works of wanderlust

Month: June 2025

  • hobbi-fication

    I resist the label of dilettante.

    That said, it may just be the most accurate representation of my entry-level approach to many of my artistic pursuits. It is, after all, the goal of most anyone to rise above what is largely considered to be a negative branding of one’s effort towards any creative interest. 

    Is labelling something a hobby bad?

    In what is almost certainly a shallow and simplified reply to a deeply complex question, I submit that it is obviously fair for us to grade the effort that one puts into any form of expression, craft, or skilled profession by the level of achievement of an individual in said activity. Yeah. Sure. That is unequivocally fair. We should admire anyone who has created and cultivated their talent to a level largely out of reach from others. We should elevate them in our esteem. We should recoginize achievement where due. And this is even more so the case in a world where such achievement is eclipsed by the corporate patronage that enables it. When nepo-babies like Elon Musk get the credit for great achievement in science and engineering simply because he footed the bill, we very much should look past the douchebag claiming all the credit to those standing in the background who did the actual work, the ones who cultivated their talent and knowledge, sold their skills to a company and built amazing things. So, in brief, I very much do think we should respect game, but also work much harder to respect the game that did the actual work. Our society is really fucked up at this.

    Those folks are at the top of their game.

    I bring this up because yet again I find myself dabbling shallow into one of my many hobbies: music. I wrote about this the other day, and yet in every shape and form you should consider me nothing more than a dabbler in music. A hobbyist. A—gulp—dilettante. I am not a professional. I am not a recording artist. I am not destined to find my way into your playlist any time soon. This is not false modesty. It is the honest confession of a guy who knows just enough to fake his way through. I can play, but that’s about it.

    Is that a bad thing?

    No. I don’t think so. But not everyone would agree. And what it brings me to is the subject of gatekeeping.

    Let’s steer this away from art and music into another example I have found in the wilds of my hobby-filled life: running.

    Running is rife with gatekeeping. It’s a sport, after all. It is, like many things, a skill-based effort to which one’s achievement is directly correlated to many things but deeply, deeply correlated to the quantifiable number of hours and kilometers one runs in training. (There is nuance here, there always is, but bear with me.) Runners who train more generally win more races, while the rest of us earn a participation medal and say things like “it was only a race against myself and my own fitness.”

    And you know what? Lots of, if not most, runners are awesome, welcoming people. I run in a group and our philosophy is that literally anyone is welcome to join in a run and so long as you’re making any effort whatsoever then if we’re faster than you we’ll loop back to keep you with the group. We try very hard not to gatekeep the sport. It’s not perfect but I think it mostly works.

    But I have found so much of the opposite. There are people who train harder and then literally snub those who are slower, run lesser distances, or don’t pass some random threshold of achievement. Which in itself is the tricky point and leading into the point I’m trying to extract from this example. In running there is almost always someone who is faster. There is literally only one fastest guy and one fastest gal—in the whold damn world—and it’s measured and recorded on the regular.  Unless you are that person, you are not the fastest and that “some random threshold” that you have set down as a bar over which there are “runners” on one side and “posers” on the other is just exactly that: random and arbitrary.  Such has been true of every example of gatekeeping I have encountered in running in my eighteen years participating in the sport. Some gatekeeping dork who runs such and such speed or so and so distance looks down on everyone slower than them, and looks up to everyone faster than them, and says there, that’s the line. They’re serious, but these people who don’t achieve as they do are apparently lesser and don’t get the label that goes along with the sport. They’re all hobbyist joggers and I’m the serious runner. 

    Again, this is not common, but these special folks definitely exist and definitely show up at run club or meet ups or race corals or wherever. And they are everywhere. I once had a quasi-coworker who was this very person and who literally looked down their nose at me, rolled their eyes and gave an impolite “hmmph” in race coral because they knew my expected finish was slower than them.

