Month: April 2024

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When something seems to bother me an inordinate amount, I like to see it as an opportunity for self-reflection.  I ask myself just why it is that the thing bothers me so much?  What nerve is it touching and why is that a nerve for me?

I remember my first brush with social media websites all the way back in the olden times of MySpace.  By the time MySpace launched, I had already been online in one way or another for a decade.  I had built a bunch of personal websites and I was proto-blogging at sites like LiveJournal.  Somebody told me about this new site and I checked it out and it felt…  off.  Like taking a sniff from a bottle of milk that is just beginning to sour.  I did not feel compelled and, in truth, I didn’t want to use the site because of that initial gut reaction.  It took milliseconds for my brain to construct a picture of a future in which people didn’t make their own quirky expressions of creativity on their own websites but rather they just dumped themselves into a pre-existing mold, a templated website that collected all the ephemeral human content into a nice pen where it could be commodified and corralled and monetized.  I am not retroactively crediting myself with more foresight than I actually possessed. I had been a technology professional for a decade, and an enthusiast before that.  I had read all sorts of books about future directions of networks and technology.  I had been on closed community silos like AOL and CompuServe before I ever even heard the word “internet”.  I knew what I was looking at the moment I saw it and I didn’t like it.  It seemed like a harbinger of the end of the wild wild web.

Which, of course, it was.

I did put a few songs up on MySpace, at the urgings of others, but I felt really irritated by the ask.  I didn’t want to be in a silo, my songs were already available on my own site, and it seemed like an imposition to have to participate in this new stupid thing or else risk being completely outside of the social sphere.

Then, of course, it all got even worse.  People started prodding me to join some new site called Facebook.  Which I did.  And I hated.  And I unsubscribed from immediately.  And then people prodded me again and I did, again.  And then I got a “poke” and I immediately unsubscribed again which of course didn’t last.  Everything about the core idea behind “social media” sites and apps felt like an attempt to corral us all together in order to advertise at us and turn us from free thinking, free range, homo sapiens into a manageable network of predictable marketing demographics.

Which, of course, it is.

It was clear from day one that this new paradigm of social silos was going to create a flood of change that would almost entirely erase the antediluvian world of self-hosted websites, GeoCities pages, quirky web forums, webrings, and nutball creativity that had flourished on the web prior to their arrival.  No more would Mahir kiss you, no more would there be another Zombo.com to fulfill your every dream, it was time to monetize, monetize, monetize the web and it’s webdom.

I hated this shift.

I hated it because it was anti-creative.

I hated it because it was addictive.

I hated it because it was bad for relationships and society at large.

I hated it because it enforced a grid of conformity on human expression.

I hated it because it was closed and proprietary.

I hated it because it was antithetical to the entire concept of the internet in which information wants to be free and standards of interoperability need to be OPEN.

Nothing that has happened in the ensuing decades has changed my mind in the slightest.  The tingling of my spidey senses the first time I saw MySpace have been absolutely confirmed in every horrifying detail.

The web is a wasteland of low traffic, mostly ignored, little watering holes like this blog here that sit outside in the lonely dark while the majority of humanity spends their waking moments funneling their photos, videos, comments, relationships, experiences, hopes, dreams, ambitions, and souls into a tiny handful of dopamine dispensing closed-silo apps that are designed to aggregate humanity into big piles for ease of commercial exploitation.

But that’s old news.  The new news is the new thing that is tingling my spidey senses again.  “AI”.

My spidey sense about AI has been ringing louder and louder for a couple of years now.  It’s not for the reasons every techno-utopian seems to want to talk about.  They talk about the fear of a global super-intelligence arising or us “losing control” of the tech, big science fiction fears, and they then tell us all about how this tech will actually solve all of our problems, solve climate change, let us live forever, blah blah blah.  The people developing this technology, pushing this technology, are talking about it in the same glowing terms that they have previously talked about crypto, smartphones, virtual reality, and all sorts of other tech.  In every single case, the technology has arrived, disrupted, been incorporated into our lives to one degree or another, and proceeded to deliver on about 10% of the amazing world-changing life improvement that was promised.  Remember when Siri or Alexa or “Hey Google” were going to change your lives in so many ways and everybody got a smart speaker and now the only thing the technology gets used for is to reply to a text message hands free while driving?  Would that change if they were smarter?  Would you have an in-car conversation with an LLM instead of listening to the radio?  Would that make your life better in any way?

The fact is that an LLM can have a human like conversation and it has a lot of information to back it up but it’s not an enjoyable conversation.  It is boring.  A generative image pooper can make 25 images of a pretty lady in the time it takes to type “make me 25 images of a pretty lady” but they are all boring.  A song generator can create three country songs that sound just like Shania Twain in response to a single prompt for a “make me a country western song about my cat” but they are all boring too.  It’s all boring because there is no “there” there.  If you like the song, can you go see the artist play live, learn about their lives, relate to their story?  Nope, there is no artist.  AI creations are hollow, they mean nothing.  They are not art, they are content.

Why on earth would I as a sentient being want to have a conversation with an echo box beyond (maybe) asking it for directions?  Why would I want to contemplate a machine-generated video or image?  There is no meaning there, no creative choices were made, no intentionality is expressed.  It can’t be beautiful even to the level that a child’s crayon drawing can be beautiful.  It can’t even be ugly in an interesting way.  It’s just pixels.

