July 2015

a friendly little note from my agent

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This arrived via email today from Bandcamp, where I've been digitally busking:

Over the next week or two, we're rolling out an important change here at Bandcamp. Rather than payments for digital transactions going from the fan directly to you, those payments will be processed by Bandcamp and then paid out to you within 24 hours (higher-value transactions may take a bit longer to arrive). Our revenue share is not changing, and you'll continue to receive payments via your PayPal account. There is no action necessary on your part.

We've officially moved from the "too good to be true" phase of Bandcamp (the buyer's funds went directly to the artist's pocket and the agent took its cut after a certain number of purchases) to the "you'll get paid, I promise, I just need to hang onto the money a little longer" phase.
Bandcamp's "about" page does still claim that:

We continue to work tirelessly to build an enduring service, one that treats artists fairly, puts them in control, and is integral to them building sustainable careers. This approach has earned us our most valuable asset: trust.

Will be watching for subtle changes in that wording in the coming months. In the meantime, will be looking into setting up a "store" on tommoody.us for music sales, so the artist doesn't have to wait to be paid by some Silicon Valley dreamer whose angels are getting anxious. If that's too much trouble will return to posting mp3 links, this time accompanied by a big ugly graphic that says MR. TIP JAR with a link to my email.

Crude Essence (new Bandcamp release)

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Am pleased to announce a new Bandcamp release titled Crude Essence.

Liner notes:

Noisy samples from field recordings, made in and out of the studio, are the heart of this release. Street voices, slamming gates, plastic bag dispensers at the deli, crackly vinyl "ghosts of the past," "sounds of the internet," old songs of mine cut up and granularized. Several voltage-controlled low res samplers were used. The songs are very short and structured. Strings also figure prominently -- synthesized and found.

Your support in the form of buying the LPs or songs is very encouraging, but all the material can be streamed. A cassette version is available!

[embedded player removed]

d-oh ex machina

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It wouldn't be surprising if the movie Ex Machina were funded by an industrial consortium seeking to "normalize" replacement of human labor. The movie's propaganda message is: AIs are coming, they'll look so good we'll want to sleep with them, and they'll outsmart us in the short run. Whoa, Nelly! Put down that Koolaid.™
The Uncanny Valley is still an obstacle to robot sex toys. Anything short of perfectly human (too-plastic skin, unusual joint movement, glassy eyes) looks freaky to the non-fetish majority. Ex Machina uses CGI sleight of hand to convince us the male characters are reacting to "hot" (skinny) fashion models. If that failed the film would fall apart in the first half hour.
There's no point in critiquing the movie's other implausibilities. It's film noir, meaning we watch helplessly as the patsy makes one blunder after another in a clockwork mechanism of predestined doom. Elements of the Stepford Wives, Terminator 3, etc.
So we look for other agendas this movie's cranking. Hollywood lifestyle (swanky modern home in picturesque wilderness); adolescent libido (disposable, elfin hotties that keep pushing those male gaze buttons); Silicon Valley as the new Rockefellers (bad guy invents a search engine called "Bluebook" -- note Bluebeard reference -- that 90% of the world uses); sadism as entertainment (women are chopped up but hey they're just robots). Watching it, you are subtly re-programmed to value the things it purports to be critiquing.

self-driving truck hypothetical

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Journalists are treating self-driving vehicles as a given and pundits are already chin-scratching about the social implications. Whoa, Nelly! Put down that Koolaid.™
Here's a hypothetical. Big Mack the Robot Truck is barreling down the Nevada freeway. Bubba the driver is curled up asleep behind the seats.
Several minutes before, a station wagon with a family of seven lost control on a soft shoulder, flipped over, and crashed in an arroyo several hundred yards from the highway. Everyone in the car was killed except a baby, who was thrown out the window, landed in a thicket of Johnson Grass, and is now crawling back towards the road.
If Bubba had been driving he might have spotted the smoke from the crash and gone into alert mode for possible freeway consequences up ahead. Big Mack's sensors note the plume of smoke but its response algorithms "disregard it" because it is well off the highway. Bubba might have recognized that little white smudge up ahead as a crawling human; Big Mack "disregards it" as blowing trash or a desert rodent that would cause no harm to the truck. Thus, braking procedures are not implemented and...
The grandparents of the deceased infant sue the driver, the manufacturer, and the trucking company. A jury, happy to punish a "mere robot" and driver dumb enough to trust one, awards $20 million in damages.
The parties hoping to profit from driverless vehicles will have to factor in the business costs of one or two "freak accidents" such as the above. Is it worth the ethical and PR risk? Or, they'll have to bribe legislators to pass laws limiting liability for robot vehicle accidents; again, risky if discovered, PR-wise.
Is the above scenario plausible? Are robotic detection-and-judgment algorithms "smart" enough to handle all crazy situations at or near the speed limit? So many articles of the "driverless cars are here" persuasion seem to assume so.