For a while now there has been growing concern (in some quarters more than others) about standards of online speech - especially around areas of social media like Twitter. Several notable and, to my knowledge usually female, people have come out and said they have received death or rape threats. Some people have even reported threats to the Police and people have been sent to jail - usually for a few weeks. Concerned and august organs like The Guardian newspaper then write articles about the phenomenon of "hate speech" and "death threats" online and a certain narrative gets created and mutually re-inforced. In addition to this, "trolls" are said to be a problem, although defining this term is often a problem in itself when the word seems to be applied both to people with bad manners, making an inappropriate or unwelcome comment, and more organised individuals looking to spoil or derail a specific conversation.
Now this is just a personal blog and I'm not here to solve or dissect this problem in any overarching way. This blog is just a place for me to write down some of my thoughts as they occur to me in real time. As such, you shouldn't hold me to much of a standard of debate. I will say what I think on the subject and it should simply be taken as my point of view. And, for starters, I do believe that people should be allowed to have points of view, even, whisper it quietly, points of view that do not agree with yours. You, by the way, are also allowed to have a point of view. And it doesn't have to agree with mine. This is a basic tenet of the idea of free speech, the idea that people are allowed to have points of view and express them publicly. This applies expressly, if not in an exemplary sense, to exactly those views that you don't agree with yourself. "Free speech" is not merely speech you agree with. Its all the speech you don't agree with too.
So what I intend to do now is just jot down a few points related to this whole phenomenon. I make no claim that they are my final thoughts on the matter. If anything, they are more the points and questions that come to my mind when I read about this subject or hear of yet more example of trolls and hate speech. They are outlined in random order and may be considered as goads to further thought.
1. When is a death threat not a death threat? When the person concerned only wishes you dead and doesn't personally threaten to kill you.
There is a case in the UK at the moment of TV personality, Sue Perkins. Perkins allegedly received a few tweets wishing her dead after she was touted to present the very popular TV show, Top Gear. The story itself, according to Perkins, was entirely false and she has no interest in the job anyway. Nevertheless, some fans of the show seem to have reacted strongly and in haste and tweeted her on her public Twitter account. I personally have seen a couple of examples where people wished her to be "burnt at the stake". No tweet, that I have read, was from someone saying that they personally wanted to kill her and neither Perkins nor anyone else has produced any such tweet. However, quite predictably, this has been reported and written up by many as "Sue Perkins received death threats". And this happens in other cases too. The problem is these people are quite often not receiving death threats at all. They are simply receiving unpleasantness from people saying the equivalent of "I don't like you" in a more extreme way.
Then there is the further issue of credibility. Do murderers and rapists regularly broadcast their intent to commit rape and murder online to the target of their attacks? Doesn't that strike you as making any threat less and not more credible? You may say that we have no way of knowing and its better to be safe than sorry. But when we live in a world where a person upset that he can't take a flight from a regional airport because it is closed due to the weather - and then tweets that they need to get their shit together or he will blow it up - and is arrested and convicted of a crime, we need to be wary. People talk on social media in the vernacular. They talk and act like they would with their mates but often to people who aren't their mates at all. They are strangers. Add into this equation the fact that tone of voice, humour and all the general clues that would usually come from knowing the speaker are not present in 140 character social media snippets. It sets up a strange kaleidoscope of words and understandings. The possibility to take things the wrong way or give them the wrong weight is obvious. We should be all the more wary knowing that some people are more than ready to have their outrage triggered at a moment's notice.
I also find it relevant that public discourse, especially the distorted online version of that phenomenon, is becoming infantilized. These days, and I must say I see this agenda often being pressed by those with feminist leanings, people are encouraged to be victims. They are encouraged to be naive and irresponsible. They are told it is their right and that if anything unpleasant happens to them it is absolutely not their fault or, more importantly, their responsibility. To put the focus on the responsibility of people for themselves and their own safety, we are told, is "victim-blaming". In my view this is both stupid and childish. As I see it, everyone is responsible for the choices they make and so a constituent part of any consequences that occur. In a world where people can choose A or B to choose one or the other is to contribute to a chain of events. There is no rhetorical way to escape this inevitability. In the same way, taking part in public forums or social media is a choice you make. In doing so, you open yourself up to what is out there. On Twitter you can even lock your account so that your comments are reserved for those of your choosing and no one but who you choose can reply to them. If you choose not to do so you contribute to the possibility that people might send you unpleasant messages. You are not to be blamed for being sent such a message. But you did contribute to it being possible in the first place.