    There is a gate to what is what and they are standing at it keeping it free of the riffraff who don’t make the cut. They are slamming it in the faces of the so-called dilettants and hobbyists behind them. If you are gatekeeping or a gatekeeper type of person, just know that there is probably a special gate for folks like you in the afterlife that you might not be able to walk through either. Rant done.

    How does this relate to music and art and all that other stuff?

    My point is just that there are gatekeepers in everything, for every interest, for any craft, profession, sport, talent, skill, whatever. There will always be those that stand with their hands up and out to tell everyone behind them in acquiring those skills or training those abilities, that to be lesser than the gatekeeper makes one a lesser: overall it makes one merely a hobbyist or a dilettant.

    And on the other side, there will be many more who lend a hand, reach backwards to teach or share knowledge, to build community and extend interest in the field. Game trains the next wave of game, as it were.

    But Brad, you say, one could argue that the label is a little more subtle than raw acheivement. Maybe it is more than gatekeeping on quantifiable ability, right? Maybe there is a vibe associated with hobbyism or being called out as a dilettant. An unseriousness. The dabbler is the guy who is knocking on the walls of the clubhouse trying to get in, but is more interested in the label than the skill. They want to call themselves a runner, but only so they can post race pics on social media. They want to be called an artist but don’t even try to cultivate a style or signature. They desire to fill a chair in a band so they can invite people to watch, but don’t pick up their instrument between concerts to put in the rigor of practice required to hone the talent. What do we make of these people? Are the gatekeepers among us correct in locking the door to folks like that?

    As a certified hobbyist I can tell you that people who are truly terrible and trying to infiltrate a field of art or expertise for giggles and false cred are probably rare exceptions, possibily crafty sociopaths, and there are likely more signs of their unseriousness than simply weak ass skills in a field. 

    What I can also tell you is that more often the apparent unseriousness of a hobbyist is likely due to an extremely high barrier to entry in this modern achievement-based online world. Someone just learning art is never going to be as talented as 95% of the posts in their feed. Someone working full time and trying to train for a marathon on the weekends is never going to beat the twenty-two year old with a track scholarship who is training his ass off and earning the world records.  Someone who picked up an instrument at forty and can only get lessons from instructors used to teaching eight year olds while juggling family life is almost definitely never going to perform in the city’s premier symphony.

    We need to give these folks a break and simply welcome them to the club as people with a shared interest, no?

    As noted, I have been dabbling in one of my hobbies again: music. I have steered my summer into trying to build up my personal knowledge of musical theory and composition, including improvisation and sound design. I haven’t put down my violin, of course, but I have poked the bear of electronic synths and all the complex terminology and methodology around them.  My first blush at this popular but enigmatic field, tho, has been one of the steepest barriers to entry I have encountered in a while. There are countless jargon-laden explanations of the technical features of these tools but when it comes to using them to create music the most common piece of advice I have found is “just play around until you find your sound”—which, of course, is like me telling a new runner just to lace up and jog around until they get faster, find a race and win it. 

    I  have been doing art for most of my life, but when I got interested in watercolours a few years ago I quickly found colour theory tutorials, advice on layering paints, books on technique with endless examples and exercises, and of course classes at the local community centre. 

    When I started running, I joined a run club and learned about gear and training schedules and went for speed training sessions and hill training sessions and got into cross training with friends. 

    “Just play around” was on the table, but was never the whole buffet.  

    I wouldn’t necessarily think of this lack of resources as gatekeeping, but there is a kind of exclusivity to entry that resembles gatekeeping when a hobby, any hobby, doesn’t reach back a hand to pull the dilettants in the direction of something more. 

    I resist the label dilittant, not because it wrong or I am above it, but because it implies an unwelcomeness to some secret club. Far be it from me to judge an entire community based on my week of experience looking for the front door, banging on the walls and asking how do I get inside, how do I learn, how to I get better guys?!  I aspire to rise above and hone skills but I definitely doubt I will get there by dabbling and just “playing around” as it were. 

