confusion
“I think that our passions should ask more of us than just our money, and they should give us more than just pleasure.”
Phil Edwards in Disney Adults were all part of the plan [youtube.com]
Yea, that’s from a video about Disney Adults. I guess pearls of wisdom can come from anywhere; a pearl is an oyster’s reaction to an irritant. And we use it as jewelry.
After I finished writing this, when I went to create a featured image, I found that I already had one for RTJ4. Which means I already did a review. Apparently I did it over a year ago, but I failed to set the category to “Albums” when I posted it, so, I missed it when trying to decide what album to review. Since I spent significant time on this, and it’s interesting to see the evolution of my thought on the album, I’m keeping both, it’s my blog. You can read the other one here: RTJ4 [confusion.cc] and compare if you are so inclined.
I first became aware of Run the Jewels [wikipeida.org], or RTJ, as the MCs on the DJ Shadow song “Nobody Speak”. “Nobody Speak” is an amazing track and it has one of the best music videos ever! Go watch it now [youtube.com] if you’ve never seen it. After hearing “Nobody Speak” I went and found the RTJ back catalog. “Nobody Speak” was released a few months before RTJ’s third album in 2016.
So I was familiar with RTJ, and had songs from their first three albums in heavy rotation, when RTJ4 dropped in mid 2020. RTJ4 was released, a couple of days early, during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests triggered by the death of George Floyd [wikipedia.org], at the hands of the police because police brutality, especially against the black community in America is a major, in fact the major, theme of the album.
There is a lot of commentary on police brutality on the album. I’m going to refrain from turning this post into a discussion of the politics of Black Lives Matter, or Blue Lives Matter or De-fund the Police or whatever social media convenient slogan you may or may not personally agree with. But… I do want to talk about a few of the lyrics that hit hard, especially hard given the real world situation that the albums was released into.
First off, in the song “goonies vs E.T.” Mike delivers these lines:
Now I understand that woke folk be playin'
Ain't no revolution is televised and digitized
You've been hypnotized and Twitter-ized by silly guys
Cues to the evenin' news, make sure you ill-advised
Which references Gil Scott-Heron’s, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” [wikipeida.org]. By adding “digitized” and referencing Twitter I think this is encouraging people to channel their anger into action, not just posting on social media.
Mike comes back to this sentiment in the very next song, the most powerful song on the album, “walking in the snow”, when he raps:
And you sit there in the house on couch and watch it on TV
The most you give's a Twitter rant and call it a tragedy
But truly the travesty, you've been robbed of your empathy
Replaced it with apathy [...]
The most shocking thing about this particular verse by Mike is the lines that immediately proceed the bit on Twitter rants:
And every day on the evening news, they feed you fear for free
And you so numb, you watch the cops choke out a man like me
Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, "I can't breathe"
This album was dropped in the middle of the George Floyd Protests, protests sparked by the death of a man caused by a cop kneeling on his throat while he repeatedly said “I can’t breathe”. So how can Mike reference that so quickly?
He’s not.
It’s not George Floyd he’s quoting.
It’s Eric Garner [wikipeida.org] who was choked out by NYC police in 2014. While complaining I can’t breathe.
You can see why “Walking in the Snow” became such a big song during the protests. (as an aside: there are no Wikipedia articles on any of the individual songs on this album, for most albums I look at there are at least a couple of the more popular songs that have individual articles.)
Now, I want to go back to the line The most you give’s a Twitter rant and call it a tragedy
. And ignoring the irony, I want to use social media to back up Mike’s point that social media is the opiate of the masses and a false outlet for empathy and poor stand in for true action for change.
Hank Green once posted on Threads [threads.com]; “It would take a lot to convince me that the problem with America is that we’re not angry enough.” And another guy, Jason Pargin responded with a video on Facebook/Instagram [fb.watch] where he said something relevant here:
[…] With every strong emotion you can feel, there’s two versions of it and most people don’t recognize this.
There’s a fun version of the emotion and there’s a real version […]
[…] When he says the problem is not a lack of anger it sounds ridiculous because for some of you your social media feeds are nothing but outrage all the time.