2. Its a public world.
The world of public discourse is changing, as we might expect it to in a world now awash with mobile devices and giant social media corporations. These corporations want to lock us all in to their platforms and they want us to take part because we are their product that they want to sell. What this means is that, like never before, you have access to so many more people in the world. No longer is it true, as it was in the 1970s when I was a boy, that all you know is contained within a few miles of home. Now you can speak to people from all over the world. You can also tell them that you hate them, they are fat and that you hope they burn to death. But is this a new phenomenon? Did people only start being nasty to each other with the rise of the mobile phone and the Twitter app? No, they didn't. I remember telling a girl in my class "You smell!" when I was 8 or 9 at school. Other school friends brought me to tears at age 11 by telling me that the cassette recorder my mum had bought me for Christmas was "shit". I've seen people be told to "Fuck off!" in football grounds across the country. I've heard racist and sexist things (unfortunately) in basically every public place you can think of. I've heard derogatory comments and conversations in every workplace I've ever had.
And this is the issue. In our modern world besides things being thrown more open they have also become more enclosed. Once more the online world puts a microscope on this phenomenon. There are now micro-groupings for every interest (and none) imaginable. There is probably a group somewhere for "Muslim baseball fans who like to wear green jeans whilst playing ping pong". Strangely, it seems that more openness also creates more enclosedness. Try butting in (or, more generously, offering a comment) on some conversations online and be prepared to be bitten as the insiders of the group concerned protect their turf and bite back at you for daring to offer a point of view. The attitude seems to be "Who are you? Sod off!" The internet era is the era of partisanship and, crucially, now everyone can play. And they do. It seems to me that, more often than not, it generates more heat than light. When you might think that more opportunities for communication would bring more togetherness they, in fact, bring as much disharmony as harmony. But there's a good reason why this shouldn't surprise anyone.
The point I would make here is that this is a public world. Its not a world where you can go into your little nest where every truth is yours and every heresy is anything you don't agree with. Its not a world where you will never hear something you don't like or where no one will ever call you names or say something nasty to you. Is the wish for this kind of bubble world really a realistic wish? Why is someone saying "I hope you die" in the street or at work in a tiff or disagreement any more or less serious than if they say it in a tweet? Are they not equal statements? (And, to my mind, equally ephemeral and throwaway?) It seems to me that a great many of these public threats are not threats at all. They are the equivalent of saying "You are a cunt!" I can appreciate that to some this may be upsetting. I've been upset by online comments myself when a passing You Tube viewer insulted the quality of something I had uploaded. And it stayed with me for a day or two as well. But this is not to make every negative comment a genuine or credible threat of anything. People insult you in the street and keep walking. Most online things, I suggest, are exactly the same.
3. Beware the censor.
For many people who I don't agree with all these things I have been talking about call for action - legislative action and Police action. We are told by some that people who say bad things should be arrested and put in jail. Others suggest that the Internet should only be accessed by those prepared to use their real identity in a verifiable way. Anonymity is seen by many as a problem because people can spray their insulting comments about freely and be seen to get away with it. This isn't necessarily the case of course. People have been arrested and convicted in the UK of sending malicious communications, notably to feminists Caroline Criado-Perez and MP Stella Creasy. These women, and others, often write articles full of censorious and moralistic ideas to the extent that, in a nutshell, they want to control the Internet according to guidelines, and morality, that suit them.
But can you control someone being obnoxious on the Internet? Its worth noting that it is not illegal to either be on the Internet or obnoxious. And both things, it seems to me, are equally impossible to control in the final analysis. Many people who get upset at insulting and threatening speech online seem to have the attitude that the world should run on the basis that only things they like should be allowed to happen. This usually involves them being allowed to walk round in a bubble, shielded from the harsh, nasty world outside. But this is not a realistic (or achievable) desire. The problem is not technology. The problem is people. People can be arseholes. Most people, in fact, are arseholes some of the time. Some more so than others. You can't legislate or moralise that away. This attitude, added to the one that infantilizes people and turns them into victims of ever growing hordes of unscrupulous people, is not a solution either. All that happens if you go down that road is that you generate a never-ending rolling wave of more and more examples of the phenomenon. Of course, in their determination to show how horrible life is for them, that is exactly what some people want to do. But that is a destructive and not a constructive agenda. Fundamentally, you cannot control speech by censoring it. It would be like trying to hold back the waves with your hands.