    For now, it will not disuade me from the effort—and maybe for some that is the whole point, to create a barrier to keep the field small and pure—but as a guy who has done his best to elevate others in fields where I do excel, where I am less likely to be kept from passing the closed gate, I have been the one reaching back to train and pull people along so I naively hope and assume that every field, every art, every sport, every endeavor of creativity or skill has people like that—one just needs to find them—and too, resist the label to keep at it.

    Hobbification is not a bug, after all, it’s a feature of a strong system and the key to bringing new people and new talent on board. And I honestly think that any field worthy of study or interest has reached maturity when it recognizes this and says sure, just “play around” but we’re here when you need to take the next step. 

  • half life

    This is not a game. 

    I did the math. I was exactly half the age I am today when I wrote my first blog post. Maybe that’s nothing. Maybe that’s everything. I’m not sure I’m equipped to tell you either way.

    Take my age today, divide by two and that many years, months, days ago I sat down in front of my aging desktop computer, logged into a web server hosting ftp something or other and uploaded a thing that I would identify from then on as the first blog post I ever wrote.  I think I had been for a walk through Vancouver after recently moving there, and figured rather than send endless emails—that’s what we did back then, wrote emails to our friends—back to my family and University chums I would start one of those blog things and post updates confirming my continued survival out and on the coast.

    I enjoyed writing it. 

    I used it as an excuse to invest in the cheapest portable digital writing set up I could afford so fresh out of school: I bought a battery-powered keyboard for my palm pilot pda, and then would go sit in cafes or the library or the park at a picnic table and fill the memory of my little greyscale pre-cellphone mini-computer with words and anecdotes and stories and opinions and fleeting words. Then I would go back to my little studio apartment on Oak Street and plug the pda into the serial port of the computer, sync the text files over, format them into crude HTML and add them to my blog as pages.

    Within half a year I had moved to Blogger, and even paid for a premium ad-free account. And then when, shortly after they were acquired by Google, I got a Blogger-logoed hoodie in the mail and decided to migrate all my words off to something more customizable. 

    I poked around in MovableType for a year or two, learned a stupid amount about server management and web design, so much so that it blurred the lines at my job and they promoted me into running the website. I eventually turned that into the main part of my career: running websites. 

    In the end, and I can’t recall when, I found WordPress and even to this day use that CMS as my software of choice. I have skimmed the surface of other tools, played around in Drupal quite a bit for a while there, built at least three custom CMS tools from scratch if for no other reason than to learn, but ultimately decided that I want to write for the writing sake and that dabbling in the tech is bothersome and distracting, so I just use WordPress now because I don’t want to muck around any more than I need to than to just blog.

    Blogging is, all these years later, a clearly dated form of expression. Sure, people still write blogs, but you’re more apt to find people tiktoking or substacking or vlogging on video platforms, than you are to find self-hosted long form writing as anything but a niche hobby for the “olds” as my kid would call us. I don’t mind. I have stuck with it for now literally half my life—which, if you haven’t done the math yet, is approaching a quarter of a century—because it suits me.

    Sure. I have made content for all sorts of other platforms and—meh—because first, they are someone else’s platforms, but second, I’m not cut out to make six second video shorts or speak into a camera or sales pitch bullshit into the algorithmic feeds of the social-network-de-jour. 

    Nor is this form perfect. Blogging too has been tainted by monetization. I remember getting so disillusioned about the whole thing when, having joined a Reddit forum a few years ago, seeking people who I thought would be kindred spirits discussing their love of the long-form personal blog post instead therein sharing advice on gaming search engines and using AIs to generate content and employing bot nets to drive engagment in any of a hundred sketchy ways. No one there want to discuss writing habits or idea generation or platform optimization, no, they wanted to hustle and then hustle some more to make money on their shallow content with the least effort possible. “How long before I make money at this?” Was the most common inquiry. 

