Month: May 2018
-
Music As Public Utility
Ted Nelson proposed that instead of copying digital media, we should effectively keep only one copy of each cultural expression — as with a book or a song — and pay the author of that expression a small, affordable amount whenever it is accessed. (Of course, as a matter of engineering practice, there would have to be many copies…
-
Aristotle’s Frets: The human condition is a function of what machines cannot not do
Throughout human history, economic behavior has been largely defined by the notion of rival goods induced scarcity, which posits that resources are finite and individuals must compete for them. This concept has become so deeply ingrained in our collective mindset that it has become a persistent habit of the mind, creating an intellectual inertia that…
-
Why Have Key Changes Disappeared? The Algorithmic Flattening of Music
There was a time when music changed because musicians changed it. The 1960s and the late 1980s were moments of exploratory abundance, where artists—unconstrained by invisible hands of optimization—chose their own paths. Key changes, unconventional structures, and unexpected genre fusions weren’t strategic decisions; they were what happened when musicians pushed at the edges of possibility.…
-
The Brain as Server Farm
Precisely. The human cranium acts as a kind of ramshackle server farm, crammed with pulsating neurons and glistening fatty insulation – the wetware underpinning this magnificent, messy biocomputer. It’s a marvel of evolution, cobbled together over millennia, but with all the elegance of a hacker’s basement rig. The software, on the other hand, that’s the…