4. Its Time To Be An Adult.
At the end of the day I think people need to stand up and be responsible for themselves. I don't condone any form of hate speech, death threats or rape threats. I appreciate this is a serious issue. My attitude would tend to be that if such things happen in some kind of flare up then the best response is to let it go. (People can and do have disagreements and they do share harsh words.) This is what Sue Perkins seems to have done. She doesn't seem to have taken it too seriously but has just walked away from her account for a while to let the dust settle. I think that's probably wise. Of course, if you are getting repeated comments from the same person then that moves into harassment territory and it becomes more serious. The same is true if you happen to know the person. It is true that you can never know for sure if a threat of something is serious but, as I said above, I would tend to regard threats as not credible if someone is wanting to see you die in some outlandish way ("burnt at the stake") or is making the point of telling you in advance via a publicly accessible social network. This is especially true if this is just some random out of the blue. There are remedies available for those who feel under attack or threatened such as the blocking or locking available on Twitter or involving the authorities if its believed to be something more serious.
But should every nasty, insulting, threatening or obnoxious comment be referred to the Police though? No. You can't legislate for douche bags or for the obnoxiousness of the human race. To be in a public space is to acknowledge you relinquish some control over your environment and to open yourself up to interactions with others you may not desire, whether online or offline. That is just common sense. At the end of the day, if you don't want to hear what other people have to say its in your hands to do something about it. Be responsible for yourself and accept that you live in a world you don't always control.
Thursday, 16 April 2015
Some thoughts on "Life"
I suppose it happens to us all. You wake up at some indeterminate point in the night (for those who don't have clocks in their bedrooms anyway) and your mind begins to whirr with thought. The thoughts rush on and you silently nod in agreement with the thoughts that you are having. This has certainly happened to me more than once and often I have determined to write them down later when I get up. Of course, you never do because life gets in the way and it becomes just another lucid moment lost forever in the mists of time. Well, this time, I have actually made the effort to write down what I was thinking about and to use it to meditate on the thoughts I was having. So what follows will be a mash up of the thoughts I had last night in my bed and now as I write, remember and muse on those thoughts that I had.
I suppose, in a way, it really started last night before I went to sleep. The thought occurred to me that no one gets born by their choice. In that sense every one of us is born without our will being taken into account. Our birth, the fact we are given life and brought into being at all, is the choice of other people. This strikes me as partly selfish. Although not a parent myself, it does seem to me, observing from the sidelines, that some parents are selfish. They want a child for themselves. I wonder how many parents give thought to what kind of life their child will have or how much pain or misery they might be storing up for their offspring? My guess would be that many never think of that at all, at least not until or unless things go wrong. And yet these things, in the abstract, are foreseeable consequences of having, or giving birth to, a life. So why don't more people think of the downsides of being alive when bringing a new life into the world?
Maybe these people consider that although life will certainly include some bad it will also contain much good. Lives, of course, are very different. Some will contain little pain and some will contain much. In that sense, once a life has started and you are thrown into existence you pretty much have to suck it up and deal with what comes down the pipe. You can't refuse life and go back where you came from. The clock only ticks forwards. But, to get back to the point, perhaps people consider that life, overall, isn't that bad. That would be reasonable, wouldn't it? I don't think so. You can't live your life on someone's behalf. Each life is individual. You cannot measure someone's pain by how you measure your own because you are not comparing like with like. Human beings are not robots and are not built to the same specifications. Much less do they experience life in the same way. Your appreciation, or lack of appreciation, of life is not commensurable with that of another person. We each make our own minds up and human beings, in general, have always valued that fact about our species.
I raise all this because, for the longest time now, I have actively said to myself that, were it possible, I would give my life back. I don't accept the idea, for myself, that life, although a mixture of good and bad, is "worth it" over all. For at least 10-15 years now I've said to myself that if it were possible to reject life and give it back then I would. If there was a button you could press or a deal you could make where it meant that you suddenly had never existed then I would press that button or make that deal. You might now be asking about all the things I would miss that you value or all the things I would never experience. To me, that argument holds no weight. A person who never existed has nothing to miss and has no ability or desire to value things. These are the problems and issues of the living. And the difference between being alive and dead, existent and non-existent, is very great. Put simply, people concern themselves with the problems of the living. Unsurprisingly. And they find it hard to think in any other way. For the same reason I've never understood people who couldn't appreciate why someone might take their own life. To me, this is obvious: dead people have no problems.
