#creative labor | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months

Text

Middlemen without enshittification

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me next in SALT LAKE CITY (Feb 21, Weller Book Works) and SAN DIEGO (Feb 22, Mysterious Galaxy). After that, it's LA, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix and more!

Enshittification describes how platforms go bad, which is also how the internet goes bad, because the internet is made of platforms, which is weird, because platforms are intermediaries and we were promised that the internet would disintermediate the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

The internet did disintermediate a hell of a lot of intermediaries – that is, "middlemen" – but then it created a bunch more of these middlemen, who coalesced into a handful of gatekeepers, or as the EU calls them "VLOPs" (Very Large Online Platforms, the most EU acronym ever).

Which raises two questions: first, why did so many of us end up flocking to these intermediaries' sites, and how did those sites end up with so much power?

To answer the first question, I want you to consider one of my favorite authors: Crad Kilodney (RIP):

https://archive.org/details/thecradkilodneypapers

When I was growing up, Crad was a fixture on the streets of Toronto. All through the day and late into the evening, winter or summer, Crad would stand on the street with a sign around his neck ("Very famous Canadian author, buy my books, $2" or sometimes just "Margaret Atwood, buy my books, $2"). He wrote these deeply weird, often very funny short stories, which he edited, typeset, printed, bound and sold himself, one at a time, to people who approached him on the street.

I had a lot of conversations with Crad – as an aspiring writer, I was endlessly fascinated by him and his books. He was funny, acerbic – and sneaky. Crad wore a wire: he kept a hidden tape recorder rolling in his coat and he secretly recorded conversations with people like me, and then released a series of home-duplicated tapes of the weirdest and funniest ones:

https://archive.org/details/on-the-street-crad-kilodney-vol-1

I love Crad. He deserves more recognition. There's an on-again/off-again documentary about his life and work that I hope gets made some day:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/09/free-sample/#putrid-scum

But – and this is the crucial part – there are writers out there I want to hear from who couldn't do what Crad did. Maybe they can write books, but not edit them. Or edit them, but not typeset them. Or typeset, but not print. Or print, but not spend the rest of their lives standing on a street-corner with a "PUTRID SCUM" sign around their neck.

Which is fine. That's why we have intermediaries. I like booksellers (I was one!). I like publishers. I like distributors. I like their salesforce, who go forth and convince the booksellers of the world to stock books like mine. I have ten million things I want to do before I die, and I'm already 52, and being a sales-rep for a publisher isn't on my bucket list. I am so thankful that someone else wants to do this for me.

That's why we have intermediaries, and why disintermediation always leads to some degree of re-intermediation. There's a lot of explicit and implicit knowledge and specialized skill required to connect buyers and sellers, creators and audiences, and other sides of two-sided markets. Some producers can do some of this stuff for themselves, and a very few – like Crad – can do it all, but most of us need some help, somewhere along the way. In the excellent 2022 book Direct, Kathryn Judge lays out a clear case for all the good that middlemen can do:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/direct-the-problem-of-middlemen/

So why were we all so anxious for disintermediation back in the late 1990s? Here's a hint: it wasn't because we hated intermediaries – it was because we hated powerful intermediaries.

The point of an intermediary is to serve as a conduit between producers and consumers, buyers and sellers, audiences and creators. When an intermediary gains power over the audience – say, by locking them inside a walled garden – and then uses that lock-in to screw producers and appropriate an ever larger share of the value going between them, that's when intermediaries become a problem.

The problem isn't that someone will handle ticketing for your gig. The problem is that Ticketmaster has locked down all the ticketing, and the venues, and the promotions, and it uses that power to gouge fans and rip off artists:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/20/anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-will-eventually-stop/

The problem isn't that there's a well-made website that lets you shop for goods sold by many small merchants and producers. It's that Amazon has cornered this market, takes $0.51 out of every dollar you spend there, and clones and destroys any small merchant who succeeds on the platform:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

The problem isn't that there's a website where you can stream most of the music ever recorded. It's that Spotify colludes with the Big Three labels to rip off artists and sneaks crap you don't want to hear into your stream in order to collect payola:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

The problem isn't that there's a website where you can buy any audiobook you want. It's that Amazon's Audible locks every book to its platform forever and steals hundreds of millions of dollars from creators:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

