Weeks 7-8: AI-YAI-YAI

In which the podcaster jousts with Theodor Adorno, takes a digestif with Jerry Mander, and loses patience with certain techn(olog)ical difficulties.

Transcript

MY 12-MONTH VIDEO FAST 

EPISODE 9 – WEEKS 7-8:  AI-YAI-YAI

This is Richard Loranger and welcome to Episode 9, covering Weeks 7 and 8 of My 12-Month Video Fast.

I hope you enjoyed my little DJ session last week as much as I did. That was fun to do, and nice to produce an episode that was less work and more play (and we know how badly things can go otherwise). (Oh, in the all-work-and-no-play column, let me say a brief farewell and rest well to the lovely Shelley Duvall who passed last week. Wendy!) Anyway I appreciated the extra time to work on other projects, both essential and creative.

I’ve definitely been listening to a bit more music since the TV has been in lockdown, much as I do still value my silence (or at least the relative quiet of a breezy open-windowed urban apartment with train whistles in the distance, intermittent dog barks, the river-sound of the expressways and junction a quarter-mile away, and the occasional tree-trimmer and jackhammer – okay, a little less value to those last two). Going back to the topic of tunes, as some of you might know, but likely not everyone, similar to Jerry Mander’s call for the elimination of television in 1978 (which I addressed in detail in Episode 4), there was also a denunciation of popular music, both recorded and live, in the mid-20th Century. This was stated primarily by renowned German musicologist and social theorist Theodor Adorno, a founding member of the Frankfurt School which started, yes, in Frankfurt but shifted to Columbia University and UC Berkeley when Hitler came to power in the 30s. Unlike Mander, however, who roused some interest amongst progressives for his resolute arguments, Adorno, despite some adherents, was for the most part roundly rejected for his stance on music, to some extent for coming across as full of curmudgeonly scorn. Of course it’s not that simple, and it’d be interesting to go just a little into what he had to say, since it bears more than a passing correlation to Mander.

So listen, as you may have surmised by now, I am not a theoryhead. God help me in my childlike innocence, but reading dense theory always makes me feel like I’m eating tacks while banging my head against the wall. I’m just sayin’. I am glad, however, that some people can be that relentlessly serious, and I invite any of my theoryhead friends and listeners to race to the forum should any of my ensuing points require chastisement or correction. But I did read some background regarding Adorno and the Frankfurt School, and even banged my way through part of his 1938 essay “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” (the most German title ever), at least until I got a tack stuck in my palate. And I can give you a sense of where Adorno was coming from in his polemic on popular music (and culture), but it would help to tell you a tiny bit about the Frankfurt School in general (from my barely knowledgeable standpoint). So here I step out onto the thinnest of theoretical ice. 

The Frankfurt scholars were essentially a school of social theory that applied 20th Century Marxism along with various ₋ologies, especially sociology and psychology, toward the goal of what they called “human emancipation” from, very generally and I hope I’m on track, oppressive regimes and cultures. They had a long line of dartboards these social theories and programs were aimed at: totalitarianism, Fascism, Stalinism, National Socialism, State Capitalism, mass consumer capitalism, and the culture industry, among others. They had numerous founders and many members who worked on projects for decades; I could probably talk about them all day but I don’t want to. One of their outstanding achievements, it is worth mentioning, was a set of criteria for measuring fascist tendencies in any individual, developed by a team led by Adorno and published in a 1950 book titled The Authoritarian Personality, still lauded and in use today. (I’m guessing very in use today.)

As a musicologist and aesthete, though, Adorno had a particularly adamant bent. He was an elitist proponent of Modern Art and High Classical Music (though he found the term “Classical” to be demeaning). For him the purest mid-century music was formless 12-tone constructions. He even had a falling out with Arnold Schoenberg, mid-century master of the chromatic scale, for creating works that resembled popular songs. (God forbid.) So besides some Classical Masters (it’s hard to sort out which ones he actually favored, at least in the brief reading I did), what kind of contemporary music did Adorno like? Here’s an example of a very short 1945 piano piece of his own (though he did write longer pieces), to give you an idea.

[PLAY ADORNO PIANO PIECE]

 I kinda like that, actually, but do you see what I mean by “formless”? Though there’s definitely room for emotion in there – like maybe anger? – it’s ultimately about technical acuity. And it seems, from what I can make of Adorno’s essay and the background reading, that what he valued most in the art of music was a virtuosic performance of a well-constructed score (the judge of which would be he, I imagine). And at base, that’s what he found lacking in popular music: a careful virtuoso performance, and a careful listening to that performance. In his mind, popular music didn’t come close to this for several reasons, and as it was the hype of the time, he directed a great deal of contempt and condescension toward jazz music of the 30s to 50s in particular, referring to “the recklessness of a singer with a golden throat or an instrumentalist of lip-smacking euphony.” I mean, c’mon, Ted. Was that really necessary? Given how many styles of jazz there were, with more emerging every few years, and certainly virtuosos therein, I have to wonder specifically what kind(s) of jazz he was referring to, or listening to, or avoiding listening to (haha). And given that he later embraced the work of John Cage, I wonder further what he might have thought of punk rock, Noise, and other dystopic and anti-musics. Alas, he died in 1969 and didn’t get a chance to give them a listen.