But for 99.99% of us, it is not the kind of outrage that would motivate us to go attend a boring city council meeting every single week. That other kind of anger is the fun anger. It is its own reward. It is fun to sit around and imagine one day there being a revolution or imagining terrible things happening to the powerful people you hate. The system does not fear that kind of anger at all.
The system is terrified of the kind of anger that will motivate you to tolerate boredom and tedium. The kind of anger that motivates you to spend the rest of your life studying and becoming an expert and making yourself valuable in society so that you have power to effect change. The kind of anger that motivates you to sacrifice fun for discipline.
This is why Mike is talking about. That posting your outrage or support for action on social media will not help. That going out and working to affect change requires you to put down the phone and do something. To protest. To vote. To get involved.
The George Floyd Protests were action by a lot of people around the world. Unfortunately that action didn’t result in the right changes and it faded too quickly. Maybe it was the pandemic, maybe it was the feel good dopamine hit of watching people protest on social media. Maybe it was just defeatism in the face of a massive system and the backlash. Yes the fascist were defeated at the ballot box. But not for long. Four years on they stormed back, with a republican winning the presidential popular vote for the first time since I was in elementary school. And apathy is a big reason why, more eligible people didn’t vote than voted for any actual candidate, including Trump or Harris. So the pendulum seems to have swung firmly back in the other direction, towards apathy if we want to be generous, towards fascism and the politics of hate if we want to be realistic.
Anyway. I said I would not get too much into politics. So let me end this post now as every song I look at is filled with more politics. RTJ4 is a great album, like most great rap it’s highly contextual to its time and place. But it’s still relevant and hard hitting. One day, maybe the context will be lost on most listeners but it’s still fresh enough and, unfortunately, still relevant enough that it should leave an impression on you. If you haven’t heard it, take a listen.
On iTunes:
Or on Spotify:
“I’m very thankful that I get to blow stuff up with giant lasers for discoveries. And that’s my job, you know.”
Thomas White [unr.edu], in Physicists Blow Up Gold With Giant Lasers, Accidentally Disprove Renowned Physics Model [gizmodo.com], on Gizmodo.com
See also: Frigging Lasers Man [confusion.cc], AI Powered Tower Defense for my Kitchen [confusion.cc], Laser-Shaped Telescopic Glitter Clouds [confusion.cc], and Look at my Laser… pew pew! [confusion.cc].
I started drafting this post back in early March. I never finished it in part because that draft became a trip down memory lane. I spent way too much time recalling the various incarnations of The Internet I have used over the years. But, it’s also because I had a hard time putting into words how exactly I see AI as threatening the Web.
My original opening was about Google’s announcement of AI summaries. I said:
I think the marriage of Gen AI with search is the end of this incarnation of the Internet. The Internet, as it is in my head. That version of the internet has been fading for a while but it’s what I think of as “The Internet”. Though I don’ think it’s the best version of The Internet.
And then blah blah blah about the text based pre-web Internet, Mosaic and Netscape, AOL, IRC, blogs, and so on and so forth. So, this post sat unfinished for months. Then, this week I read this article in The Economist: To survive the AI age, the web needs a new business model [economist.com]. Maybe because they are focused on the economics of it, maybe because they are professional journalist, they have managed summarize the issue in a way that got me back to this post. Here is how they describe the threat:
As AI-powered search engines remove the need for people to trawl the web looking for sites with answers, they are stopping the flow of traffic to those pages. Those lost visitors mean lost money. The danger is that, as answer-engines take readers away, they are removing the incentive for content to be created. The technology that is opening up the web also threatens to kill it.
[…]
Human traffic—monetised with ads—is the economic fuel of much of the internet. A steady flow of traffic is also needed to build online communities. Wikipedia, whose visitor numbers have fallen by 8% in the past year by one measure, warns that AI summaries without attribution could deter people from contributing. Stack Overflow, a coding community whose traffic has more than halved, reports that fewer questions are being asked on its chat boards. Reddit, another giant forum, saw its share price fall by half earlier this year over concerns about bumpy search referrals.
