Category Archives: Culture

Eat The Rich?

Posted on by
Reply

There has recently been a spate of satirical films and TV series that take aim at the vanity, self-indulgence and sense of entitlement of the uber-rich. I’m thinking in particular of “The Menu”, “The Triangle of Sadness”, “Glass Onion” and “White Lotus”.  You could also include “Succession” on that list (especially in light of the latest revelations from the House of Murdoch), but this is more of a traditional drama than the others, both in terms of format and content.

Nothing radically new in these stories, their themes or the way they plot their narratives. What is perhaps surprising is the fact that these are not small, independent, art-house productions. They have substantial budgets, exotic locations, stylish design, creative cinematography, and some big names in the credits.

Plus, they receive major theatrical releases, or are luring audiences to premium streaming services. So, they are generally commercial. Best of all, they are attracting awards and nominations – which should hopefully encourage studios to invest in more projects like these (rather than green-lighting yet another sequel in the never-ending round of comic book and super hero franchises).

Of course, these particular stories could simply represent a sign of the times, reflecting current world events, and holding up a mirror to our social-media obsessed age. They also resonate with audiences who are looking for some escapism in the form of critiques of the upper classes, the filthy rich, the social elites, the global power brokers, and those hangers-on who hover and follow in their wake.

I wouldn’t suggest these productions are waging a form of class war, but they represent a kind of morality play: why would anyone want to feel jealous of, let alone become, these people?

Next week: A Journey Through England

 

I CAN live without my radio…

Posted on by
Reply

After posting my last blog on digital vs analog music, I saw the media commentary about the decline in Triple J’s audience numbers. There was a suggestion that younger people no longer listen to the radio, and have shifted to digital formats such as streaming and podcasts. As is often the case, the headline doesn’t necessarily tell the full story – and thanks to Tim Burrowes, we also have a deeper dive into the underlying data.

Seems like we CAN live without our radio (especially Triple J…) (Photo of LL Cool J by Janette Beckman, image sourced from Bloomberg)

I’m obviously not part of Triple J’s target demographic (18-24 year-olds), but I find the concept of age-oriented radio (and music) somewhat bizarre. If I was that age again, I’d probably find it highly patronizing that a national broadcaster was trying to force me into a random age bracket, on the assumption that they knew my taste in music, and/or they knew what was good for me. It’s an arrogant, simplistic and reductionist approach to broadcasting. Even now, I may not listen to all the exact same music I liked when I was that age, but my taste in music didn’t suddenly change when I turned 18 (or 24). Humans are much more subtle and idiosyncratic than demographers, marketers and programmers may like to think.

Anyway, it got me thinking about my own experience of listening to the radio, and how it formed my outlook on music. Once I had access to a portable transistor radio, it meant I got to choose which stations I listened to, and what types of music I heard, rather than what my parents or older sisters were listening to in the rest of the house. Although as a young teenager, I still kept an ear out for what was popular, I tuned out of the Top 40 format early on, in favour of pirate stations like Radio Caroline (which played mainly prog rock and psychedelic sounds), and the John Peel show on BBC Radio 1 (during his heyday of 1976-83 – the punk and post-punk era). When I first heard the whole of side 1 of Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” album played on the radio in 1974 (I was 13 at the time), I realised that the 3 minute, 45 rpm, 7″ vinyl single wasn’t the only option…

Alongside broadcast radio, the UK’s infamous weekly music papers were the major source of information about the industry. With three titles, New Musical Express, Melody Maker, and Sounds, dominating the market in those pre-internet, pre-MTV days of yore, the inkies were the main way to find out about new bands, new releases, upcoming gigs, as well as album and live reviews. Then there were the listing magazines (which covered more than music), and the fanzines that proliferated in the wake of punk.

As I had more access to live music during my teenage years and beyond, music radio became less important. And although my gig attendance is more sporadic these days (no reflection on Melbourne’s excellent live music scene!) the only music radio stations I currently listen to are ABC Jazz, SBS Chill (especially Sunday mornings…) and Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone on BBC Radio 6. I can’t bear to listen to most commercial radio or so-called popular music stations (age-oriented or otherwise) – it’s not only because of the music they play, it’s the actual production quality, programme format, presentation style and the absence of “space”: everything is crammed into every available piece of bandwidth, compressed within a decibel if its life, and the content lacks variety, depth or subtlety.

