the number you hear/read, proceed to step 2.
2. Disrupt your habits with a low-reward, high friction digital environment
   1. Lots of ways to do this. A change in tech worked well for me. When the fingerprint sensor on my wife’s phone broke she found she was opening it less because it’s just slightly harder to press those buttons.
3. Maintain this environment as long as necessary.
   1. If you still reach for the phone without a distinct purpose you aren’t ready yet.
   2. You might start to examine those moments and wonder why you are reaching at this particular time. This is a sign of growth.
4. Test the waters of the normal environment.
   1. Mutatis mutandis, you can have the convenience of a smart phone without getting sucked into the void every day.
   2. Or don’t. When my iPhone dies I expect I’ll go back to the M5. I actually enjoyed it. If nothing else, it’s something to feel smug about.
5. Transform the quality of the past with your attention to the present.
   1. Fill your environment with beautiful things and people to love.
   2. Deeply paying attention is one of the greatest forms of pleasure.

I have read the essay going around about habitats of attention and multimodal information consumption. It’s compelling, and I laud the sanguine approach. I am also wary of challenging anything a librarian says - I have learned they are so often right - but I think it has two major problems: one around incentive structures and one around media ecology.

Iacono hints at why our digital environments are the way they are, but doesn’t quite come out with it: greed. The companies that have designed our most addictive apps have reaped the rewards. Massive IPOs, rising stock prices, a seemingly infinite market cap. When you can harvest the time of humanity at scale you can get wildly wealthy. They do this while knowingly creating products that are harmful and they do not care.

Who then is going to make these proposed interfaces designed for deep thought? The fact is, they already exist, but not at scale. There are any number of small companies providing low-distraction phones, quiet RSS readers, or research and information tools. There are in fact still companies that sell physical books. These are utterly different kinds of companies though, because they are selling a product.

Slow, deep thought is not a scalable business model because there isn’t a wide demand for it. The market (by which I mean, people’s) demand is for diversion, as L. M. Sacasas gets at in this essay from a few years ago. The moment the steam-powered printing press lowered the cost of producing books, there was demand for penny dreadfuls. The moment we could deliver endless streams of whatever that stuff on tiktok is, there was an attentional market (billions of souls strong) demanding it for hours a day. As much as I would like to think that this is a design problem, my humanist instincts are telling me that we have a human-problem at the heart of all this.

My other issue is around issues raised by McLuhan and Postman: the medium [has an inexorable push toward certain modalities of attention to maximize profit, which given the above description of the financial incentives of screen-based attention means engagement maximization] is the message. Now that some of our biggest and most famous companies don’t sell products, how else are they supposed to operate? Surely we can’t expect them to fix themselves. It also seems highly unlikely that any government could or would seek to impose some kind of design regime. Nor would, I think, we want them to.

The most compelling idea from the essay is the construction of “attention habitats.” This is absolutely true, attention is a designed and cultivated good. It won’t just happen. Distraction is always available. But just like no one is going to clean your room or do your dishes, it seems unlikely to me that there will be a large scale effort to correct our attentional issues. Building and defending your own habitat is required. We need individuals who desire that for it to happen.

A recent post by @dwalbert about the proliferation of the phone-based vertical video format (and a vertical ways of noticing) got me thinking about musical mediation. One of my perennial preoccupations, as it turns out. This post suffers from a case of Too Long, but I’ve trimmed it as much as I can.

We have two primary ways of experiencing music: playing it and hearing it live. These are both embodied and direct. Player and listener are quite literally interface. We also have two mediated ways of encountering music: notation and recording. As formats of mediation, these are quite different and have very different results from one another.

The last time I taught my music technology class I asked this essay question on a quiz:

“Which technology do you think has had a greater impact on the development of music: notation or recording?”

I expected a variety of answers but was surprised at the veracity with which most students (10 out of 12) argued for notation. These were all young musicians undergoing classical music training so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it did get me thinking about the different ways we relate to music through technology.

As a tool of preservation and communication notation is of enormous value. Without it, nearly every piece of music before about 1900 would be lost. At least we assume this. Without notation would the western tradition have continued as an oral tradition rather than a written one? Would violin teachers pass Bach partitas down to their students like sitar masters pass down ragas? Would they have subtly changed over the years the way folk songs do? Would there be Bach Partitas at all or would music have sounded utterly different in his day? I don’t know, but I am fascinated by these kinds of question. I would 100% read a book of speculative musicology (which should exist) imagining a European music tradition without notation.