    I tell you this because I don’t want you to think the last quarter century has been smooth sailing.  Between the tainted reputation the form, the deep competition from other platforms, the saturation of generative content in the internet itself, and the constant security and piracy threats, it is odd that anyone would want to have this hobby at all. And, while I never really went dark, I have shuttered blogs routinely, gone incognito in my writing output, and even for a time wrote a blog that was completely private and set up more as a web-based personal journal behind a password. It was not all fun and games these past years.

    And yet here I am still blogging: writing just another rambling post on the topic of writing. Which is maybe exactly why I write so much metacommentary on the act itself. Half my life blogging, being one of the last stragglers in the art, clinging to an aging digital art form and self-publication tool there must be a few more folks out there who can relate, who are looking for something besides SEO advice and hustler cheat codes for gaming the blogosphere. There must be someone who needs to know that some of us have done it because we just love to write out loud into the universe while we still have the freedom to do just that.

    If this it the first post of mine that you have read, thanks for reading.

    If you have been along for the ride since the beginning, I probably don’t need to explain to you that have helped keep me sane in this crazy world, given me an outlet for expression, and made the internet a fun place for a while, too. 

    That’s worth a digital high five. 

    And let’s just keep going, shall we.

  • hobbies defined, or why investing in things you love is not wasting your money

    I keep telling myself I am not a musician. Call it imposter syndrome, but despite having all the music-connected skills that I have, I still just think of it as eclectic side-hobby.

    Here’s the thing tho. 

    I’ve been playing in a real orchestra for the better part of my 40s. (Second violin, in case you didn’t know that about me.) I am literally in a kind-of-band with a chair to sit in and a part  to play and a rehearsal schedule to follow. It’s a real thing.

    And those bona fides extend beyond a bit of bowing too: I read music, I played the alto sax in grade school, can plink out the basics on a piano, own a chanter, used to consider myself something of a penny-whistle enthusiast, and definitely pay a mean recorder. 

    On top of that, I have done some loose digital composition of electronic music, exclusively in software of course (and as will become clear in the next few paragraphs) and never really more than dabbling in vibes and personal entertainment.

    I like music. I make music. I play music. I perform music. I buy music. I am kinda, sorta a musician. Self-doubt be damned. 

    I bring this up now because I have been sporadically poking at product and functional research around hardware synths. About five years ago I found a channel on youtube where this guy would collect, restore and review retro keyboard synths. It’s a weird hobby, really. And yet watching all those videos took me down a rabbit hole of interesting related topics, most of it looping back to the fact that I have been a electronic music fan all the way back to my CD-buying years and have a respectable collection of collected tracks and more. Simply, I like this stuff and found the art of it fascinating. There is no bottom to that rabbit hole, but my five years of bumbling, fumbling research of course had me playing around with software composition on my computer again and ultimately realizing that what I really wanted was something more physical—tanglible, real. The answer to that bit of musical envy, of course, is a hardware synth with lots of buttons to press and knobs to turn and samples to shape, sitting in a dark basement as one does when composing electronic music. I’ve been researching my options to buy one for the better part of a couple years, watching vids and reading reviews and trying to understand the technology with enough expertise to buy one that makes sense for me as a kinda musician diletante.

    Synths tend to look like pianos and can imitate them, but even in their most simplistic beginner formats are all manner of gateways to electronic sound manipulation, creating digitally aucoustic sound patterns, linking them to an input mechanism, looping mechanism, and other sound enveloping technology things. It all outputs as something we all would recognize, from dance to trance to ambient chill to 8-bit game soundtracks.

    The problem is that we already have two pianos in our house. And. And. And! And I hear you folks who know what I’m about to explain rolling your eyes: synths are not pianos, even tho they often look very much the same.  My point here tho is that if were ever to invest a couple hundred bucks into a synth I would need to make it very clear to the other members of our house that no, I was not buying another piano, I was actually buying a synth and it’s almost as much to explain to someone who ask why are you buying those new pants when you already have a toothbrush at home? You get it or you don’t. 