But the interesting thing is his primary reasoning for this disdain. To his thought, the cause of this degradation stemmed from the sad fact that popular music was 1) a product designed to be consumed (rather than an art form) that 2) turned listeners from critical thinkers and perceivers of virtuosity into passive, comfortable, and willing receivers of Capitalist culture and ideology. He even found that anti-Capitalist sentiments in popular music and culture were negated by the fact that they were part of popular culture itself. Spin your head on that for a minute. But keep in mind, he was reacting to the early recording and radio cultures – Discs for sale! Discs played here! – which were, for the first time in history, providing melody and harmony to help people get through their Industrial Age days. Which could be seen as lulling them into persisting as cogs in the Capitalist machine – as if they had much choice, let alone education as to what any of that was. So take a step back and consider, especially if you’ve given a listen to Episode 4 on the text of Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television: doesn’t that sound a lot like a good chunk of Jerry Mander’s argument about corporate powers using the hypnotic effects of television to sell, sell, sell?

So yeah, it’s not unheard of and really quite foreseeable that some people will inevitably be wary of, resist, or freak-out (ai-yai-yai!) at new technologies for recording, representing, and conveying information, or new technologies in general – especially when it threatens their own interests. In the 19th Century, as photography floored people with its first strut down the global catwalk, classically trained painters everywhere were saying, “That’s cool but it’s not art, it’s not art, it’ll never be art, no it won’t…” Hell, even once it was established there were endless squabbles about when it was art and when not. (See Susan Sontag’s On Photography for a one-sided listen in on that flap.) And let’s not forget our much-maligned throwers of Dutch shoes (sabots) into the machinery of the Industrial Revolution (do I really have to say … saboteurs?) Then music and film and television…and after that, what do we have today?

[PLAY HAL 9000]

In approaching that question, I’d like to revisit a quote that I pulled from the last part of Mander’s Four Arguments. I think it merits some further parsing out toward my larger point here as well as considering its relationship to Adorno’s stance, the hall of mirrors that we call human civilization at this very second, and a bunch of shit that’s been going on in my life the past few weeks and months. Here’s that quote restated, and pardon if you’ve listened to it from the earlier episode quite recently.

"…our vote for congressperson or president means very little in the light of our lack of power over technological innovations that affect the nature of our existence more than any individual leader has ever done. Without our gaining control over technology, all notions of democracy are a farce. If we cannot even think of abandoning a technology, or thinking of it, affect a ban, then we are trapped in a state of passivity and impotence hardly to be distinguished from living under a dictatorship. What is confusing is that our dictator is not a person. Though a handful of people most certainly benefit from and harness to their purposes these pervasive technologies, the true dictators are the technologies themselves."

I didn’t say much about it the first time beyond making jokes about AI and the corporate oligarchy, but looking again it’s interesting how it seems both gravely unsettling in its veracity and too outrageous to be taken seriously. So which is it? Setting aside the politicians and the dictatorship for a moment, let me ask: who amongst us hasn’t had our lives disrupted, made quite difficult, or affected negatively in some way at some point by misused, maliciously used, uncontrolled, or just plain shitty tech?

Here’s an all-too-typical example. Early last week I discovered that a bunch of emails I’d sent over the week before, mostly important ones for organizing literary events, never went out. They’d all landed in my Drafts folder with no notification, labeled Unable to Send. And they were all from my website email address, which I funnel through my old Hotmail account in Outlook. You’re probably familiar, but that’s when you attach one email address to another so they both go through the same inbox, with something called iPOP. I’d been doing it for years, so I assumed, gee, I could rely on that to work. Silly me. Turns out that good old Microsoft recently disabled a bunch of functions in Outlook for web browsers, which I’ve always used, to strongarm us into using the desktop app instead, one of which was the iPOP function. Except they didn’t bother to tell us, or certainly not in any clear or obvious way. Needless to say this fucked up a bunch of stuff I worked hard on, and I end up for a couple of hours on a chat with a Microsoft tech (you know this story, right?) switching me over to the app and setting up the iPOP there, which of course took several agonizing tries to get right even for the tech “expert”. Finally got it all set up and it looked fine, seems to work, until a couple of days later I notice the mail still isn’t going out from that address, which is the default address to send from and there’s no longer a way to change that default. To which I can only say [CRAZY RASPBERRY NOISE]…