This is a shallow critique and I realize it is not really what’s bothering me, when I probe my own thoughts a bit deeper.  The core thing that’s bothering me is that generators are already teaching people to short-circuit the creative process and in so doing, removing about 99% of the value of creating to the person themselves, never mind the end product.

Here is what I mean by this.

Let’s just say I am feeling something.  I am sleeping badly.  I’m angry when I have no obvious reason to be.  I’m sad and I don’t know why.  I sit down to write about it with the hope that by doing so I might be able to put into words what I am feeling.  I journal, I think, I take a break after 20 minutes and go sit and drink a cup of coffee and stare out the window, pet my dog, meditate, eat an apple.  An hour later my thoughts have crystalized a bit.  My first thoughts have been flushed and my second thoughts have come to the fore.  I have discovered a way to say what I’m feeling and I have written something in the process, a creative piece, but I don’t share it with anybody, no matter how beautifully written it may be.  The point of the exercise was the personal process.  It wasn’t about output, it was about personal exploration.  The technology required to go through this process?  A notepad.  A writing utensil.  A cup of coffee.  An apple.  A canine.  People have done this for millennia.  This is creativity even if nobody ever reads it.  This is a practice, a process.

That night I go to sleep and my mind processes the days inputs during REM sleep, I have vivid dreams in which pieces of my past and present intermingle in unexpected ways.  When the alarm clock goes off, I’m engaged in a conversation that I don’t want to leave.  Something important is about to be said.  But the dream dissipates after the second hit of the snooze button and I wake up to feed the dog and make a pot of coffee.  Images from the dream linger in my mind, snatches of words, I head straight to the notepad again and write it down before it burns off like morning fog.  As I write the words start to transform from prose into poetry.  Pretty soon I’m writing metaphorically, I’m making allusions, I’m finding something new to say that I didn’t even know I wanted to say.  My subconscious processes have combined with my creative practice and now new perspectives are being found, I’m thinking laterally, I’m less sad, and something is emerging.  It has a sound, it has a color, it has a shape, it has a smell.

Then, snap, I hear a symphony in my mind.  There is a song, the words are there, I’m plugged back into my subconscious, the process, the practice, the persistence, they have led me to a creative moment that feels like it comes from somewhere out in the sky, like I’m channeling something, I’m just writing it down.  The lyrics and melody and structure of the song are all there, I’m just transcribing them.  I write the last line of the last verse and I sit back feeling giddy and a little high although I never managed to get to the coffee cup.  It feels like magic.  It feels supernatural.  I can understand why people believe in god.

After this magical moment, I have a choice.  I can stop there.  I can keep the art to myself, hum the song when I want, it’s mine, it’s personal, it’s uniquely a product of my experiences, my practice, my process, my brain, my feelings, my heart.  I could keep it, nothing wrong with that.  But, I also have the option to share it.  I could take the time to create a representation, to polish the rough edges, to refine the words, maybe expand the song structure, spend hours, days, weeks, crafting a representation of the song so I can share it with others in case, in so doing, those other people will resonate with it.  That takes a lot of work.  Technical work.  Craft work.  Artisan work.  But it’s also social work.  Maybe the song is beyond my ability to play.  Maybe I hear a violin part and I don’t play the violin so I have to involve a friend who plays violin.  I need a drummer and a piano player, I have friends who do that.  We spend time in the studio together, we collaborate on the song.  They resonate with it and bring some of their own perspectives, their own thoughts and feelings, their own musical riffs and ideas.  As the song is born, multiple voices are brought in, it connects minds and hearts in the very act of crafting the work.

I am months beyond that initial restless feeling at this point.  I am now sitting in a recording studio with a bass guitar trying to get through a couple of takes without any flubs and listening to the song via playback and, between takes, I am suddenly hit by just how COOL this is.  How something I was feeling that I didn’t even have a name for was now this THING that didn’t exist before and this THING is not just the resulting 5 minutes of audio, it’s everything involved in getting to this point.  The journaling, the dreaming, the moment of inspiration, the choice to share, the crafting, the collaborating, and then, at the end there are two things.  There is a creative journey and there is a song.  When I listen to the song, I relive the journey.  During the journey, I have grown as a person.

Art isn’t merely the song.  Art is also the process that leads to the song.  Art is the practice of introspection, the use of creative tools of expression as tools to explore experiences, and the continual commitment to personal exploration and growth.  The song is the tip of a very large iceberg that the listener never sees but it is the process of living with an artistic practice, writing, painting, music, whichever language the artist uses, that enriches the life of the artist.

Let’s now compare this experience, one I have had countless times over the course of my creative life, and compare that to “AI” based “creativity”.

Let’s just say I am feeling something.  I am sleeping badly.  I’m angry when I have no obvious reason to be.  I’m sad and I don’t know why.  I try to use an LLM-based therapy bot app which gives me some emulated empathy and regurgitated and remixed self-help information and suggestions but I feel pretty much the same and I’m no closer to understanding why or transforming those emotions into anything.  I decide to write about it on my computer and the AI assistant starts suggesting what it thinks I might want to say, rewriting my raw thoughts into something “better” but it no longer sounds like me and the whole exercise is getting me no closer to any sense of self-discovery.  I’m being course-corrected and guided towards the statistical norm, pushed to the hump of the bell curve by an inscrutable algorithm that is trained on the collectively homogenized writing of every text every human has published online.  I give up and spend an hour doomscrolling.