When I moved to Melbourne 20 years ago, ABC Radio National had a weekly programme called “Sound Quality”, that featured some of the most varied, interesting and challenging new music around – in fact, it was probably the only place to hear this stuff on national radio. It also encouraged listener-contributed content, and I was fortunate to have several of my own pieces played on air (ok, so I’m biased). Sadly, the programme was decommissioned in 2015, and nothing comprarable has taken its place.

In a further twist, I tend to hear about new (and old) Australian music via my local record stores, particularly the ones that specialise in vinyl, namely RockSteady Records, Northside Records, Dutch Vinyl and The Searchers.

Next week: Reflections on The Kimberley

 

Digital Perfectionism?

Posted on by
2

In stark contrast to my last blog on AI and digital humans, I’ve just been reading Damon Krukowski‘s book, “The New Analog – Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World”, published in 2017. It’s an essential text for anyone interested in the impact of sound compression, noise filtering, loudness and streaming on the music industry (and much more besides).

The are two main theses the author explores:

1. The paradoxical corollary to Moore’s Law on the rate of increase in computing power is Murphy’s Moore’s Law: that in striving for improved performance and perfectionism in all things digital, equally we risk amplifying the limitations inherent in analog technology. in short, the more something improves, the more it must also get worse. (See also my previous blogs on the problem of digital decay, and the beauty of decay music.)

2. In the realm of digital music and other platforms (especially social media), stripping out the noise (to leave only the signal) results in an impoverished listening, cultural and social experience; flatter sound, less dynamics, narrower tonal variation, limited nuance, an absence of context. In the case of streaming music, we lose the physical connection with the original artwork, accompanying sleeve notes, creative credits and even the original year of publication.

Thinking about #1 above, imagine this principle applied to #AI: would the pursuit of “digital perfectionism” mean we lose a large part of what makes analogue homo sapiens more “human”? Would we end up compressing/removing “noise” such as doubt, uncertainty, curiosity, irony, idiosyncrasies, cognitive diversity, quirkiness, humour etc.?

As for #2, like the author, I’m not a total Luddite when it comes to digital music, but I totally understand his frustration (philosophical, phonic and financial) when discussing the way CDs exploit “loudness” (in the technical sense), how .mp3 files compress more data into less space (resulting in a deterioration in overall quality), and the way streaming platforms have eroded artists’ traditional commercial return on their creativity.

The book also discusses the role of social media platforms in extracting value from the content that users contribute, reducing it to homogenised data lakes, selling it to the highest bidder, and compressing all our personal observations, relationships and original ideas (the things that make us nuanced human beings) into a sterilsed drip-feed of “curated” content.

In the narrative on music production, and how “loudness” took hold in the mid-1990s, Krukowski takes specific aim at the dreaded sub-woofer. These speakers now pervade every concert, home entertainment system, desk-top computer and car stereo. They even bring a distorted physical presence into our listening experience:

“Nosebleeds at festivals, trance states at dance clubs, intimidation by car audio…. When everything is louder than everything else, sounds lose context and thus meaning – even the meaning of loud.”

The main issue I have with digital music is that we as listeners have very little control over how we hear it – apart from adjusting the volume. So again, any nuance or variation has been ironed out, right to the point of consumption – we can’t even adjust the stereo balance. I recall that my boom box in the 1980s had separate volume controls for each speaker, and a built-in graphic equalizer. To paraphrase Joy Division, “We’ve Lost Control”.

Next week: I CAN live without my radio…

An AI Origin Story

Posted on by
Reply

Nowadays, no TV or movie franchise worth its salt is deemed complete unless it has some sort of origin story – from “Buzz Lightyear” to “Alien”, from “Mystery Road” to “Inspector Morse”. And as for “Star Wars”, I’ve lost count as to which prequel/sequel/chapter/postscript/spin-off we are up to. Origin stories can be helpful in explaining “what came before”, providing background and context, and describing how we got to where we are in a particular narrative. Reading Jeanette Winterson’s recent collection of essays, “12 Bytes”, it soon becomes apparent that what she has achieved is a tangible origin story for Artificial Intelligence.

