Collective Creativity Has Worth (even if our songs don't)

Hello dear readers, thanks to everyone who came to our (sold out!) show at Cassette. The energy was great and it felt like a big leap towards what I’d like this phase of Mutual Benefit to feel like musically. I hope you were able to get some rest this winter so far. I found that the inconvenience of being stuck inside has been counterbalanced by many cozy hours with this unhinged library haul. 

Lately I’ve been part of many doomer conversations about how art is being replaced by AI slop, how we are now told to create for obliterated attention spans to have a career, and generally feeling powerless as a couple companies vacuum up the world’s money to build brutalist data centers that vacuum up the world’s energy to train models that vacuum up stolen material. 

Two existential questions often arise from these conversations: what is the point of trying to seriously make music now that it has been de-skilled and has almost no economic value? Why waste time making music when there are more important political crises happening right now? 

I think every person must reckon with these questions for themselves but I am increasingly convinced that the process of living a life oriented around collective creativity IS the actual point rather than focusing solely on the output. This process connects us more deeply to others and our environment, it makes us curious and playful, it invites us to explore our inner depths, it grows and hones our attention, it encourages us to dissolve the self and improvise as a group, it feeds the imagination as we collectively bring something new into the world, it gives us a sense of fulfilment outside of the lesser, destructive ones readily offered by the market.

This isn’t to sugarcoat the difficulties and frictions of a collective creative life, it takes time to find collaborators and navigate working together, it is awkward, there is often little external reward or validation in the beginning, learning your craft can be slow with lots of trial and error, finding community and learning how to plug in takes time and effort, it can be hard balancing relationships with art-making, it is scary to put yourself out there, there will be bouts of deep self-doubt. But… it is absolutely worth it. 

How AI generated slop is typically made (solitary, frictionless, digital and not connected to physical space, meant to be distributed algorithmically, no organic context or history, dependent on tech corporations) is the antithesis of a rooted collaborative art practice. Viewed this way, it is funny that two wildly divergent paths and intentions could lead to the same output; in this case a song that shows up on a digital platform and competes for the user's attention alongside my own work. 

This apocalyptic moment in culture, technology, economics, and politics has clearly shown us that the old systems WILL change no matter what. Maybe releasing a song into the digital void is worth nothing in an economic sense but it is not too late to start or orient a current art practice to be collaborative and rooted in cultural and ecological place. To see the process of being more compassionately curious, attentive, and connected to community itself as the fulfilling act. One that leads to unexpected collaborations and new opportunities to align practice more closely with liberatory politics. I’m done grieving, let prompted AI make the disembodied stuff at an inhuman scale, and let’s use our art to construct new ecologically conscious, human-scale worlds in the shell of the old.

I plan on going into more depth on this and maybe eventually making a zine. I also do online creative unblocking/songwriting lessons. If you’re interested, want to share your work, or just want to drop a line I'm at mutualbenefitmusic (at) gmail.com

Listening: Cosmic Tones Research Trio (deep but approachable spiritual jazz adjacent instrumentals)

Reading: In The Realm Of The Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté (a Buddhist tinged study of addiction and recovery)

Podcast: Hermitix on the Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (far out conversation about different intelligences, teaching chatbots to pray, the increasing importance of hiding)

Article: Aeon on Solarpunk (A loose movement that uses technology to collaborate with the earth instead of dominate it)

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