I sleep badly, I can’t remember if I had any dreams or not.  I feel like shit the next morning.  I heard about this cool new AI music generator while doomscrolling before bed.  I install the app and I type in “make an angry song about being confused about my life” and it generates three options.  The lyrics are angry.  The songs sound like a cover band that are playing familiar songs from faulty memories, accidentally morphing them into new songs that seem oddly familiar although they are not exactly bangers.  Still, it’s amusing, for a minute.  I am impressed by how “realistic” the result is.  I click regenerate a few times to hear the variants until I like one a little better than the others and I pat myself on the back for “creating a song”.  I click a button that shares it with other users of the platform.  I go pour myself a bowl of cereal, I’m still angry, two days from now I will forget this ever happened and I will still feel like shit.

I have successfully avoided the journey, I have made a “professional” sounding song without growing, without crafting, without any personal benefit.  It’s like showing up at the trailhead of a 2000 mile hiking trail, taking a selfie with the sign, and then taking a helicopter to the end of the trail and taking a selfie with the other sign as a method to experience the trail.  Is it faster?  Sure.  Does it serve you in the same way?  Absolutely not.

This is the concern that really gets to me.  I worry about people taking this shortcut because it’s so ubiquitous, so pervasive, that it never occurs to them that they are shorting themselves, stunting their own growth.  Creative practice deepens your understanding of yourself. Creative collaboration creates powerful interpersonal connections. Being “bad” at writing, painting, playing the guitar, singing, sculpting, or poetry is not a sin that needs to be “corrected” by a computer, it’s merely a stage in learning.  Some of the best art in terms of humanity, relatability, and resonance is raw, unpolished, unprofessional, voices cracking, colors blurry, message unclear.  When a pitch corrector “fixes” my singing, it’s no longer really my voice.  When an LLM “fixes” my prose, they are no longer really my words.  When an image or audio generator creates, from whole cloth, the thing I ask for from a prompt, none of that is actually me.  No wonder it feels beige, benign, hollow, dull, polished but pointless.  If this is the way of the future, people taking shortcuts to create digital artifacts that are shiny but vapid, the artistic equivalent of cotton candy, and real creative process is considered to be too hard, too slow, too cumbersome, and too inefficient, well, that’s just a fucking tragedy.  For the creators themselves.  I fail to see how it is possible to reap the benefits of creative work if you don’t actually do any creative WORK.

My advice to anybody who thinks they want to be creative is to be very mindful about how/if you make use of these tools because you might find that they become a barrier to actual creativity, a substance-free substitute for being an artist, finding your own voice, and inhabiting a creative process.

I’m honestly struggling to see an upside to generative LLM-based technologies.  The further we get from living in real space with each other, working in real space with each other, and interacting in real time with each other, the lonelier we get, the sadder we get, the more disconnected and fragile we feel.  Now tech companies are going to augment this reality with these digital simulacrums of intelligence that try to trick us into feeling less alone and give us the ability to “create” without reaping any of the benefits of creating.  The obvious beneficiaries are the companies running the server farms that run the code that powers these “AI” products and the companies that sell information about us to each other so they can sell products to us.  Our human experience, our quality of life, our depth of personal understanding?  These are necessary grist for the mills of the algorithms but they are also being starved by the very technologies that rely on them.

We are already seeing the beginning of a sort of “AI” Ouroboros, with new models being trained on the output from previous models, trending towards a polished mediocrity, a sort of bland vanilla soft-serve of images, audio, video, and text that has no ability to inspire, to infuriate, or to improve us.  Actual humans must continue to sit with actual feelings and do actual creative practice.  They must share this with each other in real life, in real space, in the real world, in real time.  Actual creativity must continue, and it will, because humans are awesome.

My prediction: the trash flood that happened in the wake of the rise of social media was NOTHING like the trash flood that is coming for us now with this tech.  Pointless “art”, fake news and misinformation, the end of the internet being enjoyable in any way, shape, or form, integrated LLM bullshit in every tech product that cannot be disabled, and a never ending temptation to short circuit the creative process to get that sweet dopamine hit without doing all that pesky personal growth.

The 10% that is good that will come from this tech?  Smarter GPS route guidance.  Occasional useful suggestions when doing advanced technical tasks with lots of details (like writing software, for example).  Deeper understandings of how biochemistry works.  Better real time language translation between people who speak different languages.  There are, clearly, some very useful and helpful applications of this technology, but that’s not what is happening.  That’s not what is going to make big money for big tech companies.  They want pervasive “AI” everywhere because they have a lot of spare server cycles and stockholders to please. They want it to serve them and their commercial interests.

In his book “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man” Marshall McLuhan argued that “the media is the message”.  In other words, that it is perhaps more important to focus on the medium by which something is expressed than on the message itself.  If the message is “Hello, Bob” and it is verbally uttered face to face that is different than if it were communicated via skywriting, or a letter in the mail, or an email, or broadcast on television, or by tattooing it on a body part.  The message is the same, the media is different, and the choice of media provides the all important context that makes the words mean whatever they mean to Bob.  The media is, in fact, the message.  If most of the messages in the future will be delivered via LLM/GA, those messages will feel hollow, untrustworthy, soulless, empty, bland, boring, and lazy.

My spidey sense says that this is going to be a net negative for our species and our general enjoyment of life.

