A lot of people on Mastodon are there because they believe decentralized and open-source techologies are essential tools for resisting coercive power. The fediverse is innately resilient to censorship, advertising, and hostile takeovers.
For these reasons, I made the switch from twitter sometime in the early 2020s, but I think it's important to remind ourselves that these virtuous properties are not a panacea to all the ills of social media.
An honest answer is “all kinds,” but that’s also an annoying answer because then you are stuck wondering
“So is this guy a music fan or is he just undiscerning?”
I think a better answer is to say something like
“When I was a teenager I became obsessed with music and that’s never really changed. I liked Queens of the Stone Age and a math rock band called Hella. Now I listen to all sorts of things. I’ve been listening a lot to a folk musician named Hannah Frances recently.”
There's nothing new to say in any of these "Americans Can't Read" pieces, yet still I read them with morbid fascination.
To zoom through the typical argument: if you count subtitled TikToks and Temu product descriptions, everyone still reads. It's just the novels and newspapers that are suffering. A literary elite reads more than ever thanks to e-readers and substack, but the global median trends downward. This is bad for our brains and our university professors' sanity, and portends a post-literate, thoughtless society.
Did you know that Fenix has started pretending that he speaks with a British accent because people said RUBBERZ sounded like a song by The Smiths? At one point in the Channel 5 interview, AI music booster Timbaland calls him up to strike a deal and he responds with an I'm Br-ish innit accent like he's Ali G from the mirror universe.🇬🇧
This shameless opportunist is unwittingly creating Brass Eye in real life, a kind of performance art so deep that the creator isn't even conscious of it.
There's a viral tiktok song called RUBBERZ that is clearly generated by some low-rent generative audio model, presumably via the prompt "drake + pina colada song", where the artist behind it gave the most obvious lipsync ever to prove that the song isn't AI. He then did an interview with Andrew Callaghan where he atonally butchered his own lyrics.
I think about the miracle of libraries often.
And I think something similar as I hear blips of Esther Perel tragically slinging furniture or clothes at me as I mash my +30s button: “oh my god, it fucking rules that we can skip ads.”
Klara and the Sun is a novel written through the compound eyes of a constitutionally ingenuous artificial intelligence. I inhaled it in a few days and have been pondering its questions on love, faith, contingency, and authenticity since.
I recommend it! But this post is about an aspect of the story that its author, Kazuo Ishiguro, chose not to interrogate very deeply.
Jim Lill is a musician from Nashville who conducts audio equipment A/B benchmarks with unusually high rigour and posts them on YouTube.
His most recent of these is on microphone preamps.
It's fair to say he's been getting a lot of feedback:🔊
Criticism has converged on a handful of things:
Beyond its crux, the flippancy with which The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas' narrator invents the city is the most distinctive aspect of the story to me. There's a reading where the suffering child is optional - only necessary if you can't buy the first two and a half pages - because the narrator is only negotiating with our suspension of disbelief, not telling us about a place that Really Exists.
When I visited Kigali for 2 weeks in 2022, I observed a labour-capital ladder:
At the bottom, the poorest workers could earn a living by carrying fuel to and fro on foot.
Next, people with bicycles did the same thing faster.
If you saved enough from cycling, you could buy a motorcycle and become a mototaxi driver, providing transport for the city's middle class.
Taxi car drivers were on the next rung with air conditioning, personal space, and higher profits.