The problem, in other words, isn't intermediation – it's power. The thing that distinguishes a useful intermediary from an enshittified bully is power. Intermediaries gain power when our governments stop enforcing competition law. This lets intermediaries buy each other up and corner markets. Once they've formed cozy cartels, they can capture their regulators and commit rampant labor, privacy and consumer violations with impunity. That capture also lets them harness governments to punish smaller players that want to free workers, creators, audiences and customers from walled gardens. It also hands them a whip-hand over their workers, so that any worker who refuses to aid in these nefarious plans can be easily fired:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

A world with intermediaries is a better world. As much as I love Crad Kilodney's books, I wouldn't want to live in a world where the only books on my shelves came from people prepared to stand on a street-corner wearing a "FOUL PUS FROM DEAD DOGS" sign.

The problem isn't intermediaries – it's powerful intermediaries. That's why the world's surging antitrust movement is so exciting: by reinstating competition law, we can keep intermediaries small and comparatively weak, so that creators and audiences, drivers and riders, sellers and buyers, and other groups seeking to connect will not find themselves made subservient to middlemen.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/19/crad-kilodney-was-an-outlier/#intermediation

#pluralistic #intermediation #disintermediation #publishing #creative labor #middlemen #distributors #publishers #publicists #enshittification #monopoly #monopsony #crad kilodney #trustbusting #antitrust

171 notes · View notes

bluebelly-sun-serpentine · 9 months

Text

I’m starting to see AI “photography” pop up on my dash without any identifying tags (some obviously midjourney wolves from a canid account, very sus roses from a popular flower blog, etc.) and all I can think is that the people creating these things have entirely missed the point of photography. Go outside. Engage with the world. Observe your subjects with care. Invite someone into a space where they can perform the person they want to be. Wait patiently enough for some shy being to creep into the frame. Visit the same place every season. Rearrange your home. Communicate something meaningful.

The process should be working on you. What does spitting prompts into a machine to generate images for people to “like” and quickly forget in the flood do to or for you?

In a saturated information environment, artists know the memorability and impact of their art (production) is compromised, but there are other reasons to create, and those rest largely in what the actual practice does to you. What forms of attention can you learn? What physical connections does it create? How does it train your body? What unexpected lives do you encounter and fold into your own understanding?

Beyond the labor politics of AI, there’s just this sense of loss. Do you not get what you’re missing out on? We’re all going to miss out on the person you might have been if you were actually paying all that attention, rather than just asking the machine to do it for you.

#digital photography #ai #art practice #photography #creative labor #ai artwork #misrepresentation

8 notes · View notes

oraahdamaanta · 1 year

Text

what is Artificial Intelligence AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a field of computer science that focuses on the development of machines and software that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as perception, reasoning, learning, decision-making, and natural language processing. AI systems are designed to analyse data, recognize patterns, and make predictions or decisions based on that data. The goal of AI is to create machines that can think, reason, and learn like humans, and to develop intelligent systems that can automate tasks and improve our lives in various ways.

How Does AI Work

AI systems are designed to analyze and process vast amounts of data in real-time and derive insights from that data to make predictions or take actions. There are three main types of AI systems: rule-based systems, machine learning, and deep learning.

1.Rule-Based Systems

Rule-based systems are the simplest form of AI and rely on a set of pre-defined rules to make decisions. These systems work by analyzing data and applying specific rules to make decisions. For example, a rule-based system might be programmed to diagnose a disease based on a set of symptoms. The system would analyze the data, apply the rules, and then provide a diagnosis based on the outcome.

2.Machine Learning

Machine learning is a more advanced form of AI that involves teaching machines to learn from data without being explicitly programmed. This is done through a process known as training, in which machines are fed large amounts of data and algorithms are used to identify patterns and learn from the data. machinelearningmastery/ The machine then applies what it has learned to new data to make predictions or take actions.

There are three main types of machine learning: supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning.

Supervised Learning: Supervised learning is a type of machine learning where the algorithm learns to make predictions by analyzing labelled training data. In this type of learning, the algorithm is trained using input-output pairs, where the input is a set of features or attributes, and the output is a labelled target value. The goal of supervised learning is to find a mapping between the input and output variables so that the algorithm can accurately predict the output for new, unseen inputs.

Examples of supervised learning include predicting the price of a house based on its features or diagnosing a patient’s illness based on their symptoms.