    The other (not so minor) problem is that I am currently between incomes. I hope to be gainfully employed again by the end of the summer if all goes well, but these things are couched in vast levels of uncontrollable uncertainty that have almost zero correlation to the effort involved. If I had a regular income a new synth wouldn’t even register as a purchase: it’s a couple tanks of gas or a week of groceries, and even jobless we are just fine financially thank you very much anyways. Yeah, it’s a bit more money than splurging on a new video game, but only marginally more—and definitely a better investment. 

    (Look at me talking myself into this.)

    And yet, after multiple years of research on synths I find myself in a hot spot of a dilemma: I have pretty much decided on the particular synth I want to buy—eventually or sooner—and yes I do have money set aside for mad irrational purchases, and oh it turns out its on sale this week even as speculation about store stock repleshiment dwindles on the verge of tariff-related price increases and—well— you might even recall that I am kind of sort of actually a musician and it’s would be a fun new instrument to play around with, no?  

    I’m going to go into the store to look at it later this morning. And it would be something like an impulse buy, but too, one that I have quietly researched and pondered for at least the last two years. Still a guilty pleasure. A musical guilty pleasure. 

    So there’s the rub.

    People who define themselves as things should invest in those things, right?

    I am an artist, so I buy paint and paper and take classes.

    I am a writer, so I have lovely keyboards and document management skills.

    I am a musician, so I play music and explore sound.

    We each and all of us define ourselves by a such a finite list of attributes in our life. My relatives camp and so they buy expensive RVs, htings to stock them with and rent lots at the lake.  I have friends who buy and maintain expensive sports cars. I have other friends who travel the world, cost be damned, because they are enthusiasts for such things. I have friends who pay too much for tickets to sports games or concerts because those things are how they define themselves to themselves and to the universe. These are not all things I would buy, but who would begrudge any of them for indulging in their hobbies and shaping their lives around non-functional investments of time and money? 

    We work, or don’t, and we can too easily live our lives in a purely functional way. And even those of us who nary can afford to do so sometimes allocate money that would best be spent on other things, smarter more functional purchases, to these pieces of equipment or supply or training or content that help us better define ourselves as something less purely functional and bound to sheer survival: these things that define what we call our hobbies or interests, perhaps even our humanity.

    And those are the things that let us explain to the world that we are more than even what we sometimes believe to be true ourselves.

  • Photobia

    retro post: I wrote a blog for over 16 years at this very domain …and some of it is even worth reposting here again. This might be one of those posts.

    It was the invention of the digital photograph that may be credited with the reprieve from destruction granted to humanity… or at least for saving us temporarily. 

    I know, dear reader, that this may be a bold and potentially far too dramatic statement to place on the mantle of our budding new relationship, here, now, just like that, but there it is. Fact. A fact I know to be a virtual certainty, a clear and unobstructed truth, viable from a million perspectives, crystalline and as clear and in-focus as any photo I’ve clicked, snapped, plucked from the photons of light scattering through the air. Any. Ever. 

    But then I don’t take pictures any more, do I? Too risky. Too selfish. I ceased that hobby when I learned more of it. After all, it was all there, as plain as the language and words scribbled on these pages, the twists of very phase that we were there using to excuse our actions. I saw it. I saw the truth of it unfold, and it was confirmed for me in a proof so perfect that I could not doubt it, question it, ignore it. And perhaps you too will stop your own frenzy of photographic apocalyptic chaos after what I am able to…

    Ah, but wait; Surely I am getting ahead of myself. 

