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In any event, the new situation is even more deceptive. By featuring the same song under so many different names, the platform prevents us from knowing how many streams it is getting. If that weren’t the case, this one song might get noticed as a huge viral hit—which could be embarrassing, given the bizarre circumstances surrounding it.

A model in which the imperative is simply to keep listeners around, whether they’re paying attention or not, distorts our very understanding of music’s purpose. This treatment of music as nothing but background sounds—as interchangeable tracks of generic, vibe-tagged playlist fodder—is at the heart of how music has been devalued in the streaming era. It is in the financial interest of streaming services to discourage a critical audio culture among users, to continue eroding connections between artists and listeners, so as to more easily slip discounted stock music through the cracks, improving their profit margins in the process. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which the continued fraying of these connections erodes the role of the artist altogether, laying the groundwork for users to accept music made using generative-AI software.

Look, I’m done. I poured years and endless hours into establishing myself on walled garden services administered with varying degrees of competence and benevolence, only to have those services use my own sunk costs to trap me within their silos even as they siphoned value from my side of the ledger to their own.

The only thing worse than having wasted all that time and energy would be to have wasted it — and learned nothing.

Peer to Peer tunnels

The original Luddites—a movement of early nineteenth-century English weavers, who infamously smashed the new machines that transformed a skilled and well remunerated livelihood into low-grade piecework performed by children—did not oppose technology in its entirety. Indeed, as skilled craftspeople, they were adept users of it. Rather, they fought against what they referred to as “Machinery hurtful to Commonality,” which sought to break up the autonomy and social power that underpinned entire vibrant communities, so that a new class of factory owners might benefit.

Robin Sloan: I send a lot of stuff through the mail. Our olive oil company would not run without it. I couldn’t pay so many of my bills if we couldn’t send things so reliably and econom­i­cally through the United States Postal Service. And of course I send out all these zines to people, too. The internet gets a lot of credit as a sort of utopian network … and the internet is cool … but I think actually maybe the USPS is the utopian network, and has been all along. I often think, when I put a stamp on something, or even when I print out my postage and it’s like six bucks — which is not nothing — wow, they’ll take it anywhere. And it will get there. You’re like “how is that possible?”

Antistatic: We all live in cities, but if you live down a country road it’ll still get there.

Robin Sloan: Exactly. That’s why it’s important. That’s why the USPS is utopian. And the other [delivery companies] are not, ‘cause they say “no, no, no, we don’t really mess with Sloan up there on old Skeleton Hill”. But USPS is like “I guess we gotta go there.”

Antistatic: “We’ll deliver to that ghost.”

Robin Sloan: Exactly.

Repairing Repair

Repair is a noble cause, but it is inseparably fraught with political anxieties and machinations. Because the idea of repair is often popularly perceived as an ethically grounded panacea, we frequently miss seeing how it dovetails with our understandings of another problematic concept: injustice. Insofar as we want to operationalize it as a tool for social good, it is important to understand “repair” in its turbulences, fluidities, and anomalies.

Imagine a city — full of rich heritage, economic potential, and informal settlements — struck by a powerful earthquake. The city is decimated. In the aftermath, administrators, policymakers, and civil society feel it is their moral duty to repair their city. Yet after much contentious debate, there is no consensus as to how to rebuild.

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OpenAI has published “A Student’s Guide to Writing with ChatGPT”. In this article, I review their advice and offer counterpoints, as a university researcher and teacher. After addressing each of OpenAI’s 12 suggestions, I conclude by mentioning the ethical, cognitive and environmental issues that all students should be aware of before deciding to use or not use ChatGPT. I also answer some of the more critical feedback at the end of the post.

Remember AOL, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, even Q-Link? We do too. That's why we're bringing them back.

Let's go back to the basics - when you hoped your modem would connect to the internet, when you changed your away message to tease someone, when you used to chat endlessly with people from all around the world. It's back, baby!

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