Unsupervised Learning: Unsupervised learning is a type of machine learning where the algorithm learns to identify patterns and relationships in unlabelled data. In unsupervised learning, the algorithm is given a set of inputs without any corresponding output labels, and it must find patterns or groupings in the data on its own.

Examples of unsupervised learning include identifying groups of similar customers in a marketing dataset or finding patterns in unstructured text data.

#pluralistic #luddie #chokepoint capitalism #generative ai #artificial intelligence #voice acting #labor #creative labor #exclusive rights regimes #copyright #copyfight #careful what you wish for #machine learning #ai #ml #blurred lines #melancholy elephants

2 notes · View notes

f-identity · 1 year

Text

[Image description: A series of posts from Jason Lefkowitz @[email protected] dated Dec 08, 2022, 04:33, reading:

It's good that our finest minds have focused on automating writing and making art, two things human beings do simply because it brings them joy. Meanwhile tens of thousands of people risk their lives every day breaking down ships, a task that nobody is in a particular hurry to automate because those lives are considered cheap https://www.dw.com/en/shipbreaking-recycling-a-ship-is-always-dangerous/a-18155491 (Headline: 'Recycling a ship is always dangerous.' on Deutsche Welle) A world where computers write and make art while human beings break their backs cleaning up toxic messes is the exact opposite of the world I thought I was signing up for when I got into programming

/end image description]

28K notes · View notes

bixels · 3 months

Text

I think 90% of my gripes with how modern anime looks comes down to flat color design/palettes.

Non-cohesive, washed-out color palettes can destroy lineart quality. I see this all the time when comparing an anime's lineart/layout to its colored/post-processed final product and it's heartbreaking. Compare this pre-color vs. final frame from Dungeon Meshi's OP.

So much sharpness and detail and weight gets washed out and flattened by 'meh' color design. I LOVE the flow and thickness and shadows in the fabrics on the left. The white against pastel really brings it out. Check out all the detail in their hair, the highlights in Rin's, the different hues to denote hair color, the blue tint in the clothes' shadows, and how all of that just gets... lost. It works, but it's not particularly good and does a disservice to the line-artist.

I'm using Dungeon Meshi as an example not because it's bad, I'm just especially disappointed because this is Studio Trigger we're talking about. The character animation is fantastic, but the color design is usually much more exciting. We're not seeing Trigger at their full potential, so I'm focusing on them.

Here's a very quick and messy color correct. Not meant to be taken seriously, just to provide comparison to see why colors can feel "washed out." Top is edit, bottom is original.

You can really see how desaturated and "white fluorescent lighting" the original color palettes are.

[Remember: the easiest way to make your colors more lively is to choose a warm or cool tint. From there, you can play around with bringing out complementary colors for a cohesive palette (I warmed Marcille's skintone and hair but made sure to bring out her deep blue clothes). Avoid using too many blend mode layers; hand-picking colors will really help you build your innate color sense and find a color style. Try using saturated colors in unexpected places! If you're coloring a night scene, try using deep blues or greens or magentas. You see these deep colors used all the time in older anime because they couldn't rely on a lightness scale to make colors darker, they had to use darker paints with specific hues. Don't overthink it, simpler is better!]

#not art #dungeon meshi #rant #i'm someone who can get obsessive over colors in my own art #will stare at the screen adjusting hues/saturation for hours #luckily i've gotten faster at color picking #but yeah modern anime's color design is saddening to me. the general trend leans towards white/grey desaturated palettes #simply because they're easier to pick digitally #this is not the colorists fault mind you. the anime industry's problems are also labor problems. artists are severely underpaid #and overworked. colorists literally aren't paid enough to do their best #there isn't a “creative drought” in the anime industry. this trend is widespread across studios purely BECAUSE it's not up to individuals #until work conditions improve anime will unfortunately continue to miss its fullest potential visually #don't even GET ME STARTED ON THE USE OF POST-PROCESSING FILTERS AND LIGHTING IN ANIME THOUGH #SOMEONE HOLD ME BACK. I HATE LENS FLARES I HATE GRADIENT SHADING I HATE CHROMATIC ABBERATION AND BLUR