My thinking in this, of course, is guided and shaped by my own experience of life. I don't regard myself as having had a particularly bad life. Certainly, there are people who would seem to have had worse ones and its not hard to think of examples. But, as I said before, everyone is different. Its a mug's game to start comparing lives one with another. You can only really address your own appreciation of your own life. And I haven't appreciated mine very much. There are certain issues I've had to face daily for many years and I wouldn't be me or live the life I lead without them. But that is my comprehension of what life is from my own experience of it. You will have yours. Quite a lot of people seem to think that life is a gift and that it is ungrateful or bad to reject it or despise it. I must admit that I don't understand this, to me, irrational mentality. If life is a gift then its surely the unwanted pair of socks your granny gives you. Overall, nature is random without a guided direction or purpose. You were the sperm that made it and fertilised the egg. Its not as if any intelligence selected and formed you in a womb, made you who you are and set you on your way. (Yes, I don't believe in gods in any sense.) You are just the result of a couple of human wills and lots of random factors no one power had any control over. There will come a time when parents and doctors will be able to choose the baby they have and start to make selections both for physical appearance and mental faculties. I don't envy those people who will be actively engineering the birth of yet more people. What will happen when the children do not turn out to be the things that were selected? Can people really be created in laboratories?
I do, in a sense, see life as something mystical. But this is mystical in the sense of profound or complex or ungraspable. I don't see it as mystical in the sense of it being from a higher power. We are, all of us, life forms created in a physical universe. The conditions that make life possible, and we don't know what they are or why life happened at all, are just there and so, in turn, are we. I don't see any inherent or deep meaning to that. It just is and any meaning we do find, or fail to find, will be on our own terms. Recently, I've been following the Twitter account of a shepherd in the Lake District of England. He's become a minor celebrity thanks to a book he has written about his way of life and the fact that one of his sheepdogs, Floss, recently gave birth to 10 puppies. For the last week or so now he has been posting sometimes graphic pictures of the lambing season that he is currently dealing with. I have looked with childlike innocence at the pictures he has posted of lambs being pulled out of a sheep or, new born, lying on the grass covered in mucus and amniotic fluid. This is life. This is the wonder of life. The wonder of life to me is that it happens at all.
But that it happens at all is, for me, also the problem. Its one that existentialist writers like Sartre or Camus saw too. For the world, life, does not make sense. There is no way to square the circle of your existence. There are endless "don't knows", you are full of fallibilities and, as a physical being, you will suffer and die for change is a constant of the universe. Things do not, and are not meant to, stay the same forever. As a being with higher brain function you will also likely have to muse on all of these facts and deal with that too. "Life is suffering" has long been a truism of mine even though, at times, more positive souls have tried, and failed, to dissuade me from it. I just see too much evidence to support it. You, too, may say that's not very positive and I would probably concede you are right. But that is to miss the point. The point is that you can only be true to yourself. For although you can appreciate and think about life in general, you only ever live one actual life: yours.
You can hear my music which muses about life and thoughts about life at my Bandcamp.
I suppose, in a way, it really started last night before I went to sleep. The thought occurred to me that no one gets born by their choice. In that sense every one of us is born without our will being taken into account. Our birth, the fact we are given life and brought into being at all, is the choice of other people. This strikes me as partly selfish. Although not a parent myself, it does seem to me, observing from the sidelines, that some parents are selfish. They want a child for themselves. I wonder how many parents give thought to what kind of life their child will have or how much pain or misery they might be storing up for their offspring? My guess would be that many never think of that at all, at least not until or unless things go wrong. And yet these things, in the abstract, are foreseeable consequences of having, or giving birth to, a life. So why don't more people think of the downsides of being alive when bringing a new life into the world?
Maybe these people consider that although life will certainly include some bad it will also contain much good. Lives, of course, are very different. Some will contain little pain and some will contain much. In that sense, once a life has started and you are thrown into existence you pretty much have to suck it up and deal with what comes down the pipe. You can't refuse life and go back where you came from. The clock only ticks forwards. But, to get back to the point, perhaps people consider that life, overall, isn't that bad. That would be reasonable, wouldn't it? I don't think so. You can't live your life on someone's behalf. Each life is individual. You cannot measure someone's pain by how you measure your own because you are not comparing like with like. Human beings are not robots and are not built to the same specifications. Much less do they experience life in the same way. Your appreciation, or lack of appreciation, of life is not commensurable with that of another person. We each make our own minds up and human beings, in general, have always valued that fact about our species.