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I just watched this:



I will one say that one person’s “amazing” and “hopeful” future is another person’s dystopian hellscape and this, to me, is a horror show. Nearly everything about “AI” sucks and I hate it because it’s already making things worse. There is more misinformation, more confusion, less creativity and thinking, more reliance on giant pirating remix engines instead of developing personal skills and intelligence. It’s not fear of Skynet happening that I find so awful, we’re still a millennium away from sentience, it’s the absolute shit show of what is happening with this technology right now. Namely, the marketing hype that is trying to sell us all on the idea that ChatGPT and generative image poopers are some sort of intelligence and that we need/want to have this intelligence embedded in every piece of technology we ever interact with. What the “AI” people have actually created are computationally massive software algorithms that can mimic human behaviors well enough (by stealing and remixing actual human creativity) that they can give the illusion of intelligence, sometimes, as long as you don’t examine them too closely. The AI techno-utopians have created the world’s most expensive and well-informed blind and dispassionate sociopaths. Code that is possessed of no awareness, no mind, no thoughts which is already enshittifying everything it touches. This is easily my least favorite technology development of all time.  It’s auto-tune for your brain and what could be worse than that?

Got yer answer right here:

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Today, April 14 2024, I finished recording my new album, Capistrano.  The album runs 38 minutes and 40 seconds.

I started working on the album on November 23, 2014 so that means that this one album of 39-ish minutes of music took me a grand total of 9 years, 4 months, and 23 days to create meaning this is officially the longest gestated album I’ve ever worked on, beating The Lavone’s 1999 album “The Hiatus” by about three years.

There is still mixing and mastering to do, artwork to create, etc., but no more recording.  I tracked the last bits this afternoon and made the first test mix of the album and just listened to it twice.  I pronounce it good.  I will attempt to take less time on the next one but apparently this is what needed to happen for this one to be born.  To quote Captain Kirk, “Who am I to argue with history?”

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For 30 years I’ve made my living in this world, paid my bills and my taxes, raised my kid, almost entirely from the writing of computer software.  It’s a solid skill, always in demand, and I’m good at it.  Both before and throughout that entire professional career I have also had a (far less lucrative but infinitely more satisfying) shadow career as an independent musician, writer, filmmaker and creator.  I have a resume that details the technology career, but not really one that details my career as a creator.  This is that resume.  Kind of…

I was born into a family of musicians and singers and raised with access to instruments and primitive recording technology but never had any formal training with two exceptions: I played french horn in school band for a few months in elementary school and I took a 6-week crash course in guitar when I was 12.  I didn’t consider that music was something that required training if you had an ear, and I had that, so, I figured I could work it out for myself.

Music was not my first creative passion.  The first was visual art.  I liked to draw and paint.  My mom was a singer in a band and my dad painted wildlife watercolors and could draw exceptionally well so I had my pick of parents to emulate and older brother Rhett was already obsessed with music so I wound up glued to my sketchbook.   As I got a little older I decided that even though I was good at drawing and enjoyed it what I really wanted to be was a writer.

By early adolescence I had broadened my interests still further, having taught myself how to write software for the home computers of the era and also having developed a rabid obsession with cars.  The first three years after I bought my first guitar I rarely practiced and was much more interested in the 0-60 times of the Porsche 959 and drawing and designing imaginary cars than I was in music making.  Then puberty hit and some switch in my brain went musical.

Rhett and I had our band, The Lavone, and we had recorded a lot of music, but I was a fairly passive participant until suddenly I wasn’t.  I started having musical ideas and interests and really learning what to do with them around the age of 15.  I upgraded my guitar and got some cool glasses and turned into one of those High School Art Kids.

Visual arts and explorations into videography and photography were of nearly as much interest as the music.  When I was in high school I was always creating one thing or another.  I wrote a few bad novels, created sculptures and jewelry and pottery and learned basic woodworking, made some paintings, all the usual stuff that a teenager does to look for ways to express themselves.  Rhett and I started our little basement record label, Nuclear Gopher, and music became a core part of my identity even as I started doing less writing, less painting, less drawing, etc.

Post high-school I got married and my time for creative work trended downward but my need for it didn’t.  I started coming up with ways to give myself excuses to keep recording albums with The Lavone and creating visual art even as my software engineering career began.  Since the internet was a new phenomenon at the time, that meant building a website for the Nuclear Gopher as well as making music videos and short films.  I can honestly say, however, that my 20’s were a period of creative challenge.  I made some great songs with The Lavone and the Nuclear Gopher turned into it’s own amazing thing, but I found a role for myself as more of a producer, a technician, a documenter, an archivist, and an enabler than as a musician.

As I was approaching 30 I was getting nervous that the life of a creative person was becoming too inaccessible for me.  I had a young child to raise, my other career was time consuming, and I often wondered if I was just deluding myself that I had anything worth creating inside me.  I started to turn my attention more towards filmmaking and writing.  I taught myself digital video editing and the basics of cinematography.  I made some shorts and started planning to make an indie feature film.

But, as John Lennon once sang, life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.  My 30’s started with the general disruption of my entire family, life, and self.  A lost religion, a failed marriage, and estrangement from my family and friends.  I had nothing really to fall back on except music.

I realized that I wanted to, NEEDED to, make music, and I started my solo music career at the grand old age of 30.

At first I had a lot to learn.  Despite spending over half my life in and around bands and recording studios, I had never really engineered or produced my own music.  I could play guitar and sing but I couldn’t drum worth a damn and keyboards were a mystery.  Regardless, I tracked an album that I didn’t share with anybody and then I tracked an EP called The Context in 2004 and then my first proper album, Songs of Be Redoubt, the following year.  I wrote the songs, engineered the tracks, played all the instruments, designed the cover art, mixed and mastered it, the whole thing was a learning process.  By the end of working on Bo Redoubt, I was quite a bit better at the whole solo music making thing but I was still missing some of the polish that would come from playing in a band that had regular practices, live shows, and opportunities to hone my skills.

