"When you deny the specialness of personhood, you elicit confused, inferior results from people. [But] computationalism, a philosophical framework that doesn't give people a special place, can be extremely useful in scientific speculations." #iamnotagadget
Lanier also says music in particular, but in other industries too, moving toward cloud/invisibility has reduced their ability to impact people and spread. Music's ubiquity and lack of interaction (we no longer choose songs, hit play, etc). #iamnotagadget
So rehashing generic culture is now all that mainstream has left to do, and minor cultures now have much less chance of breaking through and reshaping mainstream's nostalgic sequel culture. #iamnotagadget
I think this is because mainstream culture has splintered more than ever, enabled by the grouping power of the Internet; now smaller and smaller groups can be maintained b/c grouping cost is approaching zero.
Human experience is continually new and unique, so culture is not reflecting that. It is at some level not authentic. Effectively 3 generations of rap have come through, with no new genre to take over.
Everything is mashup/retro/nostalgia, and you couldn't meaningfully ID something now from something previous. The only new genre is really Electronica subgenres which are themselves massively rehashed and mixed up. #iamnotagadget
Argues that no identifiable major genre in music has developed since rap and pre 90s. Millenial generation isn't a generation, it's a paradigm shift. Everything since Internet. #iamnotagadget
"...one trusts in the crowd, in the big N, in the algorithms that remove the risks of creativity in ways too sophisticated for any mere person to understand." #iamnotagadget
"In the new order, there is no [presumption that a CEO, fund manager, studio head had special skill]...Without risk, there is no need for skill." The rich own the cloud and delay discovery of imperfect algorithms. #iamnotagadget
In 2007, Bear Stearns put out a report responding to investor concerns about user-generated content. It said, instead of playing the odds with major investment vehicles, play the odds of user content, which has economy of scale. #iamnotagadget
"There are so many layers of abstraction between the new kind of elite investor and actual events on the ground that the investor no longer has any concept of what is actually being done as a result of investments." #iamnotagadget
"None of us was ever able to give the dinosaurs any constructive advice about how to survive. And we miss them now more than we have been willing to admit." #iamnotagadget
Wow. I need to articulate why building an API with a community is fighting the midi lockin of mastodon, and how fitting to others' protocols is inherently dehumanizing, fitting people into software. Long tail.