2K notes · View notes

articlesminer · 2 years

Text

'Sunday in the Park With George' Is a Thrilling Ode to the Process of Art

‘Sunday in the Park With George’ Is a Thrilling Ode to the Process of Art

Sunday in the Park With George, currently playing in a limited run at New York’s Hudson Theatre starring Jake Gyllenhaal, is blissfully free of politics—a two-and-a-half hour respite from contemporary anxieties, a holiday on the banks of the Seine, bathed in sunlight and glorious harmony. And yet, without ever straining to, it makes one of the most persuasive cases imaginable for the power of…

View On WordPress

0 notes

randimason · 6 months

Text

THE PICKET LINE: A ROAD TO PAY EQUITY AND SUSTAINABILITY - WOODSTOCK FILM FESTIVAL

youtube

SPEAKERS: Neil Gaiman, Dana Weissman, Jo Miller

MODERATOR: Thelma Adams

The Creative Industry has been radically transformed in the last several years due to the pandemic, economic turmoil, advances in digital technology, and production efficiencies.

Yet, creators of content, writers, actors, and many others that are instrumental to media development are still struggling to ensure economic sustainability.

To date, over 11,000 writers and 150,000 members of SAG AFTRA have taken up protest to be heard and galvanize change.

Come hear as the experts and those on the front lines, union members from Writers Guild of America East (WGAE), and Screen Actors Guild/ Aftra, discuss what has been done to update contracts that no longer serve current working conditions, and a critical look at what the public can do to support their efforts.

New York Women in Film & Television (NYWIFT) advocates for equality in the moving image industry and supports women in every stage of their careers. An entertainment industry association for women in New York, NYWIFT energizes women by illuminating their achievements, presenting training and professional development programs, awarding scholarships and grants, and providing access to a supportive community of peers.

To learn more about NYWIFT please visit: www.nywift.org. Please become a member and join the movement of women to ensure women gain their rightful place in the media and entertainment industry.

#woodstock film festival #sag aftra #sag afra strike #wga strike #wga strong #writers guild of america #screen actors guild #union #labor #creatives #entertainment #neil gaiman #Dana Weissman #Jo Miller #Thelma Adams #Youtube

536 notes · View notes

icewindandboringhorror · 6 months

Text

I know this is just a silly bad quality random screencap of a screencap that I found on facebook lol, BUT it's a succinct enough image to easily describe the concept in a quick/accessible way hopefully :

(and of course, feel free to elaborate in tags, etc.! (especially elaborating about other senses as well.. can you "hear" in your mind just as well as you can "see"? taste? etc.) It's an interesting topic to me, as someone who's like a 4.5 at MOST lol. I'm curious what option will be the most common :0c )

#tumblr polls #hrmm... a little poll perhaps.. about a subject I find interesting.. since this image came across my facebook today #still really not feeling that well. no longer shaking violently and such but I still feel weird and weak much more than usual #They did say my markers for like infection or inflammation were elevated but that they werent sure of the cause so hopefully #it's nothing too serious. they did also say a lot of different things can cause that thing to be higher than normal but didn't go into spec #fics of what. maybe some of them are relatively benign or something. I still havent felt much back to normal since #I got really sick that one time though. I feel fine on and off but then little bouts of feeling weird and sick happen. hrmmm #ANYWAY.. looking for small ways to be productive. such as little doodles on evil ipad or editing game videos #or posting polls or cat pictures or some other like not very labor intensive things #I WISH I COULD FOCUS on writing HHRGGhh... I need to finish my game.. it would be so freeing.. a project that's been looming #over my head for like 5 years even though througouht that 5yrs I've probably spent a total of 3 months working on it lo.. ANYWAY #I still partially really cannot beleive that people CAN see stuff in their heads. There's always part of me that's thinking like. well mayb #e everyone DOES see the same exact thing but we just describe/conceptualize it so differently that we think we're talking about #different things when we're really not. But I have been assured by people I've talked to about it that they can GENUINELY really see #stuff in their heads like as vivid as an actual picture in real life or something. And the other senses are neat too. Like for exmaple I #can hear in my head much better than I can see imagery. I still CANNOT hear vividly like as if I were listening to actual music out loud..#but I think it's developed more than my sight. AND interesting how this varies the creative process. a friend I was talking to on the phone #said they write by literally just watching stuff play before them like a movie. where my process is COMPLETELY different. AND that affects #the content/what details we focus on as well as our individual styles of writing have differences that can be traced back to that.. hrmm

531 notes · View notes

inktho · 7 months

Text

I’ve been playing this game again

#it’s a labor of love bc this game runs like ass and I understand why none of my friends could finish it #but I’ll do it for cecil OTL #rf5 #doodles #sorry my doodles aren’t good lately my creative reservoir is in shambles

186 notes · View notes

genderkoolaid · 2 months

Text

youtube

New Alexander Avila video essay! Its another sociological banger.