For everyone who ever lived before c. 1900 (and many others since) the only music they ever experienced was played within ear shot. Thinking this way it’s easy to realize why Pa’s fiddle is so present in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s childhood memories and why music and religious ritual are so closely intertwined throughout the world.

Notation is not just a means of idea capture, it is also provides a model for compositional thought. Mozart had the inner ear to write complete pieces in his head before writing them down, perfect and complete, while Beethoven worked out his musical ideas on paper as he revised draft upon draft. The key here though is they were both translating sound to notation in their heads, Mozart at his desk and Beethoven walking around the countryside. (His typical day involved two hours of vigorous walking.) The notation was to communicate intent to the musicians, but also provided the frame of creative possibility. I’m fond of this definition of notation from Ferrucio Busoni, “Notation…is primarily an ingenious expedient for catching an inspiration, with the purpose of exploiting it later” (from Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music).

Another of my speculative questions is whether Mozart would have been such a prodigy in a different era. The classical style, with its homophonic texture and clear rhythms, is the style most well-suited to Western staff notation. It makes complete sense on the page, which is why it’s the music we give beginning music theory students to practice analysis. Mozart possessed a potent combination of aural imagination, creativity, and facility, but he was also born at the perfect time. Compared to later styles, which visibly strain against the limitations of staff notation (and eventually sought to break free of it altogether), Mozart’s music on the page is like a boat in the water drafting beautifully.

Stravinsky was the first composer I know of that bragged about composing at the piano. The complex sonorities of his music had to be worked out audibly since they didn’t follow an established vernacular. Historically though, composers hear the music then they write it down. Bach considered anyone who composed at the keyboard an amateur. Professionals do their thinking by ear.

This is why it seems obvious to me recording is a more impactful technology and has changed us as musicians much than notation. Notation is potential sound, recording is actual sound.

Think for a moment about the diversity of music you have heard in your life. Now think about the music you have heard live. One of my favorite composers is Arvo Pärt. I cannot recall ever hearing one of his works in a live concert (though I have played one!). Even the concert I attended at the actual Arvo Pärt Center in Estonia didn’t have a piece by Arvo Pärt. And yes, this felt just like going to church and not praying. There are dozens of composers whose works I know and admire for whom that is true. Recording has allowed us to become musical globalists in a way that notation could never have done. Compared to notation, recording is a populist technology giving access to an entire world of music. No skills required, just the equipment to play it.

Richard Taruskin points out in the introduction to his six-volume Oxford History of Western Music, that what we generally call “music history” is really the history of notated music plus a few bits of archeological evidence. At least until the 20th century. Now all other musical activities can be recorded, preserved, and studied. The earliest ethnomusicologists developed arcane notation systems to capture the idiosyncrasies of folk musicians’ individual performance. A generation later they could just record them.

This is the place where the “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” quote usually falls, but I’m not going to. Recording has enriched my life more than almost anything else. (And I bet Wendell has a hi-fi somewhere on that farm). If I had to choose it or notation I wouldn’t have to think two seconds. I am extremely good at reading music, but I can learn the music I want to play by ear if I have to. I cannot hear the music of the world except through recordings.

I will point out some ill effects though, perhaps analog to David’s original point about ways of seeing. Recording has had profound effects on our expectations of music. Most notably in our standard of perfectionism. I see this in my students frequently. If your main exposure to music is through studio-edited recordings that simulate perfect performance then you can have a falsely elevated standard for how good a live performance needs to be. Just like we think there are actually people who look like the instagram-famous with their clever poses, cosmetic surgery, and camera filters, we think musicians actually sound like this in real-life. They don’t. Striving for this standard leads the most dedicated students to practice to the point of injury and psychological torment over their mistakes.

Nearly every music student has had the experience of performing a recital that goes well and is well-received. Everyone (genuinely) says how nice it was, and you feel great. Then you get your recording back and eagerly listen only to hear mistake after mistake. Mistakes that nobody noticed in the live performance and didn’t detract from its effectiveness in the least sound like a pimple on your nose in a photo. Unnoticed in real life, absolutely glaring on record.

However much you might love recordings, we all know that the experience of person-to-person music-making is the real item. At least for those of us who still listen to live music. It seems some of us are so used to hearing pristine, auto-tuned, doctored vocals that hearing a real singer can be a letdown. Like the virtual porn-addled college student who has lost his desire for real people, we can lose sight of the beauty of unmediated musical experience. However much I may admire Glenn Gould, his animosity toward audiences and performing should be seen as an early harbinger of this pathology. In Adam Neely’s sharp video on AI generated music he includes results from his informal survey of Suno users. One of his questions is which AI generated music they consider influential on their own music. The responses were primarily bafflement. Why would I listen to someone else’s AI generated music? I listen to my own!