Still from “Frankenstein” (1931) – Image sourced from IMDb

By Winterson’s own admission, this is not a science text book, nor a reference work on AI. It’s a lot more human than that, and all the more readable and enjoyable as a result. In any case, technology is moving so quickly these days, that some of her references (even those from barely a year ago) are either out of date, or have been superceded by subsequent events. For example, she makes a contemporaneous reference to a Financial Times article from May 2021, on Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). She mentions a digital race horse that sold for $125,000. Fast-forward 12 months, and we have seen parts of the nascent DeFi industry blow-up, and an NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first Tweet (Twitter’s own origin story?) failing to achieve even $290 when it went up for auction, having initially been sold for $2.9m. Then there is the Google engineer who claimed that the Lamda AI program is sentient, and the chess robot which broke its opponent’s finger.

Across these stand-alone but interlinked essays, Winterson builds a consistent narrative arc across the historical development, current status and future implications of AI. In particular, she looks ahead to a time when we achieve Artificial General Intelligence, the Singularity, and the complete embodiment of AI, and not necessarily in a biological form that we would recognise today. Despite the dystopian tones, the author appears to be generally positive and optimistic about these developments, and welcomes the prospect of transhumanism, in large part because it is inevitable, and we should embrace it, and ultimately because it might the only way to save our planet and civilisation, just not in the form we expect.

The book’s themes range from: the first human origin stories (sky-gods and sacred texts) to ancient philosophy; from the Industrial Revolution to Frankenstein’s monster; from Lovelace and Babbage to Dracula; from Turing and transistors to the tech giants of today. There are sections on quantum physics, the nature of “binary” (in computing and in transgenderism), biases in algorithms and search engines, the erosion of privacy via data mining, the emergence of surveillance capitalism, and the pros and cons of cryogenics and sexbots.

We can observe that traditional attempts to imagine or create human-made intelligence were based on biology, religion, spirituality and the supernatural – and many of these concepts were designed to explain our own origins, to enforce societal norms, to exert control, and to sustain existing and inequitable power structures. Some of these efforts might have been designed to explain our purpose as humans, but in reality they simply raised more questions than they resolved. Why are we here? Why this planet? What is our destiny? Is death and extinction (the final “End-Time”) the only outcome for the human race? Winterson rigorously rejects this finality as either desirable or inevitable.

Her conclusion is that the human race is worth saving (from itself?), but we have to face up to the need to adapt and continue evolving (homo sapiens was never the end game). Consequently, embracing AI/AGI is going to be key to our survival. Of course, like any (flawed) technology, AI is just another tool, and it is what we do with it that matters. Winterson is rightly suspicious of the male-dominated tech industry, some of whose leaders see themselves as guardians of civil liberties and the saviours of humankind, yet fail to acknowledge that “hate speech is not free speech”. She acknowledges the benefits of an interconnected world, advanced prosthetics, open access to information, medical breakthroughs, industrial automation, and knowledge that can help anticipate danger and avert disaster. But AI and transhumanism won’t solve all our existential problems, and if we don’t have the capacity for empathy, compassion, love, humour, self-reflection, art, satire, creativity, imagination, music or critical thinking, then we will definitely cease to be “human” at all.

The Bibliography to this book is an invaluable resource in itself – and provides for a wealth of additional reading. One book that is not listed, but which might be of interest to her readers, is “Chimera”, a novel by Simon Gallagher, published in 1981 and subsequently adapted for radio and TV. Although this story is about genetic engineering (rather than AI), nevertheless it echoes some of Winterson’s themes and concerns around the morals and ethics of technology (e.g., eugenics, organ harvesting, private investment vs public control, playing god, and the over-emphasis on the preservation and prolongation of human lifeforms as they are currently constituted). Happy reading!

Next week: Digital Perfectionism?