#especially given a certain individuals recent apologies and lack thereof #its a very good time to support transmasc creatives and their labor :)#m.#transmasc media

82 notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

Text

The media spectacle of generative AI (in which AI companies’ breathless claims of their software’s sorcerous powers are endlessly repeated) has understandably alarmed many creative workers, a group that’s already traumatized by extractive abuse by media and tech companies.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

Even though the claims about “AI” are overblown and overhyped, creators are right to be alarmed. Their bosses would like nothing more than to fire them and replace them with pliable software. The “creative” industries talk a lot about how audiences should be paying for creative works, but the companies that bring creators’ works to market treat their own payments to creators as a cost to be minimized.

Creative labor markets are primarily regulated through copyright: the exclusive rights that accrue to creators at the moment that their works are “fixated.” Media and tech companies then bargain to buy or license those rights. The theory goes that the more expansive those rights are, the more they’ll be worth to corporations, and the more they’ll pay creators for them.

That’s the theory. In practice, we’ve spent 40 years expanding copyright. We’ve made it last longer; expanded it to cover more works, hiked the statutory damages for infringements and made it easier to prove violations. This has made the entertainment industry larger and more profitable — but the share of those profits going to creators has declined, both in real terms and proportionately.

In other words, today creators have more copyright, the companies that buy creators’ copyrights have more profits, but creators are poorer than they were 40 years ago. How can this be so?

As Rebecca Giblin and I explain in our book Chokepoint Capitalism, the sums creators get from media and tech companies aren’t determined by how durable or far-reaching copyright is — rather, they’re determined by the structure of the creative market.

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

The market is concentrated into monopolies. We have five big publishers, four big studios, three big labels, two big ad-tech companies, and one gargantuan ebook/audiobook company. The internet has been degraded into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots from the other four”:

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

Under these conditions, giving a creator more copyright is like giving a bullied schoolkid extra lunch money. It doesn’t matter how much lunch money you give that kid — the bullies will take it all, and the kid will still go hungry (that’s still true even if the bullies spend some of that stolen lunch money on a PR campaign urging us all to think of the hungry children and give them even more lunch money):

https://doctorow.medium.com/what-is-chokepoint-capitalism-b885c4cb2719

But creative workers have been conditioned — by big media and tech companies — to reflexively turn to copyright as the cure-all for every pathology, and, predictably, there are loud, insistent calls (and a growing list of high-profile lawsuits) arguing that training a machine-learning system is a copyright infringement.

This is a bad theory. First, it’s bad as a matter of copyright law. Fundamentally, machine learning systems ingest a lot of works, analyze them, find statistical correlations between them, and then use those to make new works. It’s a math-heavy version of what every creator does: analyze how the works they admire are made, so they can make their own new works.

If you go through the pages of an art-book analyzing the color schemes or ratios of noses to foreheads in paintings you like, you are not infringing copyright. We should not create a new right to decide who is allowed to think hard about your creative works and learn from them — such a right would make it impossible for the next generation of creators to (lawfully) learn their craft:

https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2022/12/12/on-stable-diffusion/

(Sometimes, ML systems will plagiarize their own training data; that could be copyright infringement; but a) ML systems will doubtless get guardrails that block this plagiarism; and, b) even after that happens, creators will still worry about being displaced by ML systems trained on their works.)

We should learn from our recent history here. When sampling became a part of commercial hiphop music, some creators clamored for the right to control who could sample their work and to get paid when that happened. The musicians who sampled argued that inserting a few bars from a recording was akin to a jazz trumpeter who works a few bars of a popular song into a solo. They lost that argument, and today, anyone who wants to release a song commercially will be required — by radio stations, labels, and distributors — the clear that sample.

This change didn’t make musicians better off. The Big Three labels — Sony, Warners, and Universal, who control 70% of the world’s recorded music — now require musicians to sign away the rights to samples from their works. The labels also refuse to sell sampling licenses to musicians unless they are signed to one of the Big Three.