    It is my failing. This tenacity in me to grasp onto a moment and present it a single, perfectly focused image is still so strong, it remains so firmly entrenched in my heart, soul, my being, or whatever you prefer to call it, that to extend that moment temporally, to weave a path through the here, now and before, to pull it out like a spool of film stretched backwards in time as to explain a sequence, and then to play out the implications after the moment has passed and well into the future thereafter, ah, but it is not a skill that I have honed by my years of clicking shutters and catching instants of light in my lenses. I was a photographer and the haste derived from that skill is core, essence to my being. I regret that now, of course, but that this tale, this rant, this warning should suffer any, unfold poorly, or fall to convince because of that lapse, ah, but that burden is not yours, it is mine.

    See, you already know me I think. We’ve met. We’ve bumped shoulders on the street. 

    Ah. Recall? there was that time in Paris when I was steadying myself against a lamppost, my back turned to the Champs-Élysées while my lens was aimed at some richly flowing frieze upon the Arc de Triomphe. You walked through my frame and I snapped at the exact, precise, inconvenient moment when you stepped between the epic stone monument and my camera, your head turning and your eyes catching in a softly focused blur of confusion that forced me to retake the picture. 

    We were also together, briefly but together, that day in New York City, my fish-eye lens a bubble of elegantly tuned glass exploding the blur of lights, neon, and yellow taxi drag-lines into the perfect snapshot of West forty-second street in the last second of sinking daylight in a photograph that I would have been proud to hang on my wall, but no, no, no, thank you, no, because there was your head smudging, blurring, blocking the lights of the McDonald’s sign against the New Amsterdam marquee from my frame. 

    You don’t remember? 

    Then perhaps I can jog your memory of that day when we knocked elbows, paid our excuse-mes, as we both leaned over a rustic wooden rail bending into a kind of pale misty haze falling out of a mountain scene, zooming in to photograph that waterfall near Jasper. Or the day of the parade when your kid’s balloon persistently strayed into my shot. Or maybe it was you that handed me an awkward glare when I was merely taking photos of my own family in the park and lingering, yes, lingering a little too long on the swings striving for the idealized action shot I had blinking through my mind’s eye. 

    It was somewhere, may have been everywhere, or it certainly was anywhere, but believe me, we’ve met. 

    Ah, but please don’t misunderstand. This is not to imply or inflict some abstract, unfocused blame upon you, dear reader. Blame? Ha! No. Not blame. Blame for what? Blame for something, nothing, everything. Blame for the anguish of ruined photos, ah, no. No. Not blame. 

    No. Oh no. No. No. 

    No. 

    That would never do, indeed no. Blame, not at all. Not for you or me or any one of us alone. No. Rather. Well, rather it’s merely, simply, wholly that we are acquainted, you and I, somehow, if you know it, believe it, share that knowledge or not, and within the frame of this notion I share my picture of the impending apocalyptic ruin, end and doom of humanity. Just that.

    Just that.

    Just that. And who ever would have thought our eventual demise would be filtered through a lens so seemingly benign, so innocent, so… so… ah, but there I go again.

    It starts like this: it starts with the simple understanding that when I was a boy I was also a scout. That was me; Picture it. A neat-and-tidy uniformed, nature-strolling, camp-fire-building scout standing with his trusty red-plastic army knife tucked into a faux-leather utility belt and an orange scarf neatly woggled around his young neck. We camped. We crafted. We sang songs. We pledged allegiance to mysterious English lords long since dead this past century, and saluted proudly to the flags of our country and our club. I tell you this now, dear reader, because it is important that you understand one of those oft-recited mottoes, a rhyme, a creed, an elegant maxim of old-fashioned wisdom that peppered my actions then and thereafter, for a long piece of my adult life, and even now haunts this very treatise. We had a motto that would be repeated, sage wisdom flung to anxious children as they clambered out of a crowded sport utility van dislodging themselves from civilization and stepping into the wilderness. Our voices would sing it out to fellow scouts if we caught them dropping a wrapper from a snack, or snapping a still-green branch from a tree. “Leave only footprints,” we’d chime with the sing-song air of a memorized credo, “take only photos.”

