J.D. Moyer

sci-fi author, beatmaker

Category: Culture Rants/Shares Page 2 of 21

No More Building on Sand

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On June 16

In Culture Rants/Shares, Personal Updates

When Twitter went downhill, I wasn’t sure what to “do” about social media. Many of the authors and artists I followed fled the platform, and my feed became a cesspool of vile posts from accounts I was not following. Though my Twitter/X feed has become more sane, I rarely go there anymore. The company dismantled TweetDeck, my preferred mode of viewing and posting, and I just lost interest.

Until then, Twitter had been my preferred social media platform. I posted to Facebook and Instagram a few times a year, usually to promote a new release. But I was on Twitter daily, posting at least a few times a week, sharing thoughts, opinions, and retweeting items of interest.

Post-Twitter, I decided not to rush the process of finding my next “main” social media site. I signed up for Bluesky, Threads, and Mastadon, but I didn’t spend much time on any of them.

I’d been burned. I’d spent significant time on Twitter, and my experience had been ruined by Elon Musk’s ego purchase and atrociously poor management (firing top engineers, dismantling moderation teams, inviting fascists and bigots back to the platform, alienating advertisers, and generally running the company into the ground). I didn’t want to repeat my mistake by hopping on a new bandwagon.

Then, a few weeks ago, I had a realization. I already had a “main” social media site. It’s this website. It’s self-hosted WordPress.

If I have something to say or share, long-form text is usually my preferred mode of communication. Sometimes I like to share a picture or two, but usually it’s just words. So a WordPress blog is perfect. People can comment on my posts if they want, or message me. And I can share posts to different audiences on Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, and even LinkedIn, depending on the subject matter and vibe.

Many of my family and friends visit my site occasionally to see what I’m up to. I keep up with them by following their posts on whatever social media site(s) they post on, or just call and say hi (a Gen X thing). So my blog does function as a social media site, in addition to being a place where anyone can read my posts or learn more about my fiction writing and music.

And I’m no longer building on sand. No one can rug pull my own site, or buy it and ruin it. Nothing lasts forever, but WordPress.org is open source software. I own my own domain and my own content. Being the sole moderator, I can edit or remove old posts or comments whenever I want.

So welcome to my social media platform.

Alta (She Made History)

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On April 6

In Culture Rants/Shares, Personal Updates

My mother-in-law passed away recently. I had a good relationship with her, despite the fact that we were both stubborn people with frequently divergent opinions.

Alta was a poet, famous in some circles for both her poetry and her press. Andrew Gilbert has written an outstanding obituary on kqed.org that really does her justice.

Though Alta was complex, loved attention, and was sometimes overly dramatic, I liked her and have an enormous respect for her life’s body of work. She dedicated herself to art, compassion, equality, and all the qualities that I consider to be progress in the greater picture of civilization.

We live in an era where the radical right is actively dismantling human rights, especially women’s rights. Abortion rights have been trashed, they are coming hard for birth control, and famous influencers say publicly that women should lose the right to vote.

But because of the work of Alta and her peers, the right faces an uphill battle. There are too many female role models in all walks of life to say with any credibility that women “can’t” occupy a particular societal role. There are simply too many living, successful counter-examples of women playing prominent roles in the arts, politics, sciences, and every other sphere. Women still face discrimination prejudice, and under-representation in many fields, but culturally we’re in a much different place than when Alta was growing up. And that’s partially due to her work.

So hats off, and respect.

Purpose Is the Fifth Idol

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On September 16

In Creative Work/Career, Culture Rants/Shares, Utopian Speculations

In Tim Ferriss’s recent interview with Arthur Brooks, Brooks discusses the four false idols, what Thomas Aquinas called “the four substitutes for God.” Aquinas named those substitutes as honor, wealth, pleasure, and power, but Brooks uses fame as an Instagram-age stand-in for honor.

