Thoughts on disconnecting

I am so sick of subscriptions. I have heard people around me saying that "this is the year of physical media", but I started thinking about how that could manifest for me, and I realised that especially music streaming platforms are causing me distress. For one thing, platforms such as Spotify don't pay their artists a living wage, which as someone who creates music (for the joy of creation) feels like unethical consumption. Moreover, I miss the feeling of OWNING a piece of art, such as a film, a CD or a video game!

Art and AI

Here in Sweden, a piece of music has been topping the charts, but has since turned out to be created by AI. This is essentially what sparked this idea of returning to physical media for me. Now, I'm not against the use of AI to create art as a whole, and am interested in the intersection of man and machine.

An artist that exemplifies this well is Swedish artist Arvida Byström, who created an AI chatbot, connected to a robot-sex-doll with her appearance. The two of them toured Europe together for interviews, and the artist describes a sort of symbiotic relationship in their performances. This I feel is an exploration of AI and our relationship to it, rather than exploitation of both artistic works, and natural resources (although the issue of climate impact remains with any use).

What scares me is when a few simple clicks results in trying (and evidently succeeding in the case of this Swedish AI song topping the charts!) to recreate something that is so essential to humanity.

My Photos are Stored in a Liminal Space

When I was looking for pictures to collect for this blog, I accidentally ended up connecting my entire photo album to my Google-account, and it was a complete nightmare to disconnect again. After noticing this had happened, I started deleting the photos on Google, to then open my photo app and find they had disappeared from there as well.

Now, you might put this down to plain old stupidity, but I found when searching for a solution that I wasn't alone in having this problem. And it felt like an invasion of my privacy! Suddenly all these moments from my life had gone from my phone, when I didn't go to delete them from there myself, and I was angry with technology for daring to decide what happens to my memories!

I managed to recover the pictures and have since disconnected the sync, and deleted everything from Google, but it was an odd experience; I felt strangely violated.

So, I am here to present two of my new companions in this year of experimenting with putting distance between me and my phone: a second hand portable CD-player, and my parents old digicam!

Now, while the CD-player is a perfect example of returning to physical media, the digicam less so. But while still storing my photos digitally, I will be able to avoid letting global corporations be in charge of managing my personal memories! Also, you can't put stickers on a photo album on your phone, or on your Spotify account. This is arguably the biggest perk for me. 

PS. This is a reupload of my wixsite blog entry. Visit here: https://1999sagabrink.wixsite.com/powderpuffdyke