The Economist, in To survive the AI age, the web needs a new business model [economist.com]
I’m not sure the death of the ad supported internet is a bad thing. In fact, I would not shed a tear over the end of the ‘everything is free! But just look at this ad real quick. And this ad. And these ones here…’ model. I remember how newspapers and magazines became more and more ads and less and less content as their business model died. Now it seems every site one The Internet is doing the same. Remember kids; if you aren’t paying for it, you are not the customer…).
On the other hand, I’m not sure an everything is paywalled because capitalism is a beast which cannot be satisfied Internet would be a very nice place either.
As the old model buckles, the web is changing. It is becoming less open, as formerly ad-funded content is hidden from bots, behind paywalls. Content firms are reaching people through channels other than search, from email newsletters to social media and in-person events. They are pushing into audio and video, which are harder for AI to summarise than text. Big brands are striking content-licensing deals with AI companies. Plenty of other transactions and lawsuits are going on. … Hundreds of millions of small sites—the internet’s collectively invaluable long tail—lack the clout to do this.
That paragraph sums up what I took like ten paragraphs to say while rambling about other versions of The Internet already lost. The multi-trillion dollar companies have already choked off most of the open, individual Internet. As AI drives the few remaining small-time creators off the open internet onto closed platforms and the everything else behind paywalls it’s going to be lonely place.
I still prefer the longer form of blogs to the short form videos of Instagram or Tik Tok, to the limited length text of X or Threads. But, most of the blogs I have followed over the past two decades have long been abandoned. Most are gone, 404’ed or domain squatted into un-being. Only accessible via the Wayback Machine. Some are still online but frozen in time. A few are still going, screening into the void.
I plan to continue. I’m just short of 25 years squatting here on Confusion.cc, navel gazing and ranting. I started this blog to keep in touch with people I knew in college while I, and other friends, were studying and traveling overseas. I not in contact with any of those people anymore. I doubt any of them ever read these posts, very few people do or ever have. I do post these to various social media sites (or apps these days), as that’s how most people consume the internet and maybe a few will read my rants. I don’t style myself a ‘content creator’ this is all just me sharing my thoughts and photography, and documenting my own journey: no ads included.
This week I dropped my oldest daughter off in Melbourne to start her adventures in higher education. She’s just about to turn 17, and she is starting a Foundation Year program. An intensive year that replaces the final couple of years of high school or A-Levels or whatever your local final pre-college schooling is. Assuming she passes, she will go straight into the University next year.
I hope she has a great time. I believe, and have always told my daughters, that they should “get away from home” for college. Because, I saw what a difference distance made to the experience. When I was at George Mason I had a couple of friends who were local, in the sense that their family was a commute away not a trip away. They could go home any night for dinner, laundry or to fix their parent’s computer issues. And they did.
This created a situation where they never really left home. Parent want to see their kids, and free laundry (done for you!) and home cooking are a powerful sirens call for college kids. But, in the end, this created a situation where people struggled to cut the umbilical cord, where it was easy to put off adulting a little longer. In the end this was suffocating. I had one friend that realised this, and he transferred to another school several hours away. It made a world of difference for him. So we all came the conclusion that if you are going to go to college, go. Go far. Go far enough that you can’t run home on a whim or in an emergency, you can’t stop by for dinner or spend the weekend in your bedroom at home. You have to grow up and deal with it all yourself.
Now, I’m watching my daughter put into practice this oft repeated pearl of parental wisdom, and it’s hard. In addition to being my daughter, for the past few years she has been a great friend. Countless morning sitting at our local Starbucks during Covid lockdowns. Sitting at home and watching so many movies: sharing the classics —Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Thing, Alien, even 2001: A Space Odyssey— and discovering new classics. Hours of playing BotW and TotK, and Hollow Knight.
Being able to be a parent and also being a friend has been amazing.
So it’s with a little sadness —and a few tears— and a whole lot of excitement and joy that I said “bye for now” to her today. I wish her good luck, the best of luck. I hope she has a wonderful adventure, makes lifelong friends and some new core memories. But I can’t wait until she comes home on breaks to visit and we can sit at Starbucks or watch a new movie. I’m counting the days till her first break.
If you listen real close, you can hear them
John Keating, in Dead Poets Society
whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen, you hear it? – Carpe – hear it? – Carpe, Carpe Diem, seize the day [Tori],
make your [life] extraordinary.