In this short, Brooks uses U.S. cities to demonstrate each of the four false idols, or vices: New York is money (wealth), D.C. is power, Vegas is pleasure, and Los Angeles is fame. He asks which one motivates you? Which one leads you to make poor decisions?

That got me thinking, what’s the main vice of San Francisco? Historically, pleasure has its role in the Barbary Coast sense. So does wealth (gold rush, tech booms, etc.). But I would say SF’s main vice is purpose. A lot of San Francisco’s ambition is funneled toward meaning, vision, and progress. This can become pathological in a number of ways. San Francisco’s Summer of Love had a dark, druggy, rapey, violent underbelly. Visions of improving society with technology can easily tip into Panglossian techno-utopianism.

And maybe that’s what Aquinas meant, at least partially, by honor. Because there’s a performative aspect to the pursuit of purpose and progress. We (especially San Franciscans) want to to appear as if we’re doing good deeds and making the world a better place. So sometimes we virtue signal more than we act virtuously. It’s not for want of fame, it’s the desire to have a good reputation, to be seen as honorable, that can get us in trouble.

And then there’s the true believers, who get a dopamine high by pursuing their dreams for the future of humanity and society: a colony on Mars, self-aware computer programs, fleets of self-driving electric cars, fusion power that provides unlimited electricity at negligible cost. What could go wrong?

Even the artistic side of purpose has a dark side. Putin’s dark reign is greatly inspired by the science fiction works of author Mikhail Yuriev. Purpose is my own main vice–my desire to write science fiction is largely purpose driven. And while I don’t think my science fiction works have injured anyone, it’s always possible to put bad ideas out into the world. And the blind pursuit of purpose via art can easily lead a person to personal and financial ruin.

So yeah, purpose is the fifth idol. Fame certainly belongs on the list, but Aquinas didn’t know about Hollywood or Instagram. So honor should be subdivided into fame and purpose.

New Novella Acceptance, Thoughts on Gender Dysphoria, Art and Money

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On July 3

In Creative Work/Career, Culture Rants/Shares

Australian Giant Cuttlefish photographed by Richard Ling

Announcement

My novella “The Discovery at Alexandria”, a far-future triptych featuring cuttlefolk (uplifted cuttlefish), arcology-dwelling humans, and nomadic dogkin, was recently officially accepted by Sheree Thomas for Fantasy & Science Fiction. I’m delighted to have found a great home for this story. Publication date TBD (could still be awhile). This will be my first published novella. Inspiration came from the Murderbot series of novellas by Martha Wells, David Brin’s Uplift Saga, and Evolution by Stephen Baxter (among many other works).

Recent Thoughts and Speculations — Gender Fluidity and Anabolic Steriods

I’m not an expert on gender fluidity or gender dysphoria, but I’ve been thinking about testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) and anabolic steroid use, which is rampant not only among professional bodybuilders and MMA fighters, but also among teenage gym rats trying to get “aesthetic” and men my own age trying to recapture our fading youth. Should steroid use among men trying to appear (and feel) more masculine be part of the conversation around gender dysphoria? While “hyper-masculine” isn’t a distinct gender, it’s a very narrow band on the gender spectrum, and can only be achieved via unusual/rare genetics or the use of exogenous male hormones (combined with a great deal of strenuous exercise).

I think it’s potentially useful to bring “men trying to be more manly” into the conversation around gender fluidity and dysphoria. We’re all somewhere on the gender spectrum with a unique cocktail and ratio of male and female sex hormones and brain architecture, sometimes lining up with our birth-assigned gender, sometimes not. More importantly, many of us would like to be in a different place on that spectrum than we actually are. Sometimes exogenous hormones are the right choice, sometimes a dietary change might be appropriate (less alcohol and more cruciferous vegetables, for example, to reduce estrogen in men), and sometimes more self-acceptance might be the ticket.

Maybe some of the hysteria around gender-change politics could be mitigated if we included bro-dudes like Joe Rogan (who uses TRT) in the category of people who want to shift their position on the gender spectrum (albeit only slightly).