Here's an even better example – and if I seem to be venting here, please believe that I’ve already vented plenty and really do mean this as reportage. On June 29, my credit union, Patelco, was hit with a ransomware attack, to which they responded by shutting down their entire banking system both in person and online indefinitely. That’s where I have all of my meager savings, which of course I could no longer access or keep track of. Slight correction: there was one account that I supposedly could access via my ATM card, which got emptied out with end of month bills, leaving me with nothing but cash-on-hand and credit cards that I don’t like to use. For ten days Patelco sent out an email every day saying, Sorry, we’re working on it 24/7, etc. And after those ten days – silence, and not the kind I enjoy. Nothing at all from them for another week, after which they suddenly opened everything up. That silence left millions of customers, myself included, insanely anxious and stressed out, with no idea (despite prior reassurances) whether we’d have anything, including our identities, intact when it all fell out. Seventeen days in limbo and they still haven’t confirmed whether any of our information was compromised, which just adds assholeness on top of tech malevolence. What a world.

All of which wouldn’t be quite so bad, I suppose, if not for the fact that over the last year and a half, my freelance business of seventeen years has been going downhill. As I mentioned waaaaaay back in Episode 1, I support myself doing naming and verbal branding, meaning that I design names and short-form messaging for new products and businesses. Most of my work comes from creative agencies (e.g. branding firms), and some directly from small companies as well. And though freelance work is always up and down, I’d finally felt established and on solid ground – this was something I could depend on until I drop. Again, silly me. Because this downturn was more severe and long-lasting than anything in the past. I wondered if I’d lost my touch, or if some regular clients were unhappy, or what. But after a few months I started hearing the same from other namers, and even small agencies that verbal and graphic work was drying up – not gone, just way down. We all suspected the cause, but it’s only the last six months or so that it’s become fairly clear: corporations have begun using AI for those needs, a lot of them at least. Corporate writers and artists had been getting laid off for over a year. Branding companies were laying off staff here and there – there’s even a big one that’s shutting down its naming department completely (after decades of steady work). So there are a lot of creatives going on the dole, but not freelancers – cause we ain’t got one. Zero unemployment benefits and zero safety net, so we’re scrambling to pick up other bits of work and watching our savings dwindle. Which at 63, I gotta say, sucks big time. (Did I say I wasn’t going to vent? I really do mean this as reportage, as truth-spreading, since, strangely, it’s not much in the news this year.) Now I know you want to ask: how do you know? Are you sure that’s what’s going on? Well I’m not going to argue with you about it, mostly because I’m the only one who can talk on here (lol). I will say that the Freelancers Union (yes there is one) finally has some stuff posted about it, and I know a few branders who’ve managed to get clients to admit to switching to or at least leaning on AI.

AI-YAI-YAI all right.

The most absurd thing about using AI to generate potential names, and I know namers who’ve tried it out, is that it’s not very good at it. It will churn out ideas, and some namers have found them useful as fodder to work with, but the thing is it can only regurgitate patterns based on what’s already out there. And that is not where good names and messaging come from. Branding and marketing folks are like antennae – we smell the zeitgeist and are forward-minded, we think around the next corner, at our best concocting language that’s not yet out there. Will AI be able to do that eventually? (You know, like in The Terminator and Colossus: The Forbin Project?) In truth, I am not a fan of speculative journalism: feel free to tell me who’s going to win the election after the election and maybe I’ll listen (but probably not). One thing I do know is that we’re mammals and the bots are not, so we’ll see if that makes a difference. In the meantime my best hope for the biz picking back up is the possibility that in a year or two people will get tired of everything being named IntelliSmart, Illumalight, and Dust Wizard.

The worst part of all this is how many contractors are out there now. During the Great Man-made Recession of 2008-09, a year or two after I started my business, a ton of corporate people were laid off and started private consultancies and freelance joints, driving the number of contractors way up. The corporations fared pretty well in the end, with all the government bailouts and such, plus they gained an unattached workforce (to an extent) that they no longer had to pay benefits for. Yeah, the new invisible workforce had to pick up their own. Only during COVID did the Feds and States step up with their glacial and clunky Pandemic Unemployment Assistance – somehow they felt obliged – but with artificial employment catastrophes that result from unchecked corporate interests? They keep their hands off that shit for sure.