I raise all this because, for the longest time now, I have actively said to myself that, were it possible, I would give my life back. I don't accept the idea, for myself, that life, although a mixture of good and bad, is "worth it" over all. For at least 10-15 years now I've said to myself that if it were possible to reject life and give it back then I would. If there was a button you could press or a deal you could make where it meant that you suddenly had never existed then I would press that button or make that deal. You might now be asking about all the things I would miss that you value or all the things I would never experience. To me, that argument holds no weight. A person who never existed has nothing to miss and has no ability or desire to value things. These are the problems and issues of the living. And the difference between being alive and dead, existent and non-existent, is very great. Put simply, people concern themselves with the problems of the living. Unsurprisingly. And they find it hard to think in any other way. For the same reason I've never understood people who couldn't appreciate why someone might take their own life. To me, this is obvious: dead people have no problems.
My thinking in this, of course, is guided and shaped by my own experience of life. I don't regard myself as having had a particularly bad life. Certainly, there are people who would seem to have had worse ones and its not hard to think of examples. But, as I said before, everyone is different. Its a mug's game to start comparing lives one with another. You can only really address your own appreciation of your own life. And I haven't appreciated mine very much. There are certain issues I've had to face daily for many years and I wouldn't be me or live the life I lead without them. But that is my comprehension of what life is from my own experience of it. You will have yours. Quite a lot of people seem to think that life is a gift and that it is ungrateful or bad to reject it or despise it. I must admit that I don't understand this, to me, irrational mentality. If life is a gift then its surely the unwanted pair of socks your granny gives you. Overall, nature is random without a guided direction or purpose. You were the sperm that made it and fertilised the egg. Its not as if any intelligence selected and formed you in a womb, made you who you are and set you on your way. (Yes, I don't believe in gods in any sense.) You are just the result of a couple of human wills and lots of random factors no one power had any control over. There will come a time when parents and doctors will be able to choose the baby they have and start to make selections both for physical appearance and mental faculties. I don't envy those people who will be actively engineering the birth of yet more people. What will happen when the children do not turn out to be the things that were selected? Can people really be created in laboratories?
I do, in a sense, see life as something mystical. But this is mystical in the sense of profound or complex or ungraspable. I don't see it as mystical in the sense of it being from a higher power. We are, all of us, life forms created in a physical universe. The conditions that make life possible, and we don't know what they are or why life happened at all, are just there and so, in turn, are we. I don't see any inherent or deep meaning to that. It just is and any meaning we do find, or fail to find, will be on our own terms. Recently, I've been following the Twitter account of a shepherd in the Lake District of England. He's become a minor celebrity thanks to a book he has written about his way of life and the fact that one of his sheepdogs, Floss, recently gave birth to 10 puppies. For the last week or so now he has been posting sometimes graphic pictures of the lambing season that he is currently dealing with. I have looked with childlike innocence at the pictures he has posted of lambs being pulled out of a sheep or, new born, lying on the grass covered in mucus and amniotic fluid. This is life. This is the wonder of life. The wonder of life to me is that it happens at all.
But that it happens at all is, for me, also the problem. Its one that existentialist writers like Sartre or Camus saw too. For the world, life, does not make sense. There is no way to square the circle of your existence. There are endless "don't knows", you are full of fallibilities and, as a physical being, you will suffer and die for change is a constant of the universe. Things do not, and are not meant to, stay the same forever. As a being with higher brain function you will also likely have to muse on all of these facts and deal with that too. "Life is suffering" has long been a truism of mine even though, at times, more positive souls have tried, and failed, to dissuade me from it. I just see too much evidence to support it. You, too, may say that's not very positive and I would probably concede you are right. But that is to miss the point. The point is that you can only be true to yourself. For although you can appreciate and think about life in general, you only ever live one actual life: yours.
You can hear my music which muses about life and thoughts about life at my Bandcamp.
Tuesday, 14 April 2015
Economically Unproductive People Don't Matter!
There is a General Election underway in the UK. The thing that strikes me most is how desperate everyone is (not least the two parties most likely to be involved in government) to be seen as the party of "working people". It seems that "working people" are where the votes are. There has been precious little to hear about the disabled, mentally ill or other disadvantaged groups. Everything seems geared to making "working people" happy with their lot.
This profoundly depresses me. This is why people, and sometimes I'm one of them, say that there is no genuine choice in the election. All the parties inhabit the same ideological ground. They are all fighting like pups for the same teat to suck on. They all want to appeal to the same section of society and harvest their votes. All this is deeply conservative (with a small 'c'). It seems that our greatest political minds have one idea of what life is about and its mapped out for all of us. You might call that the idea that we are all to be economically productive capitalist drones.