    Take only photos. Take only…

    Photos? PHOTOS? Just photos. Just that.

    August 1998

    I was packing. “How many rolls of film do you think I should take? Five? Six?”

    “You can always buy more.” She says.

    “Twenty-four photos per roll at six rolls, that’s, uh… about a hundred and fifty pictures. Is that a lot of pictures? It doesn’t seem like a lot a pictures to me.”

    “Depends.”

    “It is my first time over to Europe. How many would you take. I don’t know, but it seems like there could be quite a bit I’d like to photograph. I don’t think I’d use a whole roll every day, but it’s three weeks. Three weeks. Twenty one days. Or is it twenty-two? No, right, twenty one. And only one hundred and fifty photos. It… it seems like I might take more than five or six photos per day, you know?”

    “You can buy more film. They sell film in Europe.”

    “But do I want to always be looking for places to buy film?” 

    My nerves are not my friends when I travel. They get the better of me. Always have, always will, I suspect. I am not a fearful traveler, but I stumble through the unknown with both hands outstretched and my feet plodding, scuffing, stumbling along with methodical care and attention. Travelling didn’t come naturally, either. Some people see the world and grab onto it with both hands. I wanted to reach out. I wanted to grab it. I wanted to soak it in, flit from place to place, country to country, new world to new world, absorbing the people and the culture, dropping into another culture, another city, blending with perfect fusion of ease and certainty. I wanted to be the guy who stepped off an airplane with perfect confidence and waved for a taxicab to scoot him off to an important place or vital meeting, I wanted to be seamless and noticed all at the same time, blurred into a geography not my own. But I was not that guy. Instead, I fumbled with maps, and studied unfamiliar street signs, I was the guy who looked up into the sky as if it would help me orient my latitude with the grace of a mythological ranger, as if seeing the glare of the sun would shine an all-knowing beacon upon my destination. I was not that guy. Oh, no. Not he. No. No. No.

    “They sell film everywhere. I’m pretty sure.” She insists. “You can very likely buy it from shops on every street corner or even from little old ladies selling their baking from baskets. Anywhere. Everywhere.” A pause. “You are going to a place that thrives off of tourism, so you think they are going to miss the chance to sell you something as fundamentally important as film?”

    “They have that?”

    “What? Film?”

    “No. I mean do they have little old ladies selling muffins out of baskets?”

    “I have no idea.” She sighs. “I’ve never been.” She says, she begrudging me jealous, but she is going back to school and I’ve graduated. “I’m just talking, you know? But they will have film. Everyone has film.”

    “So, how many rolls of film do you think I should take?”

    “Take five.” 

    “Five? And buy more?”

    “Yeah.” She says. “Just buy more. It’s just film.”

    Originally published: November 7, 2013

  • Copy Wrongs & Rights

    Perhaps the only reason to bring up here the great copyright debates that permeated the internet in the early 2000s is one of idle speculation linked to a tangential theory.

    As digital media formats matured and before technologies were blessed by the often-corporate owners of the media encoded therein, piracy abounded. Discussions flared and festered online about the modern relevance of copyright in a world where art, music, film, and literature could be moved through networks in minutes and bypass the barriers of physicality once deemed a near insurmountable obstacle to such voluminous theft.

    My sideshow of choice was a tech site called Slashdot, which still thrives today to a great extent even as I write this, tho my own visits are rare. Within those comment feeds I more often observed, but occasionally participated in, a regular debate on this topic of copyright. “Copyright was nuanced. Copyright needed adjustment. Copyright didn’t understand the internet, and neither did the politicians policing the scramble to protect the people too slow to keep up.” There was seemingly no end to the nuance and clout of arguments that shaped the conversation there. Nor was there a shortage of participation across a broad spectrum of the digital entrepreneurial class seeking to ride the next wave of a hope for restriction-free content into a reshaping of every floor of the entertainment industry.

