✘ Curate slowly and see
- Music subscription fantasy model - Artificial memory - Selling user data for AI training - 'Vinyl revival' in perspective - Longevity as a spiritual pursuit
What happens on the Internet misses context, almost always. There are constant interactions, yet little to no journey. Moreover, there’s almost no stewardship meaning that there’s no person or organization that takes responsibility. This last point has been a hallmark of the platformization of the Internet since the early 2000s. YouTube, Facebook and the like have never taken responsibility for what we, users, post on their platforms. They are simple distributors, but run up against problems all the time. Right now, there’s a spotlight on this with Reddit selling its data for companies to train their generative AI models. As Virginie Berger explains:
“Platforms such as Reddit, Tumblr, and WordPress primarily host user-generated content, and the original understanding when users joined these platforms did not encompass the use of their content for AI training.”
What’s more, there’s numerous times that platforms like Reddit have said they’re not responsible for the content on their servers because it’s user-generated. Now, however, they do claim ownership through sales. Something’s off.
Wait, curate
It seems like I have veered quickly away from the topic at hand today: curation. However, curation has the potential to solve for all three issues I just mentioned: context, journey, and stewardship or responsibility. In a sense everything is now curated in one form or another. Algorithms do most of the heavy lifting here nowadays, where each interaction with a platform feels to be mediated by the engagement metrics of others. Humans fix this, curating humans fix this better.
Curation versus creation
In 2012, artist and technologist Jonathan Harris spoke about how “curation has by and large replaced creation as a predominant mode of self-expression.” It’s an oft read quote, but sits better when taken in the context of his full talk. What he meant, I think, is that it has become easy to assemble a lot of different things. There’s little intentionality to it, though. I often hear people reminisce about the older Internet of Tumblr or even further back with Geocities websites. And, sure, lots has changed. Everything has become so easy to like and share and the feed is infinite and constant. Actually, curation is an act of creation. It’s the assembling of ideas, artefacts, etc. into a whole - understood in a specific context. The curator is the steward of this collection. There shouldn’t be a versus, instead the two are intertwined.
But curation cannot happen at the speed of swiping fingers. What gets lost in that speed is the reflection and the connection of one piece to another. Each piece assembled becomes a floating element, unbound from meaning. To bring that together takes time and effort and skill. The limitation is depth. There’s infinite possibilities, but none of them will take hold unless someone tells us why it matters. These are the people who curate slowly so that we can see and hear.
Two divergent paths and an archive
Last year, I wrote about the future of music curation as being a fork of two divergent paths. One focused on curation for the masses, and one focused on community. The latter allows groups of people to inspire together and build an archive. This can be as simple as a set of music recommendations. To create that archive, however, each recommendation needs to come with a piece of context. Building the thread between each track is what matters. Keeping that thread available for the future is where a value lies. That requires taking responsibility for each choice and a commitment to a journey. So curate slowly, and listen.
LINKS
🎙️ James Blake’s music subscription model is a fantasy that disadvantages fans and musicians (Tom Vek)
“The reason that per-artist subscriptions don’t make sense for fans is basic maths: multiply the number of artists you really care about by the subscription fees and the costs soon seem unrealistic, resulting in fans investing in one artist at the expense of another. And once listeners are locked in, there is a level of guilt associated with cancelling: the general subscription model is described as a “dark pattern” that makes emotional hostages of fans who want to break free of the monthly commitment.”
✘ What Tom does really well in this piece is to centre the conversation around the value of music. It’s not really about the subscription. It’s about how we project value onto music and try to make that tangible as a connective layer between people.
🪃 Artificial memory and orienting infinity (Kei Kreutler)
“The act of remembering your path through the digital labyrinth is a way of changing perception. Though we leave behind innumerable traces, it has become commonplace to forget the source, origins, or authenticity of the information we carry. This is especially true in the renaissance of spam and deep fakes driven by artificial intelligence. The strange emerging combinations of machine learning and cryptography will further force a profound renegotiation of our relationship with memory. To navigate these unusual and innumerable traces we’ll need different sensibilities.”
✘ Kei goes on to talk about the protocolization of memory and I really encourage you to take a moment to think about this. It’s as much about finding your way as anything else. How often do you forget something? How do you try to not forget things? When and how do these elements become digital?
🤨 Selling user data for AI training: A closer look (Virginie Berger)
“However, this approach is essentially a form of copyright laundering. Instead of directly training on copyrighted materials and risking legal repercussions, the strategy involves training on data generated by models like Mixtral, which have themselves been fed copyrighted works. This indirect method serves to 'cleanse' the copyright issues associated with the original materials.”
✘ Great insight as always from Virginie, but this concept of copyright laundering is pretty scary. We really need to work on getting some deals on the table around licensing when it comes to Generative AI.
🪩 Putting the ‘Vinyl Revival’ in proper perspective (Eamonn Forde)
“By all means, talk about the growth in vinyl; but please, please, please stop hyping it up as something that it is not. Sales are growing and that’s clearly lovely. But that growth is marginal and it needs to be understood within its proper context, not devoid of context.”
✘ Love this from Eamonn, especially because he plays on the LP acronym to focus his critique.
⚰️ Anna Savina: Erik Davis on Longevity as a Spiritual Pursuit (Anya Savina)
“The language of the future needs to change to make it feel new; otherwise, it loses its power. The language of singularity emerged in science fiction and then became popularized, even becoming a mainstream signifier that can be mocked in popular media. It had a long life. I think it has been replaced by AI for several reasons. AI is a more tangible thing that we can already see in our lives, making it easier to think about. It also shares many features with singularity because, of course, the AI is what will wake up and become smarter than us.”
✘ This helped me understand something I didn’t get before - the ideal of longevity. There’s a Dutch band from the 1980s, Het Klein Orkest, who wrote a song about capturing death. Everyone had fun for a while, but then they wanted to die. That’s basically how I feel about it, so this interview helped me see the other side as well.
MUSIC
Speaking of curators, one of my favourites when it comes to the slightly more leftfield electronic music choices is Michail, or Opium Hum. Because it was his birthday this week, I invite all of you to go check out his Telegram and/or Instagram to follow along. There’s also his ‘radio’ sessions on Soundcloud.