The message I'm getting loud and clear from all the policy back and forth is that economically unproductive people don't matter. They are seen as a burden, a problem, something that costs us (or probably "working people") money. So they are regarded as scroungers. People are encouraged to begrudge their existence, not least by the press barons who usually vote to the right. Their misfortune is regarded as their fault and their problem. After all, the whole ideology of "working people" is a very individualistic one. You are meant to succeed by your effort alone. And if you can't then that is your fault. And your problem.
So where are the people who ask what happens to the people who need a food bank to eat? Where are the people who ask what happens to the mentally ill person who cannot work because they are locked inside a prison of themselves? What about the people who suffer from crippling physical ailments? Any society is always going to have people like this within it. Does it say something fundamental about us in looking at how we regard and deal with such people? The only answer today's politics offers is that you become an economically productive capitalist drone too. But not everyone can.
The message I'm getting from this election is that most politicians just wish they would disappear. And some do. Because they die.
This profoundly depresses me. This is why people, and sometimes I'm one of them, say that there is no genuine choice in the election. All the parties inhabit the same ideological ground. They are all fighting like pups for the same teat to suck on. They all want to appeal to the same section of society and harvest their votes. All this is deeply conservative (with a small 'c'). It seems that our greatest political minds have one idea of what life is about and its mapped out for all of us. You might call that the idea that we are all to be economically productive capitalist drones.
The message I'm getting loud and clear from all the policy back and forth is that economically unproductive people don't matter. They are seen as a burden, a problem, something that costs us (or probably "working people") money. So they are regarded as scroungers. People are encouraged to begrudge their existence, not least by the press barons who usually vote to the right. Their misfortune is regarded as their fault and their problem. After all, the whole ideology of "working people" is a very individualistic one. You are meant to succeed by your effort alone. And if you can't then that is your fault. And your problem.
So where are the people who ask what happens to the people who need a food bank to eat? Where are the people who ask what happens to the mentally ill person who cannot work because they are locked inside a prison of themselves? What about the people who suffer from crippling physical ailments? Any society is always going to have people like this within it. Does it say something fundamental about us in looking at how we regard and deal with such people? The only answer today's politics offers is that you become an economically productive capitalist drone too. But not everyone can.
The message I'm getting from this election is that most politicians just wish they would disappear. And some do. Because they die.
Saturday, 11 April 2015
The Thinking Person's Music
It was towards the end of January this year that I sat down and watched the science fiction film, Under The Skin. The film is told through alien eyes as Scarlett Johansson, the alien of the piece, hunts men in Glasgow. This set me thinking explicitly about what it is to be human and what an alien from another world might see. At the same time I had been researching the history of the Nazi death camps before and during World War 2, a prime example of the phrase "man's inhumanity to man". But what is "humanity" in that sense? What does it mean to be human? And so my "Human/Being" musical project was born.
As we now approach mid-April my project has grown to 12 albums and 10 parts (parts 1 and 4 were double albums). It now fully mirrors in scope, if not storyline, my first musical project, Elektronische Existenz. Of course, as the names might suggest, these are really the same or close relatives as projects. I see it as my task to write music that gives meaning to life itself. Primarily, of course, this is my own. But, in a wider sense, this is adding my voice to a greater conversation about what life is for any of us. I'm aware this might sound a bit pretentious. But I see this as an art project and the music I have made here is intended to be an aid to thought. Elektronische Existenz told the personal story of a character I called "The Wanderer". It was my story. Here with Human/Being I muse on wider, more general matters starting with that musing on what we are and what "humanity" is.
Throughout the project I have tried to focus on particular areas. These were meditated upon pretty much as they occurred to me. The music I make is overtly philosophical in origin if not always in tone. And this is the most philosophical music I have ever made. Human/Being 2 came at the time when Tangerine Dream founder, Edgar Froese, died and so it starts with a tribute piece for him, a massive influence upon exactly the kind of music I was seeking to make here. It continued on with meditation on sleep, the fear of madness and the human condition. Human/Being 3 focused on time and our nature as time-bound and time-determined beings, always conscious of the ticking of the clock. I was trying to use the music as an aid for those who might actually sit back and allow what I had made to assist them in thinking.
The fourth part of the project was a double album (the pink covers) and was really about the concept of human meaning at all. All meaning is inherently fictional. We literally make things up. In the notes to these albums I mused that "Whatever I say this is, it isn't that. Whatever you think this is, it isn't that. For this isn't at all. It is merely a process of becoming that never ends. It is a game with sounds, but a game where you decide the rules or even if there are any at all." I also invited listeners to "find meaning in the spaces between sounds". It was game-playing but it was with serious intent. What is human meaning? Why do things mean something to us or not? Again, the music was there to assist with thinking about this.