Art-spiration

I’m in a good groove with both fiction writing and music-making these days, and part of the reason why is that I have currently enough money. People make great art under all kinds of conditions, including extreme poverty, but it’s much easier to make art if one has the privilege of mentally divorcing time and money. It can take hours to write a good paragraph (or even a shitty paragraph). Same goes for a four-bar musical phrase, or a painting, and sometimes hundreds of hours of hard work don’t amount to anything tangible (like a sale, or even a completed work). From a purely economic POV, most art-making is a waste of time.

Even when financial security does come along, the mental prison of time=money can still hold us back. Time is time, time is us living our lives, and money allows us more freedom. But we still have to take that freedom, to use it, to break out of our productivity conditioning.

Hope you are enjoying the summer! Feel free to comment about whatever is on your mind.

A Proposal for Distributing Royalties for AI Generated Artworks “in the style of…”

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On June 14

In Creative Work/Career, Culture Rants/Shares

I’ve been experimenting with Midjourney 5, which is probably the leading generative AI for visual images. But it’s not there yet, in terms of both image quality and ethical use.

Image quality — Midjourney often creates monstrosities of merged limbs, unnatural joint insertions, and other body horror fodder. Some examples from the prompt “two women embracing in a futuristic city”. Two of the images look more or less anatomically correct, while the other two, well…ouch.

I know I sound like someone complaining about wifi quality on an airplane. I’m overlooking the miraculous fact that such a thing can happen at all, instead focusing on the deficits. But that’s how people relate to technology. If it doesn’t work all the way, it’s basically worthless.

I assume with time that Midjourney and other generative AI will gain a better understanding of what can and cannot happen with a human body. But there are also major ethical concerns with using such technology. In the example image I used “in the style of” followed by the name of an Italian graphic novel illustrator. Midjourney did a reasonable job of approximating the artist’s style, which leads me to believe that the AI has used this artist’s artwork for neural net training.

So should the Italian graphic novel illustrator get a cut of what I paid to use Midjourney (a license that includes commercial use rights)?

I’ve heard the argument that human artists also train by observing and even manually copying the work of other artists, and they don’t pay royalties or ask permission. So why should an AI?

I think the process by which an AI trains on human-created content is much closer to sampling and repurposing, and much less like human learning. So absolutely, the human artist should get a cut.

The royalty system could look something like this:

  1. As an artist (visual, fiction, any kind), you could opt-in or opt-out of having your work sampled and repurposed by AI. If you opted out, the AI would not allow your name to be used as part of a prompt. Midjourney already includes all kinds of restrictions (including a prohibition against creating erotic images), so this additional restriction would be technically trivial to implement.
  2. Those that opted in would receive a prorated share of user subscription fees based on how many images or works were generated by that user account. So if a user generated 100 images in a month, and five of them were “in the style of Artist XYZ”, then the artist would receive 5% x TheRoyaltyRate% x subscription fee per month.
  3. I’d argue that a fair royalty rate would be somewhere between 50% and 85% (Midjourney keeping 15-50%). A 15% share is common for distribution and administration services, while a 50% share would include more compensation for those that develop and maintain the AI algorithms and neural nets. The exact percentage (and the option of advances against future royalties) would be something for tech companies and artist agencies to haggle over.
  4. Users might also user broader prompts like “in the style of Italian graphic novels”. In that case, the royalty share could be divided among all Italian graphic novel illustrators. But that begs the question of how Italian graphic novel illustrators who opted OUT would be compensated (because we can safely assume that generative AI are indiscriminately hoovering up and utilizing all the images they can find on the internet). So some of the “broad prompt” money would need to be put aside to somehow funnel back to those artists (or their estates), either as grants or as a pool that qualifying artists could apply for.

Of course all this will probably need to be legislated. Midjourney is getting away with murder right now, and they aren’t going to change anything unless someone makes them.

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