So back to Mander’s comment, which was in regard to 1970s broadcast television, mind you, about “our lack of power over technological innovations that affect the nature of our existence more than any individual leader has ever done.” How am I feeling about that right now? Pretty solid, yeah, astute observation, Jerry, and thanks for that. I dig it. Can we characterize it as a dictatorship by the technologies themselves? It’s maybe more a type of technocracy, at this point, coming from the corporate oligarchy rather than the nominal (elected) government. The technology will do what it’s made for (if it’s made well enough), the corporations will snatch it up because it’ll save expenditures and increase profit (who cares at what cost), and people will adore it because that’s what they’ve been trained to do – Oh look how pretty! How easy! How convenient! – and thanks to Professor Adorno for that perspective. And what goes most unspoken? The moguls who make it could stop it. But why would they? What kind of species do you think this is?

Which brings us back to the politicians. History shows clearly that they are not concerned about people losing jobs and livelihoods as a result of industrial and technological advancements. We saw that in the Industrial Revolution, which, while eliminating lots of non-industrial professions, produced an avalanche of jobs for a minute, until it over-produced everything else, then SO LONG! (It also, by the way, restructured the economy and divisions of wealth in ways that specifically led to the Great Depression, though historians see the IR as such a glorious pivot that they’re loathe to pose the connection.) The Feds had to help during the Depression (as during COVID), but in the 1970s? In 2009? Sorry, tough luck, Brother. And now? I’ve written twice to every politician who “serves” me, including those in the House of White, describing this imperative situation and suggesting that if they weren’t going to curb or regulate the tech, they might consider reinstating an unemployment insurance for the many private contractors who were starting to feel rather disenfranchised and who just might be voters. (And how many of us are there? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? There were millions of people on the PUA during COVID in California alone. And does it even matter how many?) 

In response to those eighteen emails I received two replies: a generic from Barbara Lee saying it’s always good to hear the concerns of her constituents (lol), and one from President Joseph Biden, saying he was concerned about tech as well and that’s why he “signed an Executive Order to help rein in big tech by challenging bad mergers, enforcing antitrust laws, and establishing privacy rules on surveillance.  Since then, my Administration has taken steps to limit the collection and use of personal data and protect children from illegal data collection.  I also called on a federal interagency committee to explore security concerns that TikTok poses to the American people.” Good try, Joe. So the question is, should I vote for someone who is not going to do anything to address my immediate and life-upending concerns, someone who makes no public statement even acknowledging it nor takes any stance or action to mitigate it? I’ve always voted but now I’m not so sure. And I’ve been wondering that for some time before I reread Mr. Mander’s book last month. Of course I’ve got friends who jump down my throat at the very suggestion. So now I ask them, “Do you think my concerns are legitimate?” “Yes, but—” “And have you contacted your representatives about that concern?” I’m yet to get a yes to that question.

So it’s been a stressful few weeks and I know I’m not alone in that, but I really did appreciate the bit of extra time last week with the lighter episode. I did have a bit of paid work I could focus on – not enough to really change my situation but a start. I was able to put out some feelers for additional work. I was able to read some more of the Stephen King Holly Gibney stories; start my favorite Michael Ondaatje novel In the Skin of a Lion, which I haven’t picked up in years (and might have a little more to say about next week because it’s soooo good); and of course waded through some research and text of Adorno and the Frankfurt School. So I’m all smartened up now. I held a writing group at my place and led a really fun poetry workshop at one of the San Francisco Public Libraries. And once I got the email straightened out (meaning found a workaround), I got a lot of prep done for the Beast Crawl, Oakland’s big annual literary festival which is happening this Saturday (the day this episode is scheduled to post, so if you’re nearby, come on down!). But I have to say, amidst all that stress I was sorely missing the simple escapism of video – instead of Stephen Kinging I would have loved to spend a few hours this week with The Doom Patrol or the crew of the Rocinante (that’s from the great space opera The Expanse on Amazon and you need to see it). And it’s had me wondering whether that specific form of escape is built into the culture-blob that we’ve all been absorbed by, or evolved out of it. Something maybe worth blabbing more on in the future.

Thinking ahead, I have an important announcement that I doubt is unexpected. I absolutely need to step up the income or in a few months I’ll be recording this on a broken cellphone in a tent down the street. No exagg there. So starting in August, I’ll be posting these podcasts on ODD SATURDAYS only – that’s the first and third and a fifth if there is one (which there is in August, so BONUS!). Next Saturday will be the first one of the month, and I’m thinking of a slightly funner episode, maybe reminiscing on another escapism that I’ve been missing a bunch (besides failing to keep up with the Marvel Cinematic Way-Too-Many Universes), unless of course something else comes up that I need to escape from.

So please don’t give up on me, keep spreading the word (there’ve been new listeners popping up every week, very cool), leave me a good rating if you’re using Spotify or whatever, and as always let me know what you’re thinking of All. This Verbiage.

This has been Episode 9 covering Weeks 7 and 8 of My 12-Month Video Fast.

Thanks so much for your ongoing interest and perseverance.