Meaning, or lack of it, leads to motivation and this is what I mused on in Human/Being 5. It was quite personal in its approach and expressed my borderline nihilism. But, again, that is not necessarily an opinion I force upon my listeners. It is more that I invite them to think about it and provide music to assist in the process. This lead me, with Human/Being 6, to think about being "condemned to be free", as the existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre put it. Where does this quite radical freedom come from and what is it set against - the vastness of the universe? It seems to me at times that all that is is quite simply absurd - in the philosophical sense - without rhyme or reason. This section of the project came to a conclusion in Human/Being 7, subtitled "The Infinite Sea". The phrase was suggested to me by Nietzsche with the following quote:
"In the horizon of the infinite. - We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us - indeed, we have gone further and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of his cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom - and there is no longer any land."
This, I thought, was - is - our human condition.
I had intended to stop at part 7. (My process is a constant one of stopping and then being re-animated by some new thought or stimulus.) But then I watched the film Chappie about a robot given artificial intelligence and I was back asking myself if a robot could ever be human. That, of course, leads you to ask what being human is in order to in any way get a grip on the first question. (My current thinking is that the robot couldn't be human but maybe it could be a being of its own.) And so I wrote the album "Robot" which became part 8 of the project. Next came "Space", unique in this project for being a collaboration on the musical side with my Twitter friend, Iceman Bob. All the songs on this album were worked on by us together. Space, of course, I see as the big, all-consuming context for everything humans do. We are, as Carl Sagan said, all "star stuff" (the title of one of the songs on Space). You don't get much more profound than this thought, I think. Space is the reason we exist. We all came from it and we are all surely going back to it. It creates and destroys, ever changing. You want profundity? There is your profundity.
That leaves us, finally, with part 10, Human/Being X. Here I concentrated, anticipating another ending, on the concept of "the end" as an idea. "All good things must come to an end" is a saying we humans have. But, of course, it is truer to say simply that all things end. As George Harrison titled a triple album, All Things Must Pass. I titled the tracks accordingly around fields of study that have within them endings. The human race will end, the universe will end (or die) and this is a very part of having any existence at all itself. The riddle is that within all life there is always death. A fitting place to finish?
So that was the subject matter. But how to achieve expressing these ideas musically? The answer was "German music". This year I have been greatly influenced by two, related sources of German music of the 1970s, that music known as The Berlin School and that music known as Kosmische (or Krautrock). You will hear the influences of both styles throughout all 10 parts of the project, although in some more strongly than others. Some may even qualify as bona fide examples of the forms. I'm far to modest to make any such claim though. Listeners may feel free to be the judge of that. As I said above, I have aimed with this project to produce "thinking music". This is music that both comes from explicit philosophical thought and that leads to, or aids with, it. The Kosmische and Berlin School music that I have soaked myself in in the first few months of this year were natural and very potent forms of music to use in achieving this. Both are free-form and without boundary giving the necessary space and freedom to think. The fact that my music is made using synthesis was also a help in that you are not stuck with stock sounds but can make sounds as you will or go where the synthesis leads. That's another reason why the pieces in this project are purposefully long. The idea was not to rush anything.What I have made here are long form pieces that are about thinking, thinking about what it is to be human and what it is to be alive, to have being. It is "space music" in a very real and multivalent sense.
So what I think I have made here is music for the thinking person. Its not frivolous or trite. Its serious. Its art. Its philosophy. Its over 13 hours long. I am me. What else could it be?
You can hear the albums in this project at my bandcamp.
As we now approach mid-April my project has grown to 12 albums and 10 parts (parts 1 and 4 were double albums). It now fully mirrors in scope, if not storyline, my first musical project, Elektronische Existenz. Of course, as the names might suggest, these are really the same or close relatives as projects. I see it as my task to write music that gives meaning to life itself. Primarily, of course, this is my own. But, in a wider sense, this is adding my voice to a greater conversation about what life is for any of us. I'm aware this might sound a bit pretentious. But I see this as an art project and the music I have made here is intended to be an aid to thought. Elektronische Existenz told the personal story of a character I called "The Wanderer". It was my story. Here with Human/Being I muse on wider, more general matters starting with that musing on what we are and what "humanity" is.
