Soylent Screens
The resource being maximized by digital technology is us
Now, AI overseers will squeeze every last dime from our bones unless we unite to stop them
A Producerist Manifesto
In the secular age, we have found our new God and it consists of ever-expanding binary code. We both worship and control this new deity, or so we imagine. Developments in AI will soon dispel that illusion. AI technology will create untold job losses, suffering, and upheaval for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of the world population. Not since the Manhattan Project have scientific inventors so thoroughly attempted to warn the public regarding the myriad disasters their own invention could bring about.
Back in 2022, OpenAI’s co-founder Ilya Sutskever made news when he said large AI networks have already developed “partial consciousness.” He also warned that AI technology allows for the possibility of “infinitely stable” totalitarian …
Richard Thompson and Friends
Being a folk singer means being a home to all the people who sing through you
The universe wants us to jubilate
Folk genius fills a ballroom in seedy, smelly New Jersey
Some of the oldest written music was melismatic. Melisma — that’s an oozy, radiant musicological word for the technique of singing multiple notes to articulate a single syllable. Think of Joni Mitchell’s sudden soaring on Blue’s penultimate track: I could drink a case of youuu-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oO-OO-Oo, darling — shooting the one-syllable you to the sky with eight extra tones. Think of the vocal acrobatics of a circa-2007 American Idol contestant, or of Bach’s Mass in G Major: Gloria. One word. Three syllables. 21 notes. That’s melisma.
Early Christian mystics felt melisma to be the ultimate externalization of spiritual feeling, an irrepressible gushing of holiness. Medieval monks called it “jubilated singing.” Sometimes jubilated singing meant one word was sung with 300 notes. St. Augustine called it “the expression of a mind poured forth in …
The Great American Eclipse
In the woods with Sasquatch and the Red-Haired Dancer
Who is engineering the weather?
Sundown, you better take care, if I find you been creeping ’round my back-stairs
My friend Ashlea Stinnett invited me to a Bigfoot campout in Washington State. I brought the Red-Haired Dancer with me, fully aware of our interloper status. We were among a crew of true believers, mostly older women with a knack for kindness and the telling of a good yarn, who spent their days noticing twigs arranged into meaningful hieroglyphics, felled trees in impossible arrangements, a pack of Honeybuns gone missing and empty wrappers carefully returned to the base of a tree. Sasquatch left a knife near Ashlea’s tent the day after I mentioned she was the kind of woman to carry a knife on her belt. Sasquatch evaded me however, probably because I am a writer.
The truth is that I was the one evading Sasquatch because I can barely make sense of this world, let alone an interdimensional one. I came because I wanted to reconnect with Ashlea, who I met in a bar in Phoenix, Arizona, during my first …