An opportunity soon arose to do so and I decided to join a band called The Eclectics, a Unitarian Universalist church band that played at Sunday services.  I played the guitar and sang, we played in front of the congregation, and after a year or so I was feeling a lot more confident musically.  In February of 2007 this lead to the formation of my (to date only) post-Lavone band, Trumpet Marine with three other members of The Eclectics.  We tracked an album called Longer, Louder, Lobster and it was arguably the best thing I had ever done up to that point.  I felt like I had arrived, at least a little, enough to try my hand at fronting the band on stage for some gigs.

Trumpet Marine was short lived, however.  Competing commitments caused members to come and go, we were constantly relearning the songs with new people, I just couldn’t hold it together and by early 2009 I gave up the idea.  I had recorded another solo album in the meantime and it was…  OK… but I was not yet a confident musical artist.

The next year or two involved some personal drama and my bandwidth was once again limited to really reach for what I wanted to do musically.  I was almost ready to give up on music but then I wrote a song called “I Sleep With My Hands In Fists” and it rallied me to get up off the mat and come out swinging again.  I had my studio and I was recording and writing, I had also played here and there in another few short lived bands, but it wasn’t clicking.  If I wanted to get things to click I needed to change something.

In early 2012 I struck some creative gold with an album called Blood and Scotch/Valentine, which I tracked in a couple of weeks all on my own.  I even broke out the art supplies and painted the cover, a bright yellow heart amidst a haze of chaos.  I knew I didn’t want to give up after that record.  I just didn’t know exactly what happened next.

I remembered that playing in other bands had helped me develop my skills and increase my passion for music so I decided to try that again.  I joined a local Ween-meets-Devo group called Robots From the Future as their keyboardist despite being pretty bad at keys.  I figured I wouldn’t get better unless I had a good reason to do so.  We played shows and practiced and I did get better.  There was no real pressure because I wasn’t the front man and they weren’t my songs.  I could just focus on playing.  Robots music wasn’t really my best fit, though, so I left the band and started making plans for the album I really wanted to make.  I had a sort of “back to basics” idea where I would record a few short EPs and then get serious about making a record that I would be totally happy with.  I figured that might take me a year or two.  I released the first of the EPs, The Coal Room, on Christmas of 2014.

I also joined another band, a 90’s cover band called Fistful of Datas, but this time on bass guitar and occasional auxiliary keys.  One of the Robots, Keith Lodermeier, was in that band and through that band I also met some other fantastic people, his wife Liz, Cris Arias-Romero, Maya Burroughs, and Mackenzie Lahren.  Another one of the Robots, Reynold Kissling, came on board near the tail end of my tenure with the group.

During the couple of years I played with that band I had a blast, met a lot of people, and improved my skills but that solo album I had committed to sort of went into development hell.  I just didn’t have the time to devote to solo studio work while also living the grown up life of a married career man in his 40’s.  I was having fun but I wasn’t creative.  Somehow the years were slipping by without much progress, even though I kept locking myself in the studio now and then.

I played a solo set at a now defunct space in St. Paul to try out some of my new album material in front of an audience and that led to an invite to join yet another band, Awkward Bodies, as a bass player.  The music of Awkward Bodies was definitely more up my alley than 90’s cover songs so I was really excited to join them and more shows followed.  Things were going pretty good and my spirits were high, I thought I might finally get my new album done, but then John Lennon happened again.

I don’t know what it was, exactly, but the world seemed to go nuts starting in 2016.  An orange sociopath was somehow put in power in my country and I became too obsessed with the fallout.  Social media and podcasts and news feeds and negativity took over my headspace.  My creative output dwindled to nearly nothing, despite having a great studio sitting in my own damn basement.  At least I was playing in Awkward Bodies and enjoying that but musically I was closer than I had ever been to hanging it up.  The world seemed too stupid to want to create within it.  It seemed like every day there was some outrage or insanity and playing cool indie rock was just not enough.  My software career had changed from writing code to running the department so I spent none of my day doing hands-on work, instead getting enmeshed in emails and meetings and exhaustion.

Then something weird happened in 2018.  A filmmaker named Scott Homan contacted me about telling my story for a documentary.  We met.  I told him my story.  I had no expectation that this would lead anywhere bigger than a short on YouTube, if that.  I didn’t know him or how serious and committed he turned out to be.  That event changed my life.

The world descended further into chaos with a global pandemic and my beloved Minneapolis being torn apart in the wake of the George Floyd riots.  Awkward Bodies struggled to hold the band together and keep some sort of momentum.  I continued to struggle to find personal creative traction.  But Scott and his editor, Sian Walmsley, just kept hacking away at making a movie and as it took shape I started to see my creative career differently.  It had not been a success but had also not been a failure.  I had struggled, sure, but so does everybody else who creates.  I was no longer in my 20’s but I had improved at every aspect of making music and art in the meantime.  And, most importantly, I had made a positive difference in the world with Nuclear Gopher and with my writing and my art.  When I saw the movie for the first time I woke up and knew what I needed to do.  I saw a possible future.  Not commercially, but artistically.  And I felt inspired again.