Throughout the project I have tried to focus on particular areas. These were meditated upon pretty much as they occurred to me. The music I make is overtly philosophical in origin if not always in tone. And this is the most philosophical music I have ever made. Human/Being 2 came at the time when Tangerine Dream founder, Edgar Froese, died and so it starts with a tribute piece for him, a massive influence upon exactly the kind of music I was seeking to make here. It continued on with meditation on sleep, the fear of madness and the human condition. Human/Being 3 focused on time and our nature as time-bound and time-determined beings, always conscious of the ticking of the clock. I was trying to use the music as an aid for those who might actually sit back and allow what I had made to assist them in thinking.
The fourth part of the project was a double album (the pink covers) and was really about the concept of human meaning at all. All meaning is inherently fictional. We literally make things up. In the notes to these albums I mused that "Whatever I say this is, it isn't that. Whatever you think this is, it isn't that. For this isn't at all. It is merely a process of becoming that never ends. It is a game with sounds, but a game where you decide the rules or even if there are any at all." I also invited listeners to "find meaning in the spaces between sounds". It was game-playing but it was with serious intent. What is human meaning? Why do things mean something to us or not? Again, the music was there to assist with thinking about this.
Meaning, or lack of it, leads to motivation and this is what I mused on in Human/Being 5. It was quite personal in its approach and expressed my borderline nihilism. But, again, that is not necessarily an opinion I force upon my listeners. It is more that I invite them to think about it and provide music to assist in the process. This lead me, with Human/Being 6, to think about being "condemned to be free", as the existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre put it. Where does this quite radical freedom come from and what is it set against - the vastness of the universe? It seems to me at times that all that is is quite simply absurd - in the philosophical sense - without rhyme or reason. This section of the project came to a conclusion in Human/Being 7, subtitled "The Infinite Sea". The phrase was suggested to me by Nietzsche with the following quote:
"In the horizon of the infinite. - We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us - indeed, we have gone further and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of his cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom - and there is no longer any land."
This, I thought, was - is - our human condition.
I had intended to stop at part 7. (My process is a constant one of stopping and then being re-animated by some new thought or stimulus.) But then I watched the film Chappie about a robot given artificial intelligence and I was back asking myself if a robot could ever be human. That, of course, leads you to ask what being human is in order to in any way get a grip on the first question. (My current thinking is that the robot couldn't be human but maybe it could be a being of its own.) And so I wrote the album "Robot" which became part 8 of the project. Next came "Space", unique in this project for being a collaboration on the musical side with my Twitter friend, Iceman Bob. All the songs on this album were worked on by us together. Space, of course, I see as the big, all-consuming context for everything humans do. We are, as Carl Sagan said, all "star stuff" (the title of one of the songs on Space). You don't get much more profound than this thought, I think. Space is the reason we exist. We all came from it and we are all surely going back to it. It creates and destroys, ever changing. You want profundity? There is your profundity.
That leaves us, finally, with part 10, Human/Being X. Here I concentrated, anticipating another ending, on the concept of "the end" as an idea. "All good things must come to an end" is a saying we humans have. But, of course, it is truer to say simply that all things end. As George Harrison titled a triple album, All Things Must Pass. I titled the tracks accordingly around fields of study that have within them endings. The human race will end, the universe will end (or die) and this is a very part of having any existence at all itself. The riddle is that within all life there is always death. A fitting place to finish?
So that was the subject matter. But how to achieve expressing these ideas musically? The answer was "German music". This year I have been greatly influenced by two, related sources of German music of the 1970s, that music known as The Berlin School and that music known as Kosmische (or Krautrock). You will hear the influences of both styles throughout all 10 parts of the project, although in some more strongly than others. Some may even qualify as bona fide examples of the forms. I'm far to modest to make any such claim though. Listeners may feel free to be the judge of that. As I said above, I have aimed with this project to produce "thinking music". This is music that both comes from explicit philosophical thought and that leads to, or aids with, it. The Kosmische and Berlin School music that I have soaked myself in in the first few months of this year were natural and very potent forms of music to use in achieving this. Both are free-form and without boundary giving the necessary space and freedom to think. The fact that my music is made using synthesis was also a help in that you are not stuck with stock sounds but can make sounds as you will or go where the synthesis leads. That's another reason why the pieces in this project are purposefully long. The idea was not to rush anything.What I have made here are long form pieces that are about thinking, thinking about what it is to be human and what it is to be alive, to have being. It is "space music" in a very real and multivalent sense.
So what I think I have made here is music for the thinking person. Its not frivolous or trite. Its serious. Its art. Its philosophy. Its over 13 hours long. I am me. What else could it be?
You can hear the albums in this project at my bandcamp.
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