Music-making, ideally an instrumental activity extending and enriching our humanity, can become another device. Removed from the need for cultivation, discovery, experience, and sharing, one of the most humanizing of all activities, playing and listening to music, enters the goon cave.

A few vignettes, then the point:

When I was an impressionable young musician, I attended a masterclass with Angel Romero (one of the famous Romero family of guitarists). He was drilling a very short passage with a technically accomplished guitarist who was getting bored trying to pull off a phrasing idea. The student finally complained, “It’s just five notes…”

Maestro Romero promptly threw him out of the masterclass and left to get a coffee.

In my grad school days when writing papers was a significant part of my life, I used to work on papers for weeks before writing them. This involved a lot of reading, score study, note taking, and thinking about stuff on the bus or while walking around Baltimore. Usually the night before it was due I would sit down and write the thing start to finish, then edit early the next morning before turning it in. (This process caused my wife great distress. Much like Donald Draper napping on the office couch, it was impossible to tell if I was working or not most of this time).

The majority of the work was figuring out what I wanted to say. How to say it was the final stage. Saying it with some level of style took up the smallest amount of time.

In an interview, microtonal pop musician Maddie Ashman says, “When you have to program every note of a song individually you really think about if it is the exact right note at the right time or if it should be left out.”

This is a great observation made necessary by a stupid music culture. Imagine a composer from the 18th century commenting on how labor intensive it is to choose all those notes. The writer who must find all those words for each sentence. The painter mixing colors. The horror! (Maddie’s music is actually very interesting, though likely not everyone’s taste).

My kids were recently watching this animated version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. While the animation is lovely, what struck me was the incredible quality of the music. Someone wrote and orchestrated a beautiful piece and then a whole orchestra of live humans (who got paid) with a conductor (who got paid even more) sat down to record it in a studio. For a six minute cartoon. When this was the only way to do it, it was normal.

Edited to add another:

I’ve been wrangling versions of this post for weeks and couldn’t get it to work. It was up to over 1000 words of the kinds of thing you read everywhere about AI. It had a tortured aside about Sturgeon’s Law. It was terrible.

After giving it another go this morning, it all clarified in a single moment. The stories were the post. They say everything I was trying to say on their own. It took a lot of friction to get there.

This is my post about AI. Let the reader understand.

Just found out that when you turn off the new AI summary in gmail (much like Charles Baker Harris, I can read thank you very much) it also turns off:

spell check/autocorrect, grammar suggestions (already off), package tracking (kinda useful), Reply/follow-up reminders (very useful), DESKTOP NOTIFICATIONS (the most non-smart and basic feature imaginable), and many other things it has had for years. It’s all or nothing now, you no longer get to choose which of these you would like unless you also let them scrape all your email contents. (Realistically, I understand they’re probably doing this already, but can any company operate at least pretending your email is sort of private?)

I’ve never had anything but gmail for my personal email, but this kind of bullying is hard to stomach. Considering alternatives for the first time.

In The Gift of Good Land, Wendell Berry writes of the value of small solutions. An example he gives is riding a bike to lower your personal carbon footprint. There are massive global technology companies spending billions of dollars (and expending who knows how much carbon fuel) to work toward making vehicles more efficient and emit fewer pollutants. One of the towering figures of our age is Elon Musk, who (even with his re-sized public image after his brief yet intense involvement with the current administration) has been heralded as one of the great generals in the army against emissions with his luxury electric cars. (Be reminded that his other pet project does consume a little rocket fuel, about 700,000 gallons a second, and his newest pet project [Grok] is wreaking havoc on the power grid of Memphis).

And yet, as mentioned in an article from the NYT, e-bikes are now reducing the daily need for gasoline by a million barrels a day - more than all the electric vehicles in the world. Getting out of your car and riding a bike has more potency than marginal gains of vehicle efficiency ever can.

My other favorite example of this is Stoop Coffee. A couple living in San Fransisco wanted to get to know some neighbors and grow a sense of community where they live (don’t we all). The obvious course of action here might be to put invitations to a party under all the neighbors doors or form a community organization and try to get people to join. Maybe gossip on Nextdoor a bit more.