Thus, producing music with a sample requires that you take whatever terms the Big Three impose on you, including giving up the right to control sampling of your music. We gave the schoolkids more lunch money and the bullies took that, too.

https://locusmag.com/2020/03/cory-doctorow-a-lever-without-a-fulcrum-is-just-a-stick/

The monopolists who control the creative industries are already getting ahead of the curve on this one. Companies that hire voice actors are requiring those actors to sign away the (as yet nonexistant) right to train a machine-learning model with their voices:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

The National Association of Voice Actors is (quite rightly) advising its members not to sign contracts that make this outrageous demand, and they note that union actors are having success getting these clauses struck, even retroactively:

https://navavoices.org/synth-ai/

That’s not surprising — labor unions have a much better track record of getting artists’ paid than giving creators copyright and expecting them to bargain individually for the best deal they can get. But for non-union creators — the majority of us — getting this language struck is going to be a lot harder. Indeed, we already sign contracts full of absurd, unconscionable nonsense that our publishers, labels and studios refuse to negotiate:

https://doctorow.medium.com/reasonable-agreement-ea8600a89ed7

Some of the loudest calls for exclusive rights over ML training are coming not from workers, but from media and tech companies. We creative workers can’t afford to let corporations create this right — and not just because they will use it against us. These corporations also have a track record of creating new exclusive rights that bite them in the ass.

For decades, media companies stretched copyright to cover works that were similar to existing works, trying to merge the idea of “inspired by” and “copied from,” assuming that they would be the ones preventing others from making “similar” new works.

But they failed to anticipate the (utterly predictable) rise of copyright trolls, who launched a string of lawsuits arguing that popular songs copied tiny phrases (or just the “feel”) of their clients’ songs. Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke’s got sued into radioactive rubble by Marvin Gaye’s estate over their song “Blurred Lines” — which didn’t copy any of Gaye’s words or melodies, but rather, took its “feel”:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/robin-thicke-pharrell-lose-multi-million-dollar-blurred-lines-lawsuit-35975/

Today, every successful musician lives in dread of a multi-million-dollar lawsuit over incidental similarities to obscure tracks. Last spring, Ed Sheeran beat such a suit, but it was a hollow victory. As Sheeran said, with 60,000 new tracks being uploaded to Spotify every day, these similarities are inevitable:

https://twitter.com/edsheeran/status/1511631955238047751

The major labels are worried about this problem, too — but they are at a loss as to what to do about it. They are completely wedded to the idea that every part of music should be converted to property, so that they can expropriate it from creators and add it to their own bulging portfolios. Like a monkey trapped because it has reached through a hole into a hollow log to grab a banana that won’t fit back through the hole, the labels can’t bring themselves to let go.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/08/oh-why/#two-notes-and-running

That’s the curse of the monkey’s paw: the entertainment giants argued for everything to be converted to a tradeable exclusive right — and now the industry is being threatened by trolls and ML creeps who are bent on acquiring their own vast troves of pseudo-property.

There’s a better way. As NAVA president Tim Friedlander told Motherboard’s Joseph Cox, “NAVA is not anti-synthetic voices or anti-AI, we are pro voice actor. We want to ensure that voice actors are actively and equally involved in the evolution of our industry and don’t lose their agency or ability to be compensated fairly for their work and talent.”

This is as good a distillation of the true Luddite ethic as you could ask for. After all, the Luddites didn’t oppose textile automation: rather, they wanted a stake in its rollout and a fair share of its dividends:

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

Turning every part of the creative process into “IP” hasn’t made creators better off. All that’s it’s accomplished is to make it harder to create without taking terms from a giant corporation, whose terms inevitably include forcing you to trade all your IP away to them. That’s something that Spider Robinson prophesied in his Hugo-winning 1982 story, “Melancholy Elephants”:

http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html

This week (Feb 8–17), I’ll be in Australia, touring my book Chokepoint Capitalism with my co-author, Rebecca Giblin. We’re doing a remote event for NZ on Feb 13. Next are Melbourne (Feb 14), Sydney (Feb 15) and Canberra (Feb 16/17). I hope to see you!

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A poster for the 1933 movie ‘The Monkey’s Paw.’ The fainting ingenue has been replaced by the glaring red eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey.]

764 notes · View notes