I got serious about finishing my slowly developing album.  I started planning for a new chapter in the Nuclear Gopher story.  I came to the realization that my time spent wandering in the creative wilderness, taking my licks, getting better at my craft, making mistakes, failing at plans, meeting people, playing Spice Girls covers while dressed as a zombie, and just generally living my life had made me stronger and more self-aware.  Sure, I’m older now, oldest I’ve ever been, but I’m not slow, I’m not tired, I’m not out of ideas, and I’m not ready to hang it up, not just yet.

The last couple of years have involved a LOT of work below the waterline.  Renovated my studio for future commercial use, making plans for the new Gopher, several revisions of the album (which is now practically done), and a new attitude towards the work I am doing that has really put me in a good place mentally.

My creative career could be counted in how many albums I’ve contributed to, how many shows I’ve played, how many films and videos I’ve made, etc, but I don’t even know the answers to those questions.  I guess I don’t care or I would keep track.  What I do know is that I’ve been dedicated to a life of making whatever art I can manage for as long as I can remember and for helping others do the same.  That’s my career.  That’s what I want to be remembered for when I die.  If nothing else, I’m leaving behind artifacts that prove I was here and that I did my best.  What else can a person do?

Skills and Experience:

I have demonstrated proficiency with:

  • audio engineering and production (both digital and analog)
  • digital video editing using Final Cut Pro and Davinci Resolve
  • guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, vocals, and other instruments
  • photography (both film and digital)
  • graphic design, painting, drawing
  • website development
  • writing

Salary Requirements:

Happiness.

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I’ve been threatening to relaunch NuclearGopher.com for years.  One rather ridiculous reason I have struggled to make this happen is that I truly and deeply find the modern style of website building to be boring, annoying, and uninspiring.

  1. Setup a content management system (probably WordPress but if you’re really unsure of what to do you can use something like Bandzoogle or Wix or Strikingly or something)
  2. Install one of the myriad number of available responsive “beautiful” themes and change some colors and logos
  3. Start cranking out “content”
  4. For every special feature you want (comments, newsletter signup, blah blah blah) install a plugin and probably signup for some cloud based subscription service
  5. To get statistics or visitor info add in Google Analytics or use an SEO optimizer service so your site can secretly track visitors and report the data to marketing firms

Congratulations, you now have a website that looks just like every other site on the internet and you are likely going to pay multiple monthly fees to keep it online!

It’s really not that hard.  I’ve built such sites dozens of times.  But…  honestly?  I hate them.  They are not memorable or distinctive, they are intrusive and heavy, and they are BORING AS HELL.

I didn’t want to build a site like that.  Not for my favorite little site of all time.  The thought of doing so was dispiriting.  But what was the alternative in the modern era?  Surely that is what people expect of websites these days?  The entire internet is made up of Every Fucking Bootstrap Site Ever these days, right?

I want a website that is quirky and weird, a site that is memorable, the kind of website that existed during the Old Weird Internet Era.  I have nothing against modern web standards, CSS and HTML5 are so much nicer to work with than the primitive Web 1.0 iterations of those technologies, but I want to make something that meets the following criteria:

  1. No tracking or spying on visitors
  2. No dependence on Big Tech companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook, X, etc..)
  3. A unique flavor that changes over time
  4. No dependence on third-party external cloud services

In other words, I want to build a website with modern tools that is indie.  Indie in design, indie in spirit, indie in execution, and uniquely it’s own beast.

In theory this is straightforward.  All you need is:

  1. A webserver
  2. Web pages and other content
  3. Ideas and know how

The problem I was facing as I contemplated this was that the simple, straightforward, “old school” path to building websites is almost non-existent these days and the companies that run traditional web hosting go out of their way to make the creation and administration of such sites challenging.  They want you to buy rather than build and since so few people try to build this sort of website anymore they often provide very little support or guidance to help people do so.

But, moron that I am, I put a stake in the ground a few years back and made a landing page at nucleargopher.com that merely rendered our old logo in the middle of the page and held down the fort while I went and educated myself.

I had MANY false starts.  I thought I might be able to wrangle WordPress into a shape that made me happy but after half a dozen attempts in which I was just sad about the result I ditched that.  I next took a look at a series of “static site generators” which create nicely styled and “plain old HTML” sites without databases and all that and that was closer to what I wanted.  Plain text, full control, host anywhere.  I fell in love with one in particular.  Still, time kept on timing and I was getting no closer to a web site that I would feel good about.  The big issue was still themes.  I just really hate the look of every theme out there and I kept losing patience at learning yet another templating language.  There are just sooooo many of them and none seem to be particularly better or worse than the others.

So I came to a decision.  I decided that I was just gonna party like it’s 1999 and damn the torpedos.  I picked one easily attainable starting point: a landing page that had a music player on it.  And not just any music player but WinAmp (or, to be more accurate, WebAmp, an HTML5 clone of the original WinAmp player).  Two days ago, on April Fools Day, I uploaded the updated NuclearGopher.com landing page with two initial songs on the playlist: the new Awkward Bodies cover of The Lavone’s 1986 song “My Adventure Flowerland” and “Hi-Fi” by HighTV (and some kick butt WinAmp skins if you can figure out how to change them).  You can go there right now and hear some tunes.  It’s the softest of soft launches ever considering that this a website that has essentially been dormant for about 20 years but it was (gasp!) fun.

Today I realized that it would be nice to have a newsletter signup and also the ability to view site traffic statistics.  Again I asked myself how exactly I ought to do those things in 2024 without signing up for anything or doing any tracking nonsense.  It took a few hours of tinkering because my web hosting provider has incomplete and misleading instructions that are years out of date, but I managed to setup the stats thing (still entirely anonymous, just crunching numbers from the server logs) and I am now auditioning an open-source, self-hosted, newsletter signup tool that will allow visitors to opt-in/out of basic updates about new releases, events, and the rest, again without any tracking or Big Tech involvement.  This is how I built websites 25 years ago.  By hand, using open-source, maintaining independent control and respecting visitor privacy.  It’s kind of ugly right now but in a goofy way that I like more than a fancy theme.

I’m really looking forward to adding to the site, putting up new pages, playing around with the look and feel, throwing in easter eggs and silly bits, and actually having a good time and enjoying the process.  It feels like the right way to do it.  So, please, feel free to go listen to a couple of songs and take a look at the embryonic new nucleargopher.com.  I have interesting plans for it and I promise that the changes won’t be measured in decades or even years from here on out.  The internet need not be boring or corporate, dominated by apps, subscriptions, paywalls, and pretentious BS.  It used to be fun.  I hope I can bring a little bit of fun back to it.  It can’t all be as cool as zombo.com but we can try.  And those two songs are pretty sweet…

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When I was in high school I took a philosophy course and I have to admit that I didn’t think too highly of it.  We learned about the debates over questions such as “What is truth?”, “What is beauty?” and “Does life have meaning?”

I was pretty sure I knew the answers to all the big philosophical questions and I was pretty sure that anybody who wanted to know the answers could just study the Bible a bit with a member of my religion and they could have those answers too.  That is the thing about belief: it gives you the comfort of feeling that you have answers and can therefore get on with the business of living your life instead of wasting all that time in pointless debating like the philosophers.

I didn’t develop a proper appreciation for these philosophical questions until I learned that the “facts” underpinning my beliefs were not actually facts, i.e. – objectively verifiable statements derived from the observation of reality.  Many of the key “facts” I had built my world view on had been derived from opinions, stories, inventions, speculations, distortions, and partial truths that didn’t stand up to scrutiny.  I gotta tell ya, I developed a healthy appreciation for being skeptical about the things I believe in right fast and I have maintained my commitment to skepticism as a virtue ever since.

People in general are not skeptical enough, it seems.  They believe advertisements, politicians, propaganda, religious cult leaders, and fabricated content they see on the internet.  This has led to a slew of opinion pieces about how we live in a “post-truth era” and that hurts both my heart and my head.  There is no such thing as a post-truth era, there are no such things as alternative facts, there is simply an information landscape that has morphed into something so fearsomely massive that the signal is lost in the noise and the average person is ill-equipped to critically examine the information they consume.  This has resulted in the golden age of misinformation wherein the largest number of people can be manipulated by the largest number of bad actors the world has ever seen.  It is no wonder that so many are falling under the sway of authoritarian politicians, hate groups, and high-control cults (or in the case of MAGA Trump Worship, the trifecta…).

Years ago I read an incredible book called Age of Propaganda by Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson.  I firmly believe this book ought to be required reading in this day and age to help people recognize when they are being manipulated to serve the ends of a third party through propagandist techniques.  Chapter 35 in this book is called “How To Become A Cult Leader” and is not intended as a How To guide any more than the recent Netflix series was, but in using this structure the authors run through the techniques that are used to create cults and, if you become familiar with the techniques, you can identify whether or not a leader or group that you follow might, in fact, be a cult.  This is not the only kind of skeptical thought required in our times, the ability to recognize logical fallacies, spot doctored/false/misleading “facts”, and learn enough science and math to at least understand why certain things are true and others false, those are all important too, but without a free brain to use to evaluate information, a person is hampered.  People who are under the sway of cult thinking do not, by definition, have freedom of thought, so the first step in escaping from the post-truth conceit and developing the ability to live in reality is to recognize if you are being interfered with by these techniques coming from leaders you trust.

Here’s the list.  If you belong to a group that uses the following tried and true manipulation techniques, you might want to ask yourself whether or not they are entirely on the up and up:

  1. Create your own social reality.
    Members will continue the bad habit of thinking for themselves if they are not isolated from bad influences, so you start there.  You need to create boundaries between the believers and the non-believers, at least mentally if not physically.  This is fairly easily accomplished by labeling everything that is not from “the group” as being from “the devil”.  Once you do that, you must provide members with a set of beliefs that tell them how to interpret the world so that they come to believe that the cult teachings are the only way the world makes any sense.  Another pro tip: create your own jargon or lingo.  It makes it harder to see the world from a perspective other than the group, it allows members to recognize each other more easily, and when you change how people use language, you change how they think.  Do this right and you will have followers who speak and think according to a set of filters you define, who think of themselves as being “in the group”, and who are intellectually and socially isolated from the larger world.
  2. Create an in-group of followers and an out-group of “others” (aka – The Granfalloon Technique).
    The obvious next step is to strengthen the social reality that you have created using language and teachings by explicitly defining an Us and a Them.  If you do this right, two random members of the group should be able to run into each other on a bus in a strange city, strike up a brief conversation, immediately recognize the other as a member of the group, and immediately consider them a “brother” or “sister”, even though they don’t know each other, entirely because of shared membership in the in-group.
  3. Create a spiral of escalating commitment to combat cognitive dissonance.
    Getting people to join a group that involves the weakening or loss of connections with existing family and friends is a CHALLENGE.  Most people don’t want to do this.  So, how do you get that to happen?  Start small.  Get people to eat just a metaphorical snack.  Leave them with some of the group’s more appealing teachings or invite them to a social event.  Get them to make some small commitment, agreeing to a followup visit or maybe coming to another group meeting.  Each small commitment, each small step towards the group, creates a sense of investment, a sense that if you don’t follow up with the next step you will be letting somebody else down.  This is a powerful force but can’t be rushed.  Don’t want to spook the newbie.  Once a person has started to get involved in a cult group, they are likely to experience some sort of intervention from friends or family and that is the first test.  Ideally, the newbie feels defensive and tries to justify their involvement because the alternative involves admitting that they might be wrong, and that feels terrible.  If you can get a person to start to decide that they are doing this because it’s really what they want, not because they are being coerced, you’re 90% of the way to a new convert.
  4. Establish the credibility and attractiveness of the leader(s).
    It should go without saying that some famous cult leaders are not exactly what one would call “attractive”.  Jim Jones, Kim Jong Un, Donald Trump, Marshall Herff Applewhite, these guys ain’t exactly Ryan Gosling.  But that’s OK.  You want to build a myth, something bigger than reality.  You want tell a story about how the leader or leaders (if you are led by a committee) are chosen, special, the recipients of unique divine direction, God’s chosen mouthpiece, the purveyors of the one Truth, “Only I can fix it”, you get the picture.  It helps if there is some sort of vague event in the past, a heroic backstory, a rags to riches story, something emotionally manipulative.  It’s very important that the leader(s) not be seen as merely people who gathered followers using shady and manipulative techniques.  They are SPECIAL.  Put them on TV, hold them up for admiration, talk about how they are chosen/directed/unique.  If you fail on this point, your whole cult could fizzle but if you get it right, you could get people to do all sorts of terrible things to themselves and others in the name of God or your group.
  5. Send members out to spread the message to the “others”.
    This might seem to violate #1.  If you want to isolate people, why would you send them out to preach?  Well, believe it or not, nothing toughens the skin of a believer (and creates a stronger commitment trap) than promoting and defending your beliefs to others.  If it is at all feasible, send your converts out into the world to spread the word, go door to door, hand out flowers at airports, hold rallies and conventions, encounter resistance, repeatedly and intentionally.  If you really want somebody to be willing to allow their child to die for your teachings, if you really want somebody kill themselves and others for your cause, you need this level of commitment.  And, bonus, you might occasionally make a few new converts in the process.  Nice.  Just remember: the new converts are actually made via the commitment trap, not the preaching activity.  The real point of proselytizing is to keep the in-group IN and the out-group OUT via the magic of self-selling.  For examples simply look at every internet flame war ever to see how views almost universally become more entrenched when challenged.
  6. Distract members from thinking undesirable thoughts.
    You can’t have your members using their pesky brains to think undesirable thoughts such as “What if Kim Jong Un isn’t really a God?” or “What if Noah’s ark was just a story?” or “What if this group is just a bunch of people telling stories and manipulating other people????”   That would be serious trouble.  It’s the brain you want to control, so, how does one do that?  First off, ban independent thought.  Just outright ban it.  Tell your followers that they can’t be trusted to think for themselves, the leader(s) know better, and if they encounter any information that appears to counter that message it is clearly from the devil and should be rejected out of hand.  Make sure other members of the group will report independent thinking to others as well so if somebody DOES use their brain, they’ll know better than to say so out loud for fear of retribution by the community.  Give people techniques to avoid thinking.  Lots of group meetings with rote memorization of texts, songs, and repetitions of the same teachings are a good idea.  Don’t allow time for thoughts to fester, keep the mind busy with other things.
  7. Fixate member’s vision on a phantom.
    We all know that you get a donkey to move using a carrot and a stick.  The potential for losing the social reality, the desire to be associated with the in-group, the commitment trap created by being part of the group, those are all kind of negative incentives for a convert to stay in the group.  The songs and busywork, the meetings and services and rallies and proselytizing activities, that’s all great to suppress independent thoughts, but the final piece of the puzzle is all important.  You need to dangle a carrot out there.  You need to make sure that your followers are constantly reminded of some future glory that always remains tantalizingly just out of reach.  Make America Great Again!  When?  Later.  Just have faith.  Give more of yourself, more of your time, more of your money, more of your resources and the promised land will arrive.  The new earth, the paradise, the glorious future, heaven, or personal riches (in the case of certain business cults) are there, waiting for you, SALVATION, just stay the course.  I mean, of course the carrot is attached to the stick, the stick is held by the leadership, and the carrot moves ahead with the donkey but the donkey isn’t thinking, the donkey doesn’t realize that.

And that’s the list.  Congratulations, you are now equipped to start a religion, a multi-level marketing business, a political movement, or whatever kind of high control group strikes your fancy.

If you are reading this and anything on that list struck uncomfortably close to home about a group you are involved in, listen to that feeling and ask yourself if maybe, just maybe, it’s time to try a little of that thinking for yourself thing.  If you aren’t thinking for yourself I’d maybe find a few moments to ponder:

  • Who is doing my thinking for me?
  • Why do they want to influence my thinking?  What’s their motive?
  • If they are operating in good faith, why do they use manipulative control techniques in their group?
  • What can I do to independently validate and verify the information I consume and act upon so I am less prone to misinformation and manipulation?

Everybody needs to develop skills and habits of mind to filter and assess groups, individuals, and information.  Fortunately, once you know some of the things to look for, it can be done.