But their brilliant solution was small. They decided that every Saturday morning, they would take lawn chairs outside and sit on the sidewalk while they drank their morning coffee. That’s it. For a month nothing happened other than doing what they would have anyway, just outside. Then one neighbor joined them. After that, it was a cascade of connections and community formation unlike anything most young Americans have ever experienced. They now have a neighborhood WhatsApp group, shared spreadsheets with resources and needs, and throw larger events regularly. A small act that took a little bit of courage transformed a collection of urban housing units into a neighborhood.

My small solution this past year was leaving books where I tend to sit. At any one time I now have a couch book, a chair book, and a bedtime book. I read eleven more books this year than last year without changing any else.

What else is in need of a small solution?

I’ve been listening to podcasts for about 20 years now, about as long as I’ve been doing anything regularly and roughly the full lifespan of the podcast. Long enough at least that I have noticed the major shift they have undergone in the last few years. When I first started listening they were primarily actual radio programs distributed via RSS. This meant they could expand listenership to those who didn’t happen to be around their radios during broadcast time (perfect, since radio listening was beginning to decline, though it is still much stronger than I would have guessed). I remember describing it to my mother: “It’s a radio show you can download and listen to anytime.” The accessibility of RSS syndication meant everyone could broadcast, and that’s what they did! This continued a long time. Podcasting was a free-form audio genre that became it’s own pillar of the media institutions (RIP Gimlet Media) but was accessible to anyone because of the openness of distribution (of which I learned all kinds of things from Manton Reese’s write-up about syndication). There were the pros, radio people who found creative freedom away from the clock and radio format needs, but using largely the same set of professional tools. The archetypal This American Life, an actual radio show rebroadcast as a podcast, and its many imitators are the coin of this realm. Then there were the indie folks. People with a passion project that found an audience through the delivery of the podcast feed. Two great examples of this are the History of Rome podcast and the History of English podcast. Both wildly nerdy, encyclopedic passion projects run by amateur enthusiasts. All of these are in the lineage of radio. Scripted or structured interviews, they are information, entertainment, edutainment, criticism, and commentary. They could be many things, but they had the soul of radio without the limits. The technological constraint of radio is the limitations of the AM and FM radio bands. You can only cram so many channels into the Very High Frequency band, and you are limited to a certain power transmission. These are regulatory controls more than technological, but they had major cultural impacts. Radio is regional. You can reliably find a public radio station in the 80s or low 90s, and they will syndicate a lot of the same shows, but the announcers and local commentary will indeed be local to you. This limitation means a finite variety of channels in any vicinity, and thus at least some amount of cultural cohesion in a location. Nearly everyone I knew growing up listening to our local public radio and thus exposure to a similar band of information. We were on the same wavelength (sorry, that’s all my radio puns). RSS (magical as it is!) means everyone is chasing personal interests, which are likely not provided for locally and take the place of local news. (Radio also had a profound influence on music genres and commercialism. Interesting interview here.) About 2023 there seems to have been a seismic shift in the nature of podcasting. I first started to notice that younger people (late teens and 20s, my students) started talking about podcasts again. There was a while there where the fact that I listened to podcasts was a generational marker, but all of sudden we were all listening to podcasts again! Then I realized my students meant something wildly different by “podcast” than I did. All at once I started seeing people posting YouTube videos with a host and guests sitting on couches talking into microphones about whatever banality of the day was getting clicks, and this was a “podcast.” I noticed that all the podcasts I listen to (almost exclusively in the car) started referring to those “watching” since they had started recording in video. About the same time various smutty “podcasts” became wildly popular and a “podcast” hosted by someone with a tangential relationship to the world biggest pop star became a major culture force. (I don’t intend to burden my mind with understanding how all of that worked, but I understand they are getting married). Dear reader, what I just described is daytime television. The podcast I grew up with is something you download and listen to on your iPod while you mow the lawn or ride the train or exercise. They are primarily monologues. Maybe you learn something you discuss over dinner (the famous words, “There’s that episode of This American Life…”). The new podcast you watch on YouTube while attractive people with full makeup interact in charming ways. They are almost exclusively unscripted and conversational and draw on celebrity power to attract viewership. This shift from exclusively audio to primarily video is a major portion of why Derek Thompson’s argument that everything is television is so convincing. Privately watching distant people, the state of Television, is the default state of being alone. And the podcast has become exactly this: being alone while observing other people together. I also wonder if it has become the dominant form of conversation. Listening to this podcast (which I downloaded and listened to in the car like a proper millennial) this week I was somewhat amused by the way the host and guest sound almost exactly alike. They are both intensely “conversational” in their manner. They talk about interesting things as well, but I suspect the main benefit we get from these is that we feel like we are participating in an engaging conversation, a privilege it seems harder to find IRL.