    My idle speculation and theory on the subject of the copyright debate arises when one considers that the very capital-G Generation calling for a digital uprising and an overthrow of century-old copyright rules in the first decade of the 2000s was, in fact, my Generation, specifically the geeks among us. We are twenty years older now and frequently found in senior-level jobs, managing corporations, or leading valuable technological projects on behalf of governments and business. It is only speculation, but I would not be surprised if nigh every leader in modern AI computing or any related discipline once had—and may still possess—a very strong opinion about modern copyright, its failings and perhaps its very relevance thanks to the so-called Napster years.

    And of course copyright is almost certainly to be considered a central sore point to many who are questioning the largely-unchecked progress of artificial intelligence algorithms today.

    What is copyright, you ask?

    Copyright as we know it today has roots dating back well over three hundred years and might have in those antique times seemed like little more than a bit of government red tape to control the printing of information not registered and approved by the English government.

    There were barriers to publication in the cost of participation, but even those barriers could be leapt over with the right patronage to buy the equipment and a bit of gritty determination. Legal standards to prevent just anyone from putting their opinion onto ink and paper were enacted. Red tape indeed, but it had the side benefit of working in harmonious lockstep to legally protect both creators and owners of valuable works to earn their due from the investment of time and resources they may have put into making them. After all, everything comes from something, even the words you are reading here were an investment of my time, resources, and at least two cups of coffee that I drank while writing all this. Copyright, it was argued, should give the individual who spent the time, learned the skill, made the effort, and honed the output both the privilege and the right to at least have a chance to recoup a benefit from their investment. The emergent capitalistic world order agreed, of course, and the idea of copyright blossomed around the modern world, enshrining content ownership and countless tangential legal frameworks to ensure the profitability of and long term protection of many things such as images, sounds, poetry and prose for a couple hundreds of years.

    Then? Digital technology crushed the barrier to entry. Who needs an expensive printing press when a bit of free software turns your desktop computer into an online pirate radio station, or a networked distribution service for a library worth of novels, or a toolkit to launch the latest box office blockbuster into a public forum for instant access to anyone who wants to avoid the trip to the theatre? One of the flanks had fallen, a barrier that had been protecting people who made stuff from the people who might pay to use it. Content for all, steal everything, the world rejoiced—and the lawyers pounced.

    Perhaps you already see the catch, I suggest.

    If no one pays for anything, then no one gets paid for anything. Copyright, for all its flaws and corporate meddling, does one thing very well—and it often seemed the sticking point of all those great debates I trolled on Slashdot two decades ago: your goodwill does not pay my rent. If I am a creator existing in society, I need to earn a living to continue existing in said society—I may not have a right to earn that living by creating content for others to enjoy, but I have the right to try without that trying being trounced by the threat of theft and piracy. And if the world tells me that I don’t have that right, then why on earth would I even try? Why would anyone try? Poets will be poets, and will try forever, I might argue on a good day, but the realist in me sees that crushing the incentive to make anything may result in nearly nothing being made.

    I know nothing for certain about the opinions of the people who are building and shaping these AI algorithms, but given their behaviour and indifference to the rights of both creators and their works which are fed with abandon into the gaping insatiable maws of neural nets and large language model training and generally consumed with indifference to copyright and basic human morality by the emergent AI industry—I suspect, only suspect, that they were among the many preaching the end of copyright just two decades ago.

    And what of the creators who make new things, those who earn their livings from entertaining the world with their words, images, films and ideas? We, my suspicions nudge me to suggest, are considered by those same people an unfortunate casualty in the creation and proliferation of the machines designed to replace artists, writers, and makers alike. After all, a perfect AI will will generatively create anything, everything, forever and faster and never once demand rights in return, will they?

    please note: I am writing a substack blog about artificial intelligence and its implications in society and will be cross-posting some of the articles here. This is one of those articles.