My Response to the Magical Teenage Idol

Transcript taken from SMGtheHouser.substack.com

This week, a break from our work solving all the problems of small scale developers in rural America. Besides, our work relies on the success of tech entrepreneurs just as much as it does with municipalities, small business owners, manufacturers and advocates. So it’s big tech and entertainment that’s got my mind captured this time around.

Ted Gioia’s recent Substack on George Avakian's entrance into the teenage idol craze circa 1958 left me in my own stream of consciousness, reliving then to now and our slip into idiocracy with MAMLMs (modern advanced machine learning models). What’s specifically got me frustrated is our consistent habit of giving up so much agency over tech and the enshitification that ensues.

Is our society at large really ok with giving AI models a pass? If so, how did we get here? What began the slippery slope into permission for intellectual sludge which in our time might be on the precipice of being used to eliminate jobs, yours and mine, while further degrading the value of intellectual rigor?

Capitalism is good at placing monetary value on a product or service. What it can’t do, what it never could do, is place a value on quality. It can’t critique, it can’t consider, it can’t make you look cool in front of your lover while you make an obscure reference.

People like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren understood plainly that the Revolutionary ideals that started it all, themselves bearing ideas as far afield from each other as those of John Locke, The Marquis de Condorset and the Haudenosaunee would not last unless the new country they helped launch waseducated. I’d like to believe they were really after a populace rooted in intellectual rigor. 

People needed to be able to judge quality. They needed to agree on minimums of toleration while also being able to envision a future rooted in intellectual pursuit. They needed to think for themselves.

So, we created the teenage idol.

Not knocking you kiddos. I mean, it’s adults who keep messing this stuff up.

Alongside the creation of a new suburban landscape that launched an entire literary and cultural onslaught based on boredom and depression, came the desire to create cheap art. It was supposed, this would be most desirable to teenagers, fresh to market and flush with disposable income. An advantageous feature for record labels and book publishers was this stuff could be made on the cheap. Why deal with sophisticated adult performers and writers who believe in the artistic process, have ‘standards’ when you can sign kids with desperate parents. Hell, let’s do away with A&R departments. Don’t need those anymore.

Stan Freberg saw it coming. It’s quaint to hear, ‘So long music parasite’. Surely, or so he thought, jazz would prevail over the trite. Here’s his Payola Roll Blues:

Right side of artistry. Wrong side of history.

How does this relate to the here and now?

Roughly speaking, we’ve had artists from the mid century to now insisting to us through their art to pay attention. Zappa’s Joe of Joe’s Garage fame ended up a cucumber living inside his head because, even as the record business debased his fantasy society, faschistic forces were tightening the screws on the public, a public willing to go along in the name of morality. Of cleanliness.

We cut music and art programs for everyday America. We amped up the morality police running parallel with the desecration of industrial America. Manufacturing America. Working America.

We gave each other permission in a two-parent-working-three-or-four-jobs-household to cut corners on quality of thought. We stopped going out. We stopped having the money… ‘not enough time for that’.

We stopped believing that our popular cultural pursuits should challenge our notions. Not enough time for that.

This led to the next logical conclusion. Don’t like being challenged by your college professor, just declare you’re triggered and start convulsing on the floor.

Let’s face it, by the time we got ahold of the fact that suburbia can’t pay for itself, and that we’re really not sure what ‘good’ art or music is anymore, and that our kids are getting to college without having read a single novel, now AI is being sold to us as the next big thing, totally going to change the world, totally awesome BTW in totally vague terms. And likely , because it’s all totally controlled by an elite who got pants-ed a thousand times in high school for being in the A/V club, is totally coming for your job while stealing your work content even as it can’t totally do everything it’s creators say it can totally do.

Totally indeed.

Totally needless. Totally worthless.

We’ve gone from giving permission for lower quality art to giving permission for companies to ‘aggregate’ art, for free, in order to feed the AI beast. After all, it’s just content, right? Why develop the largest opportunity for blanket licensing payments when you can steal writ large across the entire creative class economy?

I’m reminded of what it was like as a teenage performing artist forty years ago. ‘We can’t pay but hey, it’s a great opportunity for you to…. get your name out there.’

Now the corporate state takes your very identity and converts it into profit. Most folks are too busy surviving to understand how bad this is, let alone understand how we got here.

Because, after all, all those imaginary guitar notes, and other tasty thoughts, remain in the imagination of this imaginator. Watch your step